The Fever

8

Standing in the back, Eli had been the one who’d called 911.

Four minutes later, the back doors flew open and he showed the paramedics where to go.

“Oh, man,” the taller one said, rubbing his winter-red face. “Another one?”

Onstage, Mr. Timmins was kneeling over Gabby, who was looking up at him, her hands around her own neck like she was trying to hold it straight.

All of them had their hands over their mouths, watching.

“Goddamn it, Jeremy.”

Eli watched as his dad grabbed a phone from one of the boys’ hands.

“I’m sorry,” Gabby kept saying, her voice inexplicably loud, carrying through the space. “Did that just happen? I just got confused. Are we in school?”

The cello kept getting knocked around, wobbling and quaking like it was a live thing.

“Can you breathe, miss?” the paramedic asked.

“What,” Gabby said, her voice high and puzzled. “Yes.”

“Let’s get everyone out of here,” the tall one said, motioning to Mr. Timmins to help. “Clear this area. Give her some room.”

They couldn’t wrest the bow from Gabby’s hand.

Tiptoeing, Deenie kept trying to see over the bear-shouldered the paramedics, who were trying to snap an oxygen mask on Gabby’s face.

“I don’t need to go anywhere,” she was saying, her fingers crooked over the mask, pushing it away. Her eyes landed on Deenie. “Deenie, I don’t.”

“I know,” Deenie said, nodding, her neck thrusting almost as hard as Gabby’s had. It hurt to look at.

“I just felt dizzy or something.”

“But just to be safe,” Deenie said. “Okay, G?”

Tom sat Deenie down in the car, windows shut tight. He asked her to breathe slowly. He was trying to explain something he couldn’t explain.

“…and as soon as we can reach out to Gabby’s mom, we will. They’ll do some tests. It’s just better if you stay here. With me.”

“Why couldn’t we go to the hospital?” Deenie said. “Gabby wanted me to.”

Tom wasn’t so sure about that. When Lara Bishop arrived, soon after the EMS, Gabby’s embarrassment seemed heavy and tortured. She couldn’t even look her mother in the eye.

“She didn’t faint,” Deenie said. “But her body. What was happening to her body?”

The pensive look on Deenie’s face, like when she was small. Finding a cat drowned in the ditch by the mailbox. He didn’t know how long she’d been staring at it, her brother next to her touching it gently with a stick, hoping to nudge it to life. That night she’d had nightmares, her mouth was filled with mud. He’d tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can’t stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He’d never quite gotten used to it himself.

“And what does it all have to do with the health department?” she asked.

“They’re just making sure everything’s okay,” he said.

Of course, he had no idea. When he’d learned about their visit, just before first period, he hadn’t liked the sound of it.

“It was the nurse,” Bill Banasiak told him. “She blew the whistle.”

The new nurse, the peaked blond one whose name Tom could never remember, had called her supervisor at the hospital about a bite on her arm from Lise. Embarrassed, she hadn’t told anyone at first. But now she was worried. What if there was some kind of virus at the school? One of those new kinds?

“Not the sort of talk you want to have at a school,” Banasiak said, shaking his head.

Especially not coming from the nurse, Tom thought.

But he didn’t tell Deenie any of this.

“I’m sure we’ll know more soon,” he said now, realizing he’d said the same thing ten times about Lise. “Okay?”

“Dad,” she said, looking down at his phone resting on the gear panel, “can we call Lise’s mom again?”

“Sure,” he said finally. “I’ll call in a little bit.”

“How about now?” she asked.

“Not right now, okay?”

Deenie nodded tiredly. For a second, she looked very old to him, the rhythmic chin wobble of his own grandmother.

But when she turned back to him, her chin had steadied. Tugging her jacket collar from her neck, she said, “But you will?”

“I will,” he said. Then, “You feel up to class?”

Part of it seemed ridiculous to him, to have his daughter sit and listen to a lecture about the Panama Canal, but he couldn’t think what else to do with her.

For a moment, only a moment, he wished Georgia were there. Georgia, at least the Georgia from before, would have canceled her own appointments, left work, and hijacked Deenie for a soothing schedule of girl time. Or their version of girl time: buying stacks of magazines and tall coffee drinks and curling on the den sofa together. Or something. She seemed to know how to do those things. Until she didn’t.

