The Night My Sister Went Missing

  "Oh my god." I shut my eyes. I was an idiot, for not having turned. I could have given Stacy an alibi. I could have prevented almost all the talk at the police station. "You were standing right there when the gun went off—right behind me—weren't you?"

  With a few rays of daylight, I could see victory in her eyes. She had wanted me to know where she was—that's why she'd mentioned it. But she didn't say that.

  "Well? Weren't you wishing you were Bill?"

  "Yeah. Very much so," I said. "He knows who he is and what he wants."

  I wanted to apologize to her, but I sensed doing so would only make her tense up. I remembered her face at the yacht club earlier, when I'd asked her where she was when the gun went off. No wonder she'd looked hurt. All I'd been thinking about was myself and the Naval Academy ... all summer. She could have called me a selfish little shit, but she'd just walked off in her calm, classic way.

  She took the glasses back. "You'll find your way, Carmody. You always do."

  It sounded ominously like she thought she would not find her way. I wondered about this pregnancy until I could feel my own lower middle starting to burn and churn. How can she stand it? And I was wondering about this gun, why she'd bought it ... if not for protection, maybe to flamboyantly stick it in her grandfather's face after having it under her pillow while sleeping.

  There really was no way to know, because I was not going to ask. But my mind took me on travels of what might go wrong in families with people who are messed up and sneaking around about it. Half of what I thought probably came from reading my dad's books. He was drawn to hard-hitting stuff like this, and I'd read half a dozen well-researched stories with the bad guy being incestuous. The other half came from my summer of blogging with people who could tell the truth without fear of being eaten alive.

  I figured Stacy and her grandfather probably had a conversation similar to what he'd said at the police station. He'd found the gun in her dresser one day. (Nobody bothered to ask Mr. DeWinter what the hell he was doing in Stacy's dresser, and I didn't want to know.) She'd probably avoided saying why she had bought it. Maybe the whole facade of her buying it as "a gift" and her grandfather taking it away from her because it was unsafe unfolded between the two of them. And maybe it happened right while her mother was in the house and her grandmother was cutting flowers just downstairs.

  No wonder Stacy had scratched her mother's eyes out. No wonder her father had said he wasn't leaving without Stacy when the DeWinters offered him money to go. He'd never found the nerve to express his suspicions, and she hadn't confirmed anything to her father and brothers until last night. I imagined that prior to that, life had been like a giant play, an important exercise in "let's pretend," with actors spitting out scripted lines.

  I could see it all ... but I couldn't make any rational sense out of it. If your mother goes from slightly neurotic in Connecticut to a total Xanax queen on Mystic, why not try to discover the reasons? If your father is acting like a pig in New Jersey when he was a pretty normal guy up in Connecticut, why not demand an explanation? Why suffer all the confusion by yourself? If your grandfather breaks into your bedroom and does beyond-evil shit to you, why not just call the cops? Why rely on your own gift for melodrama and buy a gun? Why walk through a soap opera about "Granddaughter, you shouldn't have this dangerous thing in your room" and "Grandfather, it was for your birthday"?

  Somehow I could imagine her telling her grandfather at high noon that it was a gift for his birthday, while she'd previously imagined sticking the little barrel in his face at midnight. It didn't make sense, but my dad would write it this way. The spooks come out at midnight, causing everyone to be more dastardly, maybe. There's a daytime drama and a prime-time series, both going on in the same minds. I wondered if it were even possible that Stacy could remember at night and forget most of it during the day. People's lives can look so good on the outside and be so much dark shadow on the inside. It boggled my mind and brought more questions barreling down on me.

  Like, how would she begin to tell a friend what had actually happened if she wanted to? Wasn't it worth paying Crazy Addy seventy dollars to get Alisa to leave it alone? What could Alisa say after all that?

  What do I say now?

  I settled on: "Your dad is perfectly safe. He's not in any trouble."

  She spun her eyes to me just for a moment but then froze up again, as if I'd brought her back to herself—and away from looking for Casey. But being as I'd already gone there, I tried, "I think you should ... go down there. Cops can help. They've been looking for you all night."

