Invisible (20 page)

Maybe that was the moment that changed everything for me.

I walked around the small white plane. Nearby, a couple of overalled mechanics worked on another plane, larger than this one.
Beyond them, Boy Scouts sat cross-legged on the grass, listening to a guy in khaki as he walked around and gestured. Rock music thumped from the open door of the hangar across the way.

“Nice,” I told Joe. “I never knew you wanted to fly.”

“Sure.” Joe stood on a foothold built into the side of the plane, leaning across the wing to unscrew a cap and peer inside. “I built this, you know.”

I glanced at him, astonished. How many other things didn’t I know about Joe?

He smiled at my expression. “Took me two years.”

I’d heard of planes being assembled from kits, but had never seen one up close. I ran my hand along the bolted sheets of metal. It all looked real enough. “Remind me, how did you do in tech ed?”

Now he laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve taken it up hundreds of times. Handles like a dream. Come on. Let me show you Black Bear from the air.”

“A dream come true,” I muttered.

Grinning, he handed me up the small folding steps, and we both settled ourselves into the cockpit. He gave me a pair of headphones. “Put these on and we can chat. It’ll get pretty noisy once I start her up.” He consulted the paper pinned to a small clipboard, then opened the glove box and slid the clipboard inside. Pushing open the small window beside him, he called, “Clear!” Then to me, “Strap yourself in.”

Loud sputtering as the propeller on the front of the plane began rotating, and a minute later, we began bumping across the pavement. The noise grew louder and we moved faster. He spoke into the microphone. The ground fell away and the sky opened up before us, endlessly blue and reaching all the way up into heaven.

Over the background rumbling, Joe’s voice came clearly. “Nice, isn’t it?”

Off to the right sprawled the amusement park: turquoise, yellow, navy, and red tent tops, a huge devil’s head with horns, the
Ferris wheel. The roller coaster snaked up and down along the curve of woods.

“You still crazy about coasters?” Joe asked.

“I haven’t been on one in years.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even been to a park, but I remembered the first time. It had been a little county fair with rickety rides, and I’d been with Joe. A lot of my firsts had been with Joe. “So you’re Peyton’s teacher.”

He nodded. “She reminds me of you, you know. Her mind works in the same way, hopping from point to point.”

I stared steadfastly out the window. Had he ever looked at Peyton and wondered at the color of her eyes, the shape of her face? “Irene Stahlberg says she doesn’t have any friends.”

“Peyton’s okay. She’s an independent thinker. She’ll find her own way.”

It made me feel good to know that Joe was there, helping Peyton navigate the rocky road of adolescence. It meant even more now that Julie wasn’t there.

The pines thinned to grass, then to fields of wheat, stippled pale green and yellow, stretching all the way to the horizon. Brown patches of earth showed here and there. I turned in my seat to look back. In the distance, along the horizon, the crops shone in the afternoon sun like emeralds. Was that what the two old farmers had been talking about? “The wheat doesn’t look good,” I said.

“Farmers are having a tough year.”

“Anyone know why?”

“You know what it’s like. Sometimes it happens.”

Joe knew better than most. His father had been a farmer. “How’s your dad? I didn’t see him yesterday.”

“He moved to St. Paul to be near my sister and her family.”

“That’s nice.” Joe’s younger sister had worshipped him, and he’d pretended to hate the attention. But he’d been the one to
stand up for her at school, and he’d gone to every one of her high school softball games. “Do you like her husband?”

“Sure. He’s a good guy. They have a little girl, another baby on the way.”

There, for the briefest murmur of time, hung the way our lives could have spun out, if we’d let them. We could be married, settled, taking turns unloading the dishwasher, carrying out the trash. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass and looked down at the lake, broad and placid below. “You still ice fish?”

He nodded. “I’ve upgraded some. Got a heater, a TV.”

All the times we’d lugged sleeping bags and lanterns out to his dad’s ice house, that shack dragged out to the middle of the frozen lake, our breath frosting the air. We’d curl up together inside the cozy space, almost never getting around to dropping a line. I stared at the deep blue of the lake below and pictured it white and gray in a low winter sun. “Remember when I dropped my bracelet?” Though it hadn’t been my bracelet. It had been Julie’s. Joe and I had been playfully wrestling and it had fallen right off. I’d felt the tickle of the chain sliding down my thumb, then immediately pushed Joe away and plunged my hand through the fishing hole, into icy black water. Nothing.

“You kidding? I thought I was going to have to fish
you
out.”

I’d been furious at him for holding me back. Those reckless emotions, over-the-top and played to their full limit. Nothing touched me that deeply anymore.

The water sparkled. Somewhere among its depths lay the gold bracelet with the dangling heart, the one Frank had given Julie for their first anniversary. I’d stolen it out of my sister’s jewelry box. Julie had been in tears.
I’ll get you another
, I had snapped, though I never did.
That’s not the point
, Julie had said, and turned away.

Apparently, she’d ended up finding her own replacement. Just the other day, Peyton had lifted it from the jewelry box, and
it looked almost exactly the same as the original, though the heart was a little smaller and the links a little bigger, and altogether not as pretty. I wondered if it had pained Julie, fastening it around her wrist, if it had reminded her of all the ways in which I’d ended up disappointing her. “The lake’s so blue,” I said.

He nodded. “You can swim in there now. The town installed a weed puller.”

Those long, silky fronds would wrap themselves around my ankles and calves, and squish unpleasantly underfoot. “Should have done it long ago.”

“We didn’t have the money for it back then.”

Black Bear had been a miserable town on the verge of extinction. But no longer. We banked over the treetops, and below me, as the trees parted to reveal a clearing dominated by a large beige building, I saw the reason why.

