From midafternoon Saturday, Cassie was in Bangor. This was the tricky part: she couldn’t get herself noticed; she couldn’t seem to be barely fifteen. Even seventeen would be okay, but not fifteen. She’d worried about this, in her weeks of planning, she told Peter, and had decided, if anybody asked, to say that she was in town to see her sick grandpa, a patient at the hospital—Anders Shute’s old hospital; what were the odds?—and that her mom was on her way too but had had to deal with a crisis at work. She’d even thought of a name—Cassie Byrd—and a way to explain it, if anybody asked: that her dad, Clarke Byrd, had died, which was why her mom’s name was different, or she preferred to go by “Byrd” as a way to remember him.
“Pretty cool, don’t you think?” she said to Peter. “I read that it’s always best to keep your lies as close to the truth as possible. It’s harder to get caught out that way.”
Peter said that in the moment she said this, given what she was telling him about Bev, and what Cassie firmly believed was Bev’s amazing ability to lie to her daughter over a lifetime, the need to stay close to the truth seemed not so obvious. But never mind.
In the event, nobody official asked anything. The youth hostel occupied a sprawling Victorian house near the downtown (“Like Julia’s, but, like, five times as big,” she told Peter) and it was obviously spring break somewhere because the front hall was crowded with young backpackers—grown-ups, Cassie said, but barely. She got put in a room with three Swedish girls, two of them, Anja and Linn, as fair as she was herself. The third, Inge, small and dark with big breasts and wide blue eyes to rival Cassie’s, was the most talkative. Nineteen, speaking perfect English, they were friends from high school, taking time to travel before university. They’d come to the West Coast first and were making their way back east—just another week before they flew home; but they wanted to do some early spring hiking in Maine first.
Cassie told them her prepared story, and when they invited her to join them for dinner she excused herself, saying she was too sad about her grandfather—he was really sick, or she wouldn’t have come alone—and that she just needed to rest. She pretended she’d already been to the hospital to see him, earlier that evening. The Swedish girls were very understanding.
“I lost my grandpa too, about three years ago,” Inge said. “My mother’s father, the same as you. He had no memory by then, didn’t know who I was, but I remembered so well how he’d been when I was small and we would play horsey, on his hands and knees, he’d let me ride around on his back. So sad.”
And then: “Does your grandfather have his memory? I mean, does he know who you are?” Anja asked.
Cassie had to decide in a hurry. “Mostly,” she said, to cover her bases. “Mostly he knows, but not always.”
“What’s he sick with?” Linn’s turn.
“A cancer. A bad one.”
“Where is it?”
“Spread. It’s spread all over. It’s in his lungs and his brain and other places too.”
They nodded quietly and looked at the wooden floor, and then Inge got up and patted Cassie on the knee. “It’s really good that you’re here, then. He probably doesn’t have very long.” And then the three Swedish girls filed out to find some dinner, leaving Cassie alone beneath a fluorescent panel on a plastic mattress with her lone sheet and hand towel for bedding, for supper her Wheat Thins and for entertainment the tattered magazine she’d read in South Station.
Cassie hadn’t ever expected to go to Bangor on the weekend. This wasn’t the way she’d imagined encountering Arthur Burnes and her stepfamily. She was also in the thick of her lie about her grandfather, and felt she couldn’t be seen by the Swedish girls to loiter around the hostel when she should be at his bedside. But the girls, keen to hike, dressed by the time it was fully daylight, and slipped quietly from the room, leaving their belongings tidily rolled and stacked for their evening return. Cassie discreetly opened an eye to watch their preparations at one point, Inge’s breasts dangling only a couple of feet from Cassie’s face as she bent to pull on her pants, but hadn’t let on she was awake. It was a hostel, not a Hampton Inn, she told Peter; she couldn’t hang out there all day; and she’d almost convinced herself of her fictional grandfather at the hospital. So when she’d showered and dressed, she embarked purposefully, head down, stride sure, for Bangor General, as if getting there really was important.
The spring morning was chilly but bright, and the budding trees nodded as she passed. Forsythia bloomed in yellow bursts across the yards, alongside patches of crocuses and bluebells. To Cassie, these were signs of hope, blessings on her path. Two cherries, earlier than the rest, had begun to unfurl their frilly pom-poms, and she paused beneath them for a while, looking up at the patches of blue sky behind the pink. She told Peter she felt better than she had in months. The air in her lungs felt different, the slight chill of her fingertips and the breeze at her neck, the rosy hue of the sun through the petals . . . it was like being kissed, not in a romantic way, she said to Peter, but in the way your mother—or father—kisses you when you are small, and gently strokes your hair.