Undercurrent (5 page)

“T
EXT MESSAGES OR
beeswax.”

I looked up from my AP calculus homework. Paige sat on the bed, a book open in front of her.

“Those are Simon’s choices,” she said.

My heart skipped. “For what?”

“For regaining control when you distract him to the point that he loses sleep, friends, and life as he knew it. According to these books, breaking up by text or plugging his ears with beeswax are the only ways he can escape his siren.”

I stared at her. She smiled, but when I didn’t smile back, her face fell.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t funny. It’s just, of course you’re not, you could never be a—”

“It’s okay. And
I’m
sorry. I guess I’m still getting used to that word.”

“You and me both. That’s why I want to learn more. If I understood who they were, why they do what they do, what they did… maybe it all wouldn’t seem so strange.”

“Paige, if you really want to learn more, why don’t you ask Betty?”

“After she tried so hard for so long to keep the truth from Raina and Zara? Who not only defied her wishes but used what they learned against her?” She shook her head as she turned a page. “Talking about it will only hurt her, and I can’t do that. She’s been through enough already.”

“It’s not an ideal situation,” I admitted, “but she’s still your grandmother. She’d still do anything for you.”

Of this I was certain. After all, Betty had let Paige spend the school year here, depriving Betty of her only surviving family member. She loved Paige so much that she wanted her to be able to start over in a new place, one without constant painful reminders.

“Want to hear something crazy?” Paige asked a moment later. She’d closed the book and now looked at me, her blue eyes wide, like she was about to share a secret she couldn’t believe was hers.

“Sure.” I thought of the last secret she’d told me several months earlier, when her cheeks were flushed and her belly round. That one had almost killed her.

“I saw them.”

A silver streak flashed before my eyes. I blinked it away.

“Raina and Zara, in the park. My English class met there today. We were reading
The Winter’s Tale
, and the story was so dull, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. When I opened them again… I saw them. On a bench. Looking right at me.”

Simon’s reassurances flew through my head.
It was frozen… whatever was alive is dead now
….

“Crazy,” Paige said when I didn’t say anything. “I know.”

“It’s not crazy.”

“But it is impossible.” She climbed off the bed and sat on the floor across from me. “You know how you could hear Justine? After she was gone?”

I nodded.

“Maybe it was something like that? Maybe I made them up? Not because I miss them, but because I’m so traumatized—or whatever—by what happened?”

I hadn’t just imagined Justine’s voice then, but it was good that Paige still believed that. For now, anyway.

“It’s okay to miss them,” I said. “Raina was your mother and Zara was your sister for a long time before they… changed. It’s okay to miss the people you thought they were.”

Her blue eyes hardened. “They killed dozens of people and would have killed countless more if we hadn’t stopped them. They killed Jonathan. They locked Grandma Betty in her bedroom for two years and then left her to die.” She shook her head. “I don’t miss them. I won’t miss them. Not ever.”

This was the harshest I’d ever heard Paige speak about anyone. I was tempted to change the subject for both our sakes, but there was one thing I had to know before I did.

“What did they do when you saw them?” I barely heard the question over my pounding heart.

She shrugged, her face softening slightly. “I blinked, and they were gone. Because they were never really there.”

Of course they hadn’t really been there. Despite what they were, they still had hearts. They still needed oxygen. Like Simon said, there was simply no way a siren could survive two months locked in ice.

“Anyway, it was nice of Riley to check these books out for me, even if they were completely useless.” She reached up and took
The Odyssey
from the bed. “He seems like a good guy.”

“Simon wouldn’t be friends with him if he wasn’t.” I reached forward with my pencil and tapped the toe of her slipper. “And he thought you were pretty okay, too.”

That triggered the small smile I was hoping for. “Yes, well. He’s not…”

Her voice faded, but she didn’t have to finish the sentence for me to know what she’d started to say. Riley, as nice as he was, wasn’t Jonathan.

Thinking she might want a few minutes alone, I closed my notebook and stood up. “Mom’s attempting brownies tonight. Interested?”