“I can’t get away,” she had started saying the year before she left. “I’m sorry, Tom. I can’t get away.” That’s how she would put it, as if home were “away.” This was when she was spending an hour a day at the Seven Swallows Inn on Beam Road with her coworker lover (what else could you call him? Married himself, with three kids, cat, dog, hamster). She confessed to this and everything, far more than he’d ever wanted to know, including how ashamed she was of keeping spare underwear in her desk drawer. And how she was “very­—mostly—sure” that this coworker lover wasn’t responsible for the pregnancy, and thus not for the ugly miscarriage, nine days of bleeding and sorrow. That was something else she had Tom to thank for, he guessed.

Later, after she was gone, he found himself driving to the Seven Swallows, sitting in the parking lot for hours, going through the bank statements, the separation agreement, divorce papers, filling in squares with a ballpoint pen, gaze returning again and again to the sign out front: CLEAN COMFORT HERE. He wanted to keep everything in his head all at once.

“I can go to class,” Deenie was saying now, her hand on his arm. “Dad, I can.”

Tom looked at her, saw her eyes fixed on him, searching. Like she had seen something on his face. Something that worried her.

“It’s okay, Dad,” she said, firmly. “I’ll be fine.”

“Sheila,” he said. “Tom Nash. Just leaving another message to see if there’s anything I can do. Call me, okay? If I can be any help. Deenie sends her love to you and Lise both. We all do.”

He thought of Deenie inside the school, wondering, worrying.

An uneasy thought came to him: If she doesn’t find out something, what if she takes off for the hospital again?

So he had another idea.

“Billing, can I help you?”

“Hey, is this Diane? This is Tom. Tom Nash.”

The harried voice on the other end eased into something soft, breathy.

“Tom. Well, well. I was hoping you’d call. I’d given up a little.”

He cleared his throat. “I’d been meaning to. I had a great time. It’s been a crazy couple weeks.”

“Eight weeks.” She laughed.

He’d met her at the post office, on the longest line either had ever seen. She’d told him her son was trying out for junior hockey and Eli was his idol. She didn’t want her boy to play because she worked at the hospital and saw all the players come in with faces dented by flying pucks, teeth knocked out, cracked cheekbones, and, once, a blade to the neck. But what could you do, he loved it.

Tom said he understood.

She’d given him her number and they had dinner at someplace Tom couldn’t quite remember. Maybe it was Italian. He’d meant to call again. A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement.

“Eight weeks, really? I’m sorry. But I’ve been meaning to and now I have a reason, a good excuse.”

“You didn’t need an excuse.”

“Okay, but here it is.”

It turned out all he had to do was say Lise’s name.

“Oh, that girl.”

There was a pause on Diane’s end, and Tom wasn’t sure what to make of it. It wasn’t a large hospital, but still, he was surprised she knew who he meant as soon as he said Lise’s name.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “We were over there yesterday, but they didn’t know much then.”

He heard a momentary clicking sound. “Let’s see what I can find,” she said.

Her lack of hesitation in breaking HIPAA regulations and various laws was a relief. He felt a kick of revived interest in her, followed by wanting to kick himself.

“She’s still not conscious,” she said. “She’s stabilized, though. And they’re doing diagnostics. I can’t tell you exactly.”

“Oh,” Tom said. It seemed like a long time to be unconscious. Unless not conscious was code for “coma.”

“But the mother is a real problem,” she said, her voice quickening a little. “Everyone’s talking about it. First, she blamed the paramedics. Claimed they’d dropped her. They don’t do that, Tom. Then she blamed the ER doctor. Now she seems to have darker theories.”

“Darker theories?”

“I don’t know. Crazy stuff she probably got off the Internet.”

“Ah.”

“We’re hoping she doesn’t find out about the other one.”

“Gabby Bishop,” Tom said quietly.

“You know her too?”

“I do.” Part of him was expecting her to say Gabby was unconscious too. That maybe something had happened to her heart too.

“Jesus, sorry, Tom,” she said. “But they’re not the same. It’s not the same thing. That’s not a cardiac situation.”

He could tell she was the kind of woman who told men what they wanted to hear. That didn’t strike him as a bad thing, even though he knew it should.

“I saw it happen,” he said. “It looked like a seizure.”

“Well, they haven’t even admitted her. They’re doing tests.”

“Diagnostics?”

“Yes,” she said gently.

“Thanks a lot,” he said, “for all this.”

Then a lilt returned to her voice. “You know you left your doggie bag in my fridge. I gave you two days to call, then I ate all that peach cobbler myself.”

