Authors: Tara Altebrando
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
w
a
v
y, unsure.
“How do you know there are others?” Scarlett asked. “What happened? What’s going on?”
The woman stiffened. “Are they back or not?”
/
/
/
/
/
“Yes, but no one remembers anything.”
The woman seemed not
as
confused. “Well, that’s common.”
What could that possibly mean?
But then Scarlett looked at the papers on the table beside the sofa where she was sitting.
Paranormal Underground
magazine.
UFOlogist Monthly
. The cover of
Open Minds
had a story called “ETs and Religion.”
“Do you think we were abducted by aliens?” Scarlett asked.
“You got any better ideas where you’ve been all this time?” the woman asked with a bit of an edge.
All
.
This
.
Time
.
A person doesn’t accumulate that many magazines in one night, or even a week.
“How long was I gone, exactly?” Scarlett asked, slowly, as a series of revelations clicked into place.
She had never before sat on this couch.
She had never before seen the cat that had peeked out once but was now hiding under an armchair by the television.
“You really don’t know?” The woman shook with tears. “You don’t
know
?”
????
????Know???????
??????????????? what?
The woman sat beside her on the sofa, took up her hand again. “You all disappeared eleven years ago.”
Scarlett pulled her hand away; the room spun around her.
One spin.
Two.
Three spins.
Four.
Who
was
this crazy person?
Five spins.
Sixseveneightnineten spins.
You couldn’t be somewhere for eleven years and not remember.
“I always believed they’d bring you back.” The woman put her hand to her heart and eyes toward the sky. “That we were chosen for this special thing for a reason.”
It was closing in on 2:00 a.m., according to the clock on the dining room wall, and Scarlett felt her body starting to shut down.
Like the lights going off in a large building, wing by wing, fuse by fuse.
Legs—
clunk
—out.
Lungs—
clunk
—out.
Head about to shut
down
down
down
.
She very suddenly wanted only to sleep. “I need to lie down.”
The woman said “Of course,” then wiped away tears and said she had to call some people, to tell them the news. “Steve’s never gonna believe it,” she muttered. Then she went into her bedroom with her cell phone.
Scarlett lay on the couch, but it smelled of cat, so she got up and went down the other short hall to where she knew her room had been.
And still was.
Exactly as she had left it?
The life-size cardboard cutout of Glinda, the good witch, from her
Wizard of Oz
–themed fifth birthday party.
The purple hanging canopy adorned with butterflies and ribbons that created a little nook in the corner.
The My Little Pony stickers on the wall.
They seemed familiar.
She liked the feeling.
She wanted to run.
Scarlett stretched out on a cupcake-print comforter—on her back, fingers laced over her belly, as if in her own coffin.
A mobile made out of wire and puffy plastic princess stickers hung from the ceiling.
She stared at it and tried to remember something. Tried to remember anything or everything.
Long stripes of blue, green, red, and yellow, with black stripes in between.
The feeling of floating away, possibly forever.
The wonder of it all, of a bird’s-eye view.
Unable to sleep after maybe twenty minutes of lying there and drifting through the sky . . .
Clouds . . .
A flock of birds
Below, a river.
Or . . . ?
She got up, went down the hall, through the living room, and out onto the terrace off the dining room. The beach—the Gulf—seemed to whisper an invitation, so she went down and across the patio and through the gate and stepped out onto the sand. It was cool and soft beneath her bare feet. Down to the right, the shoreline was rainbow-speckled, hotels aiming colored lights into the night. The
boom-boom-boom
of a far-off dance party tempted her. She could run there—
that
way—until she found it.
Found him.
Wait.
Who?
Lucas.
Or she could fold into the crowd like she belonged there, maybe disappear again through some dance-floor trapdoor.
The water was calm, lakelike. Putting her feet into the warm surf, she looked down at her toes.
When had they last felt the ocean?
Eleven years?
Then looked up at stars.
Aliens?
Really?
So very many stars.
She didn’t think she’d visited any but what-did-she-know-not-much.
No wonder her mother had had so many strange questions—“Can I check you for scars?” “Are you still a virgin?”; probably other people would, too. Maybe answers would come. In time.
Or maybe it was better to forget.
Because didn’t this qualify as a happy ending?
There’s no place like home even if home smells of cat dander and ashes and desperation.
Right?
Lucas
First came the ambulance then the squad cars then the bad news was confirmed—his father was dead—and next the questions.
“Do you have ID?”
POCKETS EMPTY NO.
“You were just
let go
?”
VAN. BLINDFOLD. TAILLIGHT.
“And the others are back, too?”
SCARLETT. SCARLETT. SCAR.
“What do you
mean
, you don’t remember?”
CAROUSEL. BEACH.
HORSE.
SPINNING.
The back of the police cruiser was, at least, quiet as they rode through town—Fort Myers Beach, Florida, he’d discerned from signs. The sidewalks bulged with college types out barhopping. Cars crawled through the main intersection in town, even at 2:00 a.m.
