Mistwalker

TWENTY Willa

Every time I started to look toward the Rock, I distracted myself. It was hard, because the weather went crazy. Well, not the weather so much. The fog.

It rolled in and out, wildly random. The horn blared constantly, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for four hours. It was like a strobe light in slow motion. White, then clear. Clear, then white.

But distraction didn’t come too hard. The way my parents saw it, I’d disappeared for three days after court. Long enough that they reported me missing. Long enough that a patrol car came to our house when I turned up.

I sat in the living room. Head hanging, I suffered through the lecture Scott Washburn gave me. He talked like I was supposed to forget he was my lazy-eyed cousin just because he was wearing a badge.

“That kind of irresponsible behavior, you set people to worrying,” Scott said. “There’s been enough trouble in Broken Tooth this year, don’t you think?”

Stepping on my own toes, I didn’t even lift my head. “I know. I said I was sorry.”

With a suddenly sympathetic face, Scott stared at me real hard. “Where have you been? You in some kind of trouble?”

“I’ve been around.”

Dad made a disgusted sound. My mother echoed him with irritated precision. “Around.”

“I haven’t been fishing, if that’s what you want to know.”

“You’re just making this hard on yourself,” Scott said.

“I hear that a lot,” I snapped. Cutting a look at my parents, I spread my hands. “I hid out in Uncle Toby’s cabin, all right? It was quiet. I wanted some time to think.”

They all relaxed. That’s why it was a perfect lie. Uncle Toby’s cabin was an old hunting lodge up in the woods. Surrounded by blueberry barrens, hidden in the trees—it had been abandoned in the fifties. We all sort of owned it, and most everybody in Broken Tooth had spent a night or two there. It was full of graffiti and other people’s first times.

“That place is dangerous.” Scott had to say it; nobody believed it.

I apologized, and they didn’t have to know I wasn’t sorry. I hadn’t meant to disappear like that. Time on the Rock was different. Somehow I forgot that at the worst possible moment. I wondered if I was three days older. If my molecules had kept the time, or if I was just stopped when I was there.

A real important question Grey needed to answer, since he wanted off that rock so bad. He might be happy to stay there if he knew he’d crumble to a hundred and seventeen years’ worth of dust if he left.

“Am I dismissed?” I asked, because I wasn’t thinking about Grey. I wanted to get out of the house.

Scott shrugged at my parents. Mom stepped right in; at least she was a warden I was used to. “You’re leaving this house to go to school and back, period. I’ll walk you if I have to. This nonsense stops today.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Since they didn’t know what to do with compliance, Mom and Dad fell quiet. Since Scott was her side of the family, Mom followed him to his car and saw him off. Daddy pushed the curtains back. He watched her stop on the walk to talk with Scott, then finally turned to me.

“I figured you needed a year off.”

Though I knew he was talking to me, I guess it didn’t sink in exactly. It was so unexpected, I didn’t know what to do. I stared up and realized he’d gotten so old. Not just the grey in his hair or the lines in his face. He seemed shorter, shoulders slanted. His cheeks were hollower. The circles under his eyes deeper. And his voice was soft, gruff, as he sat in the rocker by the window.

“Didn’t intend for you to stay off the boat forever,” he said. “I figured, come next summer, you’d be all right.”

Unsure what he meant, I leaned forward. “Daddy, I’m fine.”

He waved a hand at me, brushing that claim aside like it was a black fly. “I think not. Nobody’s fine. There’s nothing to be fine about. It’s my place to protect you. You and Levi both. I did a piss-poor job of it with Levi . . .”

An ache consumed me, and I was quick to cut him off. “It wasn’t your fault, Daddy. We all know . . .”

“Look,” he said. He rocked the chair forward and perched there. Hands knotted up, they flickered as he dredged up more words for me than he ever had. “You’re a Dixon. We’re nothing like your mother’s people. You go on and take the blame, ’cause there’s no getting through that hard head of yours. But I’ll take it too, for the same reason. It is what it is, Willa.”

My eyes burned, tears spilling over. “What are we going to do until I get my license back?”

Closing back up, Daddy let the rocker go. “I’ll mind my business. You mind yours.”

“Daddy.”

“I expect you to graduate on time.” Tugging a cap over his eyes, he pretended that he was going to nap. “So you’ve got a whole lot of work to make up.”

He faked drifting off just in time for my mother to sweep back into the house. She slammed the door and cut me with a look. Then, because she apparently thought just sitting there wasn’t punishment enough, she pointed at the kitchen.

“You get in there and do the dishes. I’m too mad to look at you.”

Peeling myself from the couch, I made my way to the kitchen. And though I didn’t have Levi to rinse or to elbow me or to squeeze the soap bottle until tiny bubbles floated around our heads, things in my house felt almost normal. Not quite settled, but heading that way.

They weren’t.

Music blared from my computer, and Bailey’s notebooks covered my bed.

It was kind of terrifying how much junk she kept stuffed in her backpack. She took beastly notes for every class, wrote down every assignment, knew when everything was due.

