Why They Run the Way They Do (25 page)

“Caroline Gable found half a shoe in their backyard yesterday,” my mother said over dinner. “They're almost two miles from where it went down.”

“Christ,” my father said, setting down his fork. “Not at the table. Let there be one place—”

“We should look on the roof,” my mother said. “We should make sure there's nothing there.”

“I'll climb up tomorrow,” my father said. He looked at me wearily.

“How ya doin'?”

“I'm all right,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'm busy. We're doing a special issue of the paper.”

“When I was a senior in high school,” he said, “we did a special issue of the paper when our quiz bowl team won at state.” He traced the lip of his water glass with his index finger. “I can't even—” He stopped. Even
what
? he must have been thinking. He did not know. All he knew was that tomorrow he had to climb onto the roof of his home to look for pieces of shoes.

“It's okay, Dad,” I said. “We're all okay.”

“Listen to her,” my mother said. “Everyone's okay.”

My father put his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Those people.”

“Tell him again, Katie,” my mother said.

That was September, of course. By mid-October all the roofs in Somerville had been checked. The news vans had migrated north to the turnpike and then scattered in the numerous directions of new threats. Only a few strangers remained in Somerville—counselors, investigators, coroners—and they, too, were beginning to pack away their bags of tricks. You could look around town and see that it was the same as it had been in August, the same barbershop and diner, the same cracked sidewalks and battered stop signs. It could seem like a dream. And like a dream, it slowly sank from view. Like a dream, it descended from the sky and took root under our feet until instead of it being something we had to squint to see it became the very ground we walked on.

“You know there's treasure in the woods,” Toby Hartsock told me one Sunday evening as I prepared to shut off the light in his bedroom.

I paused at the switch. “What are you talking about?”

“Gold,” he said. “And diamonds. Rings and watches and stuff that fell out of the plane. It's spread all over the woods.”

“Toby,” I said. “That's crazy.”

He scrambled out of bed. “Check this out.” He opened the top drawer of his dresser and took out a tube sock that was spooled into a ball, unwound it and reached in, then removed his hand. He unfolded his small fist in front of me; inside was a tiny gold stud. “I found it in the woods behind the Burger King. That's less than a mile from where it went down. It could be worth like a hundred bucks or something.”

“Toby, some girl probably lost that. It's probably from Walmart.”

He scowled. “Nuh-uh. Why would a girl be in the woods behind the Burger King?”

Well, what could I say? In another few years he'd know why a girl would be in the woods behind the Burger King. He'd know about the places high school kids went—not me, not my crowd, but lots of others, including Dean, I was sure—to drink beer, to pass a joint around a sloppy campfire, to hook up under cover of the thick, towering trees.

“What were you doing back there anyway?” I asked him.

He sat down cross-legged on his bed. “Adam Lefton and me were at Burger King. He started telling me about all this stuff you could find in the woods and so we went looking. I found this in like a half hour.” He closed his fist around the stud. “It's not just us. Lots of kids are doing it.”

“But Toby,” I said, “right after, the FBI and all those guys, they combed the woods. If anything was left—”

“They didn't look everywhere,” he said. He got under the covers, the stud still in his grasp. “I'll bet ya they didn't get down in the brush. Or those skanky ponds. Plus they were just looking for evidence. We're looking for treasure.”

I shut out the light. “Whatever you say, Tobes.”

Downstairs, on the Hartsocks' couch, I set about pretending to do my homework. I was trying to get through
The Tempest
for AP English, but trying to get through
anything
while sitting in the Hartsocks' living room was next to impossible. The babysitting job was a total ruse—I'd pretty much given up sitting at fifteen—but in the last six months was always available for Mrs. Hartsock, day or night, weekday or weekend. Last minute? No problem! Sitting for Toby had become an excuse to sit among the things Dean touched every day, to imagine myself in this house not as a babysitter but a girlfriend. I'd sit on their overstuffed sofa with a book in my lap and consciously detach myself from reality, pretending he'd just gotten up from beside me, was in the kitchen fixing something for us to eat. Sometimes I'd look over my shoulder impatiently, wondering what was taking him so long. On more than one occasion I'd become so lost in the fantasy that I'd nearly called out his name to hurry him along.

“Katie?”

It took me a moment to realize he was actually there, standing in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing sweats and his Somerville Basketball T-shirt and his hair was wet and slicked back and he was just standing there smiling at me.

“Hey,” I said, wrenching myself from the dream. I could almost hear the ripping noise. “Hey. What's up?”

“You looked really freaky just then,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean. You just . . . what're you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, you know.” I held up the book cheerfully. “Shakespeare or something.”

He came and sat on the couch beside me. I inched myself away so that if one of us shifted, our knees would not accidentally touch. He smelled like honey shampoo and I either wanted to bury my nose in his brown hair or vomit on my shoes. There seemed to be no other choice.

“You know what I was thinking just now, watching you?”

I swallowed what felt like a walnut. “What?”

