Granite Harbor, page 15
Ethan smiled gamely. “I wouldn’t know.”
Chester glared at both of them. “One of these days I’ll get you back.”
“Yeah, right.”
Chester lumbered away.
“Call me, text me,” said Roger.
“I will, Roger.”
Roger put his hand on Ethan’s arm and squeezed. “Take care,” he said to both of them.” He headed toward the door.
“Who was that guy with Roger?” asked Sophie. “Why was he talking about tools?”
“That’s Chester. He’s just joking. We took some of his tools years ago when he was building stuff at the Y for the summer camp. We hid them all over the place, so it was like an Easter egg hunt, he had to find them all. He’s always joking about it.”
“So, can we go see your ships?”
* * *
Sophie looked through the wavy glass of the bottle as Ethan explained what was happening to the ship: it was stuck in the ice, probably sinking. Those were Eskimos looking at it.
Sophie shivered. It was almost as cold as the Arctic in the basement. “Why’s your house so cold?”
“The furnace is broken. I can make a fire upstairs.”
His mom was out. Ethan made tea and a fire in the woodstove in the living room. They ate crackers covered with some jam he found in a little blue jar in the refrigerator.
Sophie’s phone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans.
“Do you want to get that?”
“No,” she said. “It’s my mother.”
For some reason they both found this funny. They began giggling. Ethan pulled a throw over themselves on the sofa. Ethan heard his own laughter, which sounded young and babyish, but he couldn’t stop it. And Sophie was making the same sort of noise, higher-pitched and sweet. When there was a pause, Ethan reached for the little blue jar he’d found in the refrigerator. He stuck his finger into the sweet-but-earthy-tasting jam. It had produced a slight, pleasant bubble effect on his tongue.
“Want some more?” He offered it to Sophie.
She shook her head and sat up. “I better go soon.”
They both heard knocking on the door. They dropped down onto the sofa cushions and stared at each other.
Ethan whispered, “At least we know it’s not my mother.”
They tried not to laugh. Sophie put a hand over his mouth, and Ethan put his hand over her mouth, and they were reduced to stifled snorts. He pulled her hand away and gasped for air. Sophie rolled on top of him and clamped her hand over his mouth again, her face inches above his.
From outside the door. “Hello?”
Sophie’s eyes widened with alarm. “It’s my dad!” she whispered.
“Hello? Isabel?”
They stared at each other, aware of their bodies sandwiched together, and the new thing that was happening between them.
“Hello? Ethan?” Sophie’s father—the detective’s voice!—
Sophie’s phone vibrated again. It was in the front pocket of her jeans, vibrating between them. Ethan felt it throbbing into his crotch.
“Oh wow—”
“Shh!” Sophie dropped her face until her lips covered Ethan’s. He felt their swelling size and soft shape. He opened his mouth slightly, and her lips parted too and their tongues met, warm, wet, tentative. His eyes closed, and for a moment he existed entirely inside their two mouths.
They both heard the car start and drive away. Sophie raised her face, her mouth still open.
Ethan said, “My mom’ll probably be home soon.”
“I better go home.” She rolled off him and pulled out her phone to look at it. “Yeah. My mom. Once she starts she never stops.”
They stood up, swayed and held on to each other. Sophie looked at his full lips and kissed him again.
30
“Why aren’t you eating your dinner?” Morgana asked. “That’s a beautiful and perfectly cooked piece of wild salmon. From Alaska. Eat up.”
Sophie saw that poor wild salmon with a big hook in its mouth, twisting violently as it was pulled out of the water, then its rotting flesh as it was shipped thousands of miles on a bed of slushy ice. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
“What is the matter with you?” Morgana peered into her face. “You’re white as a sheet.”
Sophie thought she was going to throw up. “I don’t feel well.”
“Then you’d better go up to your room.” Morgana removed the plate and put it on the granite counter near the sink. “You can eat it for breakfast.”
