“No, I’m fine.”
“Maybe you should be quiet now,” I said.
I tried to remember him as he had been. Of course, I had hundreds of pictures and videos of all those years—and would I ever be able to look at them.
Rob was asleep.
Quietly, I beckoned Mrs. Dorn to the door. She came. “What are the doctors saying? How many years? How many months?”
“Weeks,” she said. “I don’t believe it. He’s in such amazing physical shape. He worked out four hours a day, Allie. You know. You all did that once. That’s what they say though. His poor organs are shutting down. You can’t see how jaundiced he is. He’s struggling to breathe, but he won’t let them put a breathing tube in.”
“Why?”
“He wants to talk to you. And … he doesn’t want to be held on to …”
What did I want to say to this poor woman, this woman I’d known my whole life. “I’m not a mother. I don’t know how you feel. But I love Rob as much as I could ever love anyone. I wanted to spend forever proving that to him. I wish you would not blame me. Because none of this is my fault.” I also wished my mother would drop down from the ventilation system, brandishing her sharp tongue, my sword and my shield.
“I don’t blame you, Allie,” she said. “Don’t blame me. This is a day I tried hard not to see coming.”
28
FOREVER AND EVER AND NOW
The days stretched out.
I was probably the only scholarship student in history (or so I believed, then) to miss my first week of school. I turned eighteen in a lounge chair at Divine Savior Hospital, a chair that would have passed anywhere else for a medieval torture device. The time I “got” with Rob was the time his parents went home for showers, an hour of sleep, a desultory meal. I clutched tight to every moment of it.
On the third day, dressed in scrubs—looking eerily, remarkably, like herself—Juliet appeared in the doorway.
“I have to see him,” she said.
Instantly, Rob, who’d been fast asleep, jerked awake. “Juliet?”
“Buddy,” she said. “My amigo. How did you get yourself in this fix?”
“Tanning,” he said, barely a whisper, and Juliet cried, silently, crystalline, long tears that traced the rivulets next to her nose and dripped off her chin.
“Come here,” Rob said. The room was darkened, and Juliet, who’d been in isolation even from me, until doctors could determine that whatever ailed her was only the consequence of hard treatment and neglect—not STDs, no viral infections. Outside a plastic sealed curtain, her parents spoke with her through a microphone, for hours on end.
Later, Juliet, the duchess of impatience, said she wouldn’t have minded if her parents read aloud from the phone book or recited nursery rhymes or recipes. Their voices were like a narcotic, her long dark dreams made serene and secure. That night, her face was clean, and her hair was shorn, its natural dark blonde color. She wore no makeup. So thin, in her hospital tunic and paper pants, she reminded me of old paintings of Joan of Arc.
“I’m here,” Juliet said. “I’m right here, Rob.”
“Juliet, I didn’t believe …”
“Don’t talk. You are my hero. You are all our hero. I would be dead without you. You are Sir Robert of Dorn, my most gentle knight. I hear you’re sick.”
His damaged lips trembled. “You know how much.”
“But you will always be with us, the tres compadres. You gave your life to me, and I will give my life to paying you back.”
“Tell me how she looks, Allie.”
Juliet shot me a glance of pure terror: He can’t see?
“Well, all those curves you used to stare at instead of mine are gone. She’s a little matchstick with a blonde faux hawk. But she is beautiful to me.” Juliet reached for my hand and for Rob’s. For a moment, I closed my own eyes, and I whispered, “Tribe,” our old Parkour pledge before every trace. And it was the three of us, together again for the last time.
WHEN THE DORNS were with Rob, Bonnie asked me to make time to come to her office. As it certainly concerned her as well, Juliet came, too.
“This is the first time I’ve ever met you face to face, though I’d seen you, of course,” Bonnie said. “I feel pretty fortunate to see a genuinely reincarnated person.”
“I feel pretty good to be one,” Juliet said humbly.
While we’d had entirely enough to handle, Bonnie wanted us, my mother, and the Siroccos to know what was going on at Garrett Tabor’s chalet. She had already spoken to our parents.
