The Edge of the Light

  “That’s not possible,” Amy replied. “I was afraid I might do that, so I made a record.” She went to the bedside table, and from the drawer she took a small spiral pad. She showed him how she’d divided it into days and weeks. She showed him there were only two marks for every day since the pills had been prescribed.

  Seth said, “Maybe you got up in the middle of the night a few times and took a pill and forgot to mark it.”

  She shook her head and her gaze seemed regretful. She said, “Seth, I don’t think so.”

  He was forced then to ask, “What kind of pills are they, anyway?”

  “OxyContin,” was her reply.

  • • •

  SETH DIDN’T WANT to have the conversation he knew he had to have with Prynne, so he stalled as long as he could. After dinner, he told her and his parents that poor ol’ Gus needed a long walk, run, and ball-chasing session, and when his mom said, “In the dark?” he replied with, “You know Gus,” which meant, essentially, nothing.

  His parents looked surprised by this. So did Prynne when he said no to her question of, “Want me to go, too?”

  He got out of there quickly. He and Gus piled into the VW. Seth drove around as long as he could. When he finally went back home, he found his dad the only one still up. Rich was loading pictures of his newest glass pieces onto his website. He said, “Everything okay, son?” and Seth claimed everything was fine.

  He then went to his bedroom. He found Prynne sitting up in bed, flipping through an old National Geographic. She laid this aside and said to him as he closed the door, “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Why d’you think something’s wrong?”

  “Because you didn’t say ten words at dinner and you never take Gus anywhere to play at night.”

  Seth could see no other way to go at it but directly. “You’ve been getting high,” he said.

  She seemed to be trying to read his face for what was going on in his head before she answered with, “You know I smoke weed. I’ve only been doing it when you’re—”

  “I don’t mean weed,” he interrupted.

  Her expression altered. He could see it get wary. She said, “Becca.”

  “Huh?”

  “She told you.”

  Seth swore, which he never did in front of anyone except the guys at work. Then he said, “Becca didn’t say anything. Are you frigging telling me you dropped Oxy over at Grand’s?”

  “You’re protecting her, aren’t you? That’s just what I would—”

  “Keep your voice down. This isn’t about Becca. She didn’t tell me jack. This is about my mom’s pain pills. She’s missing six. And she’s been keeping a record of when she took them. So she knows how many she should have left. Okay?”

  Prynne was silent for a moment before she said, “I didn’t . . .” but her voice was shaky.

  Seth pressed his point. “Oh right. Like I’m expected to believe you?”

  She pressed her fingers to her lips. Seth said nothing else so that she would be forced to speak, which she finally did. “I ran out of weed. I can’t buy it legally yet, not at the weed store, and I didn’t know where else . . . I mean, I couldn’t exactly ask you who’s dealing, could I? So I took one of her pills. Just one.”

  “I said she’s missing six, Prynne. The pharmacy told her she should have eight left, not just two. So tell the truth. Did you take six of her pills? Pills she needs for her frigging pain?”

  Tears began to spill down Prynne’s cheek. “I didn’t think . . . It didn’t seem . . .”

  Seth threw his jacket onto the floor. He paced to the bed. Prynne shrank back. He hissed, “That’s just great. So now she gets to take some completely not effective painkiller till she can renew her prescription. All because you just had to get high. Is something wrong with you? What am I missing here?”

  Prynne grabbed the other pillow on the bed and held it to her stomach, as if it would somehow offer her a comfort that wasn’t coming from Seth. She said, “I was an idiot. I was stupid. I saw them inside the cabinet where you told me I could put my stuff and . . . Seth, please. I’m totally sorry.”

  What Seth thought was that sorry wasn’t going to cut it, and he was about to say that when Prynne grabbed her purse where it sat under the bedside table. She fumbled with it to get it open. “I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t think she would . . . I just wanted to see what it was like. See, I’ve heard of them but I’ve never done them and there they were and . . .” She began to sob. She brought from her purse a twisted-up tissue and shoved it at him.

  He untwisted it. There were five blue pills screwed up within it. He said, “Six, six,” because he still couldn’t get his head around what she’d done to his mom by snatching the pills.

  Prynne said, “I only tried one. I didn’t like what it did to me. I was out of it. Becca came home and found me. I don’t remember what I told her but I think I said I wasn’t feeling good or I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep or something. But after I used that one, I forgot I even had them. If I’d remembered, I would’ve put them back. I swear it. I double swear it. You have to believe me.”

  Seth looked from the pills to Prynne’s face. He’d never seen her so upset. He hesitated. She was so close to him: not only right now in this room but also in the spirit of who she was. He’d never met a girl with whom he’d had such an instant connection. He’d never even expected that out of life.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “But do you . . . Seth, do you believe me? Because if you don’t . . . If I’ve wrecked everything between us . . .”

  “I believe you,” he told her. “I wish you’d put the pills back, but I’m glad you didn’t like what they did to you.”

  She said, “I was out of it. I don’t want to feel that way again, ever.”

  He smoothed her wild and crinkly hair. He considered what he could do to tell his mom about what Prynne had done. When he thought he had it all straight in his head, he kissed Prynne and told her he’d be right back.

