The Bargaining (21 page)

I blink at the screen while the timer in the corner blinks back. One and a half minutes left. I return to the first article listing all the kids' names and paste each one into the search bar. Aside from random articles featuring different kids with the same names, the same articles appear as did for Jack. Nothing more comes up about the lives of these kids beyond
the day they came back, aside from vague speculation.

I watch the clock count down from ten. From five. Three, two, one. And as though the sweet librarian who first gave me the code has been hiding under the desk ready to pull the cord the minute the clock ran out, the screen goes black, not even the Pierce County Library icon left to keep me ­company.

“They're not fooling around,” Bubble Gum says. Apparently, even repositioning myself with my back to my computer neighbor couldn't do the trick.

“Yup.” I stand, crumpling the paper with the code and tossing it into the nearest bin.

“Crazy thing about those kids, huh?” he says, getting shushed by the same person across the room.

I turn toward him, suddenly a little more interested in what he has to say.

“Oh shush yourself, Frank. It ain't like you're over there workin' on your dissertation,” Bubble Gum hollers, raising more than just Frank's head in response. He turns back to me, winks, and says, “Crosswords. The guy acts like he's researching the cure for cancer. Anyway what was I . . . oh yeah. Those kids. The darndest thing. The dad of one of 'em—the little girl? He used to be a drinkin' buddy of mine. He did a lot more drinkin' after she came back, that's for
sure. The Washingtonian. Now that place has seen a few sins. I can't drink like I used to, lordy no.”

I sit back down on the bench, not certain I want to hear more of what Bubble Gum has to say but unable to walk away.

“One night after—” He stops himself, looks up, looks back down, twists his mouth. “Maybe a few too many,” he says, choosing a strange time for discretion, “George tells me this story about how he heard this sound in his daughter's room one night. He goes to check on her, and what he sees, he can hardly even describe it to me without his hand shakin.' Says her eyes were huge, whited out like she had cataracts or somethin.' Says she's facin' the window, lookin' out at the trees behind their house, and she's got her mouth so wide open he thinks maybe she broke her jaw or somethin.' But she's not sayin' a word. Just standin' there with her mouth open and her eyes lookin' like that. Says he ran from the room—ran from his own daughter—and when he sees her the next morning,' she ain't sayin' a word. Just sittin' there eating breakfast like nothing happened, lookin' normal. But not normal, you know?”

I do know. And I shouldn't know. But I can't make sense of how this man I have never met has just described what I'd promised myself I hadn't seen last night.

I recall with crystallized clarity the image of those two
boys, the curtains billowing from their faces, exposing their wide, white eyes. Their hanging jaws open in a suspended, silent scream.

I've never remembered any image from a nightmare that clearly.

“Shame, you know? Everyone sorta drifted apart after that.”

“I don't understand,” I say.

“Well, ya know. All those families. They used to be pretty tight before that whole mess. But after their kids all went their own ways, or went no way really, no one really heard much from any of 'em after that . . .”

I shake my head against a slowly forming realization. It's not possible. It can't be those kids. They came back nine years ago. But then, what is it I've been seeing? What is it Jack insists on showing me, dragging me out of bed and into his nightmare, like I needed another to add to my collection?

“Yeah, well, kids, they go off, they get into trouble,” he continues. “But these kids. I dunno. I don't think any of 'em live here anymore. Small town, you know? You'd think we would've run into them by now. Margie Torrey—those boys' mom—she mostly just drinks where we all used to. Like she never really left, you know? Poor thing. But you know, life goes on.”

I think back to the article. George Riley. The little girl's
father. And suddenly, my brain pieces together a man with a tan jacket, gin-blossomed nose over a mustache that weighs on the mouth of a man who just wanted to buy groceries without facing the memory of losing and never really regaining his daughter.

“Hey, you mind if I use that computer?” Bubble Gum says, changing direction quicker than I can register.

“What?”

“It's faster than mine. This thing moves like a dinosaur.”

I peer at his screen, the words “massive government conspiracy” in bright red slathered across the page.

I've been talking to Government Conspiracy Guy for the past five minutes.

I leave without another word to Bubble Gum and give a half wave to the kind librarian. I walk back to the Registrar's Office in a daze, my head swimming with the information a paranoid schizophrenic just assaulted me with.

But even skeptical me knows that's not true. I've seen what that poor father saw, the one who watched his daughter turn into a monster before his eyes and wondered how to eat breakfast with her the next morning.

I wonder if there's a single person in this town other than him who might understand what sorts of secrets are trying to crawl their way out of the North Woods. I wonder if those secrets will leave me alone before I hear them out.

Back at the Registrar's Office, April is yucking it up with Cynthia Doom at the only cubicle designated for public use. I approach with caution, certain I can't be correct thinking those are the sounds of laughter. But the closer I get, the easier it is to make out the muffled cackle of a woman who is long out of practice at making that sound.

Cynthia Doom is doubled over the cubicle wall, my stepmom matching her hysteria.

“What the hell?” I ask, and both of them turn to me.

“Language,” they admonish in unison, then bust up all over again.

“Honey, your stepmom is a bad, bad lady,” Cynthia declares, and April throws me a wink that says she can literally win anyone over.

Anyone but Ripp. Or Roberta. Or George.

“Hmm,” I agree as much as I can without the benefit of their backstory. “Find anything interesting?” I direct the question to April while Cynthia tries to recover her composure. People are starting to stare.

