I start to swim toward the shore. For a second I imagine I see a flashlight blinking through the trees. But the light blinks out again as soon as I try and focus on it.
My heart feels like it, too, is swollen with water. Head down, head up. My jeans weigh a thousand pounds. The shore seems to be getting farther, not closer. I’m gasping for breath, choking on my fear, wishing for things I haven’t wished for in forever: for my mother to hold me, for my father, for God to save me—for anyone.
I sink. Fight for the surface. Sink again. Up and down. Barely making any forward progress. If I can just make it, I can hide in the woods. I can lose him; I know these woods better than he does, better than anyone does.
But even as I think it, an enormous amount of light dazzles the surface of the reservoir, illuminating even the logs floating in the shallows a hundred feet away.
I turn around and am blinded by floodlights: Brent has powered them on, lighting up a clear path between us. The hum of his engine grows to a roar as he wheels around.
And points the boat straight at me.
“Help!” There’s no point in screaming but I do anyway, taking in another mouthful of water. “Help!” The boat comes so fast it cleaves a wake behind it. Thirty feet away. Fifteen.
I’ll never make it. I have no strength to swim anymore.
It’s the craziest thing: just before I drop, before I let the water take me, I swear I see Kaycee Mitchell step out of the trees, almost directly on the place my father and I buried Chestnut. Not Kaycee as she was the last time I saw her, but Kaycee the child, Kaycee my best friend, skinny and long-legged, just a flash of blond hair and a strong, urgent message she sends out across the water.
Swim.
Brent’s boat sends a surf of water up to meet me, and I fall down under its weight, tumbling. The underside clips my shoulder, missing my head by inches.
Underneath the water, sound becomes vibration: a shudder, a distant boom that makes the whole reservoir shiver. I open my eyes. The floodlights have cut their way down into the depths. A peaceful place to die. Green with old growth. Weedy and silent. There are letters embedded in the silt, large white letters, a hieroglyph I understand intuitively, a message that fills me with a strange joy.
I have learned how to see.
—
“Abby. Abby. Can you hear me? Abby.”
A whirl of lights and color. Fireworks. Explosions of sound.
“Just hang on, okay? You’re going to be okay. I’m right here with you.”
A web of branches above me.
I’m a child again, bundled in a white sheet, rocking.
“Keep the oxygen coming.”
“Radio the bus to come down Pike Road, it’ll be quicker.”
My mouth is made of plastic. My breath mists inside of it.
“She’s trying to say something. She’s trying to speak.”
A stranger touches my face. She looses my mouth from its plastic cage.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” the stranger says, “you’re going to be just fine.” She has a smile that reminds me of my mother’s.
It takes a second to work out what my tongue is, how to move it in the right direction.
“I found her,” I whisper.
“What’d she say?” I know that voice. Condor. “Abby, what’s the matter?”
She frowns. “Found who, sweetheart?”
“Kaycee.” I close my eyes again. I see the letters written at the bottom of the lake: the white of her bones, so clean, so fine, almost glowing. “She’s been waiting for us to find her. She’s been waiting for us in the reservoir.”
Epilogue
It’s September before I finally pack my car with my suitcase and my duffel bag, my mother’s jewelry box, and a cardboard box of my dad’s belongings I’ve decided, after all, to save.
Why not? The past is just a story we tell. And all stories depend on the ending.
And for the first time in my life, I truly believe that the ending is going to be just fine.
Hannah gives me a sheath of drawings bound up in a three-ring binder: a superhero named Astrid who wears a purple cape and a pair of leather boots and goes around rescuing kids drowning in ocean waves or stranded by mounting floods on the roofs of their houses.
“I tried to make her look like you,” she tells me shyly, before briefly squeezing me into a hug and then darting off.
“You didn’t say good-bye,” Condor calls after her, but she’s already vanished, disappearing inside the house.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t like good-byes, either.”
It’s a bright day, full of classic Indiana colors: gold and green and blue. The month of August seemed determined to make up for the drought, as if twelve months’ worth of rain had just been piling up waiting to spoil everyone’s last bit of summer. But when the storms passed, they left fields wild and lush. The reservoir is approaching normal levels again, though it’s still testing too high for lead and other contaminants, and the people of Barrens are still drinking and washing in bottled water trucked to town by the state and various charitable organizations. Protesters even set up camp in the playground that, ironically, still welcomes visitors with an Optimal Cares! sign. (Though after a recent graffiti modification, it now reads Optimal Scares.)
I never found out who sent me the envelope full of photographs that finally set me on a path to understanding the truth. But I suspect Misha might have had something to do with it, just as I suspect it was Misha who tried to run me off the road, though I doubt I’ll ever know whether she was finally sick of covering for Brent, whether she’d simply realized that he would never love her in the way she kept hoping he would, or whether she simply thought she could get me out of the way, even if it meant implicating herself. All I know is that she has been cooperating with the federal investigation into the nature of the Optimal Scholarships and the abuse perpetuated in their name. Maybe she’s cooperating in an attempt to redeem herself. Maybe it’s just an attempt to reduce her sentence, although, given the number of girls affected, it’s unlikely she will ever leave prison again.
And then, of course, there is Kaycee’s murder, and the charges related to it. Now that Brent’s dead, Misha will stand trial, alone.
I almost—almost—feel sorry for her.
An awkward silence stretches between Condor and me—uncharacteristic, since we’ve spent weeks talking, eating dinner together almost every night, bonding over the strange and sudden bubble of publicity that made us into a makeshift family. It’s funny: through all of this, we fell into an easy intimacy, the kind of friendship I’ve always craved and have had only intermittently with Joe.
I’m not ready to leave him, or Hannah, or even Barrens.
But I have to.