The Vanishing Season (17 page)
As she and Pauline and James crossed the parking lot, clouds slid across the sky, the sun going dim and bright again. It was heavy-coat weather but not freeze-your-nose-hairs frigid. The warmish front was supposed to last for a couple of days. The weather had turned strange: layer upon layer of clouds moving slowly inland, white puffs piled on lighter gray piled on blue.
“We may get one of those crazy midwinter thunderstorms,” James said. He knew a lot about the weather. Pauline said he got As in everything.
Inside, they peeled out of their coats. Pauline was wearing a dress she’d bought online from Barneys in New York—eggshell white and thin and drapey, with one strap on her left shoulder and the other shoulder bare. She wore a comb with tufty, delicate, tiny feathers in her dark hair. Everyone else looked overdone compared to her. The thin dress was barely visible on her shivering frame; it contradicted the elaborate corsage James had slipped on her wrist.
Maggie’s own dress was one she’d had for two years: emerald green, simple, and structured. She’d worn it last year to a dance in Chicago, on a date with a guy who’d bored her the whole night, saying things like “Really?
Really?
” over and over again, thinking it was clever. She’d drunk three disgusting swigs out of the flask of cheap whiskey he’d brought in his coat just to power through the ennui.
The Gill Creek dance had been pushed into one of the three main ballrooms, which was packed. It was an Under the Sea theme; there were blue and white balloons arranged along the ceiling to look like waves and buxom, retro paper mermaids pasted to the walls and fake starfish and shells dotting the refreshments table.
“I suspect these mermaids have been surgically enhanced,” Maggie said.
“No, I’m pretty sure 39-18-32 is a totally realistic measurement for mermaids,” Pauline offered sarcastically.
“I don’t think they have pelvises. Oh, we women and our huge, unattractive, structurally necessary pelvises.”
The room was stuffy, and the dancing had already started. Maggie felt her face flushing with heat. James took their coats and told them he’d grab them some food and drinks. He wore a slim suit and, Maggie thought as she watched him, he moved like this was his place, like every place was his place.
“It’s nice to have five minutes when he’s not trying to touch my ass,” Pauline said, sighing forlornly and watching him. “You should see it when we’re alone. It’s like kissing the giant squid; he tries to get everywhere at once.”
“You should break up with him if you don’t like him,” Maggie said.
“I know, I know.” Pauline looked at her. “I’m kind of just . . . coasting. He makes everything easy.”
James came back with plates full of food, and Pauline devoured hers. “Dance?” he asked. Some of his friends were dancing in a group at the right of the dance floor.
Pauline shook her head. “I feel a little hot actually.”
“Wanna leave?” He looked a bit overly concerned, as if she were a baby or a delicate flower.
Pauline shook her head again. “No, that’s okay. I’m just gonna go walk a little and see the rest of the hotel. I’ll be back. You guys stay and hang out.” She took off down a plush, carpeted hallway to the left.
Maggie and James stood in silence, Maggie feeling awkward because she had nothing to say to him. “My Humps” came on, which made it even a little more awkward when a couple in front of them started grinding.
“So you and Liam,” James said, after a while.
“Uh-huh,” Maggie replied. What else was there to say to that?
“Wasn’t he into Pauline for a while?”
“Probably not something you ask someone’s girlfriend.”
“So you’re his girlfriend?” James pressed.
Maggie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She could feel herself flushing with annoyance at having her personal life invaded. “Oh, that’s right. Pauline says you don’t like to reveal very much. She says you hold back.” Maggie tried to ignore the slight hurt that Pauline had said something like that about her.
James smiled, seeming completely at ease. “I can tell you don’t like me.” Maggie looked up at him but didn’t argue. “Sorry to be pushy. I just don’t think Pauline always knows what’s best for her. I just don’t think Liam Witte is what’s best for her, even as a friend. That dude is seriously messed up. Sorry.”
“You’d make a really good Taliban boyfriend,” Maggie said. James smirked and rolled his eyes.
