Shallow Pond (14 page)

“He's kind of on the small side,” Cameron said. He gently tossed the fish back down into the water.

“After all that you're not going to keep him?”

“I'm not really in the mood for fish.”

I shook my head. Cameron Schaeffer was a complete enigma.

“It's starting to get dark,” Cameron said. “I should probably get you home.”

I nodded. As we gathered everything up, I wondered if this had been a one-time thing, a fluke. Would Cameron go back to being the guy I only knew at a distance as the occasional boyfriend of my sisters? It made me sad to think it.

Cameron had managed to grab both chairs and the corkscrew drill in his left hand, and I grabbed everything else. He threw his free right arm around me and hugged me to him to keep me warm as we shuffle-stepped our way back toward shore and the parking area. He didn't say anything, but I couldn't have heard his message any clearer if he was shouting it from the top of a mountain. He was my father. He was here for me. He would take care of me and protect me.

I should have left well enough alone. Why wasn't I content to bask in the happiness of knowing that after all these years I'd found my real father? As Cameron drove me home through the twilit streets of Shallow Pond, though, I kept thinking about how weird things were with Cameron dating Gracie instead of being back together with Annie. If only he was with Annie. If only he had never left Annie. Then we could be like a normal family.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

“Another one,” he said, briefly looking away from the road to give me one of those smiles. “I see a bright future for you as a journalist.”

“Why did you break up with Annie?”

“What?”

“She loved you. She still loves you.” I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but it needed to be said. “Why did you break up with her?”

“Babie, I never broke up with Annie,” he said. I excused his use of the nickname, but I shook my head at his blatant lie. He stopped the car at a stop sign. There was no one behind us, so instead of pulling forward when the road was clear, he turned and looked at me. His eyes were deadly serious and a little bit sad. “I never broke up with Annie. I loved Annie. She broke up with me.”

“No she didn't,” I said, ready to defend my sister.

“When I went away to college,” he said, “it was like some-
one had taken a knife and stabbed me in my heart.”

Cameron resumed driving. I shook my head again. He had to be wrong. He had to be lying. Annie was completely and totally in love with him. She never would have broken up with him. Plus, the timing didn't make sense. They couldn't have broken up when Cameron went away to school. I could remember going on that camping trip, getting ice cream with them. Annie couldn't have had me until right after high school. I could feel hot tears beginning to form, and I blinked them away.

We'd pulled up in front of my house.

“Hey,” Cameron said softly. “Are you all right?” I nodded. I was afraid if I tried to speak I would burst out crying. He reached over and gently lifted my chin so that I was looking into his eyes. “It's okay. You were probably just confused. It happens. If it helps any, the reason she broke up with me is that she'd met someone else, another guy. Maybe that's the guy she's been in love with.”

I knew this couldn't be right, but I nodded. Silent tears streamed down my face. I pulled away from him and quickly got out of his car, shutting the door behind me. I should have said goodbye. I should have thanked him, but I couldn't speak. Halfway up the front steps I turned and saw Cameron watching me. I tried to smile at him, and he smiled back.

Eighteen

I stepped into the house, and Gracie all but leaped on top of me before I could even make it through the doorway.

“Who was that?” she demanded, her voice a little more shrill and high-pitched than usual.

I glanced over my shoulder to see Cameron's taillights headed down the street.

“Was that Cameron?” Gracie asked. “What were you doing with Cameron? Where is he going?”

I didn't know which question to answer first. I didn't want to answer any of them, but I had a feeling she wouldn't let me off the hook that easily.

“Ice fishing,” I said. I shut the door and started to take off my coat.

“Ice fishing? Since when do you go ice fishing?”

Since I've come to the conclusion that there's something about our family that doesn't quite add up and I'm hoping to find some answers
, I thought but didn't say. I didn't see any point in explaining my theory to Gracie, especially since she would completely dismiss it and since it probably wasn't even true anyway. Couldn't be true, I now told myself. Cameron Schaeffer was not my father. I felt like I was missing something. I needed some time to sit down and think things over, to figure out what it was that I wasn't seeing.

Standing there just inside the front door, my coat half on, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I sucked in a lungful of burnt-smelling air.

“What's that smell?” I asked.

“French toast!” Gracie shrieked, running into the kitchen. I heard her cursing. I finished taking off my coat and my shoes and followed her in to see the damage. The kitchen was thick with smoke. I opened the back door and wafted cold fresh air into the room while Gracie scraped the ruined slices into the trash.

“Was this supposed to be dinner?” I asked.

“Annie's still not feeling that well,” Gracie said. “She's taking a nap. Crap, what are we going to do now?”

“We can make more,” I said.

“That was the last of the bread,” Gracie said. She looked about ready to cry. I actually felt a little bit bad for her, but only a little bit.

