Once Was Lost (21 page)

Nick suddenly brakes and swerves down an unmarked road to our right. “Sorry,” he says. “I think the taco stand is down here. It kind of snuck up on me. Or maybe I should just take you home?”

“No, I’m hungry.” The big aching hollow in my stomach isn’t hunger, but I don’t want to go home.

We bump along, the road rough enough that I have to hold on to the plastic handle that hangs from the truck cab roof. Scrub brush and weeds and rocks line both sides of the road. It doesn’t look like the kind of place where a taco stand could do any real business.

“Are you sure it’s here?”

“Uh, no,” Nick confesses. “It’s been awhile. I think my memory is screwed up.”

“Should we turn around?”

“Let me go a little farther. If it’s not around the next bend or two we’ll go back.” We pass a bend. He takes another road. “Maybe this is it.” Then another turn. “This looks familiar. Sort of.”

There are no houses, no roads to anything that could
be
a house, no mile markers, no power lines. I wonder if the searchers looked here for Jody, if this was part of the 1,500 square miles they searched, and how many other deserted stretches of scrub forest there are in the county and if those have been searched. She could be here. We could be driving by her, or her body, this very second.

And no one is looking for her. Everyone is doing what they do. How many people are sitting at home watching TV while Jody is missing, how many lounging in pools like I did today, choosing not to think, how many shopping, how many counting the money in their cash registers, how many giving a long kiss good-bye to the person who is not their spouse. All while God watches, if he exists.

And Jody, still, alone.

I rest my head on the warm metal of the truck door and at first just let the tears come out. The truck makes a lot of noise on the dirt road and I don’t think Nick can hear me.

“Hey, Sam? I think we’re lost. Really lost. And I have the feeling I’m going to be in trouble with your dad if he thinks you’re at Vanessa’s and really you’re with me.”

I lift my head and look at him, not caring that my face is probably splotchy and tear-streaked now. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Hey, don’t worry, I’ll get you home.”

“I said it doesn’t matter.”

“Come on, Sam. Talk to me.” He’s driving slow now, and reaches over to touch my knee.

I look at him, and he’s so kind, and so good. His whole family is like that. “It shouldn’t have happened to you,” I say. “It shouldn’t have happened to Jody. She has so many people who love her.”

He stops the truck. “It shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

And I stare out at the wilderness we’re in, thinking about my family and the way we’re islands, now, and if I could just drift my island away, they could go on into their separate lives and be happy. And God, he could just let me go, too, once and for all, instead of this slow, endless betrayal.

“I wish it was me,” I say.

“What?” Nick whispers it, sounding afraid.

“I wish it was me who disappeared.” And my stomach lurches so hard I think I’m going to be sick. I whip off my seat belt and open the passenger door to jump out.

“Sam… hold up!” Nick grabs my arm and yanks up the brake. I jerk away and nearly fall out of the truck cab, and now I don’t feel like I’m going to be sick but I run into the field of nothing, knee-length scrub scratching my legs, feeling the rocks through the soles of my flip-flops.

Nick’s footfalls crunch behind me. “Sam, wait! What is it?”

But I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. Except I can’t stop running, and I just want to lose myself in the desert, and either disappear forever or wake up from whatever this is. Everything that’s happened since the day Jody disappeared seems like it’s been part of some other reality, where I’m friends with Nick but fight with Vanessa, my mom in rehab is a better parent than my pastor father, and Erin and my dad do whatever they want and God doesn’t care or do anything or stop it.

All the suffering, all the brokenness, and no one to fix it.

With 150,000 flyers and 37 horses and 19 trained dogs and 1 helicopter and 2 kayakers can’t we at least, at the very least, find Jody?

“Jody!” I scream out her name.

Nick’s footsteps stop for a second, then start up again, faster.

I keep running, calling Jody’s name. Field sparrows rise up from the brush ahead of me.

“Stop it,” Nick says from behind me, breathless. “Sam, stop!”

He catches up with me, grabs my wrist. We both fall onto a clump of sagebrush and rocky ground. I’m on my stomach, Nick’s body on top of mine. My hands bleed from trying to stop my fall.

