Emmy & Oliver (25 page)

Maureen froze. So did the rest of us.

“Every time I asked Dad about you, he would just say he didn't want to talk about it!” Oliver yelled, his face flushed. “And then one day last month, I went to the library, the big one with the lions, and I tried Googling you, and there were all of these articles about
me
and I saw your picture for the first time in ten years, Mom, okay?
Ten years!
And I knew then what Dad had done so when they asked for fingerprint volunteers on that stupid field trip, I said yes. And now sometimes I wish I hadn't because I just fucked everything up for you, didn't I?” Oliver's eyes started to fill with tears. “You had this perfect life with the twins and Rick and I just messed it all up.”

“Oliver, no, honey—” Maureen said as she started to cross the room to him. I was still in my chair, and my mom's hand felt clammy in mine.

“No!” Oliver yelled, and Maureen stopped in her tracks. “Just don't, okay? You still love the kid that left, but I don't think you like the one that came back! I don't think you—”

But he stopped talking when we all heard the tiny sobs coming from the corner. Molly and Nora were standing in the doorway, huddled together, both of them crying as they watched the fight.

That current between Maureen and Oliver suddenly severed, and Maureen seemed to crumple as she buried her face in her hands. “Shit,” I heard her whisper.

Oliver, for his part, looked sick, like he wanted to throw up, and he closed his eyes and said something to himself that I couldn't make out. Then he opened his eyes and stalked away from the table, coming back a few seconds later with his hoodie in his hand, the same one he had been wearing in the gazebo the night we kissed. Had that
really been just three days ago?

“I'm sorry,” Oliver said, and I wasn't sure who he was talking to until he knelt down in front of the twins and hugged them both, their small arms reaching up to wrap around his neck. “I'm sorry, okay?” I heard him say again. “I didn't mean to scare you. I'm sorry.” Then he was kissing their heads and standing up, heading toward the door and almost running out.

The rest of us sat at the table in stunned silence. My entire face was hot, but my hands were cold, like I had a fever. My mom let go of my hand and started to go around the table to Maureen, Rick went to the twins, and I sat back in my chair and looked at my dad, who was watching me very, very carefully.

“Dad?”

“Go,” he said, answering the question that I didn't even know how to ask.

I stood up. My legs were shaking. “I have my phone,” I told him.

“It's okay, Emmy. Go.”

I pushed my chair back and grabbed my coat, then walked out the still-open door and pulled it shut behind me. I had no idea where Oliver had gone, or even where to look, but when I went out to the front yard, I saw a small figure stalking up the street, illuminated by orange streetlights and the ever-present coastal fog. He looked like a ghost, lost and alone, floating away.

“Oliver!” I called. “Wait!”

He didn't acknowledge me, though, and I dashed through the wet grass after him, my sneakers squeaking when I hit the street. Three years of surfing had its benefits, it turned out, including some pretty good cardiovascular skills, and I caught up to him in less than a minute. “Oliver, please!”

“Emmy,” he said, and he stopped so fast that I went running past him and had to double back. “Emmy, look. I appreciate you coming after me, that's really nice of you but—”

“I'm not going back,” I said, and he just looked at me and started walking again. “Wait,” I said. “Stop running, okay?”

“Just go back and stay with my sisters, okay? I didn't mean to upset them.”

“I know. They know that, too.” His legs were longer than mine and I had to hurry to keep up with him. “Where are you going?”

“I don't know!” he finally cried, coming to another screeching halt. “I have no idea, Emmy, okay? I don't know where the fuck I am or where the fuck I'm going! I probably couldn't even find my own house on a map.” He ran his hands through his hair, balled it
up between his fingers, then let it go with a huge sigh. “Sorry. I'm not mad at you.”

“I know,” I said again, because I did. I felt like I knew everything he was about to say, like that electric current that had snapped between his mom and him had snaked over and wrapped itself around me.

I ignored him, though, and led him to the curb. “Sit,” I said, and he plopped down next to the streetlight and leaned against it. I sat down next to him, then wrapped myself around his arm, holding him there. He took a deep breath, then let it out and rested his head against the top of mine.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, our ribs rising and falling in opposite waves, like we were breathing for each other. His pulse was racing under his skin and I ran my thumb against the veins in his wrist, waiting for him to calm down. “What happened?” I asked after enough time had passed.

“I think you saw what happened,” he said, but there wasn't any bite to his words. He sounded deflated, like the fight had sapped his energy.

“I mean before. Did you and your mom have a fight or something? Because that was . . . sort of out of the blue.”

“Not really, not if you live in our house. It's been coming for a while.” Oliver ran his thumb over my knuckles, smoothing the skin. But his eyes looked wild, feral, like the coyotes that sometimes snuck through our backyard in the middle of the night. “I just can't stand it sometimes, you know? Like, I know my mom suffered a lot. I know that and I don't mean . . .”

“Why didn't you tell her, though?” I asked. We were standing next to each other now and I reached out and took his sleeve in my hand. He just glanced away, looking so defeated under the streetlight.

“Because how do you tell your mom that you knew your dad took you away from her and you didn't do anything about it?” He didn't phrase it as a question. “What kind of kid does that?”

I pulled him over to the curb, where we sat down together, Oliver falling with a heavy sigh onto the concrete. “Fuck,” he muttered, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“You didn't do anything,” I told him, fumbling for the right words. I felt like if I said the wrong thing, he would wither up like a flower, cave in on himself and disintegrate. “You were a kid, Oliver. It's not up to you to fix what your dad did.”

