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Authors: Jodi Lynn Anderson

Tags: #Fiction

The Vanishing Season (3 page)

BOOK: The Vanishing Season
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Every day I wait for heaven to open its pearly gates or for a great white light to swallow me. But nothing yet. It makes me think—or maybe only hope—that there’s something I am here to do.

I’ve been noticing moths lately. They seem to congregate wherever I am, alighting on my invisible frame. Outside the cellar window, I watch the souls of owls and trees and spiders for some sign to tell me where to go, another soul like me to tell me what to do. The house breathes while the town is dark, but there is no one here to answer me.

3

WHEN MAGGIE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, A DRUNK DRIVER HIT THEIR FAMILY CAR while they were on their way home from ice cream, and Maggie—who’d just unclipped her seat belt to pull on her jacket because the ice cream had made her cold—went flying between the two front seats and hit the dashboard headfirst.

The doctor at the ER said she was made of rubber, because she didn’t have a scratch on her. But for Maggie it was the first time she’d ever realized—or at least
really believed
—that she was breakable.

Sometimes she wondered if the accident hadn’t happened would she have turned out differently, a little more reckless like her friends: Jacie, for instance, seemed to think she could never get hurt and that adulthood would never arrive. But Maggie thought of the future all the time. And for college, life, all the stuff coming her way in that future—she needed money and a job.

Gill Creek—she noticed on her first trip into town that Monday on the job hunt—was a white town: white houses, white boats, white curbs, white outfits. It seemed to glow and reflect off the rippling, sparkling blue of Lake Michigan, dotted only with the changing colors of the leaves that lined the crisscrossed streets. Late-season tourists meandered up and down Main Street, strolling into poky, old-fashioned candy shops; pastel-washed clothing stores; fish boil restaurants (a local specialty her mom had threatened that they’d try); and cafés. Shops had started putting pumpkins by their doorways and hanging stalks of colored corn on their doors. It took about an hour for Maggie to size up the town—to measure its width and length and breadth against where she’d come from—and to know life was going to feel small here.

“Fudgies.” That was what Elsa, the woman who stood before her, called them, but Maggie had to ask her to repeat herself. “Oh, that’s a word for the tourists. For some reason, when people are on vacation, they love to buy fudge. You would
not believe
how much fudge Fudgies will eat any given summer.”

A long day of walking had landed Maggie here. She’d filled out three applications—at two restaurants and one kite store—but it was pretty clear that the part-time jobs were drying up now that summer was ending: The clerks had taken her applications as if she were just another one of the day’s hassles. She’d meandered all the way to the uglier end of Main Street—beyond the reach of the tourists’ natural habitat—and arrived at a giant, yellow Help Wanted sign leaned against the side of a low, square, brick building. Only when she’d walked through the front door had she realized it was a sprawling antiques mall. Inside it smelled like dust and mothballs and stale cigarette smoke and old coffee. It was like something out of Charles Dickens: full of nooks and crannies and narrow walkways and pieces of furniture piled crookedly. A sign by the register announced that Elsa’s Lost World Emporium did not take checks without proper ID. Maggie was just turning around to leave when Elsa had approached her and introduced herself. She was plump, moist-faced, probably in her late forties. She had shoulder-length, curly, dirty-blond hair. She wore bright orange-red lipstick and a sweep of sparkly, brown eye shadow with thick mascara.

“You here about the sign?” she asked. “You don’t look like an antiques hound.”

Maggie nodded uncertainly.

“What kind of grades do you get?” Elsa asked, looking her over distractedly and wiping the moistness from her forehead with one long, gray sleeve.

“As,” Maggie responded. “I’m homeschooled by my dad now,” she added, then speedily threw in, “but I’m self-disciplined.” Was she actually trying to get this job?

“Have you had a job before?” Elsa fingered the golden crucifix around her neck.

Maggie nodded and shifted from foot to foot.

“Well, this one’s pretty simple—just ringing up customers, keeping inventory, keeping up with the vendors and communicating about their stalls—but I need to know you’re reliable. Are you reliable?” Maggie nodded. She wondered if anyone had ever said no.