Sophie almost barfed right then. She got off her stool, scooped up Bella, her dachshund, and left the kitchen.
* * *
Her bedroom on the second floor of Belleport was not like the warm, mussed, comfortable, personalized bedrooms of her teenage friends, full of untidily tossed fleece throws and posters of boy bands, Taylor Swift, makeup, clothes stuffed into corners—or her room at her father’s house, with the books he’d bought her that she didn’t read, but with her own stuff she’d put on the shelves, photographs and pictures on the walls that she’d chosen. A room she’d made her own and liked to spend time in with her friends.
Her bedroom at Belleport was like a museum space. A young lady’s bedroom designed, curated, a showplace for the treasures Morgana had bought for Sophie over the years: the Matisse with the floating girls, the original Broadway poster of The King and I starring Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner. The French cabinet with beveled glass holding netsuke pieces from the Edo period. The four Noh masks, faces of highly individual character, yet scarily devoid of the spark of life, hanging on a wall. All were as familiar to Sophie as her own hand, but they meant nothing to her. She was allowed to sleep in the hand-painted bed, use the en suite bathroom and walk-in closet, the leather-topped French Empire desk with a protective plastic sheet on which to do her homework, but she wasn’t allowed to touch the treasures or be messy and make more work for Roxanna, her mother’s cleaning lady.
Twenty minutes later, she was lying on her bed, rolled over on her right side facing away from the door, wrapped around Bella, Snapchatting with her friend Christina, when her mother abruptly opened the door.
“Get up,” said Morgana.
“What?”
Bella leaped off the bed and shot out the door.
Her mother took Sophie’s hand and pulled her onto her feet. “Come with me.”
“What? What’s going on?”
Morgana opened the door to the bathroom, pushed Sophie in, and handed her a tall water glass. “Pee in that.”
“What?”
“Pee.”
“Mo-om? What’s going on?”
“That’s what I want to know.” Morgana stood implacably before her, her closed fists pushed into her hips. “You’re not leaving this bathroom until you pee into that glass.”
Sophie sat down on the toilet seat. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re high as a kite. What is it?”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t lie to me. I know you’ve taken drugs, Sophie. I know, okay? Do you think I, your mother, who knows you better than you know yourself or anyone ever will, can’t see it?”
“But I haven’t! I haven’t, Mom.”
Abruptly, Morgana’s face crumpled and she began to cry. “Sophie, you have no idea what I do for you. What I’ve tried to give you. I love you more than you’ll ever understand. And I can’t imagine you would ever do this to me if you loved me.” Morgana leaned back against the sink and wailed with a long keening sound.
Sophie began to cry. “Mom, please don’t cry. You know I love you too.” She stood up and hugged her mother, and they cried together. “Mom, I know what you do for me, and you know I love you.”
They hugged and wept, and each said I love you to the other several times.
“But I haven’t done anything, Mom.”
“Well, we’ll see, right?” Morgana gripped Sophie’s arm with one hand, pushed her down onto the toilet, and held out the glass with the other hand. “Weed? Bong? Ecstasy? Something mellow for sure, because, darlin’, you are out of your gourd. And you think I can’t even see it.”
“I didn’t take anything!”
“I’ve got all night,” said Morgana, blinking her tears away furiously.
Still crying, Sophie unbelted her jeans, pulled them down, sat on the toilet. After a while, it came. Sophie’s shoulders were shaking as she handed the glass to her mother.
Morgana placed it beside the sink and drew out of her pocket the Walgreens twelve-panel drug test she’d just raced out to buy, and placed the panel in the glass. “We’ll just see.”
Sophie pulled up her jeans and returned to her bed. Morgana came into the room and sat down on the bed. She stroked Sophie’s hair.
“Darlin’, you think I don’t know anything about drugs? My dear, I took everything. But later, when I was at college, not at your age. I know what happens. Who was it? That big cave boy Jordan? Richie Podolsky?”