I shut the back door and started to scavenge around in the fridge for something dinner-worthy. I'd just located a package of hamburger buns when the smoke alarm sounded an ear-piercing wail. I thought we'd done a good job of clearing the smoke out of the room but perhaps it was just that I had gotten used to it, or maybe it had all risen to the second floor. So much for Annie's nap.

I wafted more cold air into the kitchen and the smoke alarm went silent. Annie was downstairs in seconds, and even though she looked like someone who'd just been rudely awakened from a nap, she also looked a bit more like her normal self. Maybe the medicine was actually helping her.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“Burnt French toast,” I explained. Gracie glared at me, but what did she want me to say?

Annie shook her head and said, “Babie, grab all the vegetables you can find in the refrigerator. Gracie, grab the step stool and get the big pot off the top of the cabinets. We should have enough ingredients to make Mom's vegetable soup.”

We didn't have all the ingredients listed on the recipe card in Mom's neat handwriting, but Annie did her best to improvise. Together we chopped and added vegetables to the pot. Annie added broth and water. Gracie set it on the stove to simmer, and before long the burnt smell was replaced by the aroma of soup. Annie was like some sort of magician. I'd always looked up to her, but now I felt something else—awe, I guess it was. I also felt scared.

What if she was really sick, seriously sick? How would we manage if she got worse and had to be admitted to the hospital? I didn't want to think about it, but it was unavoidable. People in my family had a knack for dying young. What if Annie died? I imagined Gracie and me trying to make it on our own. It would be awful. I pictured us sitting at a messy kitchen table eating a dinner of stale hamburger buns.

No, I couldn't think like that. Annie would get better. The medicine already seemed to be having a positive effect. She would be fine, and everything would go back to normal, or what passed for normal in the Bunting household. That is, until that day when I finally left this town. Then I would be on my own, all on my own. For the first time, I had a little bit of doubt. How would I make it out there in the world on my own, without Annie? Annie was a grown-up. She was smart, resourceful, and always completely in control, and that's the way she'd been for as long as I could remember. Compared to her, I was nothing but a helpless child.

“Hello, space cadet,” Gracie said in an annoying voice; that is, her usual voice. I looked up. “Are you paying any attention? I asked you to get out the bowls and set the table.”

“A ‘please' would be nice,” I said.

“Puh-leeze would you get the damn bowls out already.”

“Stop it, you two.” Annie raised her hand to her temple as if her head was in pain. Probably it was, but for a moment there I had the suspicion that she was faking in order to make us feel bad for arguing. Either way, I resolved to try to get along with Gracie at least through the rest of dinner. As it turned out, I didn't have to try that hard.

Gracie started telling some story about some woman at the store, a customer who dropped a can of beans; when the customer leaned over to pick them up, her pants fell down. The problem was, Gracie kept laughing as she was telling the story and she couldn't get out more than a few words at a time. Even though Annie and I could barely understand what she was saying, we started laughing at her laughing. Then Annie told a story about the time when I was little and I dropped my favorite stuffed animal into the freezer case at the store when no one was looking. I started bawling, and it wasn't until a few aisles later that anyone realized I was missing my toy. We had to retrace our steps, looking everywhere for the stuffed animal to no avail while I screamed. They finally asked the store to make an announcement about the missing toy, and a woman found it on top of a bag of frozen peas. It made us laugh until tears rolled down our faces. It felt good. It felt like old times.

I was in my room after dinner when the phone rang. A few seconds later Gracie called my name, then appeared at my door with the phone in her hand.

“It's for you,” she said.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“What do I look like? Your personal answering service? It's one of your friends.”

It would be Jenelle or maybe Shawna, I thought. Maybe, and my stomach did a little flip-flop thing at the thought, it was Zach. I was surprised when I heard Meg on the other end. Then realization crept over me.

“We had a training session tonight, didn't we?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Meg said. “I was surprised you weren't there.”

“I completely forgot.”

“Actually, you didn't really miss much. I was just calling to let you know we got our schedules for when we work with our mentors on the phone lines. Danielle's going to be a mentor for both of us.”

I got out my notebook and jotted down the dates and times that Meg read off to me. I'd been thinking some pretty dark thoughts about her, but she really wasn't that bad. In fact, she was pretty nice. She didn't have to go out of her way and call me with the schedule information. Was it any wonder that Zach was interested in someone like her? Compared to Meg I probably came across like some sort of ice-princess bitch.

“So, see you at school, I guess,” Meg said.

“Hang on,” I said. I hesitated. I wasn't sure how to ask what I wanted to ask. I wasn't sure if I
should
ask what I wanted to ask. “Are you and Zach Faraday, are you, like, a couple?” I came across sounding completely stupid.