Elsa looked into her eyes as if searching for something. “Yeah, I think you are.” She reached out and shook her hand. “It’s eight bucks an hour. You can work weekend mornings and some evenings if it’s busy. Be here at nine a.m. Saturday. I keep a key hidden by the sidewalk at the side entrance, under the fifth rock from the door, in case you get here before me. I’m your boss.”

Maggie shook her hand limply, taken aback that Elsa would entrust her with a hidden key so easily. Also she hadn’t even said she wanted the job. And eight bucks was next to nothing . . . which wasn’t surprising, considering it didn’t exactly look like a lucrative place.

On the other hand, she needed
something
.

She walked outside in a daze. Making her way back down Main Street to where she was supposed to meet her dad, she reasoned with herself that she could always quit.

She met her dad in front of the hardware store—they’d split up to take care of their separate errands. He was looking at the big, grinning pumpkin behind the glass and sipping some coffee. “This town is so quaint, I almost can’t take it,” he said. “Someone
made
that papier-mâché pumpkin.”

“Amazing,” Maggie said drily. As they walked back toward the car, Maggie stopped suddenly in front of a boutique with a red-striped awning, struck by a dress in the window. It was a pale, sea-foam green dotted with tiny rust-colored airplanes. Maggie was mesmerized by it. It was the colors she loved: It was rare for them to be just right, but in this case, they were perfect.

“I want that so much, it hurts,” she said to her dad.

Her dad leaned close, and she realized he was trying to read the price tag. She leaned in beside him. “Whoa,” she said.

“The blue one’s cheaper,” he offered hopefully. Suddenly she felt guilty for mentioning it. Just to be polite, she looked closer at the blue one too. It
was
cheaper, but still too expensive for them, even despite its ugliness.

“Actually they’re not that great,” she said, covering. “I didn’t realize it was airplanes; I thought it was birds. Never mind.”

She started to walk away and her dad followed, but, glancing back, she could see the pain on his face. She wanted to kick herself.

The first time her mom had gotten laid off, Maggie hadn’t realized how bad things were until she’d opened her birthday present and found a handmade rug that her mom had hooked together herself. “I bought it at Anthropologie,” her mom had said, and she’d pretended to believe her.

She had to do better, she knew. She had to take care of her parents just like they’d always taken care of her.

Back home, though she was tired from walking, she got right into her running shoes. Just as she’d expected, the run soothed her. She turned at the silo again and thought that at least this—this running route—was perfect; she couldn’t ask for a better one: beautiful, challenging enough but not too hilly, and the fresh air felt great in her lungs.

Turning back, she listened to her heartbeat and the crickets and the sound of her sneakers on the pavement and the distant sound of the hammering in the woods, getting closer and closer as she got back toward Pauline’s. She passed the long driveway with the mailbox marked No Trespassing and, turning toward the property, could hear the hammering far back and to her left.

Thinking of what Pauline had said, she thought maybe she should go say hi. She hesitated, then veered off the path and into the pine trees. She found the source of the noise in the middle of a stand of four tall pines. It was like the setting from an old German fairy tale: a glade with a small, pine-needle-blanketed clearing; a slant of light; and in the middle of it all, an exquisite, miniature wooden house—skinny and pointed at the top, big enough to fit maybe four people inside if they stood shoulder to shoulder. The roof was missing a piece, and one wall was still open to the elements, and on that side a figure knelt, hammering.

He looked up just as Maggie came even with the last pine tree. He stood.

“You must be Maggie,” he said. He didn’t smile, but his face wasn’t unfriendly.

“Hey.” She wiped a hand on her sweatpants, catching her breath, and waved tiredly. “You’re Pauline’s Liam.”

He squinted slightly, amused. “Yeah, that’s me.” Liam wasn’t what she’d pictured. She’d been imagining someone who complemented Pauline—a handsome, strapping, well-dressed type—but Liam had a subtle, soft look about him: medium-framed, tall, he was dressed in a frayed gray T-shirt that had seen better days and worn jeans. He had shortish brown hair that fell a little over his blue eyes and pale skin that looked like it would blush easily—Maggie thought of it as British-boarding-school-boy skin. He squinted, his brows furrowed. “Welcome to our lonely little spit of land.” In his hand he grasped an intricately carved piece of wood.

“Thanks. What’s that?” she asked.