“She’s not here,” Nick gasps into my hair. “She’s not here, Sam.”

He’s so big, crushing me under his weight. And for the first time I know, can feel, that even though all the times I’ve been with Nick he’s seemed more or less okay, all things considered, that he’s as destroyed as any of us. Because he’s crying now, too, big scary sobs against my neck.

“Nick,” I try to say, but my face is in the sage. I can barely breathe. I need him to get off of me. I push my hands into the ground to create air space, but his weight keeps me down, so I turn my head to the side the best I can. “Nick,” I say again. I take in as much breath as I can and say, as loud as I can, “I can’t breathe.”

It’s like I’m not here. Invisible, inaudible, nonexistent while Nick cries and cries and smothers me. I put my hands on the ground again, and dig in my toes, and throw my weight back against him as hard as I can. It works well enough that I can wriggle out and roll over onto my back, gasping.

He stops, suddenly, and looks around and at me, blinking. “Oh, my God. Are you okay? Your face, your legs… you’re bleeding.”

“I know.” Everything stings.

He crawls to me and, still half-lying on the ground, touches my scraped knee, scratched thighs, bleeding hands. “I hurt you.”

I don’t say anything, just take in air and try to think, think about this situation, being hurt and in the middle of nowhere with someone that really I don’t know that well when you think about it, someone my dad has warned me about, someone who is, like my dad, maybe a suspect.

“I didn’t mean it,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.”

And suddenly I panic, hearing a double meaning in what he says, thinking about the sirens on the highway and how quickly he turned off after we heard them. The way he grabbed my wrist so tightly, pulling me down, the way he said, “She’s not here.”

I stare him in the eye and whisper, “Where is she, Nick? If she’s not here, where is she?”

A blank look crosses his face. Then a confused one. “What?” He scoots away from me and sits up. “No,” he says. “No no. You don’t think… Sam, no. No.” He puts his face in his hands and starts crying again, quieter this time. “I can’t believe you think that. I can’t believe anyone thinks that.” He lifts his face, takes one hand and rips up a clump of brush, throwing it into the empty field. “I wouldn’t hurt her. And I wouldn’t hurt you.”

I want to believe, but I’ve believed a lot of things that didn’t end up being true.

He crawls back over to me and looks me up and down, all my scratches and bloody spots. “This was an accident. I freaked out. When you jumped out like that, I thought you were having some kind of nervous breakdown or something.”

I hear the sirens again, closer.

“Sam,” he says. “I wouldn’t. Do you believe me?”

Do I believe?

I believe just enough that Jody is alive that I think we should keep looking.

I believe just enough in my mom to try to make a garden for her to work on when she gets home.

I believe just enough in my dad that he’ll have an explanation, even if that explanation is that he’s only human.

I believe just enough in myself to know that even if I start in a new school I’ll be okay.

I believe just enough in forgiveness that eventually we’ll be a family again.

I believe just enough in God that I’m praying right now that Nick means what he says.

“Yes,” I whisper.

Nick lies down next to me and puts one hand under my head, cradling it. He pushes back my hair, all undone and full of dirt. His eyes are red and puffy as he picks a few little bits of gravel off my forehead. “You’re beautiful, Sam.” His voice is soft.

He gets even closer, practically on top of me, and puts his other hand behind my head so that I couldn’t move if I wanted to.

I don’t close my eyes. I want to see it all: Nick’s teary face over me, my hand resting on his upper arm.

His lips are soft on mine, and his hands on my head and neck are soft, too, not hands that could ever hurt me, I know it. Then, he stops, and rests his cheek against mine. I rub his back, touch his neck, his arms, his waist.

I want him to kiss me again and think that in a few seconds, he probably will, and we don’t hear the cars pull up to the side of the road or the voices until someone shouts, “There they are!”

I watch from the passenger side of one police car, while Nick is in the county sheriff’s. They’ve handcuffed him, because of “procedure,” even though I’ve said over and over that he didn’t do anything. But they saw me and my bloody scrapes, in the middle of nowhere underneath Nick, who they apparently told earlier in the investigation not to go over the county line. Just in case. Not until they knew more about what happened to Jody.

