“Hold on,” Joe said into the phone. “He doesn’t take history. Shepherd Ave. And—” He went to the window and looked out. “Crest and Shepherd—Shepherd Village. Second floor in the front. Yes. Yes. No. The sheriff.”
“Why would he take his history book with him if he weren’t going to school?” The missing book was a dangling prize. I wouldn’t let go of it. He’d gone to school, of course he had. He was mad at me, and lying low in the courthouse square with Steve and Caleb and Shay and the rest of them. Or they were out at the barn smattering the day’s outrage on the walls. I would forgive truancy. I would forgive vandalism. I would forgive anything, if he’d just walk through the door.
Joe came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “World history is a freshman class. He’s in social studies. That’s the book right there.” We both gave our full attention to Our Land and Its People. “The sheriff should be on his way. Is there anything else missing? Clothes? Favorite objects? Can you tell?” He dragged a hand through one of the boxes.
“No, wait,” I said, standing up. “He’s doing a project for history class. Personal history. The genealogy project. He’s been working on it so hard in the library—you said so.”
Joe grimaced. “I said he’d been working on something. I don’t know anything about a genealogy project. I doubt Michelle Grivner’s got the seventh-grade social studies group doing genealogy. Last week they were doing reports on the Industrial Revolution. Milah—the librarian—said they’d ransacked that section of the stacks. She sent a group of them to see the principal.”
I stared at him, waiting for the words to make sense. “Social studies is history, isn’t it?”
“Hell,” he said. “I don’t remember what it means. Geography. Culture.”
“The genealogy project?”
“If he was enjoying it, maybe he was doing it for fun . . .”
He didn’t finish. Neither of us believed this.
There was a hard knock at the front door. Joe went to get it.
I sat on the edge of Joshua’s bed, shaking and sick. The room was spinning. I slid off the bed onto the carpet, listening to a commotion at the front door, more people arriving. Joe got out his phone and yelled into it for a few minutes. It seemed hours before someone showed up at the doorway. I couldn’t look up to see whose legs walked into the room. Someone knelt at my side and placed a hand on my shoulder. I pushed it off.
“Anna,” the sheriff said.
He leaned low so that I couldn’t help but see him. “Anna, what happened?”
“It didn’t work,” I said. My breath felt short, as though I had been running, running. In my dreams, in real life—always running. I’d hoped for a finish line, but I had only fooled myself. The race could never stop, and now that I’d hesitated, I couldn’t win.
We had to go. We had to run. Run, Leely. That’s what I would have said.
Running was a way of life. Running was a prayer, a church, a religion. Running was a god, the only one I’d ever truly believed in. You don’t need hocus-pocus. You don’t need magical thinking. You don’t need anything or anyone. But the worst part was that I knew, and maybe had always known, that the running would never get us anywhere.
“It didn’t work,” I said. “I lost him.”
Part II
Chapter Twenty-two
On the day I died, I dragged the new oars down to the lake. I pulled them by their shafts across the yard. They were heavy, but I was saving myself the second trip. The blades rode flat along the ground, flattening two tracks through the wet grass.
The air was cool, but down on the dock, the slats were already hot. I noted a lone fishing boat out on the water. Inside, two men hunched silently over their tackle, their faces turned out across the lake. Beyond them, mist rose off the water, nearly hiding the far shore.
I got to work. Ray had already dragged the rowboat from where it had been stored upside down under the porch since fall. Now I pulled it from the side of the hill, flipping it and pushing it to the water’s edge. The bucket we kept tied to a piling had already been fastened into place. I filled it with green lake water, flushing spiderwebs out of the boat’s bottom boards and from under the benches, then baled the water back out and pushed the boat into the water, guiding it along the dock and tying it in place.
At last I slid the new oars into the rowlocks, one at a time, stopping to admire the gleam on the blades. At the end of last summer, one of the old cracked ones had split wide, useless. We’d splurged for new instead of knocking around at rummage sales all season, waiting for something cheap to turn up.
The lifejackets. I ran back up to the house, spending twenty minutes digging through hideaways and corners as quietly as I could around our closed bedroom door. At the last minute I remembered the bungee cords to secure them. Down on the dock again, I patted at the jackets to beat out the dust.
I didn’t notice the fishermen this time, not until one of them spoke. “Morning,” he said.
His voice was quiet but large in the vast emptiness of our lake. Our lake, though many people lived on it. Many other people came to fish on it, like these men. These two men. They had drifted close to the shore, only a few feet off the end of the dock. There would be no fish there, nothing worth catching.
Their boat sat low and heavy in the water, barely clearing the sand. Two men. I glanced up the slope and stairs behind me.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said. His friend seemed content to remain silent, but his eyes roved over my bare legs. I’d gotten wet putting the boat in, and now I turned cold. I held the jackets in front of me.
“Morning,” I said.
“Trying your luck?” He lifted his reel a bit. The gesture seemed strangely dirty, as though he’d unzipped his pants and shown me his dick. I didn’t say anything. The men glanced at one another. I kept picturing one of them stepping out of the skip into the water. Up to his waist, maybe, nothing more. They were big men, but I imagined them moving fast. “Not much biting this morning,” the man said. “You fish?”
“My boyfriend,” I said. “My boyfriend likes to fish.” He didn’t. Ray preferred red meat to fish, didn’t think fresh fish on the grill was worth the guts, not worth the mess or the trouble. He liked burgers from the Clipper in town, with beer. He was up at the house now, sleeping off a late night. He didn’t like the quiet of fishing, either, or quiet of any kind. He couldn’t sit still for very long. Even out on the boat, we were always rowing, always moving, and always turning back before it got too late or too cold or too anything. He let me row more than was probably gentlemanly and took over when I was too slow for his taste. He wasn’t interested in spotting eagles’ nests with me. “We’re heading out in a few minutes,” I said.