What We Lost in the Dark

  I said, “Are you really a doctor?”

  “Of course I am. Lots of FBI agents are doctors or lawyers.”

  “So you really don’t have to save for tuition for Chris and Elliott.”

  “Sure I do, sweetie … I’m just a federal employee, Allie. I’m not on The X-Files!”

  I rubbed my eyes, feeling very tired all of a sudden. “What happened?”

  “Tabor was on his way out of here. Rob literally, physically ran into him at the airport. Rob left his parents as they were headed for the baggage claim. They just got up here now. They had to rent a car. Rob chased Tabor back up to his place. Tabor zigzagged all over the place, which is how I found out about it, because a local sheriff’s deputy saw him, but he IDed the truck as Tabor’s and didn’t bother to stop him.”

  “So by the time Rob followed him up here …”

  “He ditched the truck on Cannon Road.”

  “Rob followed him … his tracks,” I said.

  Bonnie nodded. My mom hugged me tighter. “Rob couldn’t get the Jeep up here. He followed Tabor on foot. But Tabor didn’t know Rob was following him.”

  That was why we hadn’t heard a car engine start. Tabor’s own big truck was miles down the hill. How long had it taken Tabor to get up there, only to find me in his front yard? An hour? More? Tabor was in great shape, but so was Rob. They would both have been tired, but it was nothing except a long walk on wet ground. Tabor, Bonnie went on, tended to his business in his house. Rob waited, hidden, outside in the yard. Tabor stayed inside for two hours. When he finally came out, Rob tackled him, and Tabor couldn’t get away because I had done some damage with my filet knife. Meanwhile, Bonnie had gone up there alone, but when she saw Tabor’s car, and the extra set of tire tracks, she called for help. Sheriff’s deputies came first. But by the time she was on scene, there was another agent—Molly Eldredge, from the Minnesota Bureau of Investigation. Her old teacher, Barry Yashida, had been in touch with some odd and compelling information when she, coincidentally, got word of Bonnie’s plan to apprehend Garrett Tabor.

  “I never knew that Rob would go out into the sunlight …” Bonnie said.

  I stiffened. “Rob was in the sunlight? Mom?”

  “He’s in the ER right now, Allie. You couldn’t see him anyway. Even his parents can’t see him. He was burned, but nobody knows how badly. Just wait now—”

  “I have to go where Rob is!” I shook free of her embrace.

  “Allie. I said you have to wait. This is a medical reality. Not a suggestion I’m making.”

  On my feet, pacing, I turned back to Bonnie. The nurses tried to get one of my hands to measure my heartbeat, but I brushed them off.

  “There was no way to tell Rob?” I asked her. “You didn’t warn him?”

  “You can’t get a phone call in there, Allie. I tried to call Rob a dozen times,” she said. “I would never have wanted him to be hurt in any way. You know that.” I did know that. “I’d never had any luck with it coming together with Garrett Tabor. It was what his father said in front of you and Rob that gave us a reason to even talk to him. It was just luck, Allie. Sometimes luck is all we get.”

  “But you knew that Juliet was …”

  “No, that is not true!” For the first time since I’d known her, Bonnie looked truly angry. I know she felt horrible. “You can’t think I’d let an innocent girl suffer to catch any criminal, no matter how vile that criminal was.”

  “She does know that,” Jackie said.

  “We just didn’t have all the pieces, Allie. He was very clever.”

  “You killed him. You didn’t ask questions.”

  “Allie, I called for him to stop. I fired a warning shot. I told him again to stop, and I identified myself. Garrett Tabor returned fire. He had a shotgun, and I have a Glock twenty-two-caliber pistol. I shot him.”

  My mother glanced down at her phone. “Allie, Rob is on the medical floor now. Because of infection, they would not ordinarily let you see him. But because of … other things, if you put on clean surgical garments and wash up, you can see him.”

  “Where are they? The surgical clothes? Will you teach me how to scrub in?”

  She did.

  26

  THE LOVE YOU TAKE

  It took half an hour for me to be clean, my nails clipped and scraped, my hair washed and under a surgical cap. When I got down to the floor where Rob was, the Dorns were waiting in the hall. I looked up to smile as I passed them.

