What We Lost in the Dark

  The next night, I asked Rob to buy me a camera. We were sitting alone, side by side on my bed, in the dark, music quietly playing from my dock.

  “For your birthday?” he said. “I sort of had a plan for that, actually.”

  “Well, I was thinking before. I was thinking for nothing. I’ve never asked anybody for anything in my life, like since I was little and wanted a Dracula’s Daughter doll. But I need a camera better than mine. I need a camera that does better video than mine.” I stopped and took his hand. “But that a dummy person like me could use.”

  “No offense, Allie-Stair, but why are you asking me to buy you a camera? I don’t mean I won’t. I just wonder why, because you have money. I mean, I know you have enough that even if you didn’t have savings, if it was for school or something, then Jackie would …” Rob turned over in the darkness and drew me close, throwing his leg over mine.

  “Jackie can’t know. That’s why. If I buy anything online, she’ll know. Since we dived, since you got hurt or in danger because of me, I’m officially her ex-kid.”

  “I get that. It could have been you. She was scared.”

  “Her scared is over and she’s furious.”

  “Well, maybe now. But not for long. That’s bullshit. It’s two days until Christmas Eve. She’s not going to stay mad at you over Christmas, Allie.”

  “Believe me, she is.”

  Rob knew my mom well, but he didn’t know the kind of anger engendered by the thought of her daughter beating XP only to drown. My mother would be civil to me in front of our relatives, for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when my Grandma Mack paid for the whole family (including Mom, Angie, and me) to stay up at The Timbers on Torch Mountain in a big chalet, to ski every night (and every day, for everyone else).

  “It won’t get here in time for Christmas,” Rob said. “The camera.”

  I nodded, biting back tears. Christmas this year was a difficult subject between us.

  Rob was going skiing, too. He was going skiing in Vail with his parents, leaving in one day. When my Uncle Brian arrived in Duluth, Rob would be taking off at the same airport. We weren’t married, or engaged, or anything. But it felt wrong for us to spend Christmas apart the first Christmas after Juliet’s death, the first Christmas that we were a couple. Still, we were kids, and there was no way that we could buck our parents’ wishes. The Dorns thought they were giving Rob a treat—he’d always wanted to ski Vail or Mammoth or Whistler—but I suspected also that, especially now, they didn’t particularly want him around me.

  “We can wait until after Christmas,” I said.

  “It could be after New Year’s.”

  “Well, it’ll come before then, and I can do this myself.”

  “What do you want to do yourself, Allie?”

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Allie, since when do we have secrets?”

  “Not ever.” But we had, and we did.

  “Then tell me.”

  We had agreed that I had mental problems where it came to Garrett Tabor. Why should I reinforce this already unfounded, unfair idea by telling … the truth?

  But this was Rob. So I blurted out, “I want to take video of him … like surveillance. I want to set the camera up on a timer so that it would take a few minutes every hour, so I can see what he does when he comes and goes. I could see what he carries with him. I want to take pictures so I can remember exactly where we saw the bodies …”

  Rob sat there motionless.

  “You saw them. You saw the skeletons.”

  Rob said nothing.

  “You saw them!” Just as it was impossible that Rob had nearly died down there, it was impossible, for the third time, that he had failed to see what I saw. It could not have happened. He hadn’t seen the dead girl in the apartment, the second time we scaled the Tabor Oaks. He hadn’t seen Juliet with Garrett Tabor at the Fire Festival.

  “You were taking pictures!” I said, grabbing for his shirt, not to hurt him, not to startle him, but to shake him—to make him remember. “You dropped the camera, Rob, but the camera has pictures of them. I saw the flash going off.”

  Rob’s voice was muffled. I imagined him covering his face with his big hands. “I don’t even remember taking pictures, Allie. I passed out. All I remember is waking up in the hospital. I’ve tried, honey. I don’t even remember being in the boat. I don’t remember seeing Tabor at all.”

