The Lost (20 page)

Chapter Seventeen

A buoy tolls outside my bedroom window, and I wake. Shooting out of bed, I launch myself at the window and look out. Waves lick the baseboards of the house. Whitecaps crest directly beneath me.
It’s coming,
I think.
The void is coming for me!
I grip the windowsill as if it will keep me tethered to the ground, safe from the void. The air tastes thick with salt. My mouth feels as dry as the desert that the ocean has eaten.

I step back from the window and try to take deep, calming breaths. It doesn’t help. All it does is make me feel like I’m gasping for air like a waterless goldfish. “Peter?”

He’d slept in my bed again last night, his arms around me, his body warm. I hear the mattress creak and know he’s standing directly behind me. He puts his arms around my waist and draws me against him. I fit against the curve of his chest. “It’s high tide.” His breath is soft against my ear and on my neck.

“The void...”

“...isn’t any closer. Besides, you went in and you came out. You don’t need to be afraid of it.” He pauses. “Of course, it could destroy everything and everyone else, but c’est la vie.”

“I found my prom dress.”

“You told me.”

“Tiffany’s dead.”

“You said that, too.”

I’d nearly pounced on him when he’d returned last night, telling him everything that had happened from the moment that Victoria and Sean had shown up with the oatmeal through everything with the dead girl who ran the Pine Barrens Motel. He’d listened, and when I’d told him I’d come out of the void, he’d kissed me.

Thinking of that kiss, I take another deep breath, and it works better this time. I feel my rib cage loosen, and I can suck in air again. Out the window, I see he’s right—it’s only the ocean that’s closer. The void is a distant smudge on the horizon. At least “helping” Tiffany didn’t make anything worse. “The lie seems to still be working. And Tiffany didn’t send a mob with pitchforks after me. Maybe it will be a good day. Maybe you’ll find the Missing Man today!” As soon as I’ve said the words, I wish I could suck them back.

He releases me and steps away. Twisting, I see his expression is closed and guarded. “I’ll begin my search,” he says stiffly.

“Peter...”

Claire races into my room. Even though she’s a little girl, she has elephant-loud footsteps. She jumps on the foot of the bed. “Lauren, you have to get dressed! There are people outside. For you!”

Peter grabs my arms. “I’ll distract them. You climb out the back window and swim—”

Laughing, Claire bounces on the bed. “Don’t be silly! They don’t want to hurt her. Everyone wants her help.” She hops off the bed and skips to my dresser. “You can’t let them see you in pj’s, though. You need pretty.” She pulls out a blue dress. It flutters as she unfurls it.

“But—”

She steers me toward the shower.

Digging my heels in, I stop. “Claire, how many is ‘everyone’?”

She waves her hand in the air. “A bunch.”

“Claire.”

“Lots.”

“Claire!”

“It’s okay.” She darts into the bathroom and turns on the shower. She lays my towel out for me, fluffs it, and smiles. “You can do this! You can help them! Save them!” I picture Claire with tiny pompoms. Amused by the image, I stop protesting and let her shoo me in.

I take the fastest shower of my life. Scrubbing my hair dry, I study myself in the mirror. I look thinner, like my skin is pinching my skull. The shadows under my eyes are tinged purple, as if I’ve been hit in the eyes. I pull on the dress that Claire picked out for me, and I drag a brush through my hair as I walk out the door. Claire is waiting in the hallway. She frowns at me, and then she grabs my hand and marches me into the bedroom. I sit on the edge of the bed while she kneels on the mattress and combs my hair. She hums to herself as she weaves in ribbons that she produces from hidden pockets on her own yellow tulle dress. I begin to feel like an overly wrapped birthday present.

“Out of curiosity, are you making me look like a crazy person?”

“Yes.”

I turn my head to see her expression.

She pushes my head straight. “Stay still, please.”

I look out the window. I could stand up, walk away. I don’t think she’d resort to her knives to force me, but I’m transfixed by the view out the window. The ocean roils and rolls. I notice it has ships on it: tall ships with triple masts, sunfish, catamarans, sea kayaks, a cruise ship. All of them jostle between the waves. I don’t think they were there before my shower. I can’t tell if there are any people on the boats.

“You’re sure they aren’t here to kill me?” I ask.

“I’m sure. Mostly sure.”