“The whole area is being excavated,” Bonnie said. “After the house is searched and photographed, the contents will be removed. Then it will be dismantled and numbered, piece by piece, as evidence.” I could hear the half-truth under the even tone of her voice.
“Just the house?”
Bonnie said, “No. The grounds, too.”
Whoever was excavating had found things, bad things. People that Garrett Tabor had taken and killed.
“What did you find?” I asked.
She said, “I didn’t personally …” then stopped and sighed. “A human femur. A human mandible. Small human phalanges. And, well, a skull. They’re not from the same person. So far. Very recent.”
“Were they buried?” Juliet asked.
“They were just … scattered in the woods. Animals had moved the bones around. There had been no apparent attempt to conceal the bodies beyond a covering of leaves or pine needles. We found those mounds of needles.”
“How many?” I said.
Bonnie examined her hands. “I’m not sure.”
Juliet stared at her hands, nervously twitching in her lap. “I was there. I heard them. Oh, god.”
“But there were others. Samantha Kelly Young.” I gently tugged the necklace from its familiar place on my chest and unclipped it for Bonnie. Into her hand I surrendered the golden pendant that would help bring Sky back to her family—at least that. From my pack, I extracted the copy of the missing girl poster, in case Bonnie had forgotten. “I will give this to my friend Bruce Minty, of the RCMP,” she said. “He will spend time with the Youngs and find out their story and where her story ended.”
“What’s the RCMP?”
“The Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” Bonnie said. “The Youngs knew that Sky died. They were sure of it. But of course, like any family, they want to bring her body home to bury.”
“Is there any sign of any other, any other girls out here?”
Bonnie nodded. “There is what appears to be a new and deep pit, machine dug, in the hill far up behind the house.” Before I could say more, she told me, “They will open that today.” And they’ll find the vanished brides, I thought. Balling my fists, I nearly struck them against my forehead. How could I have been so terrified, and so slow?
“It wasn’t your fault,” Bonnie said.
“On the contrary, it was entirely my fault,” Juliet told her firmly. “If I hadn’t been so arrogant, and I had outed him when I first felt that there was something wrong …”
“Juliet, you were proven dead. Garrett Tabor’s father, Stephen, could be charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact, and he certainly will be charged with concealing evidence of a homicide and falsifying documents pursuant to a homicide.” She added, “But I honestly don’t believe that Stephen Tabor understood, until right now, that he was dealing with a homicide.”
“The girl in the apartment …” I said.
“Dr. Stephen never saw the body of any murdered girl from any apartment. At least, he is not aware that he ever saw the body you saw in the apartment.”
To my relief, she did not say, what you thought you saw in the apartment. Further, she pointed out, the “silent” video Rob and I had made on the day of the fair had nothing to do with any girl in an apartment, dead by bludgeoning or strangulation. As we had hoped and feared, the (now former) medical examiner and his son were talking about the girl found hung up against the pilings of a pier, a g
irl Dr. Stephen had apparently confessed to agents he believed died as the result of a sexual encounter with Garrett that had “gotten out of hand.” He admitted to covering up the fact that she had not died of drowning, but that was all that he knew. He admitted submitting Juliet’s tissues, reasoning that Juliet was dead, in any case. A polygraph confirmed that Dr. Stephen had no idea that his son had been involved in anything illegal but had terrible guilt about compromising his professional ethics and claiming that the dead girl was Juliet Sirocco.
Both of us asked what would happen to Dr. Stephen.
“I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “If he can convince a jury that he was trying to save his son from a murder charge, I suppose he could avoid life in prison. There’s no way he can avoid prison altogether. There’s no way he can keep his license to practice.”
“That would be almost sad. Dr. Stephen always seemed so good,” Juliet said. “If what he’d done wasn’t so awful …”
“And somehow understandable,” said Bonnie. “What a parent will do for a child, there are no limits.”