  “So, you think I made it up. Anyone would think I made it up. Skeleton girls chained to the old pillars, pushed back inside the cliff cave. It sounds like a horror movie. Maybe I’ll only be able to find the place that once. So he gets away again.” I started to cry. “Then where did I get the chain? Where did I get the medal?”

  That I still hadn’t shown Rob. That I hadn’t figured out. I could feel it in my drawer, glowing and pulsing as though it had its own small power source, a beacon that that had led me to it. I struggled to pull myself together. This would be our last night for ten days. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Rob. I’m sorry that I’m making it feel like your fault.”

  “I know you’re not trying to, but I do feel that way.”

  “No, no …” Roughly, I wiped the tears off my cheeks and chin and steadied my voice. “Let’s forget it. Let’s forget it for tonight. Those … bodies, if that’s what they were, have been there for years. They’re not going anywhere.”

  Rob got up and stood with his hands pressed against the frame of my big bedroom window. “You can’t forget it, Allie.”

  Without another word, Rob sat down at my computer. I saw my screen come to life. He punched in a website and ordered me a Canon G12 with an extra lens, a bag, a sturdy tripod, an underwater case, and a weather housing. I saw him charge it and I glimpsed the price, with a sharp, involuntary gasp. It was more than six hundred bucks of camera and equipment—with being on deep sale for the holidays.

  “It will be here tomorrow,” he said dully. “It’s just like one of mine. It takes great video.”

  “Rob … you didn’t need to do that now …”

  “Well, sure. I did. I won’t be here to help you. And I’m not sure that I would want to help you if I was going to be here.”

  I stood to reach for him, and then stopped. “Well, tonight we’ll feast! I’m going to make shrimp curry for us. Surprise!” It’s the one thing I’m really good at cooking—curry. I try to save it for special occasions. “I got all the stuff yesterday.”

  Rob murmured that he wasn’t up for it.

  “You love my curry.” I flipped on the soft-glow burgundy shaded bedside lamp and sneaked my arms around his waist. Rob was unyielding, all angles and resistance.

  “I love your curry, but I don’t think I could keep it down tonight. Don’t take it as though it’s a personal thing.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Did you inhale something toxic down there?”

  “I was checked out.”

  “You don’t look right. You look pale and tired.”

  He said, “I am pale and tired.”

  “Why?”

  “Like you say, I keep meaning to lay down a good base tan but I never get around to it.”

  “You know what I mean. Are you sick?”

  “I’m as well as I’m ever going to be.”

  “Rob!” I socked him on the bicep, hard, and was shocked when he winced. “Rob! Why would you say something so feeble?”

  “Even if we have a normal lifespan, Allie. Even if we live to be eighty-six years old, you don’t get to be healthier than you are when you’re a guy who’s seventeen, nearly eighteen. That’s all I mean.”

  Apprehension wobbled through me.

  “You’re putting this in a weird way.”

  “All I mean is, I’m under a lot of stress.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we just found the burial ground of what, five girls and I don’t even remember it …”

  “Before that. You looked tired at Juliet’s
funeral. You looked tired even before.”

  “Allie-Stair! That’s just dumb! I’d been up for three days. So why wouldn’t I look tired? She was my best friend, too. Not like you, but I can’t even say how horrible I feel about Juliet, or I’ll cry like some asshole. You know, the last few months didn’t just happen to you!”

  “What about before? You were … skinny.”

  “I’ve always been skinny.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Like I said, I don’t have a big appetite.”

  It was more than that, though, and both of us knew it. It was more than Juliet’s death and the combined stresses of the past month. For the first time in weeks, I really saw Rob. I saw a guy who’d been slim and built who was now thin and anxious. Was I to blame for this? I was. I’d made him this way. I saw a guy who, like me, would always be X-tra Pale, who was now paper-white, the color of a petal on some night-blooming plant. I’d taken the bloom out of Rob’s face. He didn’t have to be this way. Terrified by a sign of weakness in him, I got angry. I marched out into the kitchen and assembled all of the ingredients for curry in a pot. Then, I set the table for one, with a cloth napkin and a candle, and proceeded to eat two helpings on my own.