They were stopped in front of an aging hotel called the Tiki Tower, where the parking valets wore leis; totem poles flanked a fountain lit with blue and green spotlights. A group of girls in a white convertible were stuck in the same traffic but in the opposite direction. They all had long ponytails, and bikinis under their tank tops, and they were singing along—poorly, drunkenly—to some pop song Lucas didn’t know. Two guys walking on the opposite sidewalk stopped, red plastic cups in their hands, and one of them shouted, “Ladies! Where’s the party?”
So this was what he’d been missing.
Eleven years, the cops had said.
Two-thirds of his life.
It didn’t make any sense.
He had to make sense of it.
The car started to move again and passed a massive inflatable water slide on the beachfront side of the road, and then a bunch of tourist shops, and restaurants, and bars, and psychics, and massage parlors, and then, finally, they went up and over a steeply arched bridge. The view from the backseat turned into rooftops and distant marinas, and so Lucas closed his eyes; there’d been a shirt in one of the shop windows that read: SUN’S OUT, GUNS OUT.
What did that even mean?
As the speed of the car picked up, he took a few deep breaths of warm, briny air.
He felt
free
.
The feeling was new.
Or maybe old?
He felt his body preparing to weep, but felt it fighting, too.
Why so much fight?
His father was dead.
Why
not
weep?
The car stopped, the door opened, and he was pulled out into the precinct, and then escorted through the main hall. All eyes on him. Most of them . . . what? Suspicious? Confused? Surprised?
He was put in a room alone.
Locked in, actually.
Was he accustomed to being locked up? Used to being alone?
He had to have been imprisoned.
Right?
For eleven years?
The room started to spin, so he sat down.
THE HORSE. TEETH YELLOWED, CHIPPED.
He let his head fall to the table, forehead first, heard the door click open.
“You okay there?”
“I will be,” Lucas said. “When I get some sleep. And some answers.”
“Answers?”
“Answers.” Lucas looked up.
A middle-aged detective who’d shaved what was obviously a balding head now sat across from him. He was thinner than seemed healthy, and something about his mouth seemed British, but he had no accent. He said, “I never thought I’d see the day.”
“What day is that?” Lucas asked.
“I’m Mick Chambers. I was the lead investigator when you all went missing.” He folded his hands together on the table in front of him. “I figured by now you were all, you know . . . dead.”
Lucas reached down and checked his pulse on his wrist with two flat fingers. “Not dead.”
“Yes.” Chambers shook his head and smiled. “I see that.” Then he
leaned forward, cleared his throat. “This whole thing? The Leaving? Pretty much ruined my life.”
“And that’s supposed to be my problem?” Lucas didn’t have to put his fingers back to his wrist to know that his pulse was quickening with irritation; the cops on the scene had called it that, too—The Leaving—right before cuffing him. Would they give that whole mess a catchy name, too? The Cuffing?
“No,” Chambers said matter-of-factly. “But this is all
very strange
.”
“You have a reputation around here for being a master of the obvious?” Now he could almost feel the tapping in his wrists, blood boiling from the inside out.
Chambers smiled again, wider this time. “Listen, Lucas. I don’t need you to like me. I honestly
couldn’t care less
. But I got guys who are going to be banging down that door right there in about ten seconds. FBI. Younger guys. Hungrier guys. I may not even end up as lead on this case and there’s not a lot I can do about it, so let me just ask you something.”
“Fire away,” Lucas said.
“If you were me, and there were a bunch of kids who were abduct ed years ago, and when they came back—just showed up—they said they didn’t remember anything—about
ten-plus
years?—would you believe them?”
He pictured the others.
Wondered whether Scarlett was having a better homecoming.
How could she not?
Was she his . . .
girlfriend
?
“Would you?” Chambers pressed.
“Probably not.”
“And if one of them was at the scene of an
accident
the very night he
happened to come back, and it turned out his father was dead, would you believe it was an accident?”
That free feeling was now officially gone. “I
didn’t
kill my father.” Then with raised voice: “Why would I kill my father?”
“You might have your reasons. I have
no idea
who you actually are.”
“
I
”—Lucas leaned forward—“am the person who’s going to figure out what happened, figure out who did this.” His blood seemed to cool at the idea of it.
“Oh, yeah?” Chambers stood. “Well, good. You be sure to give me a call when you’ve got it all sorted.”
Knocks on the door came right before it opened, and two men flashed badges.
Chambers said, “He’s all yours” and left.
AVERY
Avery flushed the toilet—she’d held off as long as she could out there on the porch—and washed her hands, then stopped in the hallway outside The Shrine and decided to call Sam, who was her boyfriend. Why was she always reminding herself of that? It was possible she needed reminding because he was her
first
actual boyfriend and the concept was still fresh. More likely, there was another reason, but she wasn’t ready to admit that quite yet. He might not even pick up so late—or was it so early?—but this was the sort of thing you woke people up for. Especially people who were your boyfriend.