Basically, she treated school like a contact sport, and by God, she was gonna win at it. All that organization was good for her scholarship prospects. And good for me, trying to figure out if I’d accomplished anything since the first day of classes.

“I know you didn’t do this,” Bailey said. She spread a photocopied sheet in front of me. “Because it’s group work, and I know how you are.”

Cussing under my breath, I looked over the requirements. “Well, I can’t do it now.”

“Just finish it yourself.”

Rolling my eyes at her, I put that sheet aside. “Uh huh.”

“You’re grounded,” Bailey said. She snatched the page up and flattened it in front of me again. “You don’t have anything better to do. And in case you forgot? I’m the boss of you.”

She was. Mom set Bailey loose, invested her with homework superpowers or something. If I wanted to do anything besides stare at my own bedroom walls, I had to let Bailey work me like a sled dog. It was a job she relished—so much that I was finally sorry for cutting all those days.

Turning herself in circles, Bailey suddenly produced a fan of assignments. “These are the easy ones. Do them first to get some momentum.”

“They’re essays,” I said, miserable.

“Exactly. I’m holding back the research report you have to do for Econ.”

Sliding to the floor, I groaned. I’d get it all done because I had to. But I wasn’t gonna like it. Not even a little bit. With a flick through the essay assignments, I rearranged them from easy to hard. Then I held them up for Bailey’s inspection. “Well?”

“I see sirens,” Bailey answered nonsensically.

Red and blue lights flashed outside. No matter how many times Seth argued that the lights were silent, Bailey still called them sirens.

We stepped over notebooks to get to my window. It was the second time that week that a cop had been at my door. This time, it didn’t seem to be for me.

My cousin Scott stood on the porch, and my parents went outside. Bailey pulled my blinds, and I lifted the window as quietly as I could. Though the lights made no noise, the patrol car’s idling engine did. It was hard to pick out words; whole sentences came out garbled.

Bailey leaned her head against mine and whispered. “I think he said the case is going?”

“Going where?” Neither of us knew, and we weren’t even sure that’s what he really said. I pressed against the screen. Its dusty weave made me wheeze, but I held my cough.

“What?” my mom barked.

That rang out, clear and pure. But what followed didn’t. Frustrated, I closed the window. Gesturing at the stairs, I said, “I’m just gonna go ask.”

“You have work to do,” Bailey said. As if she hadn’t just been pressed to the window with me.

She only said it to prove she was trying to do her job. It didn’t stop her from scrambling after me. Since it was probably family business, she stopped at the top stair. I went down first, Bailey right behind me, to wait for Mom and Dad to come inside.

When they did, they were fire and ice. Mom’s face was scarlet, Daddy’s dirty white. They shut the door with Scott still on the other side of it. Startled to see me, Dad shook his head and set my mother’s arm free. “I’ll make coffee.”

He passed me without a word, and my heart sank. Reaching for my mother, I asked, “What’s wrong?”

“You should get back to work,” she said.

I refused to move. “Mom.”

“Scott’s not sure,” Mom said, her voice thick with judgment. “But he thinks something’s going on with the grand jury.”

Glancing up the stairs, I took comfort when Bailey pressed her hands to her chest. She didn’t have to say anything to know exactly how I was feeling: wounded and wary and afraid. I rubbed my mother’s back, like she used to rub mine when I was little and sick to my stomach. “What kind of something?”

Still furious, my mother snapped, “Like I said, Scott’s not sure. He came all the way over here to stir us up because ‘there’s chatter.’ I hear chatter all night on dispatch. There’s no need to run over, lights flashing, for chatter.”

“There’s nothing wrong, though, is there?”

Daddy emerged from the kitchen. Behind him, the coffeepot gurgled—an ordinary sound that seemed so out of place. The house groaned, shifting beneath our feet. And in the distance, the foghorn went off again. It lowed in the dark, distant and lost.

“Bad news travels faster than good,” Daddy said.

“But I’m supposed to testify.” Turning between them, I couldn’t tell if I was talking or begging. Panic ran through me; it stole my reason and my sense. “I was there! Doesn’t that matter?”

Mom clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Willa, stop it. Until there’s something to know, you need to settle down. I’m sure Bailey has better things to do than tutor you. Get on up there and quit wasting her time.”

Nudging me toward the stairs, Mom waited for me to go. How she expected me to work I didn’t know.

The grand jury wasn’t even the trial. It was a bunch of shuffling papers and looking at evidence. The way Ms. Park explained it to me, the grand jury was there to decide if there was enough evidence to charge Terry Coyne with killing my brother.

I was there. I saw it. I felt it. I knew exactly who fired that gun. It was a damned given, so what was going wrong with the grand jury? I’d pointed out the right picture in the mug shot book. My feet pounded on the stairs. Bailey caught me by the shoulders.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

When our eyes met, though, I knew it wasn’t. Bailey was the one who had optimism on her side. Instead of certain, she looked worried. No doubt, I looked crazed. Between the two of us, I expected we had a right to be both.