“Gerkey’s.” I’d never seen it from above, never realized how isolated it was amid the trees, perched on the shore. All those hours I’d spent in that building, dipping candles, coming home blistered and nauseated from the sickening fruity aromas.

“Brian threw some great parties there.”

I remembered. But the corporate-looking complex below bore no resemblance to its first incarnation as the secret weekend meeting place for all the teens in town. Had Brian’s parents ever once suspected anything when they came to work Monday mornings, opening the door to the lingering aroma of marijuana, or tripping over the forgotten sneakers in a hallway, or finding the empty beer can inexplicably in the supply closet? We could not possibly have been as tidy or careful as we had imagined ourselves. We would have left clues behind. But Brian never said anything to me about getting into trouble with his folks, and Alice Gerkey had never once looked at me with anything but trust and affection. “Do you know how Mike and Sheri’s little boy is doing?”

“Turned out to be an ear infection. It’s like that every time
Logan spikes a fever, or loses his appetite. They’re raw. I worry about them both.”

“He has the same disease Julie had.” Neighborhoods spun out below, roofs rolling out in branching lines, looking all the same, one dark rectangle after another. Sheets hung from a clothesline. A car crawled beetle-like along a narrow street. A town full of people, going about their regular business. What if something else was going about its business, too, and infecting every one of them? “Seems like a lot of people around here do.”

He gave me a glance. “That why you were at Doc Lindstrom’s?”

I looked at him. I hadn’t even said a word about my visit with Doc Lindstrom. He smiled back and I felt something flicker between us. Why had I been so surprised by his perceptiveness? Of course Joe would have guessed why I’d wanted to talk to Julie’s doctor. Joe had always been able to follow the track of my thinking, keeping me going along a certain path or sometimes pulling ahead and stopping me before I did something rash or risky. I looked away. Joe hadn’t
always
stopped me. “He said the rate’s only slightly elevated. He thinks it’s just a matter of time before it goes back down—”

“But you think it won’t.”

The doctors who had taken care of Julie thought so. “What do I know? I blow up buildings for a living.”

“I don’t know, Dana.” Joe’s voice was thoughtful. “Maybe you’re right. First Julie, then Martin. Logan.”

“Miss Lainie.”

“Miss Lainie,” he repeated. “Exactly. Maybe it just takes an outsider to see something the rest of us are too close to make out.”

An
outsider
? Was that how Joe saw me? My cheeks grew hot and I turned back to watch the fields ripple gold and green, green and gold.

The airplane thrummed around us.

Joe’s voice came through the headphones. “What happened to us, Dana?”

I stared down at the wheat, alive and dead, dead and alive.
Stupidity happened to us
, I wanted to say. My own stupid, foolish self. I wanted to confess everything, but doing so would have been the most selfish thing of all. I forced my voice to be even. “I guess we outgrew each other.”

“You know that’s not true. It sure wasn’t like that the last time we were together.”

His face hovering above mine, the moonlight slanting through the branches above us, trapping him in light and shadow
. “Joe, we were kids. What did we know?”

“All I knew was I was crazy about you. Then one day, it was over. No phone calls, no explanation. You wouldn’t even talk to me in the hall.”

I remembered that day. I’d gone to school in a daze and wandered from class to class, unhearing and unseeing, trying to figure out if I could tell that I wasn’t the same anymore. I couldn’t talk to Joe, not until I knew how to tell him. By the time I had figured it out, it had been too late.

“I came by the place you and your sister rented over in Hawley.” Joe’s voice was low. “You were in there. I heard the TV. But you wouldn’t answer the door.”

He would’ve seen in an instant exactly why I was hiding. For five interminable minutes, I’d pressed myself against the wall, eyes clenched tight and holding my breath, until at last the terrible pounding stopped.

The plane droned on.

Then I nodded toward the dark clouds massing on the horizon. “Storm’s coming. We’d better head back.”

 [PEYTON]

A
NGLERFISH ARE BONY, LANTERN-JAWED FISH THAT
live deep in the abyss. They come magically equipped with their own fishing rod, an antenna that curves from the top of their head and dangles a glowing light right in front of their mouth. Curious fish swim over to check it out, and
snap!
They don’t live long enough to warn the others
.

These are the female anglerfish. The males are tiny lumps that burrow into the side of the female and fuse, flesh to flesh. They live off the female and give her what she needs to reproduce. The perfect relationship, as long as he doesn’t mind giving up his freedom and she doesn’t mind having something forever jammed into her side
.

Brenna’s house was so new it reeked of paint and carpet. It was worse in the basement, where the smells were trapped and made Peyton’s eyes water.

“We’ve seen this movie,” Eric complained.

“Like a thousand times,” Peyton muttered. She tossed a piece of popcorn at the bowl, and it missed, landing on the floor instead.
Quickly, she scooped it up before Brenna’s mom could appear and stand there, frowning, her hands on her hips.

“Who’s watching the movie?” Adam snickered. He and Brenna sat bundled in the armchair, her legs across his lap and his arm slung around her shoulders.

“Shut up.” Brenna pointed the remote at the big screen. “This is the good part.”

Her boyfriend growled and nuzzled her neck. “I like my women bossy.”

Brenna giggled, and pretended to elbow him away while letting him slide his other arm across her belly.

Peyton looked pointedly at Eric.
You owe me
.

He made an apologetic face.
I know
.

She ate another handful of popcorn. Adam was disgusting and Brenna annoying, but at least they weren’t paying any attention to her. They weren’t looking at her with big sad eyes, or asking questions that were supposed to be sympathetic but were really just plain curiosity. Like Peyton would really tell anyone what it was like to be her. Like she even knew.

But being here was better than being at her own house, where her dad wandered around like a ghost, and Dana could at any moment walk in the front door and say or do something stupid that only made everything worse.