Standing in the corner of one of the bathroom stalls, Deenie was trying to slow her breath.

Stop, she told herself. You’re not one of those hysterical girls. You’re not Jaymie Hurwich, who began sobbing in gym class and had to be walked to the nurse’s office for hyper ventilation. Jaymie, who went to the nurse’s office for hyperventilation at least once a month, upset about a test grade, fighting with her boyfriend, grounded by her dad.

Kim Court said she’d seen Skye huddled by herself on the loading dock. “I didn’t think Skye got upset,” she’d said. “Did you?”

And Deenie’s phone kept flashing with texts, one after another.

And pictures of Gabby. Even videos someone took with the phone. A gruesome one of Gabby’s head rearing back, her neck thick and purple under the lights.

And all Deenie could think of was Gabby and Lise in hospital beds, side by side, their arms connected to an elaborate blinking web of cords, tubes.

Both their heads somehow purple and split, their mouths open.

If it happens to both your best friends, the next one must be you. If it happens to both your best friends, it must be you.

But it wasn’t the same. Gabby hadn’t fainted, had never even fallen, exactly, never hit her head or bit anyone. Never had that look Lise had, like an animal trapped.

Gabby had only looked confused, lost, mortified. Which was how everyone looked some of the time, every day.

The door to the girls’ room swung open.

“It was just like with my cat, I’m telling you,” Brooke Campos was saying loudly. “Do they know if she was sleeping in a room with a bat? Or was around a sick bat? That’s how it happens. We found one in our garage, hanging right over the cat bed. We had to have Mr. Mittens destroyed.”

Deenie opened the stall door to see Brooke with a clump of senior girls, all waving their lip-gloss wands, passing them from one to another—watermelon crush, scarlet bloom.

“So you’re saying they both just happened to get bit by bats?” one of the seniors said.

“It was probably the same bat,” Brooke said, a little defensively.

The stall next to Deenie opened and Skye appeared. Deenie hadn’t even known she was in there, those long crocheted skirts of hers, one layered over the other, muffling her movements.

“Hey,” she said, nodding to Deenie.

And she started unhooking all her exotic bracelets to wash her hands, her fingers moving gracefully over the hooks. It was strangely hypnotic.

“Hey,” Deenie said, thinking about what Kim had said about Skye being upset, curled up on the loading dock. She looked at Skye’s face, hunting for a sign: red eyes, swollen face. But you could never see much through all the hair.

“I mean, think about it. What if they slept in the same place?” Brooke said, blotting her mouth with a paper towel. “Gabby and Lise.”

“A place compromised by bats?” the same senior girl said, hand on hip.

“You can say what you want,” Brooke said, digging her heels in. “I just know what it looked like. Her mouth was foaming and her tongue went like this.”

Leaning into the mirror, she stuck her tongue violently to one corner of her mouth.

“That’s not what happened,” Deenie said, watching her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard Nurse Tammy got bit,” Brooke added, ignoring Deenie. “Lise bit her. And she has big teeth.”

“A vampire walks among us,” whistled one of the girls, hooking her fingers under her mouth like fangs.

“So, Brooke, are you saying Lise bit Gabby too?” Deenie said, looking at Skye, trying to get some help. “Or that she just licked her?”

Brooke shook her head pityingly. “I know she’s your friend. Both of them. But.”

“There’s bats down by the lake,” Skye said quietly, looking in the mirror, lifting her hair from her brow.

Deenie looked at Skye, shaking her hands dry.

“If it were rabies, they would have known right away,” the most sensible senior girl asserted. “That’s not hard to figure out.”

Tugging loose three paper towels, Deenie rubbed her hands roughly, until they turned red.

“We’d be lucky if it was rabies,” Skye said, twirling her bracelets back down her wet wrists. “They have a shot for that.”

“So what are you saying it is?” the senior girl said, eyeing Skye, trying to up-and-down look at her, but Skye was not the type to be chastened by that.

Shrugging lightly, she shook a cigarette loose from somewhere in the folds of her skirt. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just thinking about the lake.”

Deenie looked at her.

The senior shook her head dismissively. “No one goes in the lake anyway.”

“No.” Skye nodded, letting her eyes skate across Deenie’s face, and keep going. “They never do.”

Like after all school disruptions, there was a window during which you could do anything, and Eli took advantage, finding a corner in the back of the auditorium as teachers corralled the remaining students.

But soon enough, Assistant Principal Hawk—his real name, maybe—took Eli’s shoulder in his talon grip and marched him to earth science.