He grinned. His top front teeth were a tiny bit gapped and crooked, a flaw that would have made most guys unappealing but somehow worked to his advantage. It was this imperfect thing that made his face perfect. “We used to do some crazy stuff, you and me. We were really whacked out.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Remember that time you put on my clothes and I put on your clothes and we thought we could fool people into thinking you were me and I was you?” He snorted a laugh. “Who does that?”

“We were really stupid,” I said. “And we were like eight then. I can't believe we thought that would work.”

“It's different now, with kids,” he said. I saw his eyes pass over Toby's picture on the mantel. “They start worrying about being cool when they're in kindergarten. They'd never be crazy like we were. It makes me feel really old, you know?”

“We are old,” I said. “We're seniors.”

“Whoever thought we'd be so old?” he said. He paused and his face turned serious. “I been thinking about you,” he said. “A lot.”

I tried to look casually intrigued. “Oh yeah?”

“You know why?”

My voice wouldn't come so I shook my head.

He sat forward, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, looked at the floor. “ 'Cause you saw the plane,” he said. He glanced over at me. “I know this sounds crazy but I'm kinda jealous. I mean, I know it was really horrible for you guys, and I feel bad for saying it—”

“Don't feel bad,” I said.

“I just mean, you know . . .” He looked straight at me. “Were you scared?”

For a moment I thought maybe I could tell him, my friend Dean. Yes, I could tell him. I could say, listen, here's a funny thing: my reed was broken, and then I stopped for a drink of water. But he was sitting beside me, the shift of his weight tilting us closer on the couch, and for the first time in a long time what I said mattered to him.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I thought . . . I thought maybe . . . you know . . . it was like it wasn't real, like I was seeing myself see it, but . . . yeah, it was, I was. Yeah. You know?”

He shook his head. “I just wish I had a little piece of it, Katie,” he said. “You have your piece. You saw it. So it's like you're
my
little piece of it now.” He smiled cautiously. “That's weird, isn't it? I mean, I know it is. It's weird.”

“It's not weird,” I said.

“Well, I guess maybe it's not any weirder than anything else right now.”

“I love you,” I said. But by the time I said this it was four hours later and I was lying in my bed next door, talking to the empty space beside me that for almost six months now had been named Dean.

“I've been waiting so long to hear you say that,” the empty space said.

“The wait's over,” I said. “We don't have to wait for anything anymore.”

I turned over and looked at the clock. It was almost 2:00 a.m. I got out of bed and went downstairs, thinking a cup of tea might settle my thoughts and let me get some sleep. I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table eating cheese and crackers and reading an admissions brochure from the University of Pittsburgh.

“What're you doing?” I asked.

She glanced up. Her narrow reading glasses were perched on the tip of her nose and she had a pencil behind her ear. “Did you know every room at Pitt has its own microwave? Isn't that clever?”

“Lots of places do that now,” I said, pulling a mug from the cupboard. “And Pitt's out, remember?”

“I was just . . . revisiting,” she said. “You know they have one of the top ranked fitness centers in the country?”

“You want me to pick a school because they have great treadmills?” I sat down while my water heated in the teakettle. “What are you doing awake?”

She pushed up her glasses. “I was hungry. I wanted some cheese.”

“I didn't like Pitt,” I said.

“But you could come home on weekends,” she said. “I could do your laundry for you. You'd be the envy of all your friends.”

I smirked. “Actually, no, they'd feel sorry for me.”

She took the pencil from her ear and laid it on the table beside the brochure. “You don't have to be nasty about it.”

“I'm not. I'm kidding, okay? It's just . . . I have my list. I feel good about it.”

“Katie, honey,” she said. Then she whispered: “Do you know how much your father wants you to live close to home?”

My mother blamed a lot on my father—the leaky pipes, the sullen cat, the patch of grass that never turned green—but this was a new one, so desperate she was not to blow her cover.

“Tell him I'll be fine,” I said. “Tell him I'm not going to the other side of the world.”

“Every time you walk out of this house it's the other side of the world.” She sliced a piece of cheese and placed it on her cracker. “As far as he's concerned.”

The Saturday before Halloween Mrs. Hartsock called and asked me to babysit for Toby. They'd gotten last-minute tickets to a hockey game in Pittsburgh and would not be back until after midnight. Toby was going to a fifth grade costume party down the block, but had been instructed to be home by 9:00. Dean, I knew from other sources, was going to a Halloween party thrown by the basketball team, so I would be free to pine among his things in peace.

I was watching TV when Toby arrived home. He was dressed as a hobo—a torn coat three sizes too big, a tattered engineer's hat, a stick over his shoulder with a bandanna-bag attached. He had three friends in tow: a skeleton, a ninja, and a boxer, who all grunted as they passed.

“We're gonna play Xbox in the basement,” Toby said.

“Sure,” I said. I didn't care when he went to bed, as long as it was sometime before his parents returned. I heard them down there, those boys, playing their games. I thought of Dean and me, how we would someday tell our children how we'd met so young, been best friends, then a little later more than friends, how we would skip over the middle part, these last few years, because that would no longer be an interesting or relevant part of the story, and the further we got from it the more this time we'd spent apart would shrink to nothing until it would seem there had only been a day, perhaps an hour, between the time we drifted apart and the time we came back together.