Since You've Been Gone (2 page)

Now that I was leaving, they all moved into action, distributing equipment and arguing about who was doing what. I gripped my door handle, but didn’t open it yet. Was I really just going to go? Without even trying?

“So,” I said, but not loudly enough, as the guys continued to talk to each other, none of them looking over at me, two of them having an argument about whose turn it was to fertilize, while the guy from last year’s English class held his baseball cap in his hands, bending the bill into a curve. “
So
,” I said, but much too loudly this time, and the guys stopped talking and looked over at me again. I could feel my palms sweating, but I knew I had to keep going, that I wouldn’t be able forgive myself if I just turned around and left. “I was just . . . um . . .” I let out a shaky breath. “My friend lives here, and I was trying to find her. Do you—” I suddenly saw, like I was observing the scene on TV, how ridiculous this probably was, asking the landscaping guys for information on my best friend’s whereabouts. “I mean, did they hire you for this job? Her parents, I mean? Milly or Anderson Williams?” Even though I was trying not to, I could feel myself grabbing on to this possibility, turning it into something I could understand. If the Williamses had hired Stanwich Landscaping, maybe they were just on a trip somewhere, getting the yard stuff taken care of while they were gone so they wouldn’t be bothered. It was just a long trip, and they had gone somewhere with no cell reception or e-mail service. That was all.

The guys looked at each other, and it didn’t seem like any of these names had rung a bell. “Sorry,” said the guy who’d first spoken to me. “We just get the address. We don’t know about that stuff.”

I nodded, feeling like I’d just depleted my last reserve of hope. Thinking about it, the fact that landscapers were here was actually a bit ominous, as I had never once seen Anderson show the slightest interest in the lawn, despite the fact that the Stanwich Historical Society was apparently always bothering him to hire someone to keep up the property.

Two of the guys had headed off around the side of the house, and the guy from my English class looked at me as he put on his baseball cap. “Hey, you’re friends with Sloane Williams, right?”

“Yes,” I said immediately. This was my identity at school, but I’d never minded it—and now, I’d never been so happy to be recognized that way. Maybe he knew something, or had heard something. “Sloane’s actually who I’m looking for. This is her house, so . . .”

The guy nodded, then gave me an apologetic shrug. “Sorry I don’t know anything,” he said. “Hope you find her.” He didn’t ask me what my name was, and I didn’t volunteer it. What would be the point?

“Thanks,” I managed to say, but a moment too late, as he’d already joined the other two. I looked at the house once more, the house that somehow no longer even felt like Sloane’s, and
realized that there was nothing left to do except leave.

I didn’t head right home; instead I stopped in to Stanwich Coffee, on the very off chance that there would be a girl in the corner chair, her hair in a messy bun held up with a pencil, reading a British novel that used dashes instead of quotation marks. But Sloane wasn’t there. And as I headed back to my car I realized that if she had been in town, it would have been unthinkable that she wouldn’t have called me back. It had been two weeks; something was wrong.

Strangely, this thought buoyed me as I headed for home. When I left the house every morning, I just let my parents assume that I was meeting up with Sloane, and if they asked what my plans were, I said vague things about applying for jobs. But I knew now was the moment to tell them that I was worried; that I needed to know what had happened. After all, maybe they knew something, even though my parents weren’t close with hers. The first time they’d met, Milly and Anderson had come to collect Sloane from a sleepover at my house, two hours later than they’d been supposed to show up. And after pleasantries had been exchanged and Sloane and I had said good-bye, my dad had shut the door, turned to my mother, and groaned, “That was like being stuck in a Gurney play.” I hadn’t known what he’d meant by this, but I could tell by his tone of voice that it hadn’t been a compliment. But even though they hadn’t been friends, they still might know something. Or they might be able to find something out.

I held on to this thought tighter and tighter as I got closer to my house. We lived close to one of the four commercial districts scattered throughout Stanwich. My neighborhood was pedestrian-friendly and walkable, and there was always lots of traffic, both cars and people, usually heading in the direction of the beach, a ten-minute drive from our house. Stanwich, Connecticut, was on Long Island Sound, and though there were no waves, there was still sand and beautiful views and stunning houses that had the water as their backyards.