“Oh.” Liam looked down at his hand and frowned thoughtfully. “It’s nothing. It’s the roof.” He held it up. “What do you think?”

It was a decorative edge for the roof—covered in intricate carved curlicues. It looked Scandinavian, like the carved bow of an old Viking ship.

“You made that?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Liam nodded.

“What is it?” she asked, gesturing to take in the whole scene. “A home for elves?”

Liam didn’t seem to notice the joke. He laid down the wood and rubbed the tip of his thumbnail along his bottom lip thoughtfully. “It’s a Finnish sauna. My dad taught me how to do it. It’s for Pauline, because she’s cold all winter.”

Maggie figured a girl as tiny and birdlike as Pauline probably had the circulation of her nana.

“Do you mind if I look?” Maggie asked. Liam considered, then motioned for her to step up to the little building and look inside. There were two benches—one on either side—and a slatted crate in the back that looked like the place for the coals. Not that Maggie knew much about saunas, but she’d been in one at her mom’s gym back home once.

“It’s not . . . it’s not perfect. I’ve never done one.”

“How long did it take you?” Maggie asked.

Liam put his hands in his pockets. “All summer, pretty much.”

What guy spent his whole summer alone in the woods building a sauna? Clearly one of few words. The silence stretched on between them. Maggie was used to chatty guys. The guys in her circle of friends back in Chicago had been loud, always trying to impress each other.

A moth flew across her sight. Liam’s eyes followed it, then turned back to her in a friendly, open gaze.

“I’ve been reading about moths,” she said, to fill the silence.

“What have you read?”

Maggie shrugged.

They navigate by the light of the moon. They fling themselves into flames and electric lights because they think they’re headed toward the moon’s light.”

“I guess they die in ecstasy then,” Liam said. His eyes followed the moth, tracking it into the trees.

“What do you mean?” Maggie asked, confused.

“Well, they probably think they’ve finally reached the moon.” Liam’s mouth spread into a slow smile that put her more at ease.

“Yeah, I guess it’s probably the pinnacle of their moth lives,” she conceded.

“All seven days or so.”

They lapsed into silence for a few more seconds, but it wasn’t a bad silence. He was strange, definitely. But she didn’t necessarily mind strange.

“How long have you and Pauline been together?”

“Since we were five. We met”—Liam pointed the stick of wood in his hands toward Water Street—“there, in the middle of the street. We both hid behind our dads. I was eating baby carrots.”

“How do you remember something that far back?” Maggie asked, laughing.

Liam rubbed the back of his neck, reddening slightly. “It’s Pauline. I have a weirdly long memory when it comes to her. Wanna sit?”

They sank onto a log, and Liam picked up his piece of wood again and began sanding it. Maggie looked around at the trees and listened to the birds. It was one of the quietest conversations of her life, but she felt, somehow, completely comfortable, sitting there with this guy she’d just met, not saying anything.

Finally Liam looked over at her. “I’m sorry, I’m not much of a talker. Pauline says I should learn to talk about stuff that doesn’t matter, because people love that.”

“People do love that,” Maggie said, amused.

She studied his profile while he worked on the sanding, reflecting that he wasn’t really her type, physically. She could see how he might be appealing to Pauline though, or to other girls in general. He was gently handsome, his eyes the softest thing about him, but the effort he’d put into the sauna hinted at something more rugged than first met the eye. His hands looked rough and scraped up from building. He was clearly used to physical work. “I hear Pauline roped you into canoeing already,” he said, to the wood he was sanding vigorously.

“I didn’t . . .” Maggie trailed off; she didn’t know what to say. More than not knowing how to swim, she hated not seeing what was underneath her in the water.

Liam kept his eyes on his work. “You can try to resist her, but it won’t work; Pauline gets what she wants. Take it from one who knows.”

“I’m already beginning to get that feeling.” Maggie lifted her eyebrows in the direction of the sauna, and then they both looked in the direction of Pauline’s house—just a distant blob of white peeking through the trees.

“She’s decided you’re her new, good friend.” He flashed her a quick smile as his eyes caught hers, one that disappeared just as quickly.

They sat in silence for a while longer. Another moth landed on a stump a couple of feet away.

BOOK: The Vanishing Season
11.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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