Losing Francesca (9 page)

He laughs but it's not happy, it's more like agitation than anything else. "So you're what? Some sort of Russian spy? A drug-runner, like they thought at first?" He stops there and laughs for real this time. "I mean, I'll stop calling you Fee if you tell me the truth. How about that? What were you doing in LA?"

I say nothing. I don't huff out an exasperated sigh, or grunt my disapproval of his questioning, or even show that I am annoyed. Even though I am very annoyed. I just sit in silence.

"You're just gonna shut me out? Me? Of all people? Me?"

I look up at him and he's pointing to his chest as he waits for my answer.

"It's me, Fiona. Brody. And you can tell me anything."

I shrug and internally wince as my indifference wounds him so acutely, it's painted across his face. "I'm not Fiona, Brody. I'm an accomplished liar, I admit that, but I'm not lying about this. I'm caught up in something strange, a weird coincidence. I'm just a girl with another family who wants to go home."

He studies my face as the words come out.

"And," I continue, "I have no idea who you are or why you think you're special to me, but you're not."

I meet his eyes for the last part, waiting for the hurt, but he smiles.

"Yeah, OK. Whatever."

And the silence takes over.

And I welcome it.

I watch some tiny fish congregate around my toes and let out a little laugh as they nibble on me. "I wish I had a camera," I say out loud before I can stop myself.

Brody reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone and hands it over. "Knock yourself out, Fee."

I shoot him a dirty look at the name, but take the phone. "What good will this do me? It's yours, not mine. And they won't let me have access to the internet at the Sullivan house, so there's no point because I won't be able to upload it."

"Upload it to where?"

"Never mind."

He pushes my hand away as I try to hand the phone back. "Just take the picture and I'll make sure you get it."

I smile inside and wake the phone up, swipe my fingers until I find the camera, and then point it down at my feet in the water and take the picture.

"Your feet?" he asks. "You want to take a picture of your feet?"

I nod and then scoot my legs over so I can take a picture of both of our feet. When I'm done I look up and he's smiling again.

"What?"

"I just think it's cute that you have a foot fetish. I mean, typically that's reserved for old men surfing for weird porn online, but OK."

I laugh. "You're a goof. I collect pictures of my feet when I travel, and since I'm here, I need a picture to capture the moment."

"Oh, I'm the goof? I've heard it all now, Fiona Sullivan. First you tell me you're some stinky foreign girl named Francesca who has no memory of the god-like being that is me, Brody Mason, and now I learn you're a foot fiend!"

I push him playfully on the shoulder and he stands up in the river and takes my hand. "Look, I get it, you've got stuff you'd rather not tell me. You've got secrets, a whole secret life maybe, and you'd like to keep it that way. I'll live with that. But now that you're here, and you have to stay for a while, I think you should consider spending every waking moment with me."

His tone is full of jokes and laughs, but his face is something else entirely. His face almost breaks my heart, that's how much pain is hiding beneath the surface.

"OK," I whisper. "I'd like that, Brody."

He sighs out so much tension I can almost feel it in the air.

"But only on one condition."

His mouth turns up in a crooked smile. "What's that?"

"You'll show me how to get to the lake tomorrow. Because I am not only a fan of feet, but beaches too."

"Why wait until tomorrow? It's right down there." My gaze follows his pointing finger downstream towards a bend in the creek. "We can go there right now. Come on."

Chapter Fourteen - Brody

For a few brief minutes, as we walk along the upper bank of the creek, I have small doubts.

At first they are just out there, drifting, like a mist, or maybe more like a swarm. A swarm of those nasty little gnats that gather in clouds each summer. The voice in my head, the one that's been talking to me since I was seven and Fiona went missing, says:
This girl is not her, Brody. She's said straight out she's not her. And if you're wrong, and she's right, and you let her back into your heart, you'll be the one who gets hurt, not her.

Only this time, instead of wandering alone in the woods desperately trying to find a girl the only way a small child knows how to, you'll end up on the other end of a bottle of tequila, or in a parking lot fight outside of a bar, or back in jail for any number of self-destructive things you relished before the parents died and forced you to learn how to put your little brothers first.

That's how these doubts start.

But after a few more minutes of trudging through the thick shrubbery that lines the beach near the lake, these doubts are more than a swarm. They are an invasion. And I'm pretty fucking sure that I'll never be able to stop asking her for confirmation. I need something from her, some kind of acknowledgment that this is real.

"Fee," I say, knowing full well she's not going to like me calling her that. "Just let me ask you one question."

"No," she says without hesitation and then squeals when a thin branch swings back and slaps her in the cheek.

"Oh, sorry." I cup her face so I can get a better look at the red welt that is creeping up. "I think you'll live."

"I don't want to answer questions, Brody. So don't ask, or you will ruin this day for me, and seriously—" She stops here and grabs my arm. "Seriously," she repeats, "I need this day to stay good right now. I need this, Brody. Please don't ruin it."

How can I say no to that?

I settle for taking her hand and leading her the rest of the way to the beach.

Lake Erie beaches are sporadic because of the cliffs that dominate most of the shoreline, and they are not always sandy. Sometimes there are no beaches at all, just cliffs. And sometimes there are large expanses of sand, because some local recreation department trucks it in every summer. The beach near the mouth of this little creek is neither of those. There's no cliff because, well, it's the mouth. And there's not a lot of sand because no one has done anything to this beach, maybe ever. It's mostly small stones and bits of glass that have been polished smooth over the years, with a few sandy patches here and there around the weedy reeds that pop out every few feet.

It's a wide area, wider than most untouched portions along this coastline, and it's teeming with wild birds trying to settle into the early evening. I know we've got a few hours until the sun goes down, so we can afford to spend a bit of time out here before heading back.