“Extremely,” she said, covering her stomach with both hands.

In the hallway with the bedroom door closed behind me, I leaned against the wall and put my own hands to my stomach. I braced for movement inside, for something zipping around like a fish in a tank. That was what Paige’s baby had felt like the one time I’d pressed my palm to her belly. It had been sick, and restless and physically draining, because her body hadn’t been ready to care for a baby.

But thanks to the accidental transformation over the summer, when my cellular water was replaced with ocean water,
my
body was. I thought of the last time Simon and I had been together. We’d been careful. We were always careful. But I still told myself that each time was going to be the last time, no matter what else happened between us. I always believed it, too… until he touched me again.

My stomach remained still now. Temporarily relieved, I continued down the hall.

“You’re just in time,” Mom said when I entered the kitchen. She stood at the counter, pouring batter into a pan. “The first batch is still in the oven. But here.” She took the electric mixer from the counter, popped out the dripping whisks, and handed me one. “A sneak peek.”

I tasted the batter, then turned to rinse off the whisk. “Delicious. Only a few weeks in and you’re already Julia Child.”

She laughed. “You have to say that because you’re my daughter.”

I looked up. In the reflection in the window above the sink, I watched her pat her hands on the frilly green apron she wore. “I tried to make grilled cheese after school today,” I said. “I burned the sandwich so badly, the cheddar evaporated between the bread.”

“Why didn’t you ask me? I would’ve been happy to make you another one.”

“That was actually an improvement over the last time I tried. I can’t cook to save my life.” The whisk was clean, but I let the water keep running. “I wonder who I get that from. You and Dad are both so good in the kitchen.”

She’d just removed the brownie pan and now stopped, her face in front of the open oven. She was still for only a second—if I hadn’t been watching for a reaction, I wouldn’t have noticed it—but my words definitely caught her off guard.

“Speaking of your father,” she said, her voice light, as she closed the oven and placed the pan on the counter. “He’s working outside. Will you please go see if he’d like his brownie à la mode?”

I turned off the water and looked out the window, past Mom’s reflection. My chest tightened when I saw Dad sitting on the small back stoop, typing on his laptop. “Sure. I’ll bring him a sweater, too.”

It was eight o’clock at night and still seventy degrees out, but Mom didn’t seem to think the sweater idea strange. That, or she hadn’t heard me over her own thoughts. Either way, it gave me an excuse to duck out of the kitchen instead of heading directly for the back door.

Dad’s office was a tiny room at the other end of the first floor. I hadn’t been inside in months, and inching the door open now, it didn’t look like much had changed. Dozens of books sat in tall, crooked stacks around the room. Papers spilled out of filing cabinets. Old coffee cups were abandoned on bookshelves, on the fat arm of Dad’s favorite leather chair, and on the floor. The only place that wasn’t completely cluttered was his desk, which was tucked under an eave that made standing upright impossible.

I closed the door and weaved through the maze of book towers. Guilt burned like a hot coal in the bottom of my stomach, but I kept going, telling myself I wouldn’t be there unless I had no other choice. Piles of student essays surrounded the desk like a protective moat, but I scaled them quickly and then sank into the chair.

The desk was immaculate; it held only Dad’s computer and two picture frames. My eyes lingered on the photos. One was of Mom sticking her tongue out at the camera in a moment of playful protest, and the other was of Justine and me when we were little girls, sitting on the brownstone’s front steps, blowing soapy bubbles through plastic wands.

I opened the desk’s top drawer and sifted through pens, paper clips, and breath mints before moving on to the next drawer, and then the next. My heart sank when each opened easily. Didn’t people guarding huge secrets usually hide clues in locked desk drawers?

I jumped up and climbed back over the piles of essays. I yanked open filing cabinets, but they offered the same thing the desk drawers did.

Nothing.