No one was paying any attention to poor Mr. Yates talking about natural-gas extraction. Everyone in school had seen what happened to Gabby.

One girl, breathless, announced that Gabby’s mother had arrived and that “her scar looked bigger than ever!”

“Let’s try to keep our focus on the subject at hand,” Mr. Yates said, straining.

“Mr. Yates, maybe it’s the drilling!” Bailey Lu exclaimed, her palm slapping her desk. “My mom says it’s poisoning us!”

Slipping in his earbuds, Eli stared out the window at the practice rink, bright with cut ice.

He wondered if it was one of those superflus and was glad he and Deenie had had all those shots the month before, their arms thick and throbbing. Or maybe it was a girl thing, one of those mysteries, like the way the moon affected them, or like in some of the videos he’d seen online that, mostly, he wished he hadn’t.

But it didn’t matter what it was. It was going to be bad for his sister, who loved Gabby even more than she loved Lise. Who talked so much, always in a hushed voice, about the Thing That Happened to Gabby, about her cokehead father, who liked to show up at school every so often, begging to see his daughter. Maybe you should have thought about that before you picked up the claw hammer, Eli always thought.

The truth was, he didn’t know Gabby very well, just as the tall, pale-faced girl all the other girls copied, her clothes, the streaks she’d put in her hair then dye away again, the way she spray-painted her cello case silver.

He did remember being surprised last fall when she started going out with Tyler Nagy, a hockey player from Star-of-the-Sea. Eli had never liked him, the way he was always talking about the screeching girls who came to all the games, the fourteen-year-old he said wanted him to do things to her with the taped end of his stick.

The only time Eli’d ever really spent with Gabby was when Deenie was a freshman and Gabby had stayed with them for a few weeks. Her mother was having a “hard time,” which had something to do with all the empty wine bottles in her recycling bin and not being able to get out of bed, but no one ever told him the rest. It was soon after their own mom had moved out, and it seemed like having Gabby there was good for Deenie too, who’d spent hours reading by herself in her room back then.

As far as he could tell, Gabby never really slept. More than once, he’d spotted her hiding on the sofa in the den, watching TV in the middle of the night. Hour after hour of the same show where they dressed middle-aged women in new outfits, dyeing all their hair the same shiny red.

His dad told him he kept finding gum wrappers, dozens of them, trapped in the folds of the quilt.

One night, not long before she went home, he found her in the basement, lying on the Ping-Pong table, crying.

Girls—at least, the girls he knew, not his sister but other girls—always seemed to be crying.

But Gabby’s crying was different, felt wild and broken and hurt his chest to hear.

Drumming his fingers on the Ping-Pong table until it vibrated, he tried to talk to her, to make her feel better, but the things that worked on Deenie—recounting graphic hockey injuries, popping his shoulder blade, trying to rap—didn’t seem right.

Finally, he had an idea. Took a chance. Pulled one of the Ping-Pong rackets from under her left thigh, reached to the floor for the ball.

“Come on, little girl,” he said, pointing to the other racket. “Show me what you got.”

The grin that cracked—with tortured slowness—across her face stunned and rallied him.

They played for forty-five minutes, flicking and top-spinning and crushing that hollow ball, until they woke up everyone in the house.

I’m just thinking about the lake.

Deenie couldn’t believe Skye had said it. In front of all those girls. In front of Brooke Campos, who stopped talking only while texting and usually not then.

At the final bell, Deenie found her at her locker.

“Skye, why did you mention the lake?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with any of this,” Deenie whispered. “So why bring it up?”

Skye looked at her, shrugged. Skye was always shrugging.

“I don’t think,” she said, closing her locker door, “we really know what this has to do with.”

They weren’t supposed to go into the lake. No one was. School trips, Girl Scout outings, science class, you might go and look at it, stand behind the orange mesh fences.

Every spring and at the end of the summer, the lake would give over to acid green. It was called “the bloom” and Deenie’s fifth-grade teacher warned them, pointing to the iridescent water, that it meant it was filled with bacteria and hidden species. With a stick, he would poke one of the large blades of algae that washed up on the shoreline. One year, during a conservation project for Girl Scouts, they found a dead dog on one of the banks, its fur neon, mouth hanging open, tongue bright like a highlighter pen.