They ask me a bunch of questions about what we’ve done since the minute Nick picked me up. I want to start before that, with what made me call him in the first place, but they don’t ask.

What I’ll find out later is that Nick didn’t tell his parents where he was going and didn’t leave a note like he was supposed to, and something turned up that made everyone panic and there was a big news alert, and they came looking for him. A highway construction guy called the police saying he’d seen a truck matching the description of Nick’s and that there was a young girl with him but all I know now is that they’ve called my dad and we’re waiting for him.

“Nick didn’t do anything,” I repeat to the female officer in the car with me.

“We hope not.”

When Dad shows up, he escorts me to his car, and we sit. He squeezes and unsqueezes the steering wheel, shaking his head. Sometimes angry, sometimes almost but not crying. “I told you that you couldn’t be alone with him.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes. I did.” He’s silent for a few seconds. “You know you’re not supposed to go off and do things we didn’t plan and agree to.”

I watch the back of Nick’s head, what I can see of it, in the sheriff’s car. I wish I could go over there and tell him it’s okay, we’ll sort it all out.

“Samara, I feel like you’re not listening to me. I said you know you’re not supposed to go off and do things we didn’t plan and agree to.”

“You were in Lawrence Springs. I didn’t want to bother you. In your meeting.”

He’s quiet.

I add: “Nick didn’t do anything.”

Someone from the sheriff’s department comes over to our car. He leans into the open window on my dad’s side. “You all can go on home,” he says. To my dad: “Did you tell her?”

“Tell me what?”

Dad won’t look at me. The officer crouches down lower so he can see my face.

“Tell me what?” I ask again.

Dad closes his eyes, shakes his head.

The officer says, “They found remains.”

Day 12

Wednesday

KPXU

SPECIAL REPORT

This is Melinda Ford, live at the search site just outside Dillon’s Bluff, where hikers made a gruesome discovery yesterday morning. Here’s what we know: three hikers were a few miles off the Ridgeline Trail when they literally stumbled onto a human hand, and immediately notified authorities. As you can imagine, there was concern that the remains were somehow related to thirteen-year-old Jody Shaw, who has been missing for nearly a week and a half.

Unfortunately, yesterday’s confusion led to misinformation. A local radio station reported that Jody’s body had been found, and that story was widely reported for much of the day. However, as of right now, it is not believed that the remains are at all related to the Jody Shaw case. The size of the hand and the state of decomposition led experts to believe that the hand belongs to an adult male deceased for at least a month. There will be a press conference later today to confirm these details.

It’s not all good news for the Shaw family. Sources tell us that Nick Shaw, Jody’s eighteen-year-old brother, was taken into custody yesterday afternoon for reasons not made known and given a second polygraph. Neither the family nor the authorities have any comment at this time, but we expect that to be addressed at the press conference as well.

I’m in the yard, fiddling with the plastic sheeting and wondering how long it’s going to take to thoroughly smother everything that’s under there, though I guess I shouldn’t worry about that since Mom’s return is so… indefinite. I hear the back door slide open and look up; Dad stands there, watching, his coffee cup in hand.

“You need any help with that?”

“No.”

You would think I’d feel happy and relieved now that we know that the remains aren’t Jody’s. In a way it feels like we should start the search all over again, like we’ve been given a second chance. But in another way, the more time goes by, the harder it is to not know anything, to just be in the dark. Knowing for sure, even bad news, would at least be one thing that’s certain.

Dad tried to sit me down last night and talk to me about what happened with Nick. He tried to get the point across that this is danger, real danger, and I can’t go on acting like everything and everyone is safe.

“I don’t think that,” I said. If anything I feel the opposite. Just because I trust one person doesn’t mean I trust anyone else.

We went around and around, and eventually I wouldn’t reply to anything and only sat there at the table with my arms folded, telling him over and over, “I’m tired.”

Finally he gave up, and let me go to bed.

I didn’t sleep. I stayed up nearly all night with my phone in my hand, on vibrate, hoping for a call or a text or anything from Nick. Over and over again I replayed being out in that field with him, the moment I knew I was safe with him and he was going to kiss me.