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The woman sat beside her on the sofa, took up her hand again. “You all disappeared eleven years ago.”
Scarlett pulled her hand away; the room spun around her.
One spin.
Two.
Three spins.
Four.
Who was this crazy person?
Five spins.
Sixseveneightnineten spins.
You couldn’t be somewhere for eleven years and not remember.
“I always believed they’d bring you back.” The woman put her hand to her heart and eyes toward the sky. “That we were chosen for this special thing for a reason.”
It was closing in on 2:00 a.m., according to the clock on the dining room wall, and Scarlett felt her body starting to shut down.
Like the lights going off in a large building, wing by wing, fuse by fuse.
Legs—clunk—out.
Lungs—clunk—out.
Head about to shut down
down
down.
She very suddenly wanted only to sleep. “I need to lie down.”
The woman said “Of course,” then wiped away tears and said she had to call some people, to tell them the news. “Steve’s never gonna believe it,” she muttered. Then she went into her bedroom with her cell phone.
Scarlett lay on the couch, but it smelled of cat, so she got up and went down the other short hall to where she knew her room had been.
And still was.
Exactly as she had left it?
The life-size cardboard cutout of Glinda, the good witch, from her Wizard of Oz–themed fifth birthday party.
The purple hanging canopy adorned with butterflies and ribbons that created a little nook in the corner.
The My Little Pony stickers on the wall.
They seemed familiar.
She liked the feeling.
She wanted to run.
Scarlett stretched out on a cupcake-print comforter—on her back, fingers laced over her belly, as if in her own coffin.
A mobile made out of wire and puffy plastic princess stickers hung from the ceiling.
She stared at it and tried to remember something. Tried to remember anything or everything.
Long stripes of blue, green, red, and yellow, with black stripes in between.
The feeling of floating away, possibly forever.
The wonder of it all, of a bird’s-eye view.
Unable to sleep after maybe twenty minutes of lying there and drifting through the sky . . .
Clouds . . .
A flock of birds
Below, a river.
Or . . . ?
She got up, went down the hall, through the living room, and out onto the terrace off the dining room. The beach—the Gulf—seemed to whisper an invitation, so she went down and across the patio and through the gate and stepped out onto the sand. It was cool and soft beneath her bare feet. Down to the right, the shoreline was rainbow-speckled, hotels aiming colored lights into the night. The boom-boom-boom of a far-off dance party tempted her. She could run there—that way—until she found it.
Found him.
Wait.
Who?
Lucas.
Or she could fold into the crowd like she belonged there, maybe disappear again through some dance-floor trapdoor.
The water was calm, lakelike. Putting her feet into the warm surf, she looked down at her toes.
When had they last felt the ocean?
Eleven years?
Then looked up at stars.
Aliens?
Really?
So very many stars.
She didn’t think she’d visited any but what-did-she-know-not-much.
No wonder her mother had had so many strange questions—“Can I check you for scars?” “Are you still a virgin?”; probably other people would, too. Maybe answers would come. In time.
Or maybe it was better to forget.
Because didn’t this qualify as a happy ending?
There’s no place like home even if home smells of cat dander and ashes and desperation.
Right?
Lucas
First came the ambulance then the squad cars then the bad news was confirmed—his father was dead—and next the questions.
“Do you have ID?”
POCKETS EMPTY NO.
“You were just let go?”
VAN. BLINDFOLD. TAILLIGHT.
“And the others are back, too?”
SCARLETT. SCARLETT. SCAR.
“What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
CAROUSEL. BEACH. HORSE.
SPINNING.
The back of the police cruiser was, at least, quiet as they rode through town—Fort Myers Beach, Florida, he’d discerned from signs. The sidewalks bulged with college types out barhopping. Cars crawled through the main intersection in town, even at 2:00 a.m.
They were stopped in front of an aging hotel called the Tiki Tower, where the parking valets wore leis; totem poles flanked a fountain lit with blue and green spotlights. A group of girls in a white convertible were stuck in the same traffic but in the opposite direction. They all had long ponytails, and bikinis under their tank tops, and they were singing along—poorly, drunkenly—to some pop song Lucas didn’t know. Two guys walking on the opposite sidewalk stopped, red plastic cups in their hands, and one of them shouted, “Ladies! Where’s the party?”
So this was what he’d been missing.
Eleven years, the cops had said.