When she was very young, she believed the slumber-party tales about it, that a teenage couple had gone skinny-dipping and drowned, their mouths clogged with loam, bodies seen glowing on the shoreline from miles away. Or that swimming in it gave you miscarriages or took away your ovaries and you’d be barren for life. Or the worst one, that a little boy had died in the lake and his cries could still be heard on summer nights.

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frightened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid. Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.

“It looks beautiful,” her mom had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. “It is beautiful. But it makes people sick.”

To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilies, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don’t touch, don’t taste, don’t get too close.

And then, last week.

It had been Lise’s idea to go to the lake, to go in the water. She’d stood in it, waving at them, her tights stripped off, her legs white as the moon.

It was nine o’clock and Tom wasn’t sure where the day had gone, other than to ragged places, again.

Deenie was hunched over the kitchen island, eating cereal for dinner.

Outside, Eli was slamming a tennis ball against the garage door with his practice stick. Sometimes it was hard to remember his son without that stick in his hand, cocked over his shoulder. Even watching TV, he’d have it propped on his knee. It seemed to have happened sometime during early high school, when the other parts of Eli, the boy who liked camping and books about shipwrecks and expeditions and looking for arrowheads in Binnorie Woods after a heavy rain, had drifted away, or been swallowed whole.

His phone rang: Lara Bishop.

“Tom, thanks for your message.”

“Of course,” he said. “How’s Gabby?”

“We’re home. They were going to keep her overnight, but she seemed to be doing okay. And she hates that place so much. So here we are.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Really glad.”

He could feel Deenie’s stare, her hand gripping her own phone.

“Well,” she said, and there was a pause. “I guess I just wanted you to know. And, you know, to check in. See what you might have…I don’t know.”

“I understand,” he said, but he wasn’t sure what she was suggesting.

“I mean, we don’t know what this is,” she said.

“No,” he said, eyes on Deenie. “But I don’t know anything. You mean about Lise?” He wasn’t going to tell her what Medical Biller Diane had said.

“Or if maybe…Gabby’s dad didn’t call you, did he?”

“Charlie? No. No.”

“I was worried he might have found out. From the school maybe. I don’t want Gabby to have to deal with him right now.”

“Of course not.” But what he was thinking was, Weren’t they obligated to notify him? He was still her dad.

“Thanks. It’s just…” And her voice trailed away.

“And if he had called,” he added, though he wasn’t sure why, “I wouldn’t have told him anything.”

“Thank you, Tom.” He could hear the relief in her voice. It all felt oddly intimate, in that parents-in-shared-crisis way. Lightning hitting the Little League batting cage. Mall security agreeing not to call the police. Those “whew” moments fellow parents share.

After he hung up, he wondered how he would feel if he were Charlie Bishop. He would never, ever do what Charlie had done, even if it had been an accident. Once, before everything, they’d been teammates for a pickup baseball game, had cheered each other on, played darts after and drank shots of tequila with beer backs.

That was just a few weeks before the accident and it made Tom sick to think about now. How much he’d liked Charlie. How Charlie had slapped him on the back and said he knew just how hard marriage could be.

The minute her phone rang, Deenie began running upstairs to her room.

“Gabby—”

“Hey, girl,” Gabby said.

“Are you okay, what—”

“Hey, girl,” she repeated.

“Hey, girl,” Deenie replied, slowing her words down, almost grinning. “What’d they say at the hospital?”

She leaned back on her bed, feeling the soft thunk of her pillow.

“They did all these tests,” Gabby said. “They made me count and say who the last two presidents were. They gave me a tall drink of something that was like those candy orange peanuts that taste like banana. If you put a bag of those in a blender with gravel and old milk.”

“Yum, girl.”

Gabby snickered a little. “Then they strapped a mask on me and rolled me into this thing that was like the worst tanning bed ever. Everything smelled. Then they did this other thing where they put these little puckers all over my head and I had to lie there for twenty minutes while they shot electricity through my body.” She laughed. “It was awesome.”

“It sounds awesome,” Deenie said, forcing a laugh. “So.”

“So.”

“What is it? What happened to you?”

“They don’t know,” she said. “They even made me talk to a therapist. She asked if I was under stress. She told my mom that sometimes this happens. Like maybe I was upset and my body just freaked out.”

“Oh,” Deenie said.

“I asked her if she meant ‘stress’ like having your dad tear a hole through your mom’s face.”

Deenie felt her chest tighten, but Gabby was laughing, tiredly.

“So they don’t think it’s like with Lise?”

