Nick
1:45 a.m.
As soon as I’m back on the highway, I grab my phone and punch in Parker’s number. For a second, I’m worried it won’t connect: my phone is flashing every five seconds, showing 2 percent battery. Come on, I think, come on, come on.
Then it’s ringing: four, five, six times before clicking over to voice mail.
“Come on,” I say out loud, and punch the steering wheel with a palm. I hang up and redial. Three rings, four rings, five rings. Just before I click off, Parker picks up.
“Hello?” he croaks. I’ve woken him. No surprise. It’s nearly 2:00 a.m.
“Parker?” My throat is so tight, I can barely say his name. “I need your help.”
“Nick?” I hear rustling, as though he’s sitting up. “Jesus. What time is it?”
“Listen to me,” I say. “My phone’s about to die. But I think Dara’s in trouble.”
There’s a short pause. “You think—what?”
“At first I thought she was just messing with me,” I rush on. “But I think . . . I think she might be involved in something big. Something bad.”
“Where are you?” When Parker speaks again, his voice is totally alert, totally awake, and I know he’s gotten out of bed.
I could kiss my phone. I could kiss him. I do want to kiss him. This fact is huge and solid and impassible, like an iceberg rising suddenly out of the smooth dark water.
“Route 101. Heading south.” I feel a growing sense of vertigo, as if the road in front of my headlights is in fact a long pit and I’m falling.
You can’t let me have anything of my own, can you? You always have to be better than me. Dara’s voice comes to me at once, a voice as loud as memory. And then I know: I am remembering. She said those words to me. I’m sure she did. But the second I try to grasp for the connection, to follow the slick handholds of memory down beneath the water, my mind is enveloped in the same numbing cold, the same undifferentiated dark.
“You’re driving?” Parker’s voice inches higher, disbelieving. “You need to pull over. Do me a favor and pull over, okay?”
“I need to find her, Parker.” My voice cracks. My phone beeps at me even more insistently. “I need to help her.”
“Where are you exactly?” he repeats, and his room unfolds in front of me: the old baseball lamp in the shape of a catcher’s mitt casting a warm cone of light on the navy-blue carpet; the rumpled sheets that always smell faintly like pine; the swivel desk chair and the clutter of books and video games and faded T-shirts. I imagine him wriggling into a shirt one-handed, rummaging under the bed for his Surf Siders.
“I’m heading toward Orphan’s Beach,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think to do. Andre must have a second location, a private place where he brings girls to be photographed. The answer lies along the beach, close to Beamer’s, maybe even inside it. They might have a secondary basement; or maybe I missed a doorway somewhere, or a converted storage shed closer to the water. I need proof.
I have an ever-growing sense that this was all planned, at least initially, by Dara. She intended me to find her phone, and the pictures on it. She was leaving me clues so that I would be able to help her.
It was a cry for help.
“Orphan’s Beach?” On Parker’s end, a door opens and closes with a firm click. Now I see him moving down the hall, navigating by feel, keeping one hand on the wall (papered with faded patterns of ribbons and dried flowers, a design he despises). “Where we went last year on Dara’s birthday? Where we found the lighthouse?”
“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a bar just down the road called . . .” The words turn to dust in my mouth.
Suddenly I know. Images and words flash through my head—the neon Beamer’s sign, cocktail napkins imprinted with a logo of twin headlights, to beam, a sweep of light—and just like that I know exactly where Andre takes his girls, where he has his parties, where he photographed Dara and Sarah Snow, where something terrible happened to Madeline.
“A bar called what?” Parker’s voice sounds distant now, thinner. He’s outside. He’s hurrying across the grass, holding his cell phone to his shoulder with his chin, rifling through his jeans for his keys. “Nick, are you there?”
“Oh my God.” I’m clutching my phone so tightly, my knuckles ache.
Just then my phone cuts out, powering down completely.
“Shit.” Cursing out loud makes me feel better. “Shit, shit, shit.” Then I remember Dara’s phone and feel a surge of hope. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I feel around for it in the cup holder, but come up with nothing but an ancient mass of gum, papered together and stuck to the back of a quarter. I reach over to run a hand along the passenger seat, increasingly desperate. Nothing.
Just then an animal—a raccoon or a possum, it’s too dark to tell—shoots out from the underbrush and freezes, eyes glittering, directly in the path of my wheels. I jerk the wheel hard into the next lane without checking for cars, expecting to feel a hard thump. After a second, I regain control, correcting my steering before I can plunge past the guardrail and straight past the darkened beachfront houses and into the water. When I look in the rearview mirror, I see a dark shape bolt across the road. Safe, then.