  Mrs. Dorn’s eyes were slits in flesh rubbed as raw as a child’s from crying.

  “It’s not your fault, it’s her fault,” Mrs. Dorn said, sharply. “She should never have gotten involved with that man.”

  I thought of Juliet’s face, the first time I saw her alive since I’d assumed she was dead: the blue eyes in her filthy face, terrified and yet desperate for the sight of me, the mess around the pipe, the bowls that were never washed. I thought back to the night that Rob and I were locked out of his car at daybreak, and that was no accident; it was Tabor all over. I saw again Juliet, in a wheelchair, her leg stitched up, coming … now I recalled … into this very room. We huddled together in the bed, eating a bag of cheesy popcorn, Juliet’s favorite, as she confided for the first time the full truth of her old history and her new terror of Garrett Tabor. It was then that she vowed to me. Never again, Allie Bear. Never, ever again. And yet, at least so I assumed, she had gone back to him. That was the reason for all her agitation on the night at Lost Warrior Bridge—the reason for her frantic and fervent goodbye. Even then, at the last moment, she must have thought she had some power over him. She must have thought that she could seduce him away from hurting me. She was afraid of him, but she was still willing to do that.

  Juliet had made mistakes. But she was just as brave as Rob.

  Until last night, a part of me thought Tabor had guaranteed Juliet a passage to freedom and she had literally jumped for it. Now I knew, he had guaranteed her a passage to hell.

  I said, “No, Mrs. Dorn. She was just a kid. She was at his mercy.”

  “From what Rob said, she was a kid who learned pretty quickly.”

  “Not that he was capable of murder. Juliet was a good girl.”

  “She was a good girl? She was a good girl?” Mrs. Dorn eyes were all pupils, dark and dreary. “Do you have no idea at all what went on here? Are you clueless? She was with a man twice her age!”

  “I am not clueless. I know what Juliet did. But she wasn’t wrong. She was a child who was forced.”

  “She was always showing off,” Mrs. Dorn said.

  “The reason she ended up out there was that Tabor said if she didn’t come with him, he would hurt her, me, or my little sister. Rob was so sick of hearing about Garrett Tabor that we broke up over it …”

  “But he couldn’t stay away from you. Or forget her.”

  My throat tightened. “Rob loves me, and we’ve been best friends all our lives. The three of us. Would you blame any other rape victim? One who didn’t know Rob?”

  “Yes, I would,” Mrs. Dorn spit the words out. “If it wasn’t for her, Rob wouldn’t have gone out there.”

  “Stop now,” Mr. Dorn said. “My wife, Rob’s mom … she’s out of her mind.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “See if you’re proud of Juliet after you see my son,” Mrs. Dorn hissed.

  “I’ll always be proud of Juliet. I’ll always be proud of Rob. I love Rob.”

  Still, at the door, I recoiled. If Rob’s backpack hadn’t been sitting in the corner, in a big chair, I would not have known him.

  He looked like a monster.

  Huge blisters dripped from the distorted shape of his beautiful square chin and his forehead, and his eyelids were so swollen they bulged over the patches of gauze on his eyes. His head was bandaged above the hairline. His strong torso was unmarked, because he had worn a layer of silk under a layer of flannel, so that he wouldn’t need more than a warm-up coat … but his hands were grotesque, bulging and
bluish grey. Lines sprouted from his neck and the inside of his elbows.

  I said, “Oh, honey. Oh, Rob! What did you do? What the hell did you do?”

  He said, “Come close, Allie.”

  I did.

  “I thought I could stop him,” he said.

  “Bonnie told me. You shouldn’t have done it.” For a long time, I simply sat there, while Rob woke and slept. The medicine they’d put in the bags seemed to soothe his restless movements.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dorn, wearing protective clothing over their regular things, came into the room. I could hear her behind me, crying harder at the sight of Rob. He woke to the sound.

  “It didn’t make any difference, Mom. It didn’t matter.” His voice was a dry croak.

