Chapter 10
The Boat Ramp
Sofia Whitlock counted her breaths the way other people checked their phones.
She did it without thinking, in the car, in the shower, in the dark of her bedroom at night: four in, hold, six out. It had been a habit since she was five years old, when a doctor in Port Merrin with a bristly mustache had held a plastic mask to her face and told her mother that the child had reactive airways, which was a lovely, slippery, expensive way of saying that her lungs sometimes decided the world was on fire. She had an inhaler on a lanyard round her neck, and another in the glove box, and a third in her purse, and a note taped inside her wallet that said, in her mother's tidy nurse's capitals, ALBUTEROL FIRST. IF NO CHANGE IN 20 MIN CALL 911. DO NOT TRY TO BE BRAVE.
She had read that note a hundred times. She found it funny. It was the single most accurate thing anyone had ever written about her.
At twenty past eight on Saturday evening, with the dishes from her sister's birthday party still stacked in the sink and a cake the shape of a lighthouse reduced to a ruined stump, she stood in the front hall of the only house she remembered and looked at her father.
"I'm going to the ramp."
"Who with?"
"Jules. Priya. Marcus, if he stops being a drama queen. Some people from the diner." She jangled her keys. "It's the last Saturday before everybody leaves. Somebody's bringing a guitar. It's a bonfire, Dad, it's not a crime."
"I didn't say it was."
"You have a face."
"I have the only face I've got."
"It says and what if." She said it lightly. She was eighteen, five foot six, narrow-shouldered, with her mother's dark curls scraped into an unpromising knot and her father's gray eyes behind a pair of round wire glasses, and she had perfected the particular look that a girl of her age gives a parent who is being unreasonable and knows it. "I've done this fifty times. I've done it since I was sixteen. I'm not going to get kidnapped by a bonfire."
"I know."
"So stop doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing. Where you look at the door." She nodded at him. "You've been doing it all week. You looked at the door at breakfast. You looked at it at church, and church doesn't have a door, it has an arch. And you looked at it when Mr. Tobin came, and Mr. Tobin has known us for six years." She pointed a finger. "I notice things. It runs in the family."
He didn't answer.
He stood at the foot of the stairs in his good gray shirt, with a dish towel over one shoulder, and for the first time in her life Sofi saw her father's face do something that she could not read. It was not anger. It was not even worry. It was something stiller than both, a sort of stripped, attentive blankness, like the face of a man listening for a sound in another room.
"Text me when you get there," he said.
"Dad."
"Text me when you get there. And when you leave. And when you get home." He hesitated. "Humor me."
"You're being weird."
"Yes."
"Is it about Millbrook?" She had been waiting to say it. It came out sharper than she meant. "Because you can't keep doing this. I'm going. I'm leaving on the twenty-third. I got in, I got the scholarship, I paid the deposit with my own money. It's three hours from here, it's not the moon. You can't keep saying maybe next year."
"I know."
"You said it in March. You said it in May."
"I know I did."
"It's where I was born." Her voice cracked, and she was furious at it. "Port Merrin. It's forty minutes from campus. You never take us there. You never talk about it. I was nine when we left and I remember the stairs in our old house, Dad, I remember the color of the door, and you act as if it's a place that burned down." She dragged a breath. Four in. Hold. "I just want to see it. That's all. I want to see where I was a kid."
Her father looked at her.
It lasted a long time. In the front room behind him someone had put on a record, and her mother was laughing at something, and the last of the neighbors were calling goodnights on the lawn. The hall clock ticked. He took the dish towel off his shoulder and folded it, in four, very precisely.
"After the weekend," he said, "we'll talk."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Properly? Not a we'll see?"
"Properly." He looked suddenly very tired. "I'll tell you whatever you want."
She stared at him. And then, because he was her father, and because he looked as if he were about to cry, which he never did, she crossed the hall and put her arms round his waist and her head on his chest, and felt, under her ear, his heart going slow and heavy, like a man walking uphill.
"You're so strange," she said into his shirt.
"I know."
"I love you."
"I know that too."
She let go. She picked up her keys. At the door she turned, as she always did, and looked back at the three of them in the golden light: her father in the hall, her mother in the doorway of the front room with a glass in her hand, and her sister, in the new blue dress, sprawled on the carpet among the wrapping paper, with her notebook open on her knee, counting something under her breath.
"Bye, Ivy-bean."
"Five things," said Ivy, without looking up.