Still, I can’t shake loose that spike of panic, the terror of being out of control, of heading over the brink. I must have left Dara’s phone at home when I went inside to look through her room. That means I really am alone. The answers are all there, down on that lonely stretch of beach between Beamer’s and the accident site, where the currents make it deadly to swim: the answers to what happened to Madeline Snow, and what happened to change my sister; the answers to what happened on that night four months ago, when we went sailing off the edge of the earth and into the darkness.
And a small, persistent voice in my head keeps speaking up, begging me to turn back, telling me I’m not ready for the truth.
But I ignore it, and keep going.
Dara
2:02 a.m.
From the outside, the lighthouse looks abandoned. It rises above the construction scaffolding like a finger pointing to the moon. The narrow windows are boarded up with wood bleached a dull gray, and signs declare the whole place off-limits. WARNING, one of them reads, HARD HAT AREA ONLY. But there has been no construction here, not for a long time; even this sign is streaked with salt and warped from weather, graffitied with somebody’s tag.
I should have brought a flashlight.
I don’t remember how to get in—only that there is a way in, a secret door, like a passage to another world.
I circle the beach, slipping a little on the rocks. In the distance, beyond the boulders, I can see Beamer’s lit up, squatting on the shore like a glistening insect, and every so often I hear a car go by on the highway, see a section of beach and stone get lit up by a fast sweep of headlights, though I’m concealed from view by the thick, gnarled hedges of beach grass and pigface that grow up near the divider.
The tide is up. Black mud bubbles up between the stones, and waves foam not four feet from where I stand, forming pools between the rocks whenever they recede. It’s a lonely place, a place no one would think to investigate—and yet, less than a thousand feet down the road the lights and chaos of East Norwalk begin.
I duck underneath the construction scaffolding, running a hand along the curve of the lighthouse, paint splintering under my fingers. The only door is boarded up, like all the windows. Still, I keep circling. I’ve been here before. There must be a way in. Unless . . .
The thought comes to me suddenly. Unless Andre, knowing the cops are getting closer, has covered his tracks.
But almost the instant I think it, my fingers hit something—an irregularity, a minuscule break in the wood. It’s so dark beneath the scaffolding I can barely make out my hands, groping along the surface of the lighthouse, a place that has been patched over and nailed shut, as if long ago a hurricane tore out a chunk of the wall and it was only hastily repaired. I push. The wood gives a quarter of an inch, groaning a little when I lean against it.
There’s a door here: carved deliberately out of the wall, then made to look like it has been boarded up. But no matter how much I push, it won’t release. Could it be locked from inside? I run my fingers against the nearly invisible seam, crying out when I feel the sharp bite of a nail. I suck my finger into my mouth and taste blood. It’s just like I thought. The nails aren’t actually nailed into anything, but simply hammered through the door and then distorted, bent parallel to the wood. Still, it won’t open.
I aim a frustrated kick at the door—I need in—and then spring backward as the door rebounds, groaning, unhinging like a vertical mouth. Of course. Not push. Pull.
Something stirs behind me. I whip around as the wind lifts and another wave crashes to the shore, foaming between the slick dark rocks. I scan the beach but see nothing but the looming shapes of ancient boulders, the wild tangle of beach grass, and the faint lights of Beamer’s twinkling in the distance, turning a portion of the ocean silver.
I slip inside the lighthouse, bending down for a sand-slicked rock I can use to keep the door open. This way, at least a little light breaks up the darkness. Besides, Nick will need in.
If she manages to find me.
Inside, the air smells like stale beer and cigarette smoke. I take a step forward, groping for a light switch, and something—a bottle?—rolls away. I collide with a standing lamp and barely catch it before it crashes to the floor. The lamp, which is cabled to a generator, barely lights up a coiled staircase leading to the lighthouse’s upper levels. The room is bare except for a few empty beer cans and bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes, and, weirdly, a man’s flattened shoe. Dozens of footprints crisscross the room, disturbing the heavy layer of sawdust and plaster. Ants swarm a crushed McDonald’s bag in the corner.
I drag the lamp toward the staircase. In the light, it looks like a serpent. Then I start to climb.
The red sofa has been removed from the room at the top of the stairs. Even before I find another lamp, I can tell that a large object has been recently dragged across the room—tracks are visible in the dust—and worked, somehow, down the staircase.
But the lamps remain—four of them, with huge bulbs exposed, like lights on a movie set—and the old coffee table, ringed with stains from drink glasses. The AC is still squatting in the corner, its grille choked with dust, and cinder blocks and plywood are stacked just to the left of the stairs, probably from the planned renovations that never materialized. Balled into one corner is a girl’s bra—yellow, faded, with bumblebees patterned across the cups.
I stand for a second in the center of the room, fighting the sudden urge to cry. How did I get here? How did any of us get here?