  “How can you say that? You’re hurt! You’re badly hurt!”

  “Allie knew he was hiding something,” Rob said. “She always knew. I wanted to ignore it. If I hadn’t listened to her, Juliet would still be out there.” He turned to me, or at least in my direction. His eyes! They might be permanently damaged, I thought. But even that would be an acceptable trade for keeping him. Was there a chance that I wouldn’t? “Allie, are you there?”

  “I’m right here.” I didn’t want to touch him, for fear I would hurt him more.

  His voice slipping with the effects of the medicine, Rob slipped one of his big, swollen hands around my small one, like a helmet. He asked, “Did Bonnie get him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I suspected that Bonnie was FBI,” Rob said. “I thought, why is she so into this? I saw her take him down. And I have to say, for something that awful, it was pretty damned magnificent. Will he live? Will he have to tell about everything he did?”

  “No,” I said. “She said he had a gun. I guess she had to shoot to kill.”

  “Wow,” Rob said. He was still a boy, not yet eighteen.

  “Rest now,” said Rob’s mom.

  “She needs to know everything.”

  “She can come back,” said Mrs. Dorn. “We need to be with you now.” She turned to me, her face nothing like the Mrs. Dorn I knew, always perfectly made-up and composed. Tall and slender and fashionable, Mrs. Dorn had always looked like one of those moms who would stay young forever. Now, she was stooped, and her hair hung in strings. She didn’t look slender, but, like Rob, skinny. I couldn’t help but imagine how my own mother would be if I was the one here. Her only baby lay gravely wounded. How little it must have meant that his girlfriend needed him, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I’m so sorry.”

  She softened then, and put one arm around my shoulders, giving me a little hug. Although Mr. Dorn was the bluff and friendly guy, everybody’s buddy, Mrs. Dorn had always treated me with respect. Since we were little, we had trooped in and out of Rob’s house, literally like vacuums sucking up homemade food, scattering the plates, making noise, dumping sports equipment, banging around to loud music. So it was gentle, finally, when she spoke up. “Allie, you need to understand something.” She put herself between Rob and me.

  “I can tell her myself,” Rob said.

  “Then do, Rob,” she said, her face a new sheet of tears.

  “Leave us alone, then, okay, Mom?”

  With Mr. Dorn, she left the room. I felt the page of something turning, and I didn’t want it to.

  “Allie,” Rob said. “I’m dying.”

  27

  IN REAL LIFE

  In movies, I would have dropped to my knees. I would have screamed and thrashed until someone gave me a sedative. Mercifully, a drape of forgetfulness would have fallen across that moment, until I could better cope with the certain agony that I was losing my first true love, the only boy I could ever love, and that there would be no happy ending. The thought of Juliet, alive and with me, was no consolation. I had outlived Juliet, and I knew I could outlive Rob, and months from now, laugh again. But I would never be the same. I was too young for outliving.

  “Why now?” I asked.

  But I already knew. Rob did have it worse than I did, and he’d had narrow escapes before in his not-quite-eighteen years.

  When you are this sick, denial is not only your friend, it’s your only ally. Every night, you wake up prepared to deny that your sight might be a little dimmer, or your hearing a little less acute, that you skin isn’t mottled in a funny way or the ends of your fingertips aren’t really a tiny bit numb. With all your might, you try to be like everyone else, when you really are like no one else. The only person you’re like is the person who has XP, too, the person closest to you—who is just like you, and whom you will lose if you don’t die first. Juliet had been that person for me, and then Rob and Juliet had been that person for me, and then Rob and I fell in love, and we were like one person—except that sometimes, I stopped in my tracks to admire the boy who loved me. It was almost worth having XP to have someone know you so completely.

  No one ever could again. Some XP people were with Daytimers. But I didn’t see how they could be.

  Rob said, “Do you believe in Heaven?”

  I wanted to say that I did. But Rob did know me completely. Just as I had known, honestly, even before Juliet disappeared, that he was keeping something from me (your only ally is denial) he would have heard the lie. In my voice I said, “No, honey, I think this is all.”

