Invisible (24 page)

“No! Don’t come any closer. The sand, remember?”

“Oh, right.” The sand that was now clinging to the bottom of his sweatpants. I hoped it fell off before he realized it.

“Dana, does it happen to you, too? When you wake up, can you tell that things have changed while you were sleeping?”

Change
. Maybe that was it. He was looking at me, waiting. “Well, sometimes my dreams can make me think about things in a different way.”

He nodded, sending the foil pieces sliding down his cheeks. “That’s why we have to be careful. That’s why we always have to watch.”

What were his touchstones, the things he used to keep himself balanced? Had one of them been Julie? “It’s good you’re doing that.”

“Yeah?” His face relaxed, and I wondered what small comfort I’d given him.

A low rumble made him glance upward. “I got to go. Planes can kill you.”

He lurched down the narrow path, his feet making odd steps as he tried to avoid swaths of sand washed across the cement, as the low grumble of the plane chased after him.

Shielding my eyes, I squinted up at the white machine with its wings outstretched and tried to make out whether it was Joe’s, but in the end one small plane looks pretty much like another,
and I watched it grow smaller and smaller until it was just a speck sailing into the sun.

Martin smiled, seeing me. His cheeks were puffy, the skin stretched taut across his face. His look of surprised joy took me aback, and I felt ashamed. I had had every intention of leaving town the day before without saying goodbye, of just packing up my suitcase and driving away.

Turning to the nurse walking alongside him into the dialysis clinic’s waiting room, he said, “I’m good now. My daughter’s here.”

I didn’t let my step falter. I didn’t react at all.

The nurse glanced at me, confusion evident on her face. We didn’t know each other. “That’s nice,” she said. “Why don’t you sit out here for a little while and make sure you’re ready to go?”

Two Native American children played on the floor, and as Martin lowered himself to an upholstered chair, a crayon rolled his way. Bending, he handed it to them. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have brought my Scrabble board, but Milly Peterson’s using it. She’s got some championship going.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I just wanted to talk, anyway.”

“Oh, sure, then.”

The nurse lifted an afghan from the back of the couch, a dizzying swirl of dandelion yellow and purple, and folded it around Martin’s knees. She gave me a meaningful look, and I nodded. I’d stay with him for a while.

“How are you two doing?” she asked the children.

“Fine,” the older one said.

“Is our mommy done yet?” the younger girl asked.

“One more hour, honey.” The nurse patted Martin’s shoulder, and walked back through the sliding doors into the dialysis room.

“What’s up?” Martin asked me.

“I’ve been thinking that Julie was right—something’s making people sick.”

“Even though the Department of Health said it’s all clear?”

“Even though.”

His gaze moved around the room and came to rest on the children playing nearby. “Go on,” he said, at last.

“I thought you might be able to help me figure out what’s changed in Black Bear over the past few years.”
Change
, LT had said. What had changed overnight, literally and figuratively?

The clock on the wall above his head chirred, and the hour hand struck one.

He sat back. “Let’s see. Were you here when they opened that new highway north of town?”

“Highway 10?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Took half the traffic right out of town, and the stores really suffered.”

“I was here.” Ten had opened way back when I was a teenager, and we’d christened it with drag races until the highway patrol stopped us. It had curved around Black Bear now for almost twenty years and could have nothing to do with what I was searching for.

“A few years back, we got a girl on the high school football team,” he mused. “That was big news around here.”

“That’s not the kind of changes I’m talking about.”

“I know, I know. I’m just trying to jog things loose.”

He was right. I needed to let him do this in his own way. “Okay. A girl joined the football team.”

“We added two more handicapped spots in front of the library. The Main Street Café started serving breakfast on weekends.”

The younger girl looked up, the light polishing the glossy lengths of her hair. “We got new swings at school.”

“There you go. We got new swings.”

Which neither he nor Julie had been anywhere near. Satisfied, the little girl returned to her coloring.

“Of course, there’s been lots of new construction downtown,
and all around the lake. That amusement park, couple new hotels.”

“My mom works at the Duck On Inn.” The older girl frowned as she industriously worked her crayon across the page. “She says the tourists are going to kill her.”

The younger girl looked up. “Our mom’s in there. She has to get her blood cleaned.”

“That’s right,” Martin told them. “You’re both very good little girls to wait for her so patiently.”

A serious nod. “We’re going to get DQ.”

“That sounds nice,” I said. The girl regarded me with round dark eyes, then returned to her coloring.

“Duck On Inn’s a popular place,” Martin said. “They got a real good fish fry on Fridays.”

“Local fish?”

“Oh, sure.”

So wait. Maybe we were onto something. “Are there any manufacturing plants that drain into the lake?”

“Well, sure. There’s Gerkey’s.”

“Can’t be that,” I said. “Gerkey’s has been around forever. We need to focus on what’s new, what’s changed recently.”

He nodded, looked down, and plucked at the blanket across his lap. “You know, Dana, you’ve been gone a long time.” His voice was gentle. He looked up with kind eyes. “Do you really care about what’s going on here?”

“Of course I do,” I said, stung. “This is my hometown. I grew up here.”

His expression told me he didn’t believe me.

“Well, hey.” Sheri was there, smiling down at me, her hand on the back of Martin’s chair. “Didn’t think I’d see you two here.” She looked from me to Martin, to me again. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Look, Miss Sheri.” The older girl clambered to her feet. “I drew you a picture.”

“You did? Let me see.” Sheri examined the piece of paper. “Gorgeous.”

“I drew one, too,” her sister said.

“Hers isn’t very good,” the older one said apologetically.

The younger one elbowed her.

“Ow!”

