The Vanishing Season (12 page)

Liam wants to know if you are reading his letters? Are you ignoring him?

Maggie

Maggie,

My aunt and I flew to Florida for a long weekend, so sorry I didn’t write back till now. It’s strange, on the plane, people just sitting there listening to their iPhones and drinking ginger ales. Everybody acts like it’s not some kind of crazy miracle to be looking down at the clouds. People are so oblivious. Anyway, my mom says I can come home when things are safer back home. Who knows when that will ever happen. I miss you so much. You’re the only person I can talk crazy with. Don’t read too much—it will ruin your eyes.

Pauline

13

PAULINE LOST THE TIP OF HER FINGER AT HER AUNT’S TEA FACTORY. THAT WAS the first casualty of her life in Milwaukee. The second casualty was what some would have called more of a gain than a loss: She got herself a boyfriend.

Pauline’s aunt lived in a penthouse apartment in a high-rise, looking down on the highway that swooped south to Chicago.

For Pauline—she said in her long letters, which arrived in envelopes she made herself out of magazine pages—the weeks themselves took on a grayness. She missed the fields and the cardinals hopping around in the snow, open views, and the beauty of the lake. She was adjusting okay to her new school. Her aunt was grooming her to move in and learn to take over the tea factory someday, and the prospect depressed her.

The factory made all kinds: Earl Grey, Assam, Prince of Wales. The tea dust got in Pauline’s nose and in the wet corners of her eyes, so that every Saturday and Sunday night when she came home, washing her face made the white washcloth gray. She was learning from the bottom up: Her first job was to stand on the assembly line and hold down the tops of the tea bags so that they went evenly into the machine that sewed the holes together. She was standing there daydreaming when she let her hand wander in too close, and that was how she came to lose the fingertip.

It’s not that bad
, she wrote.
I think it’s kind of unique.

Apparently, when he heard through the school grapevine that Pauline had been in the hospital in Milwaukee to get her finger sewn up, James Falk sent her a dozen stargazer lilies, a flower she said she’d never seen before that day but which was the most beautiful she’d ever laid eyes on.

Pauline was still utterly uninterested in James. A fact that he took in stride the first time he visited (on the pretext of being in the city to see his cousin), even when Pauline told him point blank she wasn’t attracted to him. The second time, she told him bluntly that he was too boring, and apparently—she wrote—he liked her all the more for it. Her indifference only seemed to charm him, and he showed up again and again—making the long drive from Gill Creek on lots of Red Bull. Pauline said she had never been so doggedly chased by someone before. Aunt Cylla adored him.

From the sound of it, Aunt Cylla made Pauline’s mom look like a wild optimist.

Here’s some of her favorite advice
, Pauline wrote.

“You’re no different from anyone else.”

“Too soon old, too late smart.”

But she was also loving, and gave Pauline the best bedroom, with a window that looked out across the city. Pauline wrote in so much detail—as if hungry to get it all down—that Maggie could picture it all vividly. They played cards at night, and Aunt Cylla asked Pauline all sorts of questions about James and told her to watch out for men. The only man Cylla had ever loved was a fluffy dog named Oscar that was permanently attached to her lap.

Pauline wrote, in her typical melodramatic way, that the grayness of the neighborhood seemed to stretch around the whole world, even though it belonged just to her. It seemed to her like gray was the color of being realistic. Finally, she let James Falk kiss her and then wrote Maggie a long letter—mentioning the kiss only briefly.

I know it sounds crazy, but I think I’m different from everyone else. Most people want to move forward, but not me. I just want to come home. I just wish I was little again.

Anyway, Mom and Aunt Cylla are both adamant. I can’t come home until the killer is caught. And the way things are looking, that will be never.

It sucks, because there are no Maggies here, at least not any good ones. You’ve got a stout heart, Maggie. Mine feels like a raisin sometimes. That’s right, I said “stout heart.” I got that from
The Lord of the Rings.
I’ve watched it three times so far because it’s the only DVD Aunt Cylla owns. When Aragorn says that about the Hobbit, it reminds me of you.

Maggie didn’t know how she liked being compared to a hobbit.

All the Maggies here have hearts like these,
Pauline went on.

