The Night My Sister Went Missing (19 page)

So by the day of the funeral, I had all my blather out on the table, had already apologized twenty-five times for being too dumb to save her, had already listened to them tell me just as many times that it wasn't my fault. At one point a swollen-eyed Mr. Kearney said in my den, "Enough, already! Will you shut up about it?"

I loved those three guys from that moment forward. They remind me of her.

At the church they actually wanted me to stand in the receiving line—as the bereaved boyfriend—a concept that made me fall back in horror. I was not deserving and gave the truth as an excuse—I had to look after Casey. She was in a back brace, with one cracked vertebra and twenty stitches in various places, four on her face. Barnacle bites. She hadn't complained at all about stitches, the pain, or a dozen scratches on her face along with the sutures. She had insisted on coming, but if anybody tried to hug her—that could have made her scream in agony.

I was glad to take a seat with her up in the balcony, where we could sit and vegetate, and I could bawl if I wanted to, or pray if I got the urge. We watched the Marvels file through below in one unbroken line, giving pictures to Mrs. Kearney and Mrs. DeWinter, and laying "memories" in a big basket at the altar, until it overflowed into the aisle. Tennis rackets, CDs, shoes, journals ... anything that had given Stacy a giggle lay there, and it collectively
resembled the contents of some old giant closet that had been dumped out.

I watched in kind of a daze, looking for what details left me feeling that the Marvels were just going through the motions of being Marvels—maybe without realizing themselves that they were little more than lonely, pathetic bodies wandering around. One nice detail that stands out was how no one seemed to be looking into the eyes of anyone else. Not that anyone appeared to feel treacherous or deceitful or remorseful for how she or he had treated Stacy lately—I didn't sense that.

It was something else. A lack of reliance, maybe. You search your friends' faces when you're feeling terrible things, and you need to see that your friends are in it with you. When you don't look, it's either that you don't have those feelings or you don't feel that your friends do. Either way, it was hard to watch.

Stern was the only one not there. He was in county jail, looking at eight-to-ten for attempted manslaughter, which I thought was a charitable charge. I hadn't said anything to Casey like, "I warned you about that jerk." One of the things that was making us closer, I think, was my not saying it. Another thing was the discussions we'd had all yesterday.

The tale Casey told came down pretty much like Stacy had predicted. Casey heard the shot, felt nothing, but saw Stern pointing a gun straight at her, just after she'd seen an orange crack from the corner of her eye. She had no idea that he was mistaking her for Stacy, but her flight mode
went off. She dove, thinking she was in serious danger for reasons she couldn't understand but could figure out later.

The perfect dive, yeah. Stacy was right about that. Casey cut the water so pristinely that under the pier, she was able to get out of my sweatshirt before the first swell hit her. She said that as often as she'd considered trying this dive, she had never in her wildest dreams understood the thrust of the waves under the pier. The first one spun her ten feet under, eggbeater style, then all but nailed her to one of the pilings. At ten feet down at high tide, the barnacles are about three feet thick. They're like razors, and they cut her to shreds, cut right into a vertebra, then mercifully sucked her into a rip that took her out.

The rest is a lot of ramble that was hard for her to put into words and harder for me to hear. She said there was a night surfer out there, and somewhere between the pier and the down-seas, he helped her onto a surfboard, and she lay on it in excruciating pain. She had no clue how much time had passed between when the surfer helped her and when they found Tito's surfboard. She said only that it was dark and she was weak, probably from blood loss. At one point she opened her eyes and he was gone, maybe having lost track of her in the swells ... She knew at that point that she'd have to get herself back to shore with a back that hurt like a bitch—and without paralyzing herself. She took her time.

She wondered aloud to me whether it had been the ghost of Kenny Fife, or if it had been an angel—or just
some total moron who went surfing after dark when there was only a trickster half moon. I don't speculate on that, except to reflect on how no guy ever showed up at the police station to report that he'd helped a girl onto a surfboard and then lost her in the swells, and no dead surfer ever washed up. The bottom line is that my sister is a sadder but wiser, more realistic person.

