The Sea of Tranquility (45 page)

“It is her, isn’t it?” he asks, waiting for confirmation he doesn’t need.

“It’s her.”

“I saw her with him yesterday.”

“With who?”

“Aidan Richter. On the news. The kid who confessed.”

“You
saw
her with him?” How is that possible?

“At the art competition. He was one of the finalists. When I got out of my interview, she was in the room with him.”

“What were they doing?”

“I don’t know. Standing there staring at each other. It was weird, but I just thought maybe he tried to talk to her and she didn’t answer and it freaked him out.”

“Is she okay?” The concern in his voice is genuine.

“I don’t know. No one knows where she is.” I don’t even know how I get the words out without my voice breaking.

Asher walks back in while I’m still on the phone. “My parents called the credit card company.”

I tell Clay to get over here and I hang up so I can hear what Asher is saying.

He tells us she used the card at a gas station on the northbound side of the turnpike just outside of Brighton earlier today. He’s going over to pick up some things from Margot’s and then he’s heading back there. It’s beyond me what’s so important that he has to pick it up before he goes looking for his sister but I’m not in a position to put down people who love her. I said I loved her and look what I’ve done.

I haven’t been able to interrupt him, because I’m trying to formulate my own thoughts before I dropkick her brother with them.

“She was with him yesterday.” My stomach twists when I say it. I’m afraid there are answers there I don’t want to think about yet.

“What?” I don’t know who says it. Maybe everybody.

“Aidan Richter. The kid who confessed. Clay said he saw them together at the art gallery. He was there.” I force it out in one pained breath.

“Who the hell is Clay?” That wouldn’t have been my first question if I was Asher, but I answer it, just now realizing how little her family really knows about her life here.

“He draws pictures of her. She went with him to a state competition yesterday. He said he found them in a room together, and when he saw the news today, he remembered him.”

“Does he know anything else?” Asher asks, anxiously.

“I don’t know. I told him to get over here.”

Clay pulls up and he’s barely in the door before we bombard him with questions. He tells us what he knows, which isn’t much. He was meeting with the judges while she looked around at the exhibits. When he found her after his interview, she was in a room with the Richter kid and they were staring at each other. He didn’t hear anything so he has no idea if they were speaking or not. Then Richter got called in for his interview and they didn’t see him again. Clay drove her home at the end of the day and that was it.

“She was fine on the way home. She seemed fine. Not like she talks. She was upset in the morning on the way there, but in the afternoon, nothing unusual.”

“Why was she upset? I ask, because it’s the first time he’s mentioned it.

“I don’t know. She looked out the window the whole time and when we got there she was crying. She’s been a mess ever since whatever happened between you two.” He looks at me but it’s almost apologetic, like he didn’t want to call either of us out, but he had to. “I wouldn’t have said anything if this didn’t happen.”

“She was crying?” Asher looks like he doesn’t understand. I guess she doesn’t cry in front of him, either.

“Not like sobbing,” Clay clarifies. “Just tears. I didn’t even know until I looked at her. I wasn’t going to call her on it. Who knows what goes on in her head?”

“Nobody,” Asher says, and if it’s possible, he looks more devastated than before.

“I thought you knew your sister.” I say, throwing his words back at him because now I’m getting scared and it’s making me a dick.

“Nobody knows my sister,” he says. And there isn’t any argument for that.

We work out what we do and don’t know at this point. We know a lot of things, just not the one thing we want to know. Where she is.

Basically what it comes down to is that no one has seen her since nine o’clock this morning and there’s been no trace of her since she used her credit card at a gas station just after eleven right outside Brighton. There’s nothing after that. But she’s eighteen and she hasn’t even been missing for twelve hours so no one’s going to look for her except us.

Asher has his parents on the phone the second we’ve sorted out Clay’s story. While Asher talks to his mother, his father is calling the police station to let them know what happened between Sunshine and Aidan Richter yesterday. We’re all wondering the same thing. The thing that no one is saying. If she went to Brighton, she went looking for him before he ever confessed. And if she was in Brighton at eleven o’clock and he turned himself in at three-thirty‌—‌what happened in between?