“I just need to relax,” Gabby said, not really answering, a funny bump in her voice. “I guess maybe if I light some geranium candles and take a bath, like the doctors used to tell my mom when she couldn’t breathe in the grocery store or the mall.”

It was interesting to think about, the slender filaments between the worry in your head, or the squeeze in your chest, and the rest of your body, your whole body and everything in it.

Lise, the summer before, had lost thirteen pounds in less than two weeks after something had happened at the town pool with a boy she liked. She’d thought he liked her, and maybe he did, but then suddenly he didn’t anymore.

She and Lise and Gabby had devoted endless hours to imagining him as Lise’s boyfriend and then to hating him and the girl with the keyhole bikini they’d spotted walking with him by the snack bar. Deenie was sure he’d be at the center of their thoughts forever. But right now she couldn’t summon his name.

Since then, there’d been so many boys they’d speculated about. Boys who liked them and then didn’t. Or maybe a boy they didn’t like until the boy liked someone else.

But Lise said the boy at the pool was worth it. Running her fingers over her stomach, she called it the Mike Meister diet.

Mike Meister, that was his name. Always a new boy, even last week, Lise at the lake, whispering in Deenie’s ear. How could you believe any of it was real?

Lise, her head, her body, her flighty, fitful heart, were like one thing, and always changing.

But it was different with Gabby. Deenie knew all her beats and rhythms, had seen her through everything with her dad, her mom, her bad breakup. And this was not the way stresses played themselves out on her body. Everything stayed inside, her body folding in on itself.

“Well,” Deenie said. “You’re home now. That’s good.”

“I guess everyone was talking about it,” Gabby said. “The whole school saw.”

Deenie didn’t say anything. She was thinking of Gabby on that stage, the way her body jerked like a pull-string toy. Like a body never moves, not a real body of someone you know.

“Deenie,” she said. “Say something.”

“What did it feel like?” Deenie blurted, her face feeling hotter on the pillow.

Gabby paused. Then her voice dropped low, like she was right there beside her. “There was this shadow,” she said. “I could see it from the corner of my eye, but I wasn’t supposed to look at it.”

Deenie felt her hand go around her own neck.

“If I turned my head to look,” Gabby continued, “something really scary would happen. And I couldn’t look. I could not look.”

Deenie pictured it. That smile on Gabby’s face after, when everyone surrounded her on the stage. Like something painted on her face. A red-moon curve.

“I didn’t look, Deenie,” Gabby whispered. “But it happened anyway.”

I’m okay, she’d said. I really am. I’m fine.

That smile, not a real thing but something set there, to promise you something, to give you a white lie.

He waited until he couldn’t hear the hum of her voice anymore through the floor. Then he knocked on Deenie’s door.

“Hey, honey,” he said, poking his head in.

“Hey,” Deenie said, cross-legged on her bed.

As ever, her bed like a towering nest, always at least two or three books tufted in its folds. Deenie never fell asleep without a book or her phone in her hands. Probably both. When Georgia used to make her clean, Deenie would hoist the bedding over her head, shaking all the books, folders, handouts onto the carpet.

“They told her it might be stress,” Deenie said. “Like you said.”

Walking toward her, his foot caught on her white Pizza House shirt, ruched in the quilt where it hit the floor.

“Well,” he said, picking up the shirt, sprayed with flour and forever damp, “when things like this happen, they can really knock around your body.”

“I guess,” she said, watching him closely. He wondered if he wasn’t supposed to pick up her things. He tossed the shirt onto the bed lightly.

“What about you?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like Gabby to me.”

“I know, Deenie,” he said. “We just gotta wait and see.”

He sat down at the foot of the bed. She looked expectant, like she wanted something from him, but he had no idea what. He’d seen that look a hundred times before, from her and from her mother.

Then, nodding, she fumbled for her headphones, and he could feel her retreating, her face turning cloudy and inscrutable.

“Dad,” she said, sliding the headphones on, “maybe I shouldn’t go to work on Saturday. With everything that’s going on.”

He looked at her.

“I think maybe I just want to be home.”

He didn’t know what to say, her eyes big and baffling as ever, so he said yes.

The minute her dad left the room, Deenie wanted to jump up and throw the shirt in the laundry basket. She didn’t know why she hadn’t already.

But she didn’t want to touch it or look at it.

It reminded her of the car, and Sean Lurie, the shirt wedged beneath her on the seat.

And then all the other things she didn’t want to think about.

Lise’s face. The lake. Everything.

There was too much already, without thinking about that.