She put her fist on my knee after we sat in the pew for a few minutes. She was utterly baked on pain pills, so she slurred. "D'you see how everyone kissed me?"

As we'd been heading up to the balcony, most of the Marvels were coming in. She'd asked them, please, not to hug on her back brace, so everybody had kissed her and told her how great she looked and how lucky they all were that she was still with us. They asked her questions about her brace, and they clucked over her a lot.

"Yeah. They were okay to you."

She blasted out her nose, "To my face. Rumor's already circulating that this is my fault somehow. My melodramatic exit off the pier caused the police to be distracted, or they might have had more time to help Stacy. Insane ... but normal for these parts."

I wondered where she had heard that, didn't exactly care, and said nothing.

But she slurred on, "So I think I'm next in line to be the Fallen Queen."

I liked the way she giggled evilly. We'd talked about the Marvels a lot yesterday, how she'd given the crowd its famed
nickname, how a night at sea had changed her. We were both still messed up, to the point where I don't think we ever finished a sentence. We didn't really have to.

"So ... are you expecting to stick around and accept the honor?" I mumbled.

Another little snort escaped her. "I haven't made up my mind how weird I actually want to be yet. I just know, based on what I have saved up this summer, I only have enough in my budget for four piercings. Where should I get them? All places that show, thank you. Stacy would be mad if I were, um ... vulgar about it."

They say people get weird urges to laugh at funerals—along the lines of laughing and crying being the same release. I felt the corners of my mouth wanting to turn strangely up, but I fought off the impulse. "Just don't put a plate in your bottom lip."

She shifted. Her back had stung so bad last night, she'd slept on the couch on her stomach, with her face hanging over onto the ottoman—with just enough room between the ottoman and the couch for her nose and mouth, so she could breathe. She never complained, though. After her halo rantings, that seemed miraculous.

"Duly noted," was all she said, and we slipped into silence.

We got to see how strange it looked for something huge to be happening on the island without Mr. DeWinter being at the center of it. Because Drew and I had been the only Marvels present to hear Mr. Kearney set the whole thing straight, the funeral was a very surreal time of limbo. Mr.
DeWinter had not been arrested yet. I don't know if the cops were dotting all their i's and crossing all their
fs,
but it was three weeks until the arrest actually took place and the media storm hit. So at the funeral, the only word on the street was that he was in the hospital. Most people still thought Stern was the father.

I started to notice, as this endless line of people kept coming, that very few of them were hugging Mr. Kearney and Stacy's brothers. It pissed me off to the point that I felt the urge to stand up and announce the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. I figured the arrest of Mr. DeWinter was coming—Lutz had stopped by the house and told us in confidence that testing had confirmed him as the rapist. So I just watched. Everyone hugged on Stacy's mom—the drug addict, the one-time victim, the person who probably had every reason to guess what was happening to Stacy from having lived through it herself. She probably "remembered" it all when she came back here, my dad says, and chose to lace herself up to believe it couldn't happen again.

And to everyone Mr. Kearney was still "the slug" who had looked for all the grossest jokes to tell at the famed DeWinter garden parties, until the garden parties were no more. I could see totally why he acted like such a pig. It was a protest against the well-behaved. There was something gallant about the thought that had come the closest, over the past few days, to making me smile.

And I remembered the haze of someone saying in the questioning room that pedophiles often consider their rela
tionships sacred. What was Mr. DeWinter going to do besides quit throwing parties after the Kearneys came to live with him? Throw Mr. Kearney out and risk losing Stacy? He never threw Mr. Kearney out until he'd been caught like a cat on the prowl. I thought again of the "settlement" Mr. DeWinter had offered him to leave Mystic. I wondered if Mr. Kearney bothered at that point to call it blood money to the old man's face. He'd had no proof then of wrongdoing. It was probably another of those stunning facts that never got said.

I still freeze up and sputter over the idea of all that probably was never said—by anyone, but especially not by Mr. Kearney. My dad and I had discussed how Mr. Kearney had been in a real jam. How do you ask your daughter if her grandfather is that sort of evil? If the dad gets the nerve to ask and the daughter is too afraid or psyched-out to tell, what do you say then?