“She’s just so beautiful,” he finally said. “I’ve been obsessed with her since, like, seventh grade. I mean, half the guys in my class are. She makes the other girls at our school look like nothing. If you have any hints about . . . I dunno, how I can win her over . . .”
“I gotta pee,” Maggie said, turning abruptly for the hall.
She was so annoyed and so over the conversation, she didn’t notice a figure at the corner of her eye coming out into the hallway through the double doors that led to the kitchen. The figure crossed the back of the room with two trays, taking a shortcut to a convention room across the hotel. Only as it disappeared out the rear glass doors did she register that it was someone she knew.
Here is a moment that sparkles hard like a diamond.
Pauline Boden walks out into the plush, green-carpeted hotel lobby, then out onto the empty veranda in back and crosses to the railing. Leaning over the side, she shivers in her eggshell dress but doesn’t go inside. She watches the clouds roll along and reflect in the water and rubs her arms. A squirrel scurries up a tree across the lawn, and there is the faint echo of music coming from one of the weddings inside.
Suddenly, hearing footsteps coming across the deck, she turns. Liam stands there looking uncertain, paused with two empty trays in his hands, frozen in place. He puts them down.
Pauline opens her mouth to say something, but instead, on impulse, she takes a step toward him. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and he winces.
She leads them into a dance in time to the faint music, polka steps, but slow and easy. Liam, unsure, puts a hand on her waist. He looks lost. He watches her in confusion. His fingers tremble a little on her waist.
The sun is setting and filtering through the strange clouds, and it makes the sky seem closer, like if they swam off the edge of the porch, they could reach it in twenty strokes or so. Liam pulls back and looks at her.
“You never wrote me,” he says. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”
Pauline shakes her head sadly. “I’m not your friend.”
Her lips tremble. She looks like she wants to cry.
Liam doesn’t ask her why. Maybe he knows. He smooths a piece of hair back behind her ear nervously, as if she might slap his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Liam looks down at his feet.
“I’m tired of doing this,” she says. “If I lose you . . . if you lose me . . .” She rolls her eyes up at the sky, tears welling along her bottom lashes. “It’s so tiring trying not to love you, Liam.” She looks uncertain, scared that the words are out.
Clouds cross the sun like a warning. Liam looks at Pauline’s trembling lips for a while, and then she startles him, sliding forward and pressing her lips against his. He pulls away, looks angry. But after a moment, he pulls her in tight and kisses her back. They lean into each other as if they’ve been on a long journey, as if they’re exhausted.
The moment feels familiar, like I already knew, and yet it comes as a surprise.
Now, at the back of the porch, I see her, looking through one of the dark glass doors of the hotel. The air shifts, shudders—I feel the past rearing up at me, and then it slips away. Only it leaves a residue of something . . . a piece of myself I’m scared to know. I’m terrified, for a moment, that I’ve done something terrible, but I can’t remember what.
From beyond the glass, Maggie Larsen watches them kiss, looking like she could sink beneath the ground.
I turn away, agitated. I float out above the woods. Despite not breathing, I need the air.
And here, I find them. Deep in the pine woods, above the trees, I arrive at the ball of ghosts. They’re twirling in the air, iridescent, glowing, windblown.
The ghosts of Door County are making the lightning dance. By trying to dance with one another.
I float to a woman with a long, thin face, but my words fall on deaf ears, and her mouth moves with no sound.
I fly to a man with a crooked neck. He barely looks at me.
And finally I realize what I have for a while suspected. We ghosts aren’t living among one another at all. We must be written on different slices of time or pieces of air. We’ll never touch, and we’ll never talk. We’re all alone.
The moths dance around us, almost like they’re their own circle of moonlight.
It’s a crescendo. It’s tragic. Because I know what it means. It means we are—
I
am—a piece of the past. And I can’t save anyone on Water Street.
It means I’m only here to watch.
I drift out and away again. I turn my face away from the world.
This is no place for anyone with a heart.