“Wow, look at these.” Sheri took the proffered sheet. “These are just beautiful. I’m going to hang them on my bulletin board when I get to work tomorrow.”

“For real?”

“You bet.” Sheri sat beside me on the couch. “How you doing, Martin?”

“Not one of my better days.”

She nodded with a deeper understanding than I could ever have, and I realized how this disease had united them, broken down barriers and allowed them to speak in shorthand. “I decided to take Julie’s advice,” she said. “I’m going to learn to do home dialysis.”

“Good for you,” Martin said. “You can do it.”

“I hope you’re right.” She gave us both a wan smile. “Hey, listen. Why don’t you come by for supper tonight?”

“That’s all right,” Martin said. “You kids go on without me.
Wheel of Fortune
’s on and I don’t want to miss it.”

“Dana?”

I suddenly very much wanted to have dinner with Sheri and Mike, see their home and their two little boys. “I’d love to. What time?”

“How about seven o’clock? We’ll feed the boys earlier, and tuck them in. We’ll have a real grown-ups’ night out.” She stood and looked down at the girls. “You two want to come in with me and check on your mom?”

The little girls skipped alongside Sheri, the younger one reaching up for her hand as the doors opened to let them into the dialysis room.

We watched them go. The waiting room felt barren, an empty silence stretching from wall to wall. At last, Martin sighed. “You know you can’t bring Julie back.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “She called me. Out of the blue a few weeks ago. I didn’t even give her a chance to talk. But she should have told me she was sick. I could have saved her.” Instead, she’d very decisively crossed out my name in the margin of her notebook.

He reached over and took my hand in his warm, callused hands. “Maybe she didn’t think she was the one needed saving.”

 [PEYTON]

S
TARFISH WILL EAT ANYTHING: CORALS, SPONGES
, worms, crabs, mussels, oysters, clams, rotting fish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, mud, and sometimes even one another. They’re focused and determined, working for days to pry open a clam, willingly fracturing their bodies in the process. They march through coral reefs, sucking out the polyps helplessly trapped in their tiny shells; they slurp down sea anemones and jellies, despite how bitter their poisons must taste
.

Other animals, seeing them approach, run for cover—at least the ones that can. The other ones burrow and hold themselves very, very still
.

People, on the other hand, think starfish are charming. They stop and pick them up from the sand. They bring them home as souvenirs, maybe even make jewelry out of them. Isn’t it funny to think that starfish die, not because they’re so evil, but because they’re so pretty?

•  •  •

Her grandma loved car rides. Peyton couldn’t understand why, but it always meant that after church and the diner, they’d drive around the lake, her grandma with her hand on the windowsill, watching the boats and people go by. She’d lived in Black Bear all her life. What on earth could be so new and marvelous that she’d want to see it again and again? Peyton slumped in the backseat and seethed.

At last, they dropped her grandma off at the nursing home, and Peyton resumed her front-row seat. “Why does Grandma hate Dana so much?”

He glanced at her. “That what Grandma said, that she hates Dana?”

“Not exactly, but you’ve heard her. I think Dana did something to make Grandma really mad, something that hurt Mom.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Grandma wouldn’t say. All she told me was that it was a secret.”

“You know your grandma doesn’t always get things straight.”

Not this time. Grandma knew something and she knew enough not to tell. Peyton slouched in her seat and watched the houses roll past. She should have guessed her dad would be no help.

“Why are you so interested in this?” he asked.

She sighed, exasperated. “It’s about
Mom
.”

“Well, if Dana did something bad, your mom would have mentioned it.”

“She didn’t tell us she called Dana, did she?” Peyton shot back.

He frowned and she knew she’d struck a nerve.

Slightly abashed, she said in a softer voice, “Why do you think she kept that a secret, Dad?”

His voice was level when he replied. “I wish I knew.”

•  •  •

Peyton poked the plastic tube to the gravel bottom of her aquarium, and the fish scattered, wary. Water began dripping into the bucket at her feet. She moved the tube around, watching to make sure she didn’t accidentally suck up a fish.

She didn’t need to worry about the loach. Plump and sluglike, they were firmly attached to the glass with their suckers, industrious and purposeful. They always seemed so earnest to Peyton, as if they were constantly trying to prove their worth. But the dwarf rainbow fish with their tiny glowing eyes could be unpredictable. They were hiding near the thing that looked like melted wax but was supposed to be a volcano. Peyton had walked into the kitchen one morning to find it beside her bowl and her mother at the stove, casually stirring the oatmeal. The endlers preferred the little arched bridge and the lighthouse, both of which had been tucked into the toe of her Christmas stocking. The leader of the tank, her dwarf gourami, liked the plastic palm tree that Eric had given her because he said tropical fish needed to feel at home.

From outside her window came a steady banging as her dad worked on her mom’s car. Something or other had fallen off the week before her mom went into the hospital for the last time, and her dad had promised her he’d fix it. Peyton had no idea why he was working on it now, but maybe it was like why she was cleaning her aquarium. Something to do. Something normal.

Footsteps tapped rapidly down the hall. Dana always walked fast, as if she was impatient to get to wherever she was going. Peyton’s mom had had a more thoughtful stride, as if she’d been enjoying the trip and the destination could wait.

The footsteps halted and Peyton knew without looking that Dana stood in the doorway. Peyton felt Dana’s indecision and uncertainty, but she didn’t look over to rescue her. Instead, she focused on the tube, moving it around to suck up the debris mixed in with the gravel.

“Hi,” Dana said at last. “How was church?”

“Fine.” It was church. If it was so special, Dana would have gone.

“I’m heating up a hotdish for you and your dad.”

“I can do it. I did it last night.” Letting Dana know they didn’t need her. They certainly didn’t want her.