*
“I didn’t bring my keys with me,” Sydney whispered as they all approached the salon cautiously, like a band of cat burglars really bad at their jobs.
“I don’t think you’ll need them,” Henry said, trying the door and finding that it swung wide open. Henry had left Josh on the green with orders to stay there. And he did. Josh was sitting on the bench, watching their odd little family with an expression Sydney found curious. He didn’t look embarrassed or amused or superior. He looked like he wanted, more than anything, to join them. She hadn’t expected him to be so nice. She hadn’t expected him to take his share of the blame, even though her daughter was clearly the one who had made all this happen. She hadn’t expected to see what her daughter so evidently saw in him. Someone lost.
She hadn’t wanted to like Josh Matteson.
After Henry had done a tour of the salon and hadn’t found anyone there, the rest of them entered.
“Are you sure you didn’t just forget to turn out the lights?” Tyler asked, which was such a Tyler thing to say. He forgot everything. He got lost going to work. He was on his fourteenth pair of reading glasses this year. And he was currently wearing two different shoes. Sometimes Sydney completely understood how he’d gotten past her sister’s walls. He’d obviously gotten lost looking for a way in, and had stumbled onto a secret passageway. That was the only way to get to Claire, those secret passageways, the vulnerable places: family, acceptance, longevity.
“I was the last to leave,” Sydney said. “Even if I forgot about the lights, I’d never leave the door unlocked.”
“Who else has a key?” Henry asked.
That’s when it hit her. Sydney went immediately to the reception desk and found the safe under the cash register open, and empty.
“You’ve been robbed,” Claire said from behind her. “We should call the police.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” Bay said, throwing her hands in the air. “Josh is going to think you’re having him arrested!”
“I don’t care what Josh thinks,” Henry said. Bay wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“We’re not calling the police,” Sydney said. “I know who it was, and she’s long gone by now. Let’s all just go home.”
They filed out. Sydney closed the safe and followed them. Before she turned out the lights, she looked over to her station.
Violet had taken the money, but left the bouncy swing.
*
When Sydney, Henry and Bay got home, Bay went immediately to her room.
“Go to bed,” Sydney told Henry as they wearily climbed the stairs together. Parenting was tough. Maybe she was crazy to want to do it again. “Get what sleep you can. I’m going to talk to her.”
“You don’t need me in there?”
Sydney shook her head. “You did the boy stuff. I’ll do the girl stuff.”
“Good night,” Henry said, kissing her. He walked down the hall, but then stopped at their bedroom door. “Was Tyler wearing two different shoes tonight?”
“Yes.”
“I should have thought of that. I don’t think we embarrassed Bay enough.”
Sydney smiled as she opened Bay’s door.
“It wasn’t Josh’s fault,” Bay immediately said. She was sitting on her bed, hugging a pillow. “I didn’t tell him I was grounded. We just talked. That’s all we do.”
Sydney walked over to her. The box of Mallomars and the two cups of tea, now cold, were on the bedside table where she’d left them earlier that night, when she’d discovered Bay missing. Her first thought had been that someone had taken her daughter and the panic had made the room pulse in time to her heartbeat. Until she’d found Bay’s phone outside, it had never occurred to her that Bay would sneak out on her own. Bay never snuck around. She was too upfront. But Bay had entered the Matteson world before Sydney could stop her. Upfront wasn’t in their vocabulary. “That’s funny, because as of last Saturday he didn’t even know who you were, according to you.”
“We just started, you know, hanging out on Monday. I wrote him a note earlier this year, telling him if he ever wanted to talk, I would wait outside school in the afternoons.”
“You wrote him a note?” A note. There was no time in your life when the power of a note was this strong, how writing down what you felt made it real somehow, how awaiting a reply felt glacial, like eons passing.
Bay tossed the pillow aside and slid down the bed, staring at the ceiling where she had taped old covers of tattered paperbacks she’d bought at a library sale years ago. She would read a book hundreds of times, carrying it with her until the pages were torn and the covers were falling off, then she’d paste the covers to the ceiling where she could stare at them, like remembering a good dream. “The first time I saw him, really saw him, was the first day of school, and I knew I belonged with him.”
Of all the things she could have followed in Sydney’s footsteps, it had to be this. “Oh, Bay.”
“I don’t know what’s so wrong about it.”
Sydney sat on the bed beside her. She took the pillow Bay had tossed aside and tucked it behind her back. She paused to compose her thoughts, then said, “I dated Josh’s father in high school.”
Bay immediately sat back up.
“Not just casual dating. We were inseparable, together for three years. I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone at the time. But I also loved what being with him meant, that I belonged to that group, that I was accepted. We talked about marriage. I would go on and on about the wedding and about living in the Matteson mansion.”
“What happened?” Bay asked.
“He broke up with me on graduation day. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I thought you understood.’ Matteson sons follow in their fathers’ footsteps. They go into the family business. They marry girls from the right families. I wasn’t one of those girls. That’s why I left Bascom. He broke my heart, but more than that, he broke my dream of being normal. I figured, if normal wasn’t here, I was going to find it somewhere else. But I never did.”
“That’s why you left?”
Sydney nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sydney reached out and touched Bay’s cheek, which was still red from the cold, making her look like a china doll with painted circles of blush. “I guess I thought that why I left was less important than why I came back.”
Bay looked at Sydney as if seeing her for the first time through adult eyes. Bay was so close to that shore it almost brought tears to Sydney’s eyes. She was too damn emotional these days. “There’s so much I don’t know about you,” Bay said.
Sydney knew this day would come. She’d just been hoping to put it off for another few years. Say, twenty. She said with resignation, “Ask away.”
Bay crossed her legs yoga-style and settled in. “Was Hunter John Matteson your first?”
“Yes. Next question.”
“How old were you?”
“Older than you. Next question.”
“What was your mother like?”