"One. Your hair's a mess. Two. You're wearing boots with a dress. Three, you've got icing on your elbow. Four, I'm very proud of you."
"That's not a thing you notice."
"It is if you do it right," said Sofi, and went out into the dusk.
The old boat ramp was two miles along the shore road, at the end of a rutted track through the birches, and she drove it with the windows down.
It was a perfect night. It had cooled off after the heat of the day, and the air that came in through the window smelled of cut hay and lake water and woodsmoke, and the sky over the water was going from apricot to violet, with one hard bright star above the pines. She drove her mother's old Honda, a dented green Civic with a bumper sticker that said I BRAKE FOR HEDGEHOGS, with the radio turned up and one hand out of the window making shapes in the wind. She felt, for the first time in a week, the tightness in her chest begin to loosen. Four in. Hold. Six out. It was always the same. All it took was a road, and the evening, and the knowledge that you were going somewhere with nobody watching.
At the top of the track she slowed, and stopped.
There was no fire.
She sat with the engine ticking and the headlights on the dusk, looking down the slope to the water. The ramp was empty. The long concrete tongue ran down into the lake between its walls of reeds, gray and cracked, strewn with weed. The gravel lot at the top was bare except for a single vehicle, a white van, parked with its nose to the track and its lights off. There was no guitar. There were no voices. No one had gathered wood.
She checked her phone.
Nothing. There was a message from Jules, sent at seven: Cancelled!! Marcus's mom is being weird. Rain check?? She read it twice. She felt the small flat deflation of a girl who has dressed for a party that is not happening, and the flicker of irritation: why didn't she text sooner?
The sliding door of the van opened.
A man got out. He was thirty or so, in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a close-cropped scalp and a scar through his upper lip. He lifted a hand. He walked toward the Civic with an easy, rolling stride, smiling, as one smiles at a neighbor.
Sofi rolled down her window another inch.
"Sofia Whitlock?"
She did not answer.
"Evening, miss. Sorry to bother you." He stopped three yards from the car and spread his hands, showing that they were empty. "I'm one of your dad's friends. Name's Rourke. He asked us to look out for you tonight. He's had a bit of trouble at the house and he doesn't want you walking home alone."
"What kind of trouble?"
"Nothing serious. Just a prowler. He said to bring you back." The smile widened. "He said to say the lighthouse is out."
She felt it go through her like cold water.
She had not heard those words in nine years. She had heard them once, in the dark of a car, on a night in August when she was nine years old and very sleepy, in the back seat beside a baby in a car seat, with her mother weeping silently in front and her father driving with his lights off along a road she did not know. He had said, over his shoulder, quite gently: Sofi, I'm going to teach you a game. If anyone ever comes to you and says your dad sent them, you ask them what the word is. And the word is lighthouse. And if they don't know it, you run.
And if they do? she had asked.
Then I'll be dead, her father had said. And you'll know it's true.
He had laughed afterward, and said he was joking, and she had gone to sleep.
"What's the word?" said Sofi.
The man blinked. "I told you. The lighthouse is—"
"That's not what I asked." Her mouth was suddenly dry. "What's the word?"
The smile did not change. But something behind it did, a small flat settling, like a lid being put on a pan. The man's eyes flicked past her, to the van, and back. He took one slow step to the left, so that he stood at the corner of her bumper.
"Don't make this hard," he said.
She put the car in reverse.
The driver's window exploded.
She did not hear the shot. She heard only the glass, a bright coarse crash like a dropped tray, and felt a rain of grit on her cheek, and saw a second man coming round the van with something short and black in his hand. He had a beard. He moved fast. She stamped on the accelerator, and the Honda shot backward up the track with a howl, and the back end slammed into a birch, and the engine stalled.
Come on come on come on—
The door was wrenched open. A hand seized her by the hair.
It was Rourke. He dragged her out of the seat in one motion, so hard that the seat belt cut across her collarbone and her glasses went flying, and she hit the gravel on her side with a scream. A boot caught her in the ribs. The air went out of her. She tried to roll, and he put a knee in her back and a hand over her mouth, and she smelled sweat and gun oil and something sweetish, like a hospital. She fought. She had never in her life been in a fight. She kicked, and clawed, and bit down on the palm, and he swore and cuffed her across the ear, and the world rang.
"Hold her still!"
"I'm trying—"
"She's a bloody wildcat. Get the bag. Get the bag."
She was breathing wrong.