Our house, in contrast, was an old Victorian that my parents had been fixing up ever since we’d moved in six years earlier. The floors were uneven and the ceilings were low, and the whole downstairs was divided into lots of tiny rooms—originally all specific parlors of some kind. But my parents—who had been living, with me, and later my younger brother, in tiny apartments, usually above a deli or a Thai place—couldn’t believe their good fortune. They didn’t think about the fact that it was pretty much falling down, that it was three stories and drafty, shockingly expensive to heat in the winter and, with central air not yet invented when the house was built, almost impossible to cool in the summer. They were ensorcelled with the place.

The house had originally been painted a bright purple, but had faded over the years to a pale lavender. It had a wide front porch, a widow’s walk at the very top of the house, too many windows to make any logical sense, and a turret room that was my parents’ study.

I pulled up in front of the house and saw that my brother was sitting on the porch steps, perfectly still. This was surprising in itself. Beckett was ten, and constantly in motion, climbing up vertiginous things, practicing his ninja moves, and biking through our neighborhood’s streets with abandon, usually with his best friend Annabel Montpelier, the scourge of stroller-pushing mothers within a five-mile radius. “Hey,” I said as I got out of the car and walked toward the steps, suddenly worried that I had missed something big in the last two weeks while I’d sleepwalked through family meals, barely paying attention to what was happening around me. But maybe Beckett had just pushed my parents a little too far, and was having a time-out. I’d find out soon enough anyway, since I needed to talk to them about Sloane. “You okay?” I asked, climbing up the three porch steps.

He looked up at me, then back down at his sneakers. “It’s happening again.”

“Are you sure?” I crossed the porch to the door and pulled it open. I was hoping Beckett was wrong; after all, he’d only experienced this twice before. Maybe he was misreading the signs.

Beckett followed behind me, stepping into what had originally been an entry parlor, but which we had turned into a mud-room, where we dropped jackets and scarves and keys and shoes. I walked into the house, squinting in the light that was always a little too dim. “Mom?” I called, crossing my fingers in my jean shorts pockets, hoping that Beckett had just gotten this wrong.

But as my eyes adjusted, I could see, through the open door of the kitchen, an explosion of stuff from the warehouse store one town over. Piled all over the kitchen counters were massive quantities of food and supplies in bulk—instant mac and cheese, giant boxes of cereal, gallons of milk, a nearly obscene amount of mini micro cheesy bagels. As I took it in, I realized with a sinking feeling that Beckett had been totally correct. They were starting a new play.

“Told you,” Beckett said with a sigh as he joined me.

My parents were a playwriting team who worked during the school year at Stanwich College, the local university and the reason we had moved here. My mom taught playwriting in the theater department, and my dad taught critical analysis in the English department. They both spent the school year busy and stressed—especially when my mom was directing a play and my dad was dealing with his thesis students and midterms—but they relaxed when the school year ended. They might occasionally pull out an old script they’d put aside a few years earlier and tinker with it a little, but for the most part, they took these three months off. There was a pattern to our summers, so regular you could almost set your calendar to it. In June, my dad would decide that he had been too hemmed in by society and its arbitrary regulations, and declare that he was a
man
. Basically, this meant that he would grill everything we ate, even things that really shouldn’t be grilled, like lasagna, and would start growing a beard that would have him looking like a mountain
man by the middle of July. My mother would take up some new hobby around the same time, declaring it her “creative outlet.” One year, we all ended up with lopsided scarves when she learned to knit, and another year we weren’t allowed to use any of the tables, as they’d all been taken over by jigsaw puzzles, and had to eat our grilled food off plates we held on our laps. And last year, she’d decided to grow a vegetable garden, but the only thing that seemed to flourish was the zucchini, which then attracted the deer she subsequently declared war on. But by the end of August, we were all sick of charred food, and my dad was tired of getting strange looks when he went to the post office. My dad would shave, we’d start using the stove inside, and my mother would put aside her scarves or puzzles or zucchini. It was a strange routine, but it was ours, and I was used to it.

