It is a long day but finally, finally that night the four of us are alone in the room that I share with Kenyon.
“How how how?” I say to Evangeline.
She and Kenyon settle together on my bunk which is the lower one. They are entwined. I sit on the floor and Caleb takes the desk chair and reverses it to lean on the back with both arms, he does not sit with me. I try not to feel rejected—he hugged me he held my hand, maybe he doesn’t love-love me but he does love me, I killed his father it is complicated I get it. It is complicated for me too, I killed his father my mother is dead. I hug my knees. It would be easy to cry, I didn’t earlier today and I won’t now. Later I will keep some lucky therapist (who is not a sociopathic manipulator) in business for years, maybe it will be Shoshanna.
Evangeline says, “I was so out of it at the hospital, I didn’t know anything, but Kenyon talked to Spencer and then Spencer . . . God, you guys.” She raises her hands with her palms out. “I have never been so wrong about a person. She’s—you know, I even think she did love my father. She told me she has kind of a father complex and likes older men.”
There is a tiny silence and I think of Dr. Colchester.
“She wouldn’t let Evan die,” Kenyon says. “She got more doctors in that ICU room than clowns in a clown car. Then somebody had a brainstorm about deadly nightshade, and they hauled Evan off to a private room, and that was when I really talked to Spencer. About your father.” She glances at Caleb.
“She believed you?” Caleb asks. “She took your word?”
“No. But she said she didn’t want to take any risks with Evan, so even though Evan was starting to recover, she arranged for it to look like she was dead. What a crazy idea, right? I don’t know how she got them all to go along with it—”
“Those big eyes of hers. Plus heavy bribes about the new hospital wing,” Evangeline puts in.
“—but she made it happen,” Kenyon finishes. “The hospital issued a fake death certificate. The people that knew were asked to keep it secret. Then she whisked Evan to Bermuda.”
“Where she didn’t let me out of her sight until my birthday. We shared a room. Caleb, I listened in on her phone calls with your father. It—it was pretty painful for her as she figured out how she’d been manipulated. Also, she liked Antoine’s mother.” Evangeline looks guiltily at me. “Not so much your mother, though, SL.”
I shrug like it doesn’t matter although strangely it does. My mother never was good at making friends, I believe she was lonely her whole life except for me. It is sad along with depressing and sickening, like I said I will be in therapy for decades there is a lot to cover.
One thing I am convinced about however—I will always have friends especially these particular three friends (gratitude amazement awe).
That is when I realize that I am not afraid anymore. I am many things, but not afraid.
Thank you, Georgia.
We fill Evangeline in on everything that happened when we thought she was dead, and she tells us more about Bermuda and Spencer, and after a while we are all yawning even me even though I do not think I could possibly sleep no matter how tired. Caleb gets up, and I blurt, “Don’t go!”
He looks back at me hesitating.
“Or we should both go, you and me,” I say, and cringe inside because it sounds like I mean you-know-what when I was only thinking of Kenyon and Evangeline, who have not been alone yet.
“Can’t everybody stay here?” Evangeline asks. “All four of us, just for tonight?”
“But don’t you two—” I start.
“There’ll be time,” Kenyon says. “Evan’s right. I want all of us to stay here. So we can hear each other breathe.”
It is exactly what I want too. I look at Caleb.
“Okay,” Caleb says.
Then the lights are off except for a tiny night-light that Kenyon and I don’t normally use but Caleb turns on. Evangeline and Kenyon snuggle together in the upper bunk and I lie in my own while Caleb stretches out on the floor beside me with a pillow and blanket.
We are silent and maybe Evangeline and Kenyon sleep, and after I don’t know how long I reach out and touch Caleb. He takes my hand. We lie hand in hand for what seems like years before I slip down to the floor next to him. I reach out.
He puts his arms around me he buries his face in my shoulder his whole body shakes. I hold him and hold him while he cries and he holds me and holds me while I cry too.
There are times when there is no need to say anything, he is warm he is alive so am I, it is enough it is everything.
Chapter 65. Caleb
Weeks later, in early December, the four of you are on the train heading to Coney Island. The plan is to visit Johanna and find Marcial and Troy. You and Saralinda sit behind Kenyon and Evangeline, who have a new MacBook for Johanna.
This time, you are not dressed like a middle-aged woman, and Saralinda is not in disguise as a child.
This should happen in private, but if you wait you’ll lose your nerve as you have so many times. You start to reach for her hand—
She says, “Caleb?”
Maybe kissing her on the subway isn’t the right thing to do after all.
“What is it?” you say.
She looks up at you. “Remember when the carriage house roof caved in? I mean, I know you do. It’s not like any of us could forget.”