Could my mother do it? My mother wouldn’t. Or would she? My mother … loved me more than God, more than the world.
As I thought this over, Bonnie went on to explain what no one in Iron Harbor except Garrett Tabor and Bonnie knew: his résumé as a killer was elaborate, long, and detailed. The first time he’d killed, from what Bonnie had been able to determine, Garrett Tabor had been very young, sixteen. A young girl drowned while swimming at a northern lake with Andrew and one of his cousins, Dr. Andrew’s son. The cousin had heard a scream and saw the girl struggling. When Garrett Tabor came bobbing to the surface, he told his cousin to swim for help, that the girl’s leg was caught on some lake weeds. Questions were put to Garrett Tabor, about horseplay and unsafe swimming behavior, but Tabor insisted he’d tried to help the girl, finally diving to get her foot free.
There were weeds, but her body was floating freely, face up, when a group of fishermen with a big bass boat finally made it to her.
In college at the University of Wisconsin, Garrett Tabor had a girlfriend, a chemistry prodigy named Dang Song who went by the nickname Sunny D, who jumped to her death from a fifth-story balcony at a dorm. She had bruises around her neck, which a bereft Tabor explained to police were the result of an earlier attempt to take her own life by hanging. There were other deaths, including two at a resort area north of Chicago—both girls under seventeen, both dumped nude in water, neither one dead from drowning.
And those were only the victims that had garnered any suspicion at all.
Tabor had begun coaching the high school ski team eight years earlier. Unexplained deaths were in the news at the time of ski meets in Colorado and New York State on three different occasions. Three girls were found naked and strangled, covered only by twigs and leaves in wooded areas near the resorts where the events were held.
“Did anyone talk to Garrett Tabor?” Juliet asked. “How long ago was this?”
“The last one was three years ago, in New York, near Whiteface …”
“I was there,” Juliet said. “Whiteface in Lake Placid was where I competed for the last time. It was where I fell on my last jump, in the exhibition.”
“You have to tell Agent Molly Eldredge all about this, Juliet. Every word. Even if you think it’s not important.”
“It’s all in what I wrote down.”
“Even what you just said? You’re the key to everything. Think back, to those ski meets. Was he ever absent? Did he act strangely? Did you ever see him with his clothes in any way torn …?”
“I was fourteen, Bonnie! The only thing I remember about Garrett Tabor was how much he asked from me as a skier. And how much he asked from me in other ways, at night.”
Bonnie lowered her eyes. “I know, honey. We have to give you some time. And whatever he did, he would have done when all the kids on the ski team were fast asleep. Even you.”
It was almost as though he were still alive there, still in the room, gloating. In fact, Garrett Tabor’s body had been released to his family. In an act of what I now consider extraordinary naïveté or hubris or denial (or all three), they were preparing to bury him in Torch Mountain Home Cemetery—next to his mother and his baby sister, Rachel.
That was one incident that Bonnie and I seemed to decide, with a level look, that did not need to ever be fully explained. Dr. Stephen had done wrong, but I could not see him as evil. Dr. Andrew and his ancient parents, and Andrew’s sons, were innocent. About Rachel, no one need ever know anyone’s suspicions.
Idly, as we left, I asked, “Who is the Iron County Medical Examiner? Who did the autopsy on Garrett Tabor?”
Bonnie sighed. “Well, for the very brief future, I am acting in that role. I did it. And I assure you, he is dead. It’s over, Allie.”
29
WHAT PASSES FOR GOODBYE
The next day, in the corridor, I stopped a nurse. I wanted her tell me the truth about Rob and the time he had left.
Absently, she said, “That’s a matter for the doctor.”
“Stop. Please have some mercy. I might be here alone with him. I hope I am. I don’t want it to be his poor mother. I’ve never seen anyone die. I don’t know what to look for.”
The woman hugged her clipboard to her chest and pressed her lips together. “Every hour, his breathing gets slower, do you see that?” I nodded. “It’s more of an effort. His lungs are filing up, and this is pneumonia we wouldn’t want to treat, because it would only make this terrific kid suffer more.”