She drew a droopy, anemic-looking heart.

She didn’t ask anything about Liam.

Since Hairica, Maggie’s mom rarely let her go into town anymore, even in the daytime. “Just until this whole thing’s over. I wish we could send you away to a rich aunt to keep you safe, but since we can’t, you’re stuck with us at home.”

With no job and no schoolwork for break and no Pauline, Maggie had very little to do, except deal with Abe. Pauline had had to leave him behind, and he’d adopted Maggie, waiting outside the front door every morning for her to wake up and come downstairs—his tongue lolling to one side, his breath steaming into the air. She fed him and took him on her runs with her, and he gave himself the job of being her protector, chewer of her shoes, and invader of her room, when he managed to get into the house. She didn’t call Liam. She figured he was probably as bored as she was, but it didn’t feel right to see him without Pauline.

And then one afternoon, he showed up on her porch.

“There’s a place just behind my house where it’s frozen solid,” Liam said. “Let me take you.”

They walked into the pine woods, Liam in front and Abe in the rear. Most guys Maggie knew would have turned back to help her over logs or held back branches to let her pass, but Liam just trudged along, and Maggie had to hold up her hands to ward off the pine branches that snapped toward her and threw snow in her eyes.

He stopped a few feet in front of her, and she caught up beside him to see they were standing at the lake’s edge, the ice creeping across the water in long, bluish-white fingers.

“I’ve already tested it; it’s fine. We’re only going a few feet out. Abe . . .” Liam turned to the dog, who was sitting at the edge of the ice with ears down nervously. Liam pointed in the direction of Pauline’s house. “Go home. Go on.” Abe looked up at Maggie mournfully, hesitated a moment, and then slunk off into the trees again.

Liam stepped out onto the ice, and Maggie followed.

As a person who was afraid of drowning, walking on water in its frozen form was still far from comforting. But Liam’s confidence helped to reassure her, and they walked only ten or so feet out before they came to a hole he’d chiseled in the ice. He’d built a windbreak on one side and left bags of snacks and a flannel blanket curled up in a ball.

“You’ve been fishing already?” she asked.

“Every night this week,” Liam said. Maggie tried to suppress a laugh. There were no guys she knew like Liam in the world.

He showed her how to bait her hook, and she fished uselessly for about twenty minutes. Every time she got a nibble, she either pulled too fast or waited too long. Liam was endlessly patient.

“Has Pauline written you?” he asked.

Maggie nodded. “You?”

Liam shook his head. Maggie realized this meant he didn’t know about Pauline and James. She thought about telling him. But then, it wasn’t her news to tell.

“You know, this one time she made me help her set all these chickens free from a chicken factory in Sturgeon Bay, when we were twelve. They were all in this giant coop. We snuck over on our bikes in the middle of the night. We opened all the doors, and they all went flying everywhere, and we came home covered in feathers. And the feathers got into everything. I bet there are still feathers in my house.” Liam sighed, remembering it. “She gouged her back pretty bad, crawling under a fence. She’s still got a big scar.”

Maggie remembered the scar, and now she pictured a twelve-year-old Pauline shimmying under a fence like a criminal. She tried to picture the chickens flying off into the dark, hundreds of them, their bright white feathers flapping and swirling in the moonlight, the sound of their wings drilling into the silent air.

“Can you imagine the people who lived nearby, looking outside in the middle of the night because of all the noise and seeing a stampede of chickens running across their yards?” Liam asked.

Maggie laughed.

“But you know,” Liam went on thoughtfully, “probably most of the chickens died or got caught. It was dumb; she didn’t think it through. Pauline breaks things just as much as she fixes them. But it doesn’t stop her.”

They sat for over an hour, until Maggie’s butt had gone completely numb.

“Well, it’s getting late. And I wanna show you something else.”

They stood up and began walking. Maggie’s feet suddenly slid, one backward, one forward. And then a
whoosh
, and her back foot plunged into the ice as it crackled around her.

Liam grabbed her just as her other foot went under. One moment she had nothing beneath her toes, and the next they were stumbling forward and on solid ground again, but not before Maggie’s feet had gotten dunked in the slushy, frozen water.

