A
t first Dale couldn’t believe it. It was just like her dream. She found the cottage just up the road from where she hit the dog. The station wagon was parked in the driveway, and there was a warm yellow glow coming from inside. She thought about running up to the front door and knocking, but something told her to savor this moment. To hold on to this anticipation for just a little bit longer. Her entire body was full of electricity. Her fingertips were tingling with it. It felt like there was a current circling through every vein and artery. She could feel every blood cell. Every molecule. And so instead of going to the front door, she crept slowly on her hands and knees to the window at the side of the house.
There were no curtains in the window, nothing to obstruct her view of the kitchen and beyond, into the dining room. At the table, she could see Sam, and it nearly took her breath away.
Her dream
. He was sitting at the head of the table, running his hands through his hair. He looked older than she expected. The hair at his temples was gray, his cheeks and chin shadowed with neglect. His wife, Mena, was sitting on his right side, ladling soup into bowls. The boy, Finn, was there too, a flop of blond curls hanging in his eyes. A faded T-shirt and puka shell choker. And Franny.
Franny
. She gasped when she saw the pale-haired girl from the photos.
She was dizzy. The electric current that had been coursing through her suddenly shorted out. Thunder cracked and lightning lit up the whole sky. She dropped to her knees and tried to catch her breath.
How could this be?
Franny was
dead
. She’d read about it online. Or had she just dreamed that? If she could have dreamed this table—the soup, the bread, Sam—could she have dreamed his daughter dead too? Or maybe Sam had lied. But why would he lie to her?
Everything was tilty, spinny. Her stomach cramped with the next crack of thunder, and she felt bile rising in her throat, sweet with Kit Kats. She leaned over and threw up in the bushes. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She felt the bump on her head where she’d hit it on the steering wheel, felt the dried blood. He couldn’t see her like this. This wasn’t at all what she planned.
And then, just as she was trying to figure out what to do next, the screen door slammed open and the boy and the girl came outside.
Franny
. She pressed herself up flat against the side of the house and held her breath. She could smell her vomit, sickly sweet in the air. The wind was getting stronger; it whipped her hair across her face. Stung her eyes. Finn and Franny lingered for a second, whispering seriously, and then ran toward the woods, their voices growing fainter as they disappeared into the trees.
How long did she wait after this? She seems to have lost all sense of time. But now, when she peers through the window again, she sees Sam rummaging through drawers in the kitchen. His wife is not in the room. He pulls out a box of garbage bags and when the wind howls again, he glances toward her. Dale drops to the ground again. Did he see her? God, did he see her like this?
She has to think quickly. What will she do? She needs to get cleaned up. Her dress is dirty. Stained with dirt and puke. The gash on her head seems to have reopened. This is a nightmare. But before she can figure out what to do next, the screen door swings open again, and it’s Sam this time. He looks around as if he’s expecting someone to be lurking in the shadows, but he can’t know, can he? And then he breaks into a sprint, disappearing down the same path that swallowed Finn and Franny.
Her head is still swimming, spinning. She feels vertiginous. She’s come so far. But for what? All of it was a lie. All of her work, her research, her writing, this trip was for nothing. Franny is alive. She’s as alive as Dale is. And with Franny here, where does Dale fit in? Lightning flashes again and she leans her back against the side of the house, bangs her head against the wood, softly, softly. Tears stream down her face and she looks up at the sky, feeling the first drops of rain on her face like slivers of shattered glass.
T
he air still smells like weed; it is heady, pungent, a lingering funk. The wind is vicious, and they are standing in the garden. The moon is full and bright, illuminating everything: the upturned roots, the dying plants.
“Shit,” Finn mumbles.
“It was so beautiful,” Alice says, picking up one of the decapitated plants.
Finn sits down on the ground and then lies down, flat on his back, staring up at the sky. He knows he is lying in the middle of his ruined garden, but in the dark, he could be anywhere. He could even be home. He looks up at the sky, at the moon hovering, watchful, overhead. There must be a billion stars tonight. A trillion specks of light. And, unlike the ones on Alice’s ceiling, these stars make pictures: constellations. They are predictable and certain even in all of this darkness.
Andromeda
.
Cassiopeia
.
Orion
.
Alice lies down next to him. She squeezes his hand, and he stares at that pock-marked sky. On the ground the wind isn’t so violent, so fierce. The air smells like a memory. Like the remembrance of living things, the pungent tang of something interrupted, cut off before its time.
Before
.
He looks at the stars. Each of his memories is like this: one bright, flickering speck, so far away he can’t touch it anymore.
Their first trip to the dentist. Finn was afraid, and so their mother made the dentist let Franny sit in the dentist chair with him. As the dentist poked and prodded at his teeth, Franny squeezed his hand. The smell of cherry fluoride, the box of toys they got to choose from when it was over. Finn picked the tiny plastic man with a parachute attached. Franny got a ring, a blazing pink stone, a gold band that pinched her fingers where the metal opened at the back.
The Easter that Finn ate so much chocolate, so many hard-boiled eggs that he threw up half the night. He didn’t want to tell their parents because he was afraid they’d never let him have candy again. So, in the middle of the night, as Finn lay doubled up on Franny’s bed, Franny changed the sheets. Hid the evidence in the Dumpster outside.
In elementary school, when someone taunted, “Franny, Franny with the big flat fanny,” and Finn’s fist met his nose. The scuffle on asphalt, the taste of pavement and the metallic blood of his scraped knuckles.
High school, after the dance when he found Franny crying outside in the parking lot by the cafeteria. Another cruelty. And so he’d broken into the back door of the cafeteria and stolen the first thing he could find, a box of frozen Tater Tots, which they’d sucked on. Disgusting, but so funny they laughed until they cried.