  In the bathroom, he opened the cabinet. He could see that, as good as her earlier word, Prynne had organized it for the family. She’d even bought some plastic containers to help in the matter. He shifted things here and there a bit, to make it look as if he’d done a search. Then he took a bottle of Aleve and carried it, along with the five extra Oxy pills, into his mom’s bedroom.

  “Mystery solved,” he told her. “I think you spilled six of the pills into your hand, took one, and accidentally put the rest in here.” He held up the bottle of Aleve. “At least, that’s where I found them.”

  Amy looked up from a novel she was reading. She saw the pills lying in Seth’s palm. She looked from them to the bottle of Aleve. She looked from that bottle up to Seth’s face. She said, “How strange. That’s where you found them?”

  “Yep,” he told her. “You want me to put them back in the prescription bottle for you?”

  She gazed at him for a very long time. He began to get hot all over. She finally said slowly, “I’d appreciate that. You go ahead and put them away for me.”

  19

  Seth wanted to believe Prynne. But he knew people on the island who played around with everything from weed to meth, and the one thing he’d learned from knowing these people was that when it came to dopers, they’d lie about anything. And Prynne had lied by omission when she hadn’t told him about moving to Port Townsend. He couldn’t forget that.

  But the thing was, he didn’t want to think of her as a liar or a serious doper. It was true that she’d smoked weed from the time he’d met her. But she’d never done a lot of weed, and this had to mean something, right?

  He wanted to be sure about the doper thing. If he and Prynne were going to make it together, then they had to come at things honestly. So in what he told himself was the cause of complete honesty, he decided to check u
p on her.

  He figured he could do it through the means of her regular, twice monthly gig in Port Townsend. He needed Becca to be willing to stay with Grand, since the gig was on a Saturday afternoon and evening, but he knew she’d do it if he asked her.

  Since Port Townsend was a popular destination for both Whidbey Islanders and people from over town, Seth figured the ferry would be crowded. This would be all to his benefit. He could follow Prynne in his VW at some distance from South Whidbey as she buzzed up the highway on her Vespa. If he timed everything right, she’d already be on the ferry—at the front, where the motorcycles were placed—when he got to the dock. With the number of cars boarding after her, he’d be lost among them.

  It all went as planned. He was a little surprised by the early hour at which she set off. But her explanation as she kissed him good-bye seemed completely reasonable: She wanted to go by the house so that she could tell the guys that her move to Whidbey was going to be permanent.

  “If that’s what you want,” she said to Seth. “After the Oxy thing and all . . . You haven’t said but I was hoping . . .”

  “Permanent?” Seth said to her. “Like in you and me permanent?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said and her cheeks got red. “I love you, Seth. You’ve figured that out, right?”

  He grabbed her, lifted her off the ground. He wanted them to be together more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

  After that, he almost gave up the idea of seeing what was going on with her trips to Port Townsend. But since he’d made the plan and since Becca was ready to stay with Grand and since his mom was happy to keep Gus with her, he decided to go ahead. If Prynne saw him, he’d tell her that he’d intended to surprise her by showing up at her gig.

  She was far ahead of him when the ferry docked across Admiralty Bay. He worried a little that he might lose her then. Parts of Port Townsend constituted a fairly vast network of streets, so if he wasn’t quick to catch up with Prynne, he was going to be in trouble.

  He didn’t ask himself why, after her admission of love for him, he wasn’t just happily heading to the coffeehouse where she was going to perform. Instead he told himself that following her was just idle curiosity. And anyway, he continued in his head, her performance was a few hours away.

  He saw her veer to the left off the ferry. He knew this meant that she was taking the southeast route that would lead to the upper part of the town. He was familiar with the way, so he wasn’t too concerned that he might lose her. He got a little anxious, though, when he hit the red light at the end of the ferry dock while Prynne herself zoomed out of sight.

  He swore then. When traffic took off, he cranked up the speed and hoped a cop wasn’t nearby.

  An old clock tower marked the road that Prynne would have had to take, and he turned there as well. Along the way, a sign pointed the direction to the upper town, and he took this turn, too. The street bisected the upper part of town, running past shops and a few restaurants, with side streets perpendicular to it. Prynne wasn’t in sight, so Seth knew she’d already taken a cross street somewhere. She had to have gone right or left soon after getting onto this main street, though. What he had to do was just keep an eye out.

  This worked. Ten blocks along, where the businesses started to give way to the nineteenth-century mansions for which the little town was famous in the Pacific Northwest, he saw that Prynne’s Vespa was parked on one of the side streets, this one narrower than the rest, populated by houses that were old like the mansions but ordinary in their architecture. Some of them were big with nothing to distinguish them, others were small with overgrown gardens.

  It was in front of a house of this latter type that Prynne’s Vespa was parked. Seth frowned when he got near enough to it to see what it was like. He was confused. If Prynne lived with three male roommates in a place large enough for them each to have a bedroom, the house in front of which Prynne had left the Vespa was not it.