“Oh, no,” Meg said. “No. I mean, he's completely gorgeous, but we're not really a couple or anything. Not that I would be opposed to that, but I think he's got a girlfriend, or maybe an ex-girlfriend who he's not over or something.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn't know he had a girlfriend.”

“Maybe from where he used to live? He just seems like there's someone else he's really into, you know?”

“Sure,” I said. Even though I didn't, not really. “Okay, thanks for the schedule.”

“No problem,” Meg said.

I hung up and sat there in a daze. Who was this girl that Zach was really into? Could it possibly be me? Why did I feel myself getting so excited by the thought?

“Hey there.”

I jumped. It was only Annie. She was standing in my doorway.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “I feel like I haven't talked to you in forever.”

“I'm fine,” I said.

She nodded, then stepped into my room. She came over and stood beside me, brushing her hand over my hair.

“It's quite the look,” she said. “It's growing on me. It looks a lot better than that perm I got when I was fourteen.”

I laughed, because I'd seen the pictures. It was, in a word, heinous.

“Who was on the phone?” she asked.

“
A girl I know from school. We're in training together for volunteering at the women's support hotline.” For a moment Annie's face looked a bit strained and pale, like she was in pain. Perhaps she was still sick and trying to hide it for my benefit.

“How's it going? The training?”

“Fine.” I decided not to tell her that I'd accidentally missed a session. It would only make her worry about me.

With her standing beside me, her hand on the top of my head, she felt more like a mother than ever. I felt a wave of sadness thinking that I had been wrong after all, but I wondered if I'd only been partly wrong. What if Annie was my mother and this mysterious
other
guy was my father? Except what about the time we'd spent together with Cameron when I was younger? That didn't make sense. Unless …

“How old are you?” I asked.

The sudden question surprised Annie. She lifted her hand and looked at me like I'd suddenly sprouted an extra head.

“I'm twenty-six. You know that,” she said.

She was still claiming to be only eight-and-a-half years older than me. But what if she was lying? What if she was five years older than she said she was? At thirteen, someone could technically have a kid. Stuff like that happened, didn't it? It was a lot less socially acceptable than having an out-of-wedlock child in your late teens, which would be all the more reason to keep the real story of my parentage a secret. I thought of the pictures I had seen of Annie in that awful perm. It would have been right around that time. Maybe that had been her way of trying to look older, of dealing with what must have been a huge change in her life that she couldn't have been anywhere near ready to deal with. It made me respect her that much more.

I turned and threw my arms around her waist and hugged her tightly. She laughed, then hugged me back.

“What was that for?” she asked when I let go. I shrugged. “Okay, well, I think I'm going to head off to bed.” It was only nine o'clock, but at least she'd been up and about for a few hours. “Don't stay up too late,” she said as she left the room.

I couldn't even think about sleep. There was too much going on in my head. What if Annie and Cameron had been just kids when I was born? It was only a few years, but it made a huge difference. Having a kid at seventeen or eighteen was not exactly ideal, but it happened pretty often. Having a kid at thirteen or fourteen? That was crazy. It wasn't the sort of thing that should ever happen. In a small town like Shallow Pond, it wouldn't be the sort of thing you could ever escape from. It would be all the more reason to want to get the hell out of this town as soon as possible. That made Annie's refusal to leave that much more mysterious, but I realized she'd done it all for me. She'd sacrificed everything so that I could have a reasonably normal childhood, or as normal as one's childhood could get when one's mother was only fourteen years older than her.

But who was this other guy, the one she'd broken up with Cameron to be with? As far as I could recall, she'd never had another boyfriend. Why would she make up something like that? It didn't make any sense. Cameron could have been her ticket out of this wretched town. Unless … what if what she'd said to Cameron was that there was someone else—not another guy, but someone else—and by someone else she meant me? What if she'd broken things off with Cameron because she felt she had to spend her time taking care of me, and because she knew the best chance I had at normalcy was if she stayed in town with me?

My head was spinning, and I wanted to march right into Annie's bedroom and attack her with questions, but that wouldn't be fair. She was exhausted. She needed her rest. And I needed answers. I squirmed restlessly in my chair, unable to get comfortable, unable to relax.

I flipped idly through my notes from the hotline training. According to the schedule I'd jotted down, my first day of being on the phones was next week. That was too soon. I felt nowhere near ready. The notes I'd taken were sp
arse and not especially helpful.

I came across the website I'd written down when the cop spoke to us. Turning on the computer, I typed the address in the address bar. I couldn't remember what the site was supposed to be, but I realized as soon as the page began to load. It was the state's Megan Law site. If you wanted to find out whether there were any registered sex offenders in your town, you typed in your zip code. So I typed Shallow Pond's zip code. In the few seconds it took to load the results page, I thought about the possible suspects among Shallow Pond's small population. The guy who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot at Mr. K's had always made me uneasy. There was that older guy who always seemed to be at the library. He could be a sex offender.