“Yeah, but now I have to fix what
I
did,” Oliver said, then laughed to himself. “I get so mad at my mom for not realizing I'm not that seven-year-old kid anymore, but she's not
the same person she was, either.”

“None of us are,” I said softly.

Oliver kept talking like I hadn't said anything. “I didn't know what to do at first because I didn't want to turn my dad in, y'know? Like, this wasn't my perfect scenario or anything. But he had let me take this forensic science class through the local high school and we had a field trip to the local precinct and they asked for volunteers to do the fingerprinting and I . . . I thought if it was true, that this way I would be able to see my mom without turning in my dad.” He shrugged and then laughed, high-pitched and a little hysterical. “And so I volunteered and the next day there were two police officers at our house. My dad wasn't home, but I was.” He shrugged. “And that was it. Gone again.”

I didn't say anything. The words I needed to say probably hadn't been invented. A car drove past us, its lights flashing across our faces and making us both duck away from the brightness. When it passed, we came back together.

“Remember last week, when we were talking?” I said. “You said, what kind of kid doesn't call their mom? But you
did
, Ollie. You did what you could when you could. And yeah, it's not easy now but it won't always be this difficult. It'll get better.”

Oliver looked down at me. “Is that what everyone said when I first went missing? That it wouldn't always be this difficult?”

I nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”

“And did you believe them?”

I smiled, my eyes filling with tears. “Nope. Because it never did get better. Not until you came back.”

Oliver kissed the top of my head and I curled up against his arm, wrapping my hand around his. The street was quiet around us, most of suburbia tucked away for the night.

“I'm sorry I was a jerk to your parents,” Oliver finally said after a while. “They're always really nice to me.”

“You weren't a jerk,” I said. “I was just nervous that you were going to out me for applying to UCSD. Whatever, it's fine, I don't care. But we should probably go back. Our parents might get worried.”

“Yeah, I know.” He squeezed my hands through the hoodie. “Thanks for coming after me.”

“Yeah, well, I needed some cardio, anyway,” I said, then wished I hadn't made a joke.

He just wrinkled his nose at me, though, then stood up and pulled me to my feet.
“Onward,” I said.

“Just so you know,” he said, “I'm probably going to be grounded again. So don't expect a text or anything for a while.”

“Got it,” I said, but I didn't think Maureen would ground him, not this time.

I thought that she would probably just be happy to see him come home.

When we got back to the house, Oliver kissed me quickly under the shadow of a bougainvillea tree, its pink petals brushing against the tops of our heads as we met in the middle. “You going up to your room?” he asked, and I could feel the words form on his lips.

“Soon,” I said. I could see my parents moving in our kitchen, their bodies casting long shadows out onto the backyard grass. Oliver followed my gaze, then nodded. “Okay. I'll wait for you to turn off the lamp, then.”

“You don't have to wait for me,” I said. “You're probably exhausted. You should go to bed.”

“Oh my God, Emmy, one mom is enough right now.” But he was smiling as he said it, and I smiled back and then stood on my tiptoes to kiss him again. “Good night,” he whispered. “See you tomorrow.”

“'Kay,” I said, and we split up into our separate yards, our hands staying together until the last possible second, until just our fingertips touched. He swatted playfully at them as we parted, a brief smile crossing his face as if to let me know that he was all right, that everything had just been a joke, a gag to pass the time until something actually interesting happened.

I smiled, too, but I didn't believe one bit of it.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

W
hen I finally managed to open the sliding-glass door and step into our living room, neither of my parents were in the room.

In fact, the only person sitting on the couch was Maureen.

She had her hand wrapped loosely around the stem of her almost empty wineglass, swirling it around in slow motion so that the wine climbed the sides of the glass and then oozed back down. The rivulets winding their way down to the bottom made it look as though the glass was crying. When Maureen heard me come in, she stopped.

“Emmy,” she said, but she didn't sit up or even look at me. “I'm sorry you had to see all that.”

Her mascara was smudged, and so was her lipstick, which I later realized was just the red wine staining her mouth. “It's okay,” I said automatically.

“No, it's really not,” she sighed. “But you're a polite girl, I know. You've always been very polite.”

“Thank you.” I glanced around for my parents, wondering if they could come rescue me from this conversation. I had seen Maureen break down in our kitchen many, many times, but I had never been alone with her. My parents had always buffered the situation.

I wondered if this was what adulthood was supposed to feel like, suddenly needing my parents and having them be just out of reach, leaving me to fend for myself.

“How is he?” Maureen asked. She started swirling the wine again, then took a sip.

“Okay,” I said. I put my hand on the back of a chair. “He's home now if you want to talk to him.”

Maureen just laughed through her nose, a sound of disbelief. “Talk to him,” she repeated. “Oliver and I don't talk. Or rather, he doesn't talk to me.” She laughed again, but it sounded more like a sob. “You know, I've thought of a million different scenarios for him coming home, but not one of them ended with him hating me.”

I sat down in the chair across from her. If my parents weren't going to steer this boat, then it was time to grab the oars. “Oliver's in so much pain right now. He doesn't . . . I don't think he knows how to talk to you, or even what to say, you know? Everything is so different for him. It's like . . . it's like he barely knows who he is, much less who he is supposed to be.” I was trying to explain things without betraying his trust, but all I could do was fumble for words. And Maureen was a woman who had been given a lot of
platitudes in her life.