  Rob wanted cereal.

  So I made him oatmeal with cinnamon, vanilla, raisins, and bad grace. It was a humiliating display of my worst self. I then came on to him stronger than I had since the first time we were together, basically pulling off his clothes in my room, even though Angela was at home and my mother was due back in an hour.

  WE LAY TOGETHER then, in the dark, really together, holding each other. After what seemed like a very long time, while love that was far more than passion and youth flowed between us, the words that came to my mind were, my beloved friend. My Rob and only. Rob stood up and slipped into his clothes. Quietly, I did the same thing, combing out my messy hair with my fingertips.

  Then, he reached in his jeans pocket and pulled something out, tossing it on the bed between us, a tiny, shiny package, unmistakably a box that had some kind of jewelry in it. “Open it, Allie. This was going to be your Christmas and birthday present. I’d like you to have it now.” He held up his hand as I started to protest. “I would have given it to you now anyhow. I didn’t picture it like this. I didn’t think I was going to be ordered to go with my parents. But, I would like you to open it.”

  I slowly unwrapped the shiny, silvery paper, the texture of silk. The box was deep red velvet. I held my breath (I’d become gifted at doing this) and opened it. The ring was lovely, a simple, declarative, square-cut blue diamond flanked by two garnets. Garnet is my birthstone, the same as Rob’s.

  “Is this … what I think …?”

  “I guess. I had planned to take you out tonight, well, not out to a restaurant … but I bought catered food for us, at my place.”

  “You did?”

  Where is it, I thought? Why aren’t we there?

  “And then?” I said.

  “I was going to say, I love you, Allie. I’ve probably loved you all my life. And when we’re out of school, or even when we’re twenty, before we’re out of school. I want to marry you.”

  I squeaked, “Really? You’re proposing to me?” I jumped up off the bed and squeezed Rob hard around the neck. “Really? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes!”

  Slowly, without letting go of my hands, he unwound them from around his neck and then held them.

  “Allie,” he said. His voice was even and slow.

  “I’m right here!”

  “That is what I was going to do. I want you to have the ring. I designed it for you, specially. It will look beautiful on your hand.”

  Slowly, the implication slipped down over me like a cloak: I could have the ring, as a present. Rob wasn’t telling me anything other than that it would be pretty on my hand.

  “So you were going to do that, and what are you doing now?”

  Rob said, “I don’t know.” Then he said the thing that no girl ever wants to hear her guy say. “I need time, Allie. I need time to think. Just a little time.”

  So it’s over, I thought.

  13

  UNDIVIDED ME

  It was all I could do to get out of bed on Friday.

  The two days since Rob and I parted were measured out in minutes, not hours. It was proof of the theory of relativity. When we were together, there was never enough time. Now, time was all I had. A hundred times, I picked up my phone to promise that I would stop my endless sleuthing obsession and try to be Rob-and-Allie-Before again.

  But I knew that would be a lie. There was no Rob-and-Allie-Before anymore.

  Slowly, I put my feet on the ground, and slowly, I pulled on a hefty black sweater that I felt I could huddle within, and with that, tights, and my fuzziest boots. Then I went through the little jewelry drawers in the top tier of my old bureau and dug up a long chain that would hang unobtrusively under my sweater. On it, I slipped Rob’s ring and the little golden pendant. I wanted it close to me for proof. I guess I wanted the ring close to me for proof, too, that if Rob didn’t love me anymore, he had once.

  I wondered if Rob, on his way to Vail, picked up the phone, too. If he did, there was no sign of it.

  I’d slept all day and most of the previous night. All I wanted to do was sleep, so that I could forget that one of the few things that made my life worth living was gone. Every time I thought about Rob, or took out one of his hoodies to inhale his warm laundry scent, I cried until I fell asleep again, only to wake a couple of hours later, with nothing different.

  The idea of work that night was a relief. At least there would be something to distract me.