The words sunk in. “So his breathing will get slower.”
“Maybe, at the very end, he’ll get agitated, a little. He might seem strong. People do sometimes. That’s what they mean about the belief that people see Heaven. I don’t know what the real reason is, but right before they die, they’re sleeping a lot, but they wake up for short periods. They ask for people who are here or who are dead.”
“What’s the very end of life like?”
“His nose and his fingers will start to cool off. And there may be a sound in his throat, a kind of rattle or cough. And then, one breath will just be the last one.”
I nodded. “If I’m here, what do I do then?”
The nurse glanced around her, to make sure that we were entirely alone. “Don’t call anyone,” she said. “Don’t ring the nurse’s bell. Don’t panic. A mom or a dad, they’ll want to start his heart again, and he’s a strong kid. That would be possible. But you don’t want to do that.”
“No.”
“He’s played out.”
The Dorns lived at the hospital. I went home to change and then I came back, sometime with my mother, sometimes not.
Most of the time, those last three days, Rob slept.
ONE EVENING, MY mother came in with Angela. My little sister looked bewildered and gaudy, her fingernails and toenails painted like watermelons and ice-cream cones. I saw the hand in this of someone in a room down the hall, still on high-calorie shakes and pushed of IV nutrients. Angela was only nine. She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t think that Rob’s life for Juliet’s return was a good trade.
Before Mrs. Staples picked her up, Angie asked, “Juliet didn’t die, so who did?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A girl fell in the water.”
“Was she just like Juliet?”
“She was someone’s little girl.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, Angela. It’s not fair.”
“But we got Juliet back.”
“But they didn’t,” I said. My tone was hard. I couldn’t help it. “And I don’t know if they’ll ever know where their girl is.”
“That’s what I think,” Angela said. “That girl had to die, and Rob had to, so we got Juliet back. Mom says what you say. I say, it has to be a trade. Somebody had to die.”
I shook my head. “No, Angela!”
“Yes, somebody did have to die! Now Rob is sick, and he has to die!” Angela was nearly in hyst
erics. The next moment, she would be screaming. I grabbed her shoulders and dug my hands into her frail arms.
“Stop it, Angela. Most things in the world don’t make sense. I know you want them to make sense, because you’re a kid. But Rob isn’t dying because it’s a trade for Juliet. He saved Juliet when she was being held by … by Coach Gary. She would have died.”
“Yes …”
“He’s dying because of XP.”
“So that’s how you’ll die.”
With the same fingers I’d been using to hold her in a bruising grip, I pulled Angela close to me. “Angie, honey, look at me. I’m not dying. Maybe someday I’ll die, and maybe it will be before you’re grown up. But I hope not. Maybe there will be medicine …” I glanced at my mother, who nodded. “It will be very soon and help me get well. It could happen, Angela. It’s not all death. I’m not sick now. Juliet’s not sick now. She’s getting better. She’ll go home soon. If it were like the way Keely says, I would tell you.”
Angela’s eyes spilled over. Remarkably, then, she began to kick me, hard blows with her little soft-toed ballet flats.
“Shut up!” she said. “All you do is lie. You said Juliet was dead. You said she was a zombie angel.”
Juliet appeared in the doorway, trailing her pole.
“Angela! Stop kicking Allie!”
Angela stopped.
“Angela, you have to forgive your sister. Same for you, Allie. She’s scared,” Juliet said. “She’s nine. Wouldn’t you be scared?” I thought about it; birth, rebirth, death, Christmas, and infinity crammed into a single corridor and a single week. What did you do on your winter break, Angela?
Juliet said, “Angie, come with me, okay? Ginny, my mom, is in my room and making you a sweater, and I think it’s too big, because you’re still pretty small. I don’t think you grew a bit since I went away. It’s grey and it’s cable-knit.”
Angela said clearly, “I don’t want a goddamned sweater.”
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“I said I don’t want a fucking sweater.”
“What?”