Sophie didn’t answer. Her mother stroked her hair for another minute, before she got up and went into the bathroom. Then she came back.
“Take a look.”
Sophie didn’t move for a moment. But she was curious. Her mother was right: she wasn’t herself. Things had been intense with Ethan. They hadn’t been able to stop laughing. But the salmon. And the way her bedroom sort of … barked at her when she came into it this evening.
She rolled over and took a look at the closely spaced thin panels her mother was holding between her thumb and forefinger.
The panels were clear.
“These tests are useless on hallucinogens. So what was it? Acid? Mushrooms? You need to tell me, Sophie. Or I will ground you for a month.”
“I’ve told you, Mom. Nothing.”
“I know you’re on something. It’s not alcohol, so what is it, Sophie? Tell me!”
“Nothing!” Sophie sat up. The clear panels fueled her outrage. “I told you, I didn’t take anything! Stop bullying me!”
“Bullying you? I am your mother. I’m in charge of you. And your well-being.”
“So? Does that give you the right to bully me? Leave me alone!” A force welled up inside her like a sneeze, filling her with a molten fury. She shrieked. “Go away! Go AWAY!”
Morgana was startled. Sophie had never spoken to her like this. Her face was contorted and strange, white with striations of color on her neck and cheeks. The big SHANE letters on her forehead still dark and horrifying. “Sophie, what is happening to you? I don’t recognize you.”
“I recognize you!” Sophie rose on her knees on the bed and at the same time backed away from her mother, holding a pillow to her chest. “You’re a bully. You bully me and you bully Dad.” A fury, validated by the clean results of her drug test, filled her. “Now leave me alone!”
Sophie’s face transmogrified, quite suddenly, from a familiar cast of small, hurt, unhappiness, into a mask of eye-blazing hatred.
Morgana’s own eyes hardened into a calm, stone-cold regard. Her daughter was clearly in the grip of whatever had violently distorted her personality. Ayahuasca? Who knew what was available to schoolchildren now. And her father—the policeman!—unable to stop her. More likely unaware. A fool.
She spoke now in a voice Sophie had learned to dislike. The acquired moderation of her accent slipped away and the words came in the broader twang of Morgana’s natural West Texas Hill Country: “You better mind your p’s and q’s, my girl, or you’re going to thrive.”
Sophie was suddenly afraid. “What do you mean, thrive?”
Her mother laughed, softly. “Oh, that’s just a lil’ol place down in Texas.”
Morgana left the room. She closed the door with an expensive click that was satisfying to them both.
Sophie rolled off the bed and went to her desk. She opened her computer and typed into Google: Thrive Texas. It came up immediately.
Thrive Girls Ranch & Home
A year-round Christian boarding school in Central Texas for girls ages twelve to seventeen who are misbehaving and struggling with self-destructive or dangerous behaviors. We help girls transform into responsible, respectful, and gracious young women.
31
Isabel was sitting on the granite steps outside his kitchen door when Alex pulled up in his Subaru. She stood as he got out of his car and came toward her.
“I need to talk with you,” she said.
Inside, Alex made tea. She sat as she used to on the big sofa in the breakfast room off the kitchen. The wall of double-glazed windows looked out at the garden, now almost tucked in for its dormant winter.
Five years in a blink.
He’d found the house, a small converted barn, in the classifieds of the Granite Harbor Herald, when it was still printed on paper, the first place he looked at and took immediately as Morgana moved swiftly to divorce him, thinking it would do for a while. He’d now lived here twelve years, longer than he’d lived anywhere since leaving his childhood home in Manchester.
He brought in two mugs of tea, placed them on the coffee table, and sat in the threadbare armchair facing her across the coffee table.
“I was hoping to talk with Ethan. I went by the house, but no one was home.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t get it together today. He’s home, he texted me. What do you want to talk to him about?”
“His clothes. Apparently, he wears some expensive hoodies.”