But when they were writing, everything changed. It had happened only twice before. The summer I was eleven, they sent me to sleepaway camp—an experience that, while horrible for me, actually ended up providing them with the plot of their play. It had happened again when I was thirteen and Beckett was six. They’d gotten an idea for a new play one night, and then had basically disappeared into the dining room for the rest of the summer, buying food in bulk and emerging every few days to make sure that we were still alive. I knew that ignoring us wasn’t something either of them intended to do, but they’d been a playwriting team for years before they’d had us, and it was like
they just reverted back to their old habits, where they could live to write, and nothing mattered except the play.

But I really didn’t want this to be happening right now—not when I needed them. “Mom!” I called again.

My mother stepped out of the dining room and I noticed with a sinking feeling that she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt—writing clothes—and her curly hair was up in a knot on top of her head. “Emily?” my mom asked. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”

“Um, here,” Beckett said, waving at her from my side.

“Oh, good,” my mother said. “We were just going to call you two. We need to have a family meeting.”

“Wait,” I said quickly, taking a step forward. “Mom. I needed to talk to you and Dad. It’s about Sloane—”

“Family meeting!” my dad boomed from inside the kitchen. His voice was deep, very loud, and it was the reason he was always getting assigned the eight a.m. classes—he was one of the few professors in the English department who could keep the freshmen awake. “Beckett! Emily!” he stepped out of the kitchen and blinked when he saw us. “Oh. That was fast.”

“Dad,” I said, hoping I could somehow get in front of this. “I needed to talk to you guys.”

“We need to talk to you, too,” my mother said. “Your father and I were chatting last night, and we somehow got on—Scott, how did we start talking about it?”

“It was because your reading light burned out,” my dad said,
taking a step closer to my mom. “And we started talking about electricity.”

“Right,” my mother said, nodding. “Exactly. So we started talking about Edison, then Tesla, and then Edison
and
Tesla, and—”

“We think we might have a play,” my dad finished, glancing into the dining room. I saw they already had their laptops set up across the table, facing each other. “We’re going to bounce around some ideas. It might be nothing.”

I nodded, but I knew with a sinking feeling that it wasn’t nothing. My parents had done this enough that they knew when something was worth making a bulk supermarket run. I knew the signs well; they always downplayed ideas they truly saw promise in. But when they started talking excitedly about a new play, already seeing its potential before anything was written, I knew it would fizzle out in a few days.

“So we might be working a bit,” my mother said, in what was sure to be the understatement of the summer. “We bought supplies,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the kitchen, where I could see the jumbo-size bags of frozen peas and microwave burritos were starting to melt. “And there’s always emergency money in the conch.” The conch shell had served as a prop during the Broadway production of
Bug Juice
, my parents’ most successful play, and now, in addition to being where we kept household cash, served as a bookend for a listing pile of cookbooks. “Beckett’s going to be at day camp during the week, so
he’s all set. Annabel’s going too,” my mother said, maybe noticing Beckett’s scowl.

“What about camping?” he asked.

“We’ll still go camping,” my dad said. Maybe seeing my alarmed look, he added, “Just your brother and me. The Hughes men in the wilderness.”

“But . . .” Beckett looked into the dining room, his brow furrowed.

My dad waved this away. “We aren’t going until July,” he said. “And I’m sure this idea won’t amount to much anyway.”

“What about you, Em?” my mom asked, even as she drifted closer to the dining room, like she was being pulled there by gravitational force. “Do you have your summer plans worked out?”

I bit my lip. Sloane and I had made plans upon plans for this summer. We had concert tickets purchased, she had told me she had mapped out something called a “pizza crawl,” and I had decided we should spend the summer seeking out Stanwich’s best cupcake. Sloane had a plan for both of us to find “summer boys,” but she had been vague on just how we were going to accomplish this. We’d blocked off the weekends we would drive upstate to the various flea markets she’d spent the last few months scouting, and I’d already gone through the drive-in calendar and decided which nights we needed to block off for the double features. She’d planned on making friends with someone who had a pool, and had decided this would be the summer
she’d finally beat me at mini golf (I was weirdly naturally skilled at it, and I’d discovered that Sloane got strangely competitive when there were stuffed-animal prizes involved). I wanted to learn the zombie dance from “Thriller” and she wanted to learn the dance from London Moore’s new video, the one that had sparked all sorts of protests from parents’ groups.