  She adjusted the glasses a couple times and said in too even a tone, "They could have picked me up anytime if they'd wanted me."

  "Where were you? You told me you were going home."

  "I was home. I've been living with my dad and my brothers."

  Mr. Kearney had said so much that I'd forgotten that little bit of info. It made sense. Better safe down at the Ocean View than vulnerable in a mansion. The time flashed before me of seeing her struggling with all those pillowcases outside the Coin-Op. They don't have washers and dryers at the Ocean View. She'd flipped out on me, thinking I would start to ask questions—and the answers would be very, very complicated.

  "That's good ... it's good you were living with them," I muttered, but she ignored me, cursing and saying my sister's name in a coaxing way. She would not budge, I realized, would not unburden on me—or on anybody for that matter. She'd tried with Alisa and lost her nerve, I guessed, creating some bizarre drama with Crazy Addy. It was all a mess, mostly bottled-up smoke with just the fumes escaping. I wasn't qualified to pop the cork.

  I sat in silence as the second real line of red hit the horizon. Supposedly the sun rises so fast that you can actually see it moving. But since you'd be blind if you looked directly at it, I had never done so. We sat there watching the water grow brilliant as the sky grew lighter and brighter. Beach day. Definitely. Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Outside the sun itself, the sky was clear, throwing a turquoise outer ring around the sun. The water was calm, the waves sounded normal, and their white neon lines looked not at all angry.

  When the sun was more than a half circle on the horizon, I nudged the glasses, so Stacy's eyes broke away from them. "I don't think you need them now."

  She laughed and fudged with the focus. "Duh. They work as regular field glasses, too."

  "You're kidding. Gimme." I looked through them, and the rising sun brought on some positive thoughts. "Only drowning we've ever had on Mystic was that first suicide kid. They listed him as death by drowning to try to keep down the scandal. Jesus, what was his name?" I was too sleep deprived to pull it up.

  "Kenny Fife," she said with emphasis, then chuckled. "I got here later than you. All the stories stuck with me. I really ... loved living here that first year."

  I didn't pull the glasses away, afraid the implications of what she was saying would show in my face. I wondered, Has her life been a hell for two of three years here? Is that how long this thing has been going on?

  There were a hundred things that no outsiders could ever know. But I felt like her boyfriend now in some unexplainable way—not that I was dumb enough to think there was a near future with a girl who was going through this much. But I felt it. I wanted to be there with her until I knew she would be okay. I kept looking through the glasses, using one hand—and I reached down with the other and took her hand.

  She let me lace my fingers through hers, though there was no response. It was like holding a warm dead squid, and when I finally looked down, she was staring at our laced fingers and her eyes were filling up. She shook her head and croaked, "It's too late."

  "I'm a real patient guy," I told her.

  "Yeah, about the slowest mover I've ever seen." Her smile trembled as she brushed a tear off her face. "God, I thought I was the slowest mover around. What have you been waiting for, Carmody? Mother Teresa in a flowered dress?"

&nb
sp; I'd taken girls out only a few times. I was picky. "There is a big part of me that never felt comfortable with the people we were hanging around. They're too..."

  "What, too normal?" she said.

  I smiled, amazed at her blast of insight. "I don't need a Mother Teresa, just ... someone the likes of which I figured I wasn't going to find around here"

  "Yeah, well..." She laughed in a way that sounded nervous, and I wondered if I should be touching her at all. She said, "Sometimes the things you search far and wide for are right under your nose."

  She gazed off to the north in a dazed way, and I tried to squeeze her hand tighter—I just didn't want to let go. The urge to kiss someone had never hit me anywhere nearly this strongly, but it just would not have worked. For whatever perverted reason, I thought of the movie Rosemary's Baby, with the woman carrying the Antichrist. I wondered if Stacy felt like that.

  This situation was beyond fixable, beyond belief, beyond scandalous, beyond me, and I couldn't understand what was preventing Stacy from leaping into the surf. My sister was giving her superhuman strength, I decided, and for a second I was glad Casey went missing.