Asher leaves, planning to stop at Margot’s to pick up whatever it was he promised to bring his parents from his sister’s room. Then he’s heading straight back to Brighton. Margot’s staying at her place on the off chance that Sunshine heads back this way.

Everyone knows I’m going, and Drew says he is, too. Asher gives us the address and the phone number to his parents’ house and tells us he’ll let them know we’re coming. We decide to take our own cars in case we need to separate when we get there.

A few minutes later, I climb into my truck alone and head to Brighton. I spend the entire drive bargaining with everything I will ever have. I don’t know how many times I say please. Please give her back to me. Please not again. Just please. My phone doesn’t ring. It’s the longest two hours of my life.

***

The room is full of controlled chaos. It reminds me of the day my mother and sister died. Phones ringing off the hook. Frantic calm. Poorly concealed fear. They’re like zombie people. Empty. Haunted and endlessly waiting for something. I know what it looks like. These people were probably normal once. I think about how easily this could be the Leightons if it had been Sarah. How every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.

There are photographs all over the room of a girl I should know, but don’t. A girl in pastel dresses, with ribbons in her hair, smiling and playing the piano in more pictures than I can count. I feel like I’m mourning all over again, but this time it’s for a girl I’ve never met.

Her parents are both on cell phones. The land line keeps ringing, but nobody answers it because the reporters keep calling. Finally, her father rips the cord out of the wall and then it’s quiet. But not really.

Drew and I sit on the far side of the room. Separated physically and emotionally from the rest of the family. The rest of the family. Whether or not they acknowledge me, I am in that category, also. She made sure of it, no matter how much I’d like to say otherwise. She’s gone now, too. It fits.

Asher walks in not long after we arrive. He’s carrying a stack of black and white composition books; the kind Ms. McAllister makes us use for creative writing. He puts them on the coffee table in the middle of the room. It’s a hideous coffee table. I could make a better one. I think about offering.

I can only see the front of the book on the top of the pile. Chemistry is written in red marker on the cover. It’s Sunshine’s handwriting and seeing it breaks me a little.

Her mother steps toward the stack of books like it’s a bomb. “Is this them?”

Asher nods. He’s pale and looks older than he did the first time I met him. Everyone here looks older than they should. Like they’ve seen too many horrible things and now they’re just tired. I wonder if I look like that, too.

Nastya/Emilia/Sunshine. I don’t know what to call her. Her mother picks up the book on top and opens it, flipping through the first few pages. “It’s just chemistry notes,” she says, relieved, but confused.

“Keep going, Mom.” Asher sounds like he’s delivering a death blow.

A moment later her face contorts in the most wretched expression and her hand goes to her mouth and I look away because just seeing it feels like an invasion. She looks exactly like Sunshine. Drew doesn’t look away. He just stares at her. He looks older, too. I think it might have happened, just now, when he saw the look on this woman’s face.

“It took her all of these to write this?” she asks to no one in particular. Her husband, Sunshine’s father, the man who’s been standing behind her the whole time takes the book out of her hands and she shakes her head at him. Not like she doesn’t understand something, but like she’s telling him
no
. She doesn’t want him to look. It’s like someone telling you not to look at a dead body, because if you look at it, you won’t ever be able to not see it again. It will always be in your head and you won’t ever close your eyes without the image being there. That’s how she looks when she shakes her head at him. Like she’s seen the body and she doesn’t want him seeing it, too.

“No,” Asher says. “It’s all the same thing. In all of them. It just repeats like it’s on a loop. Over and over and over again.” His voice breaks on the third over and he starts to cry but no one consoles him. They don’t have any comfort to offer.

There’s a knock at the door and a girl walks in. She doesn’t say anything. She just walks straight over to Asher who doesn’t move until she reaches him. Then he wraps his arms around her and folds her up until she’s almost gone and I miss Sunshine.