A neighbor’s trampoline, a bad spring, a broken arm. He couldn’t go in the ocean for a whole summer, and so she’d painted the beach on his cast.Waves, sun, sand.
Franny in her room, practicing the positions.
First
,
Second
,
Fourth
,
Fifth
. Hours and hours and hours.
The sound of her feet shuffling across the hardwood floor, the shampoo smell of Franny’s hair when she got out of the shower, the way she tilted her head when she listened to anyone speak.
Stars. Flickering, burning out and reappearing again, brighter. Blinding. And together they form pictures, the pictures of their life. Of his life.
He looks at the pictures the stars make, at the angles of light, and he thinks about bones: the bones of her hands, the bones of her face, her collarbone, her hip bone, her feet. He remembers she wouldn’t let him touch her, as if her bones were sharp enough to cut. And he was afraid to anyway, afraid she might crumble in his hands. Why didn’t they do anything? Why didn’t he do anything? If it had been the other way around, Franny would have saved him. She would never have let him kill himself.
He stares at the moon, at the bright full moon, until the light starts to hurt his eyes.When he squeezes them shut, all he can see are stars.
“I just want to go back,” he says.
T
he three black Hefty bags are stuffed in the pockets of his anorak. He pulls up his hood and turns out the porch light that illuminates the driveway. It is dark, except for the bright white moon. He looks back at the house, at the warm yellow glow of his office. It looks like he’s home. Like he’s working. In case whoever left that note on the windshield is watching him tonight.
He creeps out into the darkness and feels ridiculous: like a teenager sneaking out of his house. He makes his way in the darkness to the path that leads to Finn’s garden. It is almost impossible to see. Luckily, the moon is bright, and the portion of the path that runs through the woods is short. The wind beats against the nylon of his jacket as he jogs through the trees. Soon, he is standing in the field, in the wide open. It is beautiful here, and the smell is intoxicating.
“Dad?”
Sam’s heart catapults in his chest.
Finn and Alice pop up from the middle of the field, like a couple of jacks-in-the-box. Finn’s hair is almost white in the moonlight.
“Finn?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Sam walks toward them, realizing as he walks that all of the plants have already been uprooted.
“What are you doing out here, Dad?” Finn looks panicked. Alice is staring at her feet.
“Alice,” Sam says, “why don’t you go back to the house. We’ll be there in a little bit. I need to talk to Finn.”
She nods and looks quickly at Finn before she starts to run back toward the house. It is starting to rain.
Finn is staring at his feet, his hands shoved in his pockets. A little boy about to be scolded.
“Somebody knows about your little project, Finn.” Sam gestures to the surrounding crop. “I think it’s that guy with the dog who lives down the road. He’s a
cop,
Finn. Do you have any clue what kind of trouble we could all be in because of this? I came out here to get rid of the plants before anything terrible happened.”
“I already did,” Finn says.
“I see.” Sam looks at the field; it looks as though it’s been hit by a hurricane.
“You’re pissed,” Finn says without looking up.
“That is an understatement,” Sam says, pissed. “What were you
doing?
What were you
thinking?
”
Finn kicks at a rock with his tennis shoe. “Dad, I don’t know how to do anything anymore. I don’t even know who I am.” Finn stares at the ground. He won’t look at Sam. “It’s like somebody cut off my legs and now wants me to run.”
Sam knows this feeling. This severing loss. “But why
this,
Finny? Why would you risk so much for this?”
Finn shrugs. He looks up at Sam then, and his eyes are filled with tears. “I couldn’t
sleep
.”
It feels like a blow to his chest. He thinks of the way Finn and Franny would curl around each other as toddlers at nap time. As if they were two parts of some larger, breathing thing. And suddenly, remarkably, all the anger he’s been feeling toward Finn has dissipated. Fizzled out like an extinguished fire.
Sam wants to reach for him, to hold him in his arms, to let him curl up in his lap like he used to when he was little. He wants to give him the magic kiss with two fingers on the sore places. He wants to fix everything that hurts. But Finn is not a little boy anymore. He’s nearly a man, and so instead they stand, facing each other, trying to figure out what to do next.
“What do I do now?” Finn asks.
“Help me bag these up,” Sam says, handing him a garbage bag. “Then we’ll take them back to the house and burn them with the grass clippings.”
It takes nearly an hour to get all of the plants bagged up. The bags are heavy, and the wind is growling now, whipping senselessly, changing directions as they drag the corpses of the marijuana plants along the path back to the cabin. By the time they get back to the barn and start to empty them into the barrels, clouds have moved across the clear sky, and it is really starting to rain.
“Is this all of them? You don’t have another crop growing somewhere else, do you?” Sam asks.
Finn shakes his head.
As they come down the path from the barn to the cabin, Finn says, “Hey, where’s the car?”
Sam looks at the empty driveway and feels his skin prickle. Mena shouldn’t be out driving, not when she’s got a migraine. She drove the car into a ditch the last time. The rain is coming down hard now. The roads will be a mess. What the hell was she thinking? Where the hell was she going? And where is Alice? He hopes to God Mena didn’t leave her here alone.
Sam throws open the front door and hollers into the empty cabin, “Mena?” He walks briskly down the hall and opens all the doors. “Alice?” Every room is empty. Every room is quiet.
“Fuck,”
he says, sitting down hard on the couch.
Then Finn leans down and picks something up off the floor. It’s a Kit Kat wrapper.
“What?” Sam says, feeling like a percolator about to burst. All hiss and stifled steam.
Finn’s eyes are wide and terrified. “Alice’s dad always bought her these. They’re her favorite. Oh, Dad. This is really bad.”