  I babbled, "Stacy, I'm sorry ... I'm sorry you were always right here, and I just had no idea how you felt or ... what you were about."

  The laugh she finally threw in didn't surprise me. Stacy laughed at everything. "Christ, the gossip must have been thick at the cop station."

  My vision was blurred from tears, but not so much that I couldn't see her face turn to an outright smile—one of the few genuine ones I'd ever seen.

  "Kurt, stop being romantic. You are about the dumbest shit I've ever met." With that, she brought my knuckles up to her mouth and kissed them absently. She was still gazing off into the north sea. "The things you're looking for are right under your nose! Turn your fool head," she hollered.

  I guess not all things end in ways that you just couldn't guess. If I'd had any hope of finding my sister, it would have been by seeing her coming ashore alive, having swum in from the down-seas. The beach was now lit, but at the sun rise the water looked white, except for one bobbing blotch about a block off, only about thirty feet from the beach. It was not a pretty sight. The first thing that came clearly to my stunned eyes was the color red. A red blob. I wiped my eyes quickly, rising slowly to my feet in shock. The red grew more clear, despite the distance between me and the blob. It was Casey's back. I could barely see bluish arms moving, plodding downward in the water. But my ace swimmer sister could not lift her head, and I couldn't tell what she was floating on.

  "Looks like Van Doren's Dungeon threw her a surfboard," Stacy said, pushing at me. I remembered the surf club babbling on about Tito's lost board. "Go, you moron!"

  Stacy pushed me again, but as the daylight threw plenty of light on the beach, I could see not one but two cops, running toward Casey. I ran back toward the brackets, and my eyes filled up and spilled over in relief. But I was not moving as quickly as I should have been. Some invisible force was pushing back on me—like in those dreams where you're trying to run but you can't. I finally reached the brackets, took the first two down, and stopped, my face right about at Stacy's feet. I wiped my eyes and looked up. Her face was shrouded in dawn shadows, but I could have sworn her eyes were filling again.

  "Go!" She kicked at my fingers. "The girl's already had one broken neck! She's your sister!"

  "Listen to me. I'm coming right back." I held my grip and just spewed my worst thought, "Don't you dare jump." I don't know what had given me the nerve, but with that the whole major cat was out of the bag. She knew I knew, and I was amazed at her calm.

  She stooped down and rubbed my hair. "I promise you, I will not jump. Just go before I kick your ass down there."

  I went down the brackets, these insane tears of relief pumping—insane because I'd been in denial all night. I had no idea how scared I had really been until I bawled in relief for Casey, for my parents, for myself—and for Stacy's ability to keep her wit even in the worst of situations. I ran up the beach. Casey seemed to be coming to shore maybe a block away, a span that looks like nothing on the beach, but it's a good jog if you haven't had sleep and invisible forces are pushing against you.

  Just about when I was halfway there, the cops reached Casey and were pulling the board in to shore. Whistles were blowing, sirens flashed from the cop car on the street, and a police jeep broke across the dunes with lights going everywhere.

  And I turned and started running back to the pier as fast as my legs could carry me.

  Stacy breaking into the museum to get out night vision goggles ... That thought was under my skin all of a sudden, and I got images of all the other stuff that was in there: big guns, war guns ... swords, daggers ... And why had her eyes been filling up again as I left her?

  The shot rang out loud enough to tell me that it wasn't any little derringer this time. Stacy had taken something from the museum that had size and volume. To this day I don't know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that Chief Aikerman beat me to the mounts. One cop climbed up while Chief Aikerman lay on top of me blathering—and my own yells got buried in mouthfuls of rising seawater.

  14

  Stacy Kearney's funeral was attended by just about everyone on Mystic. The huge arrangement of yellow roses that covered the casket seemed all wrong somehow. Yellow is a lukewarm, say-nothing color. I figured her flowers should have been white peace roses, for all the peace she'd tried to keep, or flaming red for her flamboyancy, which I will miss forever.