The mood in this room is so familiar. No one feels anything but everyone keeps moving because there are so many things to do. But right now no one seems to know what they are.

The police said Aidan Richter is admitting to seeing her yesterday, but continues to deny having any contact with her today. No one knows whether or not it’s true. There’s nothing to go on. No place to even begin.

Finally they decide that Asher and Addison and Mr. Ward will take separate cars and go looking for her, even though they have no idea where to start. Asher was right. Nobody knows his sister, at least not the sister he has now.

Her mother is staying here to man the phone. They don’t know what to tell Drew and me to do. We don’t really know the area and we have no idea where she would go. We’re just useless and waiting.

“You can wait in Emilia’s room if you want,” her mother offers. Everyone in this house calls her Emilia and it sounds more right than Nastya ever did.

***

Her room is insane and I feel like I’ve walked into her mind. There are no walls. You can’t see them. Every inch of space is covered with newspaper clippings, computer printouts, and handwritten notes on scraps of paper. They almost seem to move, to shimmer; swimming in and out of my vision like an optical illusion. Like her. I want to close my eyes but I can’t. I just turn in a circle waiting for it to stop, but it goes on forever. I think I might run from the room but now this is in my head, too. Like whatever dead body is hiding downstairs in those books.

We step in and get closer because you can’t read any of it unless you’re almost on top of them. Names. They’re all names and origins and meanings. Some of them are from the newspaper, like the ones I’ve seen her cutting out at my house. Some were obviously printed off of the internet. Others she’s written herself.

I don’t know how long we stare at the walls before Drew speaks. “Where’s Nastya?”

I look at him. I don’t know. How would I know? But he’s looking at the walls, not me. He’s searching for her name. I start looking, too, but it’s impossible.

“Your name means salvation,” he says at one point, looking at a handwritten scrap of paper taped up next to the window.

Salvation.
Such a load of shit.

“Did she tell you that?” he asks.

“No.” I never asked. I never asked a lot of things. “This is pointless. We could look it up faster,” I say, needing to look away.

Drew pulls out his phone and finds a baby name site on the internet. He types Nastya in, and a second later, we have our answer.

“Rebirth,” he says. “Resurrection. Russian origin.”

“I think that’s why she picked it. The resurrection part. I guess the Russian, too.” Her mother is standing in the doorway. She’s pulled her hair back and it makes the dark circles under her eyes more noticeable.

“Why resurrection?” Drew asks.

“Because she died,” her mother says, looking so much like Sunshine that it unnerves me. “And she came back.”

***

Her mother tells us what happened that day. I don’t know if we want to hear it, but she needs to tell it, so we listen. She talks about the things we didn’t hear on the news and the little they know of Aidan Richter. She tells us about the part that came after. The not remembering. Then, later, the not talking. The surgeries and the physical therapy. Wanting to go back to school where no one would know who she was. The Russian name her mother didn’t understand until now.

Then she talks about before. We hear story after story about a girl and a piano and a whole community who took ownership of her. Her eyes light up at the memory of it. But that’s what it is‌—‌a memory. Like Sunshine said. I know what she’s seeing. A dead girl.

And as I listen to these stories, in this shrine of a house, I start to understand why she left.

I feel like I learn more in one evening about the girl who has practically lived at my house for months than I have since the moment I met her. And I don’t want to know any of it.

Her mother thanks us but I don’t know why and then she leaves to make more phone calls. I think she just needs something to do.

Drew lies back in Sunshine’s bed, staring at the ceiling. I sit on the floor and lean against the wall. Every time I move I can hear paper crinkling against my back.

“I don’t understand,” he says, eventually.

“Don’t understand what?” I ask. There are so many possible answers to that question.

“I don’t get why he didn’t rape her.”

“
What the fuck kind of a question is that
?” I practically growl at him.

“I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m serious,” he says, and I can tell he is being serious and it’s uncomfortable for him. All of this is uncomfortable for him. In the last few weeks, Drew has had to handle more emotionally-charged, disturbing situations than he has in his whole life and he’s not equipped for it.