That's if she wants to go back.

Secretly I'm wishing she'd ask to come live at my house.

I smile at this and she catches it. "What's funny in there?" she asks, thumping her finger against my head.

"Nothing," I lie and pull her through the remaining underbrush and out onto the beach. "Well, here it is, Lake Erie." I throw my arms out wide and wait for her reaction.

"Wow, I had no idea it would be so big! Mrs. Marco was right, it's like an ocean." Her nose crinkles as she sniffs. "Except it smells like…"

I laugh. "Lake. It smells like lake. It's very different from the ocean, isn't it?"

"Yeah, this is really nothing like the ocean where I live."

"Which is where?" I venture.

She gives me a sideways glance and quips, "Nice try."

I keep her hand as I walk over towards a sandy spot near the shore and pull her down with me so we can sit and watch the water do its thing. There's no wind today, it's calm and still quite hot and humid for early evening, so the waves are almost non-existent. They lap gently up to within a few feet from us, then recede with just as little fanfare. Still, the sound is calming. Fiona pulls her legs into her chest and rests her head on her knees.

"What are you thinking about?" I ask as I skip some stones across the water.

"My dad. It breaks my heart to think of him picturing me here with the Sullivans. I bet he is so sad."

"Maybe he can come visit?"

She throws me a very dirty look.

"What? They won't let him?"

She holds her words inside with her secrets.

I lie back on the beach and put my hands behind my head. "So, we're gonna spend the whole summer hanging out and I'm not allowed to get to know you even in the most basic and simple ways? Is that how this is gonna go, Fee?"

She lies back next to me and turns on her side, her eyes searching mine. "Why do you insist that I am her? I'm not her, Brody. This fact will hurt you if you don't accept it and I don't want to hurt you. You're nice, I like you, but I'm not that girl."

"I want you to be her." I tell her truthfully. "I so,
so
want you to be her, Francesca. I cannot even explain how much I want to talk to her again. How much I want to tell her about all the days we never shared, to tell her that I thought of her at the end of every single one of them and that I prayed to God for years, every night, on my fucking knees, that she'd come back. I want to give her the Fruit Roll-Up I brought to school that first day back after summer vacation. That stupid Fruit Roll-Up that I still have hidden away, because I had this faith as a kid. This unwavering faith that only a kid can have that one day my friend would be back. And when she finally showed up, I'd give her that stupid snack to show her how much I missed her. And to prove myself to her. Because that little girl was my soulmate."

She frowns so deep it makes me hold my breath.

"I'm sorry," I say, turning my head to stare up at the sky. "I shouldn't tell you this stuff, I'm sorry." I'm projecting, that's what I'm doing. I want Francesca to be my Fee so bad I'm starting to believe it myself, even as she sits here and tells me straight up she's not her.

Her hand touches my cheek and I look back over.

"You can ask me one question, but it can't be about my other life."

I laugh. "What good does that do me?"

"Well, you can ask about things, but not my family, or school, or the places I've lived."

"Give me a
for example
, because I'm not seeing the difference."

She sighs and turns away, biting on her thumbnail a little. "OK," she says, turning back. "For example, I'll ask you the first question and you answer, then I'll answer the same question for you."

I smile.

She chews on her bottom lip this time. Clearly she is nervous. "All right, tell me about the best day of your life."

I sit up and stare down at her. "The best day of my life?"

She nods.

"Today, Fee. The best day of my life is today."

Chapter Fifteen - Francesca

I'm not sure if that's all he's got to say, or if he's doing the whole dramatic pause thing they teach you in speech class. So I just wait it out. He looks over at me, the pain coming across so clear in his expression.

It occurs to me then, he is not kidding about how he feels about this Fiona girl. This isn't a joke.

"My mom told us—well, Renn, my older brother, and me—the night before school started. I think Renn already knew, he's six years older than me, so he was almost thirteen. But even though I hadn't seen Fee since she left for vacation in June, I was excited because she was going to start first grade. I was in third," he says, stopping to smile at me. "She rode the bus in kindergarten too, but she had the afternoon class, so she was never on the morning bus. And I'd been wanting to give her my snack all year, but I always ended up eating it at lunch, so I never had a snack for her on the bus home."

I reach over and drag a stray hair out of his eye and this unnerves him for a second, because he stops to smile at me before he continues.

"But this was first grade, all-day school, unlike kindergarten, which is just half a day. She'd be on the morning bus
and
the afternoon bus. And man, I tell you, I was so fucking excited at this change in fate, I could barely stand it." He stops again, this time to let out a long sigh. "It made no sense to me, ya know?" His eyes search mine. "That one day she's there and the next day she's gone."

"That's how death happens," I say, then immediately regret it. "I mean, not that she's dead, but I had this dog once and every day I'd go outside and feed the chickens and he'd bounce along behind me. And then he got sick and we had to take him to the vet." I throw up my hands a little. "And then he was gone. And I kept thinking to myself,
But I just saw him yesterday
."

Another long exhale escapes between his lips. "Exactly," he whispers with the breath. "
She was just here,
I thought. That's exactly how I felt. And in my mind, she still was here. Ya know?"

I nod at him, because yes, I do know.

We both turn back to the sky and think for a few moments. I guess he's thinking about his childhood soulmate, Fiona. But I'm thinking about my dad and Sophia. If I have a soulmate, I've yet to discover him. All I have is my little cocoon of a family. Maybe we're not your typical family, and maybe we're far from perfect, but I love them more than anything in this world. And the stress of it all suddenly hits me. My grief at being held prisoner, my longing for my home, my anger at being robbed of my last summer of childhood—and no matter how this ends, I've lost the whole reason I came back to America in the first place.