My worst thought, while watching Mrs. Kearney get hugs and Mr. Kearney get frosty handshakes, was,
Did Stacy think of
my
dad?
Had she thought of all the people like him who had got DeWinter money over the years—and would now get nothing if she sent his butt to jail? It would seem like an insignificant thought in comparison to her own predicament, but that's one thing my dad confirmed for me about victims like her: The ways in which they are messed up are beyond tragic. They can adopt the minds of angels to make up for their physical world being a hell.

On that note I lost it, and my crying felt like a train wreck. I was glad to be in the back with no one but my
sister, who had heard me bawl enough over the past few days to view it as normal.

The Kearney men got tired of being snubbed, I gathered. They excused themselves and five minutes later showed up beside Casey and me. We all sat together in the balcony, which, if nothing better, prevented any of the Marvels from coming up to chat with us. Except Drew.

He came up and sat with us for a while. But sensing, I think, that Casey and I needed to be left alone, he wandered downstairs. He didn't ask any questions. I was about to leave this church and begin a life in search of originality, which for months would include thoroughly disliking any person who looked too normal. But I sensed even at the service that Drew would be one mindless conformist I would always forgive, because he's got special gifts. He had stayed with me the whole night Casey was missing, and he never left me the next day until noon, when I finally crashed out on my family room floor and slept twenty-four hours straight. If you're the nicest guy in the world, you can have a whole lot of shortcomings.

I watched Alisa Cox leave after saying her good-byes to Stacy by the casket. She had the classic nerve not to cry at all. She didn't say good-bye to anyone else, and I don't know what became of her. No one on the island has seen her again, though the rumor flies that she, too, committed suicide, and the service that followed was private. Casey tells the more likely story, considering that Alisa's parents still smile smugly when seen in the supermarket but seem other
wise reclusive. They wouldn't be smiling if their daughter died. The less popular rumor is that Alisa did her senior year at a boarding school for precocious gifted kids who want a sure deal into Harvard. Sometimes I wish I knew more.

Maybe five minutes after the Kearney men sat down beside me, I spotted Crazy Addy coming up through the mourners' line, getting ready to hug Mrs. DeWinter. I almost shot up in the pew to shout a warning at her to keep her big mouth shut. I'd been scared she would start in on some self-righteous loud trek about predicting how a girl would die at dawn. She had been right again with her predictions. But she merely hugged the family silently, then took a place in the balcony not far from us.

She looked down at Casey, and then at me. I sensed there was some recognition in Crazy Addy's tearful eyes, though she hadn't seen me at the police station, hadn't been parading herself all over the beach when Stacy died, like she had after the Van Doren debacle. I'd been in her place a couple times years ago, but so had every other teenager on Mystic, so it probably wasn't any memory that made her smile at me.

I waved and she waved back. I wished I hadn't. For whatever reason it inspired her to get up, come over, and sit down on the other side of Casey. I had the Kearneys sitting on my left, which was enough; I didn't need a drama developing to my right. I got ready to say, "Do
not
freak out my sister by telling her anything clairvoyant." But Crazy Addy seemed content just to sit there and not say anything. I got
a twitch that maybe she was just lonely. Everyone around here is lonely.

When the priest finally started in with the Lord's Prayer, I simply could not pray at first. I sat there numbly, watching the Mystic Marvels, noticing how not many of them were praying, either, and caught myself before gloating over
their
hypocrisy.

I wouldn't have had a chance, anyway. Mr. Kearney had his worst breakdown yet as he was reciting the Catholic prayers, and I don't remember who grabbed for whose hand first. But me, my sister, this row of Kearneys, and Crazy Addy held hands for those prayers, and I got the deep impression Mr. Kearney had recited them over and over and over throughout the years, looking for something—sense maybe, strength maybe, forgiveness for defaulting to playing a pig role, maybe.

Memories of Stacy claiming to be a devout Catholic shot through me—despite that she'd always been given to moments of extreme mouthiness and self-defensive outbursts—and I figured she'd followed her father's example, the only example in her life that held much meaning.