The Leaving(4)

“Mom?” Avery crouched down, bracing for some kind of bad news about her dad.

A plane crash, maybe? Car accident?

Get ready for what?

Mom looked up and smiled and clutched the phone to her heart. “They’re back.”

Avery’s grandparents had just taken a trip up to New York, but that hardly seemed worthy of a wee-hours phone call. “Who’s back?”

“Your brother,” she said. “The others.” Then she pushed past Avery and said, “I’m going to be sick.”

“But—?”

Avery had years ago stopped imagining it would ever happen and certainly hadn’t pictured it happening this way: her holding her mom’s hair as she retched up nothing at all.

“Where are they?” Avery actually looked around the room. The shower dripped once. “How?”

“That was Peggy.” Her mother wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “She said Kristen showed up at the house and said they’re back. They’re fine. She doesn’t remember anything—she said none of them do—but they’re fine. They turned up with just the clothes on their backs.” Then, with her eyes wide and wild, she said, “Ohmygod, I can’t believe it. I seriously can’t believe it. Can you believe it?”

Like a crazy person.

Again.

Avery followed as her mom walked downstairs and through the kitchen and stopped to fix her hair in the mirror that hung beside a massive floral arrangement—mostly sunflowers that Rita had clipped from the front yard and then gotten an earful from Mom about. Her mom then turned and opened the door, and Avery half expected her brother to be there, too shy to knock after so many years away.

What would he even look like? Would she like him?

They don’t remember anything?

He wasn’t there.

She and her mom stood out on the porch for a while, looking up and down the quiet road. Eventually, they sat down on the top front step, still in pajamas, and waited.





Scarlett


She walked and walked, panic receding some.

Her mind was a void.

But . . .

. . . drip



. . . drip





. . . into it

. . . glimpses.


Her loop u n w i n d i n g.


That house over there had a small pond in the backyard, she knew—where frogs hung out; she’d played there . . . with that same boy from the playground.

That road led to the beach, where there was a long walk to water.

By the time she stood where the star was, she thought, Yes.

This was where she lived.

Had lived?

This was home.

A pale-yellow shingled house built up on tall wooden stilts.

A fence of white crisscrossed wood that ran down both sides.

An old turquoise car parked under a carport made of more crisscrosses.

Angry fists of hard grass punching up out of the sandy front yard.

There’d been a pink plastic flamingo in that garden right there at one point. Right at the base of that palm tree.

But not now.

The whole place looked storm beaten and crooked, like if she closed her eyes she could see wild winds, diagonal rain.

She knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again, more loudly, and a light went on inside.

A middle-aged woman with a long bleached-blond ponytail opened the door. Her shirt: a hot-pink polo with a tiny stitched white lantern and the words LAMPPOST BAR AND GRILL. “Can I help you?”



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She was almost a stranger.

But her voice was familiar, and her scent—cigarettes and vanilla—felt right.

“Mom?” The word felt weird in Scarlett’s mouth, garbled and foreign.

And everything around them froze—some sort of cosmic snapshot—and the air seemed to shake.

The woman trembled and her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my god, Scarlett?”

Then screamed: “SCARLETT?”

Scarlett nodded, half wanting to deny it and not knowing why.

And the woman grabbed her and collapsed into a hug.

Then stiffened and pulled back, eyes scanning the yard, the road. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Before someone sees.”

Ten minutes later, the woman had finally started to calm down, had finally stopped crying and rubbing Scarlett’s hand—too hard, with her thumb—and asking, “Is it really you?”—who else would it be?—and “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” and more.

She was fine, Scarlett had said, over and over.

She hadn’t been hurt.

She hadn’t been abused.

“Not that I remember,” she added now. “That’s the thing. I don’t remember anything.”

“Are the others back, too?” The woman was closing the blinds, drawing the curtains.

Looped again now.

Back in that hot air balloon, the heat coming off the flame, making the air

wavy, unsure.

“How do you know there are others?” Scarlett asked. “What happened? What’s going on?”

The woman stiffened. “Are they back or not?”



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