  “Well, then this has been my Heaven.”

  He wasn’t a boy who talked like that. I didn’t feel brave. The beauty in his words just made it all worse.

  “Mine, too,” I said.

  “If I could live a hundred years more, there would only be remembering the first time I touched you, remember? Kissing you in the parking garage? When I knew I loved you.”

  “Rob, why is this happening now?”

  “The melanoma came back …”

  “There are things they can do …”

  “And I’ve done them all, Allie.”

  He was telling the truth.

  In real life, I knew that my beautiful, hunky big man weighed twenty pounds less than he had last summer. I had seen that, but I had not wanted to see that. In real life, I saw that he was always tired and paler than the way people like us are pale. I had not wanted to see that, and pretended it was nothing but anxiety. The truth was I had grown stronger, physically and in my deep core.

  Rob, instead, had withered. Always game, always ready for the next adventure, the cautious one but never a follower, he had simply run out of steam.

  “You kept this to yourself. You kept this from me and I love you. How, Rob?”

  “How could I tell you this?” Rob said. “Allie, I should have told you. I tried to break up with you instead. But when I was away, I realized I was just thinking about me. I needed you to stop thinking about Juliet and Tabor and be there with me, while I had the time. But that’s not you, Allie. You couldn’t give up on her. You didn’t give up on either one of us.”

  Trying to speak around the sobs that shook me, I said, “How long have you known?”

  “Just before Thanksgiving. I knew I didn’t feel right. But I didn’t know it was like this.”

  How had I withheld this time from him? How had I let a hundred other preoccupations crowd my mind—from Garrett Tabor’s threat to the identity of the dead girl called Sky? Little girl detective jazzy jump-up, I’d lost track of the dearest thing on earth. My best friend. My first love. The boy I would marry someday.

  Should I ask him to marry me now?

  “The ring you gave me,” I said. “Would you marry me? I would love to marry you now.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Why, Rob?”

  “I’d just leave you,” he said. I could tell he’d thought about this. I could tell that he wouldn’t be moved. “Anyway, I already feel like I’m married to you.”

  “How can you not be afraid?” I whispered.

  “I’m very afraid,” Rob said, reaching up to remove the patches over his sightless eyes.

  “Should you do that?”


  “It doesn’t matter. I can see a little light,” he said, scanning the ceiling. “I’m not a hero, Allie.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No. Not even a little bit.”

  They had Rob floating on the big opiate air mattress of drugs, the very best. When they don’t bring you dental floss, he told me, you know that at least they’re not worried about you becoming an addict. I hoped he couldn’t see shapes, or movement, because I flinched when he said that. It was so final, so unbelievable, so not what should happen when you’re eighteen. And it wasn’t lost on me that I’d believed that Rob and I would live our life together remembering Juliet, not Juliet and I remembering Rob—in different ways.

  “Does it help for me to be here?”

  “Honey, I don’t know. I don’t know how much I want you to see. Things … happen when you die. I’m not like this seventeen-year-old guy. I’m like five, and I have to go to kindergarten alone. I want my Obi-Wan snack sack. I want my mom.” I wanted to hold on to him and cry until I was drained, picturing the little Rob, as I had known him, with that very Obi-Wan lunch sack. “Sometimes I want my parents to be like in those documentaries they made us watch in clinic where the parents are holding their kid and saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t have to hang on for us. Just hang on to us.’ But my mom has nobody. She’s an only child. She has no friends. My mom is so scared I can’t let go,” Rob said. “Allie, you know my dad. This is killing him. He doesn’t even have a way to let me go.”

  “And I am supposed to let you go? I am supposed to know how to do that?” I climbed up beside him, careful not to dislodge all the dressings on his hands and arms. “Make room for me,” I said. “Tell me why you did this.”

  “I knew he had some kind of lair,” Rob said, softly, his words slightly slurred by the drip of painkillers. “And he didn’t think I would follow him. And I didn’t think Bonnie Sommers-Olsen would follow me. I didn’t see anyone. I never even looked back.” Rob drew a long, rattling breath.

  “Did that hurt?”