She knew it at once, with the strange cold clarity that comes in a crisis, as one notices a pain in a dream. The first small wheeze, high and thin, in the top of her chest. A tightening, like a hand closing round her ribs. No. No, not now. Not now. She dragged at the air and it would not go in. It came in sips. It came in thin hot threads that burned and went nowhere, and her vision began to pulse at the edges, and she heard herself making a noise like a rusty hinge.
"What's wrong with her?"
"She's having a fit."
"She's faking."
"She's blue, Rourke."
The weight lifted from her back. She rolled onto her side, curled around the pain, and clawed at her throat. The lanyard. The lanyard. Her fingers found the plastic, the small cold barrel, and she dragged it out of her collar and got it to her mouth and pressed, and breathed.
Once. Twice. A bitter chalky mist, and a long, shuddering, merciful intake of air.
"Jesus," said the bearded man. "It's a puffer. She's got a bloody puffer."
"Take it off her."
"Why?"
"Because I said."
Rourke bent. His face was a foot from hers: pale, scarred, perfectly calm. He reached for the lanyard with a big square hand, and she saw in the flat light of the headlights the veins on the back of it, and the gold ring, and the dirty crescent of each fingernail, and she understood with the sharp irrelevance of fear that she was going to be taken somewhere and no one would know.
Dad told me, she thought. He told me what to do.
He said: you never go to the water without a knife.
It was in her pocket.
She had carried it every day since she was twelve. It was a plain steel fillet knife with a six-inch blade, in a leather sheath, the sort sold in every bait shop on the lake; her father had bought it for her on the morning of her twelfth birthday, in the shed, and shown her how to hold it. Not to use, he had said. Never to use. Just so you've got it. She had felt faintly insulted. She had worn it at the waist for six years like a rabbit's foot, and she could not remember a single occasion on which she had unsheathed it for any purpose more dramatic than a perch.
Her hand went to her hip.
She did not decide. It was not that kind of moment. She felt the cold leather under her fingers, and the horn handle, and the blade slid out as easily as a sigh; she saw the man's throat, soft and brown and ridged with a pulse, a hand's breadth from her face. She thrust upward with her whole body.
It went in under the jaw.
She felt it. That was the thing she would never be able to say to anyone. It was not like cutting a fish. It was not like anything. There was a resistance, a dense wet give, and then a click, a small, appalling, definite click as the point struck bone; and a jet of heat, startlingly warm, ran down over her wrist and her arm and into her sleeve. The man made a noise. It was a surprised little grunt, such as a person makes when stepping on a stair that isn't there. His hands came up. They closed around his neck, and the blood came out between his fingers in thick pulsing ropes, and his eyes, a foot from hers, went wide and pale and astonished and fixed on her face.
"Oh," said Rourke.
He sat back on his heels.
"You little—"
He did not finish. He put out one hand, as if for a handrail, and found nothing, and toppled sideways onto the gravel with his knees drawn up, and lay there making a wet whistling sound while the dark pool spread out beneath him, black in the light of the headlamps, shining.
Sofi knelt in the dirt.
She was holding the knife. It hung from her hand, red to the hilt, dripping on the stones. She looked at it. She looked at the man. She looked at her own right hand, and it was very steady, which seemed to her the most terrible thing of all.
I've killed someone, she thought.
I've killed someone, and I'm still kneeling here.
"Rourke!" screamed the bearded man.
She ran.
She did not remember choosing it. She remembered only the shock of the night air on her face, and the thudding of her own feet, and the roar behind her of a man in a rage: a hoarse bellow, and a flat crack, and something that plucked at her sleeve. She plunged into the reeds. She went down the bank on her hands and knees through a thicket of cattails and black mud, with the knife still in her fist, and the cold water closed over her shins, her thighs, her waist. It stank. It sucked at her sneakers. A second shot went off, high, and she heard the whine of it in the trees.
Quiet. Quiet. Don't breathe.
She slid under the lip of the bank, into a hollow of roots and rotting leaves, and lay in the lake to her chin with her head against the earth.
The footsteps came down the ramp. They were heavy, hurried, stumbling. A flashlight swept the reeds above her, and she saw the beam pass across the water in a long white bar, and felt it touch her hair, and go on. She stopped breathing. Her chest was a vise. Don't wheeze. She pressed her face into her sleeve and clenched her teeth until her jaw ached.
"Where is she?"
"I can't see."
"She went in. I saw her."
"There's a hundred yards of this stuff. She could be anywhere." A pause. The man was