“That’s disgusting,” Leo said.
“I know,” I told him. “Plus, we don’t even look alike. Why would you say that?”
“We do look alike,” he insisted. “A lot alike. We’re both short. We both have dark hair and freckles. And our eyebrows are the same.”
“They are?” Did mine look devilish too?
5.
On the ride home we stopped by the new theater construction site.
They were pouring the foundations.
“Just big craters filled with cement,” Leo said. “No tunnels there. No mysteries.”
“What is it with you and those tunnels?”
“They’re the only place we know Lisette went that we haven’t been,” Leo reminded me. “Maybe we’ll see her ghost.”
“You can’t really believe that,” I said.
“Other people say they did,” Leo said. “And even if we don’t, this is our last chance to know for sure. At the end of the summer, the old theater and the tunnels are going to be destroyed. We’ll never know.”
When the policeman came to follow up with my mother about the accident, I hid out in the hallway by the living room and eavesdropped on their conversation. She asked him so many questions. Some she’d asked before. How could this happen? Did they suffer? Why was that driver on the road?
He said he thought it happened fast, both for my dad and Ben and for the drunk driver who hit them, but for the rest of the questions he said, We just don’t know.
We just don’t know.
Some things are gone for good. You can’t get them back. You can’t know what happened. Ever.
“Meg wondered if I wanted to volunteer,” I said. “Maybe if I worked in the costume shop I could find something out about the tunnels. Maybe about Lisette too. Meg’s been working here for a long time.”
“That would be great.” Leo looked impressed.
I decided to take advantage of that.
“But you have to pay me equally for the tour stuff from now on,” I said.
“All right.”
“And never, ever say that we’re cousins again.”
“Got it.”
“And—”
“Come on. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“There might be more,” I told him. “I’ll let you know when I think of the rest.”
6.
My uncle Nick came over that night to help my mom with the deck. I was always glad when he did because then my mom wasn’t alone out there. She wanted to finish the deck before we left for the summer and it was taking longer than she’d expected, so she often worked late, when the night cooled things off.
Nick had strung up a light in the back so they could see in the dark while they worked. I hoped it would scare the turkey vultures away but they didn’t leave. Sometimes I’d hear the sanding stop and when I looked down either Nick would have gone home or he and my mom would be talking.
Ben and I could never really talk the way Miles and I did, but I got to understand Ben anyway. At first, during the earlier years, he would scream and yell and you couldn’t say a lot to him. But then when things sort of evened out, when he’d had some therapy and my parents knew how to help him more, you could have short almost-conversations with him. Like he would say, “Do you want a LEGO set for Christmas?” and I would say, “No, I want a camera for Christmas. Do you want a LEGO set for Christmas, Ben?” He would grin really big and say yes and I knew I’d said what he wanted me to say.
Also when we went skiing together I could tell from the look on his face that he felt the way I did. Peaceful. Good. I saw him breathing deep when we went on the trails and I knew it was because he smelled the pine trees. We looked a lot alike when his face was at rest. I had never noticed it until I saw a picture that my dad showed us from one of the days we were up on the mountain.
We didn’t deal with skiing last winter. My mom didn’t get out the ski rack or the skis. She wasn’t as good as my dad, and driving in the snow scared her, even though she was the one who had lived in it all her life and my dad was from Portland, where it didn’t snow nearly as much. We didn’t even talk about going skiing. And I wasn’t mad. I didn’t want to go either. Maybe Miles did, but if so, he didn’t say.
7.
I was changing into my black jeans and black T-shirt early in the morning when I heard Miles hollering out and my mom hurrying down the hall to his room.
He didn’t usually have nightmares. Not even after the accident.
I tiptoed down the hall to the room and I heard my mother soothing him and Miles saying something about Harley.
Uh-oh.
I pushed open the door. “Everything okay?”
“Miles had a bad dream,” Mom said, looking shaky. “He dreamed he was buried alive.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Miles said. And then, before I could stop him, he said, “It’s from a show that Cedar and I have been watching.”