“Where’s Peter?”

“On the roof,” she says. “He’s not as sure.”

I try to look at her again, and she yanks on my hair. I wince. Looking back at the water, I think of the Pacific. I used to wake to the sound of the ocean, back when we lived in a barely insulated cottage by the shore. At nine o’clock, Mom would knock on my bedroom door and tell me not to waste the day. You only have so many glorious days per lifetime, she said, and if you fritter them away, then you’ll come back as a penguin who has to brave winters in Antarctica as penance. I’d tell her I like penguins and go back to sleep.

When she was diagnosed, Mom said I’d never ignore her again. A side benefit of dying, she claimed. Your words carry a lot more weight. She then told me to floss daily, wear suntan lotion, and never, ever date a guy who doesn’t respect your dreams. I told her I’d listen to every word she said if she didn’t say the word
dying.
She told me I had avoidance issues and gave me a self-help book, which I avoided reading, and she continued to talk about dying.

Claire hops off the bed. She spins me so she can examine me from all angles. Bits of ribbon dangle at the edges of my vision. “Claire...” I’m not certain how to delicately break it to her that I don’t want to look like a half-wrapped present—or that I’m not sure I can “save” people. I don’t know how I found the ring and the newspaper.

“You look wise,” she says. “They need you to look wise. If they even
think
you can help them, even if you can’t, then they won’t kill you. Lauren, this is your chance to win them over, to fix what happened in the diner.”

Oh. That...makes sense. I nod slowly. “Okay, go ahead.”

Claire smiles.

“What?”

“You really trust me.”

“Sure.”

“I told Peter from the start that you’re different.” She sounds very satisfied with herself. “Most grown-ups wouldn’t listen to a kid.”

“You’re not an ordinary kid.” But I can’t argue with the sentiment. I had an uncle who liked to talk to me as if I was no smarter than his pet Maltese. Less smart, in fact. I had on occasion contemplated biting him on the hand as he patted my shoulder and told me how cute it was that I liked art, or how sweet that my mother still kept my artwork on the wall, even though I was well out of elementary school, as if the paintings I’d labored over and poured my heart into were no better than the drawing that I’d scrawled when I clutched a crayon in my hand, still plump with baby fat.

He was Mom’s older brother, and he’d talk to her that way sometimes, too. He’d notice what she hadn’t cleaned—the dust on top of the refrigerator, the eggs inside that had expired a week ago, the mail that hadn’t been sorted, the shoes that were scuffed, and he’d gently remark about how it was such a shame she was so busy, or how his wife miraculously juggled it all, even though they were married and childless and she didn’t work, unlike Mom. Mom always tolerated it. She let it roll off her back like water off a plastic tablecloth. Or at least she seemed to. It was one of those things we didn’t talk about, like my father, like her father, like why she never went home for Thanksgiving, like why I broke up with that boyfriend that everyone thought was better than sliced bread. He wasn’t. But he thought he was, too. And he took my best pair of sunglasses when he left. He didn’t respect me. Certainly didn’t respect my dreams. He might have respected my sunglasses.

Claire hugs me. “I trust you, too.” She releases me and skips out the door.

The dress that Claire picked out for me has a pocket, and I slide a knife into it. The weight makes me feel marginally better, even though I can’t imagine stabbing anyone with it. Following her, I head toward the front door.

I hear the crowd before I see it, a low buzz like a hornet’s nest, and I contemplate jumping out a window and swimming away. I could do it. I’m a strong swimmer. Or I used to be. I can find a new house, scavenge for new things. Claire would be fine, and eventually I could sneak back and fetch her and Peter. I’ve learned enough about how to survive here that I think I could make it on my own, at least for a little while. But Claire has a grip on my hand.

She flings open the front door. In a dramatic voice, she says, “She was lost, and she suffered. But she has forgiven you and is here to heal your soul!” I hear voices, rising in excitement—they’ve seen Claire’s glow.

Pulling my wrist, Claire yanks me outside.