“It’s all secondhand. He buys and sells used clothing and sneakers online. He makes a little money from that and from his ship models, but none of the stuff he buys and wears is expensive.”
“Maybe it’s more than you know.”
“I know how much it costs, and what it costs new. He shows me. It’s not expensive. Why?”
“Do you know if he’s doing any drugs?”
She looked at him sharply. “I don’t know. Maybe some weed. Why?”
“Anything harder? Any mushrooms?”
“I don’t think so. Why? Was Shane?”
“We’re looking into everything.” Alex tried to make it sound vague. “Why are you here?”
Isabel took off her hat, a slouchy snood, throwing it on the sofa beside her coat. He’d made a point of not looking at her closely in front of Ethan in their kitchen. She’d worn her hair—which he’d loved, dark and wavy—below her shoulders when they’d been together. Now he looked at her buzz cut. It was still dark, and thick, with new hints of white. She was all face now. As though she had stripped naked, with nothing to conceal her.
“I never told you some stuff. About me.”
“Okay.” He sat back in the chair and sipped his tea.
“I knew Joshua wasn’t coming back. I knew it before he left. I didn’t tell him, I didn’t want to sound hysterical or irrational. As you know, I sailed to the Caribbean with him before Ethan was born. He knew what he was doing. Lots of people sail across the Atlantic all the time, alone, and they’re usually fine. There was no reason for me to think that anything would happen. He was very capable. So I didn’t say, ‘I’m sure you’re going to die, please don’t go.’”
“It was probably natural.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” she said quickly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I saw his boat being destroyed. It was very specific. I saw it being crushed and splintered, going down fast in the water. I saw it. Vividly.”
“What, like—”
“Like I was there. Not like a dream. I saw it, felt it, heard it.”
He nodded, trying to make his face open, nonjudgmental.
“I’m getting to my point—why I’m here. I have to tell you this first.”
“Okay.”
“As you know, Joshua never arrived in England. There was no weather system around him when we last heard from him. I’m sure he was run down by a ship. Maybe I told you that.”
“I remember you saying something like that.”
“The point is, I knew Joshua wasn’t coming back because I’d seen it.”
“Okay.”
“Since then, I’ve seen other things. A girl, Amy Leroy, went missing in the winter, four years ago. I saw where she was, though I didn’t know the place. I’d never been there. I told the state police—”
“The girl in the toboggan chute.”
“Yes.”
“The official story was that someone provided information, but in the department we heard that it was a clairvoyant. Or something like that. That was you?”
“Psychic, clairvoyant, second sight—all those labels carry associations. I knew people would start asking me all sorts of things, so I told the police I didn’t want anyone to know it was me. And it doesn’t happen often.”
“So, you’ve seen something?”
“Alex, stop interrupting me,” she said impatiently. “You’re always doing that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He knew he had a tendency to finish other people’s sentences, move a conversation along.
Isabel’s eyes bored into him “There’s a trigger. And an association. With Joshua, I was helping him get ready for his race, stowing things aboard his boat. One of them was a flare kit. It’s like a little toolbox with a flare gun and flares to shoot off if you’re in trouble. You can shoot off a flare that might be seen by ships in the area or maybe an aircraft, especially at night. I was putting the kit in a locker in the boat and I was suddenly aware that there wouldn’t be time to get it out and shoot off a flare. I had the kit in my hand and those words came into my head: ‘there won’t be time.’ And then I saw the boat being crushed and going down fast. Like I was there. I saw it. I heard it.”
Alex remained still. He waited a moment, almost asked a question, and then she spoke.
“The trigger for the toboggan chute was Ethan. He’d met Amy three weeks earlier on a school ski trip to Sunday River, and he was upset when she went missing. She’d given him a friendship bracelet she’d made. When he showed me the bracelet I touched it, and I saw her in the toboggan chute. I knew she was there and very cold. I felt the ice and the tightness of the toboggan chute that was holding her in. Like I was there too.”