A WHITE WIND SWEPT THE SNOW IN LATE THAT FEBRUARY. IT COVERED DOOR County like a blanket, as if it wanted to lay a sheet over the horror. Another girl dead, and the peninsula had turned inward for the rest of the winter. Adults stayed indoors or retreated to wood-paneled bars to sit by roaring fireplaces. The young people sought each other out at one another’s houses or occasionally snuck out to stand huddled in the snow and talk with their breath puffing out in the air, daring the darkness. This was the time of year when it felt like maybe time wasn’t moving and the whole world would be stuck below freezing forever. It was like the earth was no longer in orbit but only hovering somewhere far from the sun.
Maggie hadn’t told Pauline what she’d seen. But the fact that everything had changed had been unspoken among the three of them on the way home from the dance—the silence in the car, the tension when they’d all parted in the driveway, James and Pauline going one way and Maggie the other. She and Pauline hadn’t talked since. Maggie hadn’t returned her calls and hid when there was a knock at the door, telling her parents to say she wasn’t home.
But she could sit up in her window, watching it all: Pauline and James arguing in the yard, and James finally driving away. Pauline in the passenger seat of her Subaru while Liam drove, probably riding to the diner so they could sit for hours leaning across the table toward each other, hands darting together and apart. The shaft of light across the yard as Pauline snuck out to meet Liam after curfew. Pauline leaving her window cracked open all night, letting in the cold air and waiting till the rocks hit her screen announcing his arrival. It was hard to watch, and it was hard not to.
On a normal year in Door County, Elsa said, February could break your heart. You were into the season as deep as you would ever be out of it, and it seemed that all signs of life, any sign that summer had ever existed or would ever exist again, had vanished. The sky lay low over Lake Michigan, and there were no surprises, no new faces downtown. Everything—the days themselves—only moved ahead, one foot in front of the other. And Elsa was right. The days looked the same each morning when Maggie woke up.
The snow had piled up too deep for her to run at all. She spent a lot of time wandering the house and the yard, because there was nowhere else to go and only so much schoolwork to keep her occupied. Elsa gave her a pair of used snowshoes that had come into the antiques store—which she miraculously hadn’t reclosed yet, and which Gerald Turner had returned to, without a word to anyone about what had happened. (He’d just walked back in one morning and resumed his regular routine.) Maggie tromped around the woods in the shoes, but only on the side farthest from Pauline’s. Back home, she would have been happy to read, but this was one thing Pauline had changed in her life: She no longer loved to just sit still. It made her feel, now, like she was missing something.
She bought a book on birds and tried to track and identify all the birds in the woods around her house. And she threw herself into finishing up the interior of the house. She sanded the banisters and helped her dad stain the floors that hadn’t been done yet. Together they repainted the upstairs hallways and replaced the cabinets in the kitchen with cabinets her dad had gotten on sale at a reclaimed home-goods store in Green Bay. Day after day, the final pieces of their house came together.
She hid in the back rooms when Pauline knocked on the door. Only Abe was a regular visitor. Now that Pauline was back, he was confused about who to protect, and he spent most of the days jogging back between the Larsens’ and the Bodens’ to check on both houses and make sure everything was secure.
Maggie tried to put everything else out of her mind. She retreated inside herself like she’d done in the past—when her mom had lost her job, when they’d had the car accident long before that.
But she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t forget Liam’s hands on her skin or his breath in her hair or how it had felt like her whole body was filled with thudding drumbeats when he touched her.
“Wounds make you deeper and bigger,” her dad said, one night in front of the fire, even though she hadn’t told him what had happened. “The bigger the challenges you face, the bigger and deeper your soul gets.” Maggie smiled at him as if the words were encouraging. But she felt the opposite: like her heart had turned small and hard. It surprised her that she couldn’t stop the ache in her chest. At night she gazed at the ceiling and obsessed over whether Liam kissed Pauline exactly like
they’d
kissed. She tried to think of other things, like reciting the alphabet backward, but inevitably she was bleary-eyed each morning when she came down to the kitchen, and her mom looked at her across the table in concern.