  I sometimes relive that hour in Saint Thomas Maritime Cathedral when I sat in a pew in the balcony, watching below, holding Casey's hand, glad that she'd developed a sudden love of silence.

  Casey and I went through the mourners' line early, and I don't remember what I said to Stacy's mom and grandmother, but I took one look at her dad and brothers and about busted in half. They'd been over to my house the day after she died, understanding that I had found her and had "been with her."

  So by the day of the funeral, I had all my blather out on the table, had already apologized twenty-five times for being too dumb to save her, had already listened to them tell me just as many times that it wasn't my fault. At one point a swollen-eyed Mr. Kearney said in my den, "Enough, already! Will you shut up about it?"

  I loved those three guys from that moment forward. They remind me of her.

  At the church they actually wanted me to stand in the receiving line—as the bereaved boyfriend—a concept that made me fall back in horror. I was not deserving and gave the truth as an excuse—I had to look after Casey. She was in a back brace, with one cracked vertebra and twenty stitches in various places, four on her face. Barnacle bites. She hadn't complained at all about stitches, the pain, or a dozen scratches on her face along with the sutures. She had insisted on coming, but if anybody tried to hug her—that could have made her scream in agony.

  I was glad to take a seat with her up in the balcony, where we could sit and vegetate, and I could bawl if I wanted to, or pray if I got the urge. We watched the Marvels file through below in one unbroken line, giving pictures to Mrs. Kearney and Mrs. DeWinter, and laying "memories" in a big basket at the altar, until it overflowed into the aisle. Tennis rackets, CDs, shoes, journals ... anything that had given Stacy a giggle lay there, and it collectively resembled the contents of some old giant closet that had been dumped out.

  I watched in kind of a daze, looking for what details left me feeling that the Marvels were just going through the motions of being Marvels—maybe without realizing themselves that they were little more than lonely, pathetic bodies wandering around. One nice detail that stands out was how no one seemed to be looking into the eyes of anyone else. Not that anyone appeared to feel treacherous or deceitful or remorseful for how she or he had treated Stacy lately—I didn't sense that.

  It was something else. A lack of reliance, maybe. You search your friends' faces when you're feeling terrible things, and you need to see that your friends are in it with yo
u. When you don't look, it's either that you don't have those feelings or you don't feel that your friends do. Either way, it was hard to watch.

  Stern was the only one not there. He was in county jail, looking at eight-to-ten for attempted manslaughter, which I thought was a charitable charge. I hadn't said anything to Casey like, "I warned you about that jerk." One of the things that was making us closer, I think, was my not saying it. Another thing was the discussions we'd had all yesterday.

  The tale Casey told came down pretty much like Stacy had predicted. Casey heard the shot, felt nothing, but saw Stern pointing a gun straight at her, just after she'd seen an orange crack from the corner of her eye. She had no idea that he was mistaking her for Stacy, but her flight mode went off. She dove, thinking she was in serious danger for reasons she couldn't understand but could figure out later.

  The perfect dive, yeah. Stacy was right about that. Casey cut the water so pristinely that under the pier, she was able to get out of my sweatshirt before the first swell hit her. She said that as often as she'd considered trying this dive, she had never in her wildest dreams understood the thrust of the waves under the pier. The first one spun her ten feet under, eggbeater style, then all but nailed her to one of the pilings. At ten feet down at high tide, the barnacles are about three feet thick. They're like razors, and they cut her to shreds, cut right into a vertebra, then mercifully sucked her into a rip that took her out.

  The rest is a lot of ramble that was hard for her to put into words and harder for me to hear. She said there was a night surfer out there, and somewhere between the pier and the down-seas, he helped her onto a surfboard, and she lay on it in excruciating pain. She had no clue how much time had passed between when the surfer helped her and when they found Tito's surfboard. She said only that it was dark and she was weak, probably from blood loss. At one point she opened her eyes and he was gone, maybe having lost track of her in the swells ... She knew at that point that she'd have to get herself back to shore with a back that hurt like a bitch—and without paralyzing herself. She took her time.