  My mother drove me silently to the medical examiner’s office. I know she suspected that something was wrong, but she was still in a foul mood, and hosting her older brother, Brian, always put her in a worse mood. Brian had the perfect life and the perfect family.

  I hadn’t decided what to tell Bonnie, or how much to involve her. Yet, I knew that she seemed to know a great deal about a wide variety of things, and I thought that, with her help, perhaps I could figure out what the pendant was … and then maybe I could figure out who the girl was that it had belonged to.

  When Rob first saw it, he said, “It’s some kind of symbol. Maybe it’s Hebrew. Maybe it’s Hindi.”

  Immediately, when he said that, I knew it wasn’t.

  “It’s not,” I said to him. “It’s Chinese.”

  A memory of the first time I saw my little sister unfurled across my mind.

  When we adopted Angela, I met my mother at the airport in Minneapolis with her brothers, Brian and Sean, and my grandmother. Mom had come all the way from a village south of Bejing with Angela, from Bejing to Chicago to Minneapolis. Angela had about five pairs of identical little black pajamas and two pairs of identical little slippers. On the one she was wearing, there was a little coin with a red cord pinned to the tunic. On the coin was Angela’s lunar New Year symbol. She’d been born in the year of the dragon. There were also stamped characters that spelled out ‘Kim.” That had been her surname when she was born, or someone else’s name entirely. It was impossible to keep it as her middle name because she would then have been Angela Kim Kim. Angela’s dossier didn’t even prove conclusively if the little pin came from the young woman who sadly had to abandon Angela literally on the doorstep of a church in Zhoukoudian—near the place where the so-called “Peking Man” and other ancient fossils were found. It might have been pinned on her by the nuns before she left for the United States, as a symbol of good luck.

  The little golden pendant bore the same kind of symbol.

  THAT NIGHT, BONNIE sought me out. She brought her son Chris to work with her; he was actually planning only on dropping her off on his way to go out. But he came in for a few moments. Everyone’s fascinated by the morgue. Since I hadn’t really gone to high school, I barely knew Chris, although he’d briefly dated Nicola Burns before Nicola died. He was the same age as I was, but still in high school, planning to
go to DePaul in Chicago in the fall.

  The lab was slow that night. Death takes holidays, too. I said to Chris, “Are you good with a computer search?”

  He said, “Best in the West. I’m going to major in games design.”

  “Would you help me with some research?”

  We spent an hour looking up Chinese characters for many different kinds of common words, but none of them looked very much like the characters on the necklace. After she finished up a case she was working on, Bonnie came in.

  “Maybe it’s Japanese,” Bonnie suggested.

  We found it right away.

  The little pendant spelled out the kata for the word sora, which means sky.

  “So. Now we basically know what it means. Would that be someone’s favorite thing?” Bonnie wondered aloud. “Perhaps her hobby was astronomy?” She asked again who the pendant belonged to. I told her that I didn’t know, that it was something we saw when we went free diving. All of this was technically the truth.

  Chris said, “Maybe it’s a name.”

  “Sky?” I said. “No way.”

  “Not so fast,” Bonnie said. “That’s possible. Let me look up this file I kept in Chicago.” She went back to her own computer.

  “I went to grade school with a girl named Sunshine,” Chris said. “People are always naming their kids things like Destiny and Summer and stuff.”

  He was right, too, of course.

  Together, we thought of the most outrageous names in our combined experience: mine was limited. One of my online work-study group partners for AP English was named Theodora. One was a girl named Gus, short for Augusta, and there was an older guy whose name was Hammersley. Chris, like Rob, did online gaming, although Rob did it in part because he could play all night long against people in all kinds of time zones all over the world. One was named Taggert, another Jonathan Johns, and there were brothers called Dane and Shane. A player from Israel was named Uzi—the gun is named after a person, not the other way around.

  Bonnie found her informal computer file of horrible children’s names; these were often inspired by the birth of twins, which apparently moved people to epic heights.