She stood up to her full height, and once again I was glad I hadn’t told her the whole tale. I didn’t need this much girl judging me.
At the front door, I reached up and kissed her on the cheek. What was I thinking? Of course she had feelings. Over and over, she’d gone out on nights like this with nothing but a flashlight and a hound and brought home scared little kids.
And those were the lucky ones.
Maybe thinking of all those families, families like us, who were missing a loved one and never said thank you when they were recovered, made me do something I’d never done before. I ran my hand through her long blond hair. I buried my face in it. It smelled like lavender shampoo and something the shampoo couldn’t cover, like saltwater spray and Scotch broom pollen and sand and things dying and clams spitting and people laughing and drinking things from a cooler.
She smelled like the island.
What would she know of my betrayal?
I told her good night, and as I turned away, the wind practically forced me off my feet. I had to lean forward forty-five degrees on the walk through the lagoon just to get home. If my abs hadn’t been so strong, I don’t think I would’ve made it.
Down on the shore, people were leaving. News crews were packing it in; retirees and people who could afford waterfront property like us had the belongings they needed in the backs of their SUVs and everything in their houses shuttered and bolted and locked against the storm. The water was only an inch deep on the shore drive, but everyone was in a hurry to get past the DANGER – TSUNAMI ZONE sign.
Everyone but two guys with flashlights wading their way through the lagoon.
Grays. Unfolded by the weather, out looking for my brother. There was a tribe on my side, which should have comforted me. But on this night it wasn’t enough. Not after what I’d almost revealed to Pixie.
It took a long time to get home on the dike trail. Each footstep squelching in the mud, each time I raised my ankle, it made a noise like the question: Why?
Why, Mom?
Why did you stay gone?
seventeen
PIXIE
Outside, the wind was howling. Down on the beach, the water was whipping up actual waves. Unusual for our inland waters. I couldn’t help thinking: The Sea is pissed about something.
I couldn’t understand Henry. It seemed like there was so much he’d left unsaid. When I asked if they’d fired the nanny, and he’d said, “We got a different nanny,” it made me wonder, “What happened to the first one?”
He was hiding something from me. Something important. It felt as though I were out on a search for his little brother and there were a giant flag blowing in the breeze.
This way.
I mean, if he didn’t want me to know about the abuse, then why tell me?
I was puzzling through the whole thing as Mom made up a bed for me on the sofa, which was where I’d be sleeping for the foreseeable future because I didn’t want to lie on raw brain matter, or the possibility of raw brain matter, no matter how much we all had scrubbed at it. “This’ll have to do until we can get you a new mattress,” she said as she fluffed the pillows on the sofa.
“It’s fine, Mom. Thanks.”
I pretended to settle in, and she turned off the lights.
I waited until the noises in her bathroom subsided, then let my thoughts churn another half hour so she would be through reading before I crept out of bed and stole into her home office. I flipped on her computer.
Here was my big question: Where was Henry’s mother in all this? I knew she’d been gone for so long it was ancient history. But why had she left? Something about Henry’s story, and her absence in it, made me think that she’d been outplayed somehow.
I brought up a search on the computer. I didn’t know Henry’s mom’s first name, but it wasn’t hard to find. I searched on “Rupert Shepherd First Wife,” and there it was: Ellen Dawes; and her place of birth, Cupertino, California; and her age, forty-five. I found out that she was currently working for a catering company out of Seattle. Nothing about whether she owned or trained any pets. That’s what I was interested in. Because that’s what it had sounded like to me—like someone in his life, either his mother or his nameless nanny, had trained him as if he were a bad, bad puppy.
I was about to head back to my sofa and try to sleep for real when I looked out the back window.
There, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Patience.
She was standing by the trailhead, completely dry in the rainstorm. Of course she wasn’t there when I looked at her straight on—it was only when I looked at the Douglas firs, swaying in the wind, that her outline became clear in my peripheral vision.
I thought about chasing after her, but the last time I did, someone got shot, so I thought I should be a little more prepared.
I eased myself into my brothers’ bunk room and tried to feel around for Lawford’s Taser without turning on the light.
Big mistake.