You nod. “Yeah.”
“Well, do you also remember that you saved my cane for me?”
You go still. So much happened that day, and in the days after. You actually had forgotten this part. But it’s true—you dug her cane out of the rubble and brought it to the hospital and restored it to Saralinda.
“I never said thank you,” Saralinda says. “I meant to, but then everything happened and I didn’t do it.”
You are in shock, a little, as you think it over. The cane. You gave her back the cane. And if you hadn’t—
“Thank you,” she says. “This comes late, but my cane—Georgia—meant a lot to me.”
You look down into her face and she looks up into yours.
If her cane had remained buried in the rubble.
“She meant a lot to me too,” you say at last. “As it turned out.”
Saralinda nods.
You put your hand on her cheek.
This is the right moment after all.
Only—you have never kissed a girl before. What if you do it wrong?
Instead of kissing her, you blurt, “I’ve decided on my new name. Want to know what it is?”
Chapter 66. Saralinda
I am so finished with hoping for things if I can do something about getting them.
“Tell me later,” I say.
I put my hands up and pull his face down to mine.
I kiss him.
Sometimes in life you want something and you get it but it turns out not to be what you thought. This is not like that.
This is the opposite of that.
Epilogue
Head of School Dr. Dennis Y. Lee is almost in bed when a light flickers on over in the pool house. It lasts only momentarily but he’s not fooled. “Skinny-dippers,” he says to his wife, and grabs his pants. “Again.”
Shoshanna laughs.
As Dennis crosses the quad, the full moon glows softly on new, white, pure snow. The semester ends tomorrow. He can’t wait for the break; it’s been a rough few months, worse even than his first year of teaching. He could laugh at his naïve younger self; he’d thought responsibility lay heavy then.
The surface of the Olympic-sized pool—a gift from alumni—lies undisturbed. Dennis unerringly follows the sound of soft voices into the spa room. He directs the beam of his cell phone flashlight at the hot tub. “You’re busted,” he says casually.
Lit candles flicker in a row on the perimeter of the hot tub. One kid is in the
water, immersed to his shoulders. Three others, all girls, kneel fully dressed outside.
Of course it’s those four.
“Hi,” he says. “What are you up to? Are the candles necessary?”
“Hi, yes, I’m sorry, they are,” Saralinda says.
“We’re doing a renaming ceremony,” Kenyon says.
Dennis raises his brows. “Usually that happens at City Hall.”
“We know,” says Evangeline. “He’ll do that too. Listen, can’t you pretend not to have seen us?”
The boy starts to get out of the tub. “No, we’ll leave. Sorry.”
Dennis sighs. “Stop. Okay, I’m not here. I was never here.” He owes them, after all. And how deeply satisfying it is to see this boy grow into his new self. There’s talk of him staying another year at Rockland before college, which Dennis believes is a great idea—and not for the same reason the boy does. The boy is making great progress with Shoshanna in figuring out exactly how it was that his father performed all the little evils that he blamed on his son, but therapy is not only about the rational side of things. There is also the spirit that must be tended. He adds, “But can you at least be quick about it?”
“Absolutely,” Saralinda says. “We only need like half an hour.”
This is not Dennis’s idea of quick but he lets it go.
“What’s the new name?” he asks the boy who used to be Caleb Colchester Jr. “It took you a long time to decide.”
“Yes, it did,” says the boy. “But now I’m sure. It’s Harker. Harker Antoine Silva.”
“Parker?”
“Harker. It’s the name of the main characters in Dracula. Antoine gave me the book. Have you read it?”
Dennis shakes his head. “I’m afraid not.”
The boy—no, he is a young man—shrugs awkwardly. “Well, this married couple, Jonathan and Mina Harker, they fight back. They have other friends with them too.” He pauses. “One dies.”
Dennis can’t answer. The familiar grief and anger rise in his throat. On my watch, he thinks, as he has so many times. Hunted like rabbits on my watch! But he didn’t fail to fight for these four. He has that.
And they didn’t fail to fight for themselves.
This time he counts the candles.
“Dr. Lee?” Harker Antoine Silva asks. “By any chance would you be willing to stay for the ceremony?”
The four wait.
Dennis clears his throat. “I would be honored,” he says.
He steps forward as Saralinda hands him the fifth candle.
About the Author
NANCY WERLIN has written nine previous young adult novels, including Edgar Award winner The Killer’s Cousin, New York Times best seller Impossible, and National Book Award finalist The Rules of Survival. A graduate of Yale College and part-time technical writer at a software firm, Nancy lives with her husband near Boston, Massachusetts.
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Nancy Werlin, And Then There Were Four
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