She cuts her eyes to me, gives a nearly imperceptible nod to Cynthia, and puts her hand on the massive stack of yellowed papers in front of her. “We've been having so much fun, I haven't even gotten started!”

I glance at the line of waiting Registrar Office customers.
It's seven people deep, and each person looks more exasperated than the last. One of them even gives
me
the stink eye.

The stack of papers under April's elbow is four inches high. It could take hours to go through. I search the office for a place to get comfortable and find a row of three plastic orange chairs lined against the wall like inmates.

I slump into a chair and beg my brain not to rehash Bubble Gum's story. But my brain has not cooperated with me for at least nine months, and there's little hope it's going to start now.

I've almost decided to curl up across the three empty chairs to take a nap while April extracts herself from Cynthia Doom when I feel a vibration in my bag.

It's Rob's face on the screen.

“Are you on a break or something?” I ask, relishing the full bars of cell range afforded by the Registrar's Office.

“Or something,” he says, sounding distracted. And while my reception is crystal clear, his voice is crackling for the first time all summer.

I sink lower in the seat, as now half of the line of waiting customers stares me down, apparently deciding their death rays are wasted on the real culprits behind their misery.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“A fresh level of hell, I think.”

“How fast can you get home?” he says a little breathlessly.

“Not fast enough. Wait, are you back in Seattle? I thought soccer camp went through the middle of August.”

“No, I mean home here,” he says.

After a few seconds of struggle, my brain wakes up.

I edge past the line of customers and interrupt Cynthia Doom's story about her coworker and the UPS man.

“Hey, April, can I borrow your car for a little bit?”

April looks like a caged animal. Cynthia casts her large shadow on April, giving me the same look her customers are trying so desperately to give her. Evidently, I'm interrupting.

“I'll be back in a couple of hours,” I say. Then a little louder, “Remember, we have to meet up with Dad by five at the latest. You told me to remind you.”

April looks a little more relaxed under the cover of my lie, then turns to Cynthia. “I completely forgot. Wow, guess I'd better get started on this research.”

Then she puts a hand on Cynthia's dry, withered forearm. “Don't you take any shit from Mary Jo. She might have gotten the UPS guy, but she doesn't have what you have.” She pauses while we all wait for it. “A pension!”

April and Cynthia Doom bust a gut while April slides me her keys, squeezes my hand in a way that begs me to come back before five, and releases me.

16

B
EFORE
I
CAN EVEN GET
out of April's jeep and say hi, I notice Rob staring at the house. He's looking at it like he doesn't want to go near it. I follow his bony shoulder down his long arm to his knobbly hand, fingers twitching but otherwise unmoving.

“Where's Alfredo?” I ask from the open jeep window, pointing to a car that isn't his.

He looks startled to see me, and I wonder for a second if he even came here looking for April and me, if maybe he just stumbled into a random forest in a random town several random towns away from Seattle.

“Borrowed it from a friend,” he says. “Alfredo's in the ­hospital.”

“Is it serious?” I ask, trying to find comfort in our easy
banter but distracted by his unfocused gaze and the fact that he's here at all. Not that I'm not overwhelmed with relief to see him.

“He'll live.”

We both get quiet. He goes back to staring at whatever he was staring at, and this time I have to look because his lack of focus is starting to weird me out. But when I look at the house behind me, all I see is the same wood, the same glass, the same place that should have been a two-month escape from this type of feeling.

I try again. “Well, he's going to be lonely.”

This seems to get his attention because he walks away from the house, and I walk toward him, and we meet somewhere in the middle.

“He's been acting like an asshole for a while anyway,” Rob says. “Needs a new transmission.”

“That sucks,” I say. All he'd have to do is lift one eyebrow giving me the signal and I'd get into the beige compact car he's borrowed from his friend, and I'd go anywhere with him. Absolutely anywhere but here. I wouldn't even need to know why he came.

“Come on,” I say. “April—um, your mom—is living the dream over at the government building. We've got sandwich stuff inside though.”

But Rob just shakes his head, looking up at the house with that faraway stare again. “Nah, I'm not hungry. Let's just take a walk or something.”

The trees are whispering. They do that a lot here. It's not all that different from high school.

When we first moved to Phoenix, I gave myself this fantasy. It was the only way I could bring myself to walk through the double doors of the hallway that led to my locker without passing out from fear. In my fantasy, a girl with a face I could never fully conjure offered me her name—something else I could never make materialize, even though it was my fantasy—and she would turn out to be the most fascinating girl in school. That nonexistent hybrid that is able to move easily through every crowd, envied and loved, disarming and self-assured. And her single gesture of recognition would enshroud me in the kind of protection that would sustain me throughout the rest of my new existence in this new school, this new city, this new climate that had me sweating before eight in the morning.

But that no-name, no-face girl didn't exist. I had Rae, whose first gesture to me was a smile resting over a raised middle finger. And once she'd claimed me as her friend, so began the low grumble of hallway murmur, the act of mea
suring me for the box in which I'd eventually have to fit so everyone would know how to identify me.

If I wasn't the scary girl, I was the scary girl's friend. Close enough.

Now as Rob walks beside me through the woods behind the house, the trees start up their chatter, and I lean in closer to hear. It's a habit that's grown stronger since we got here, that need to hear what I know won't bring me comfort.

“What did people say when I first moved to Seattle?” I ask him.