I plaster a smile on my face and hope it looks more like a kind, benevolent smile, rather than maniacal, which is what it feels like.
This is a terrible idea,
I think.
I’m no savior.
I’m glad that Peter is watching from the roof. I force myself not to look up and give him away as I walk onto the porch. At least a dozen men, women, and kids are perched and lounging on the porch and junk pile. They’re rattier-looking than either Victoria or Sean. One man is dressed in a coat sewn entirely from socks. One of the boys is wearing rags with so many holes and stains that it looks as if a stiff breeze will blow it off his body. Another woman is in a sequin dress and draped with diamond or rhinestone necklaces. Every finger is covered with enormous rings, three on each finger so that her knuckles cannot even bend. Seeing me, all of them unwind from where they lay, and they rush forward.

Claire steps in front of me, at the top of the porch steps, and puts her hands on her hips. “One at a time!” She claps her hands for attention. “You know she can’t work a dozen miracles at once! Go in the order you arrived. I’ll give you numbers.” She marches off the porch. The crowd breaks. Some are glaring at her, some are glaring at me. A few look at me in what looks like awe. One lies on his back and counts, clouds I assume, except the sky is clear. He could be counting dust particles.

A young woman shoulders her way to the front. She wears a lacy hippie shirt, a bandana around her head, and Mardi Gras beads. Her eyes are sunken in with deep bruiselike circles under them, as if she hasn’t slept in aeons. Or as if she is on drugs. “I first.” She glares at me, and I shrink back.

Claire marches down the step and puts her hands on her hips. “You aren’t ready,” she announces. I stifle a smile. As my new self-appointed manager, Claire is acting more like a forty-year-old diva than a six-year-old little girl. Granted, she
is
older than she looks, and being on her own has aged her... My urge to smile fades. This place is robbing her of her childhood. How long has she been here? A year? Two? Three?

The woman switches her glare to Claire. “You don’t know anything. Just because you have the glow—”

“Come back later.” Claire points instead to a boy with a backward baseball cap and shorts that ride three inches lower than the waistband of his boxers, which are bright red with blue rocketships. “You first.”

The kid shrugs and saunters up to the steps. “I’m ready.”

I don’t know what he expects me to do. Everyone is watching me. I clear my throat. Claire is beaming up at me, her eyes wide and face expectant, lit by her glow. I wonder what Peter is thinking from his perch above me. “What did you lose?” I ask.

He shoots a look over his shoulder.

I think of Victoria, how she said no one asks about the past. “How about you come inside?” Stepping aside, I indicate the door. “Claire, let me know if...” I trail off, not certain how to communicate that she should let me know if any of the crowd shows homicidal tendencies. I’m also tempted to take her inside with me, my six-year-old bodyguard.

The boy peers into each of the rooms as I lead him inside. I take him to the living room and point to one of the chairs opposite the face of the steam engine. I sit nervously on the edge of the couch. I can see the ocean out of the window, also the void.

He nods at the water. “What’s up with the ocean?”

“I think it’s mine.”

“Sweet.”

“Thanks.” I look out at it, more for a safe place to look than anything else. How exactly did I get myself into this? Oh, yeah, I trusted a six-year-old. “Do you know what you lost?”

“Yeah. It was after school. A Thursday. Not that that matters. Girlfriend just broke up with me. Rightfully so. She wasn’t what I lost. Cheated on her. Totally deserved it. I was a douche-bag boyfriend.” He talks fast, clipped, the words popping out of him as if they’re shooting out of his mouth.

“That’s...good of you to realize.”

“Ran across some guys from school. Just hanging out, you know? Anyway, there was this pack of girls. You know the type. Pretty girls. Perfect hair. Swish when they walk. Not sure how they do that without falling over. The kind that want you to look at them but then yell when you look, you know? As if you don’t have the right to have eyes?”

I nod. I do know the type. I wasn’t one of them, but they never really bothered me. I ran with the artsy crowd. We considered ourselves superior because we’d mastered the art of publicly angsting over cultural decay, even if we were privately angsting over the basketball team.

“I was sick of them looking down at me. Sick of all of it. The guys were joking... Long story short, I singled one out, one that looked a lot like my ex, one with the superior smile and that look in her eyes, and I started talking about her. Lies. But detailed lies. And it spread. Got back to her. She denied it, but no one believed her. And so I thought I’d hit on a great way to bring them down to our level. Stop them from looking so superior, or something. It was stupid. It was petty. I knew it at the time. But I was the Robin Hood of the social order, you know? Restoring fairness to the high school hallways.”