  Seth drove by slowly. He couldn’t see much. There was an untrimmed hedge in front of the place and an arbor weighed down by a massive wisteria not yet in bloom that marked the path to the front door. In a driveway shaded by a huge cherry tree in riotous pink flower, a VW van was parked. Just beyond it, Seth could see a garage. But that was it. Prynne was nowhere in sight.

  He made a U-turn at the end of the block. He pulled to the side of the street and tried to decide what to do. He told himself that Prynne wasn’t up to anything as far as he could see. But then he realized that was the point: as far as he could see. He needed to see more.

  He got out of his VW and began to walk back in the direction of the small house. The fact that there was no sign of life on the outside of it suggested that Prynne had gone within. He knew that there was no way in hell that he’d be able to sneak around peering through the windows without someone catching him and raising the alarm. It seemed that his only choices were to wait out of sight or to slink down the driveway and check out the van and possibly the garage as well.

  Part of him was saying that this was a very dumb move. Another part of him was saying that it was way too strange that Prynne had come to this spot instead of to a house she could have reasonably lived in with three guys. And the final part of him was saying that since Prynne had apparently not told him the truth about why she’d come to Port Townsend so early, it behooved him to discover the reason.

  He peered into the van. In the back of it, he saw boxes of what looked like neatly stacked tiles. Handmade, they were the kind of tiles you could buy at the myriad craft fairs that sprang up around Washington with the arrival of spring. In addition to these boxes, there were two kids’ seats: those booster types. A beaded necklace swung from the rear view mirror. A Mexican poncho lay across the back seat. The ashtray of the van was pulled out and filled with the butts of what looked like hand-rolled cigarettes. Seth would have decided that was indeed what they were had not a second glance at the necklace shown him that a roach clip was the pendant.

  Then he knew. Prynne had come to her source for weed. Okay, he told himself. No way could he blame her. He knew that she hadn’t found a source on the island, so she’d come to buy some here.

  Then he heard voices: Prynne and some guy. Seth saw that the people door into the garage was open on the side of the building that faced the house. He moved closer to it to hear a guy saying, “I can’t even get it anymore, Prynne. It’s way too risky,” to which Prynne responded, “You have to get it.” To which he said, “Uh . . . no I don’t.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she demanded, and at this her voice grew loud.

  “Hey!” he said. “Lower your voice. All I need right now is Mandy coming out and seeing you here . . . or one of the kids. . . .”

  “You got me started and it’s your responsibility to—”

  “Wait a second! Way I remember it, you came to me. I didn’t go looking for you. Way I remember it, your parents threw you out, you left Port Gamble, you ended up here, and first thing you did was look for a source. You found me and now you can find someone else.”

  There was a silence. Then into it came words that rattled the brains in Seth’s head and turned his body into an iceberg. The man spoke them. “Look. I can still sell you weed, Prynne, but nothing else. Not anymore. You’re on Whidbey now, right? So find the stuff there. Everyone knows the place is crawling with dealers.”

  “Oh, fine. You’re a real prince, Steve. I’ll just take an ad out in their stupid paper.”

  Seth was rooted to the spot where he stood, just in front of the van. He felt frozen. He felt struck by lightning. He felt sick to his stomach. He felt sunken in quicksand. He didn’t know what he felt.

  Then Prynne came out of the garage. Then Prynne saw him. Then things got worse.

  • • •

  THE WAY SETH saw it in the split second before Prynne spoke, she should have been the person who was embarrassed, humiliate
d, freaked out, upset, devastated, or any combination of those things. She was the one who’d lied to him. She was the one who’d come to see her dealer. She was the one who was doing whatever it was beyond marijuana, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what she was doping up with but he had a good idea, especially since the important bit was that she’d obviously lied to him about what her doping consisted of.

  What happened next was a total surprise.

  After a moment of taking him in, she strode over to him. She began swearing in a way he couldn’t even have begun to imagine she was capable of. She went through every foul word she probably knew and then red in the face and shaking with rage she said, “You followed me! You acted like some FBI agent and you followed me. I hate you for that!”

  Seth was struck nearly wordless. All he could think of and all he could say was, “You were the one—” before she shoved past him.

  The guy in the garage came outside, and Seth took him in: bearded, bony, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, sandals and socks on his feet. The guy said, “Hey! Shut the hell up! Damn it all, Prynne, who is this guy? You brought someone with you? That’s just so fine. Get off this property before I call the cops.”

  Prynne then shouted, “Oh, like you’re really going to do that, Steve! Like you’ve got nothing to hide.”

  She went to her Vespa. Seth followed her. What Steve did at that point, he neither knew nor cared. Seth said to Prynne what he’d planned to say, “I was gonna surprise you at your gig. But then you headed the wrong direction and—”

  “Liar!” she shouted. “My gig’s not for hours and you know it. You followed me because you think . . . whatever you think. I’m out of here and I don’t want to see you again. I can’t even believe what you did.”

  20

  When Becca arrived at Diana Kinsale’s house for her regular practice session, she found a note on the door. Diana’s truck was in the driveway, so Becca was surprised that she wasn’t at home. But the note said that she’d be back soon, that Becca was to let herself in. “You know where the key is,” Diana had written.