“I’m so sorry,” Liam said. “Here.”

He crouched for her to climb on his back. Maggie balked.

“Come on, you don’t want to walk through snow with wet feet.”

“I’m heavier than I look.”

“Yeah, right.”

Once she had her arms around his neck and her thighs around his waist, Liam rose easily, like she weighed nothing.

He walked back in the direction of his house, but instead of turning home, he veered right. Maggie could feel the warmth of his back against her stomach and smell his Liamness, the smoky, musky smell that seemed part outdoors and part just
guy.

Maggie was just about to ask where they were going when the woods became familiar and she recognized the glade up ahead and, in the middle of it, steam rising from the finished sauna.

“This is where I was taking you anyway.”

He let her slide off, stood back, beamed proudly yet also shyly, and opened the door. A cloud of steamy heat enveloped her.

Maggie looked at him questioningly and then hobbled inside on her cold feet. He followed her in, closing the door behind him.

There was a bench on either side of the tiny room, and the whole place smelled deliciously of cedar. Maggie sank onto the bench to her right and shrugged out of her coat, pulling off her hat as Liam did the same. She felt the warm, wet air—thick and smelling like sweet, burned wood—sink into her skin, and her muscles relaxed. Her dark hair got damp quickly, and she wiped it aside from where it was pasting itself to the sides of her face. She rested her head back and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the dripping sounds of the moisture.

“Liam, it’s like summer in here. You found a way to bring summer to winter.”

She glanced over at him. He smiled, looking gratified. “You like it?”

“It’s . . . the best.” Her whole body felt limp and happy. She pulled off her scarf and her thermal shirt while Liam stoked the fire at the back, which was in a metal, racklike box low to the ground.

“I feel like nothing bad could find us here,” she said.

Liam sat again and lifted her feet across his lap, toward the fire. “We should warm up your feet.”

“Aren’t you supposed to stay away from really hot stuff when your feet are frozen?” she asked.

“I think that’s just if you have frostbite.” He began to rub her feet. “I read that you’re supposed to just put the person’s feet against your belly to warm them up.”

“Is there anything you don’t know?” she teased.

He rolled his eyes as if to say she was one to talk, lifted his shirt, and pulled it over her feet so that her soles were touching his stomach. “There.”

Steam began to fill the sauna, and Maggie, a little shy about her feet against Liam, tried to relax again. They were silent for several seconds. She tried to think of whether Pauline would mind if she saw them right now.

“Technically you’re supposed to get naked in saunas,” Liam said, with a wry grin, and Maggie smacked him on the arm.

“
Mmm-hmm
. Very subtle.”

“Just kidding.” Liam blushed all the same.

Impulsively, without saying anything, Maggie shimmied out of her shirt, down to just her sports bra. Liam looked at the wall; then they both laughed.

“I’m not embarrassed,” Maggie said, even though it wasn’t like her. “Sports bras aren’t like real bras.” She wasn’t trying to flirt. She just wanted to be . . . different from how she usually was.

“Why would you ever be embarrassed? You look perfect.”

“I don’t want to be perfect,” she blurted out. “I mean, ugh, I always try to be perfect.”

“It’s a compliment.” Liam checked her feet under his shirt. “They’re still a little cold.” He pulled out her left foot and rubbed it, paying close attention to what he was doing. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind.

It reminded Maggie of the first day they’d met, when they’d been so comfortable sitting together and not saying anything. But the difference was Liam’s hands on her feet, and a kind of intimacy in the way he was touching them—like he was concentrating, trying to think what would feel best, his thumbs kneading the backs of her heels, then, more softly, the fragile, sensitive flesh of her arches.

“They’re warm now. I guess I’ll walk you home,” he finally said abruptly.

“Yeah,” Maggie said, pulling her shirt and her coat on in two quick movements. They were so warm that the air didn’t even feel cold when they walked outside.

At her door Liam told her he’d see her tomorrow. “With Pauline going the way she did, we didn’t really celebrate New Year’s,” he said. “We should have a belated one. I’ll think of something.” As if they’d decided they’d see each other every day. As if, without Pauline, they would be an automatic pair.