I turned slowly in the middle of the room, looking for…

what? A hidden door? A secret passage? A treasure trove of information disguised as a flowerpot? I was about to lift the area rug to rule out a floorboard trapdoor when my eyes landed on the desk again. Or more specifically, on the computer.

Dad had two computers—the desktop and a laptop—and he was always on one or the other. Their combined memory could probably offer more details about his life than his real memory.

As I headed for the desktop, I felt like I had on the day of Justine’s funeral, when I first realized the pictures on her bulletin board hid something underneath and debated whether to find out what that something was. I’d felt worse with each pushpin I removed, like I was about to read her diary.

But this was different. I already knew what Dad’s secret was. And it didn’t just affect him; it affected our entire family.

I returned to the desk and took the mouse in one hand. The screen brightened as the sleeping computer awoke.

A blue password box popped up. My heart dropped, then lifted. I had no idea what Dad’s password was, but the fact that he had one might mean there was something on the computer worth protecting.

I typed the first thing that leaped into my head: Jacqueline. I held my breath as the tiny hourglass turned upside down and right side up. A few seconds later, the box reappeared.

Invalid password.

It wasn’t Mom’s name. I tried mine next, then Justine’s. I expected the e-mail program to tell me I’d reached its limit of password attempts, but it didn’t. So I tried Newton College, where Dad taught. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, his two favorite writers. Rad Dad and Big Poppa, two of the countless nick-names Justine and I had given him.

Invalid, invalid, invalid.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I stared at the blinking cursor. There was one other name I could try. I didn’t want to—I could barely think it, let alone type it—but passwords, despite all warnings, were often people or places important to the user. And besides our immediate family, there was one other person Dad might find just important enough. One person whose name no one but him would know.

Or so he thought.

I typed slowly, watching each letter appear on the screen. When I was done, I looked at the name and recalled the very first time I’d seen it, in Betty’s bedroom in Winter Harbor. It should’ve been just another name, no different from all the others in Raina’s scrapbook of sirens and their conquests. But it
had
been different. Because right above it was a faded picture of a beautiful woman in the arms of a young man with frizzy hair and warm eyes who looked so happy he could have died right then with no regrets. And according to the text next to the picture, the happy couple had had a child together.

The woman was Charlotte Bleu.

The man was Big Poppa.

The child was me.

A door slammed somewhere inside the house. I jumped at the sudden noise, and my thumb, which had been poised above the Return key, shot down.

The hourglass turned. Each rotation seemed to take minutes. I stared at the screen, waited for the password box to clear and ask me to try again.

Instead, the box disappeared. In its place was Dad’s desktop, covered in dozens of cryptically labeled documents. There were so many they overlapped, reminding me of lines of playing cards in Solitaire.

My hand seemed to move on its own, and the mouse guided the cursor to a document in the middle of the screen. It was labeled “W0198.”

Beneath me, the chair vibrated. I assumed my nerves were making me shake, but then I realized the screen vibrated, too. So did the picture frames. And a coffee cup on a bookshelf across the room. Not continuously, but every other second.

And then I heard them. Footsteps. Slow, heavy, like whoever was walking was big, tired.

Dad. He was inside the house… and coming closer.

I leaped out of the chair, knocking my head against the low, slanted ceiling. I bit my lip to keep from crying out and snatched the red cardigan from the back of the chair as I climbed over the essays on the rug. The tip of my sneaker hit the top of a stack, sending a flurry of pages drifting to the floor. As I fell to my knees and gathered them, the footsteps grew louder.

I threw the essays on top of a pile, scrambled to my feet, and grabbed a coffee cup from behind a stack of books.

The footsteps slowed, then stopped. The light beneath the door darkened. As it did, the light in the office seemed to grow brighter—especially the light coming from behind me.

The computer. It was supposed to be asleep, its screen dark.

The old brass knob creaked. The door started to open.

I lunged across the room, grabbed a handful of wires and cords, and pulled. The computer whined before falling silent.

“Vanessa?”

“Hey, Dad.”

He stood in the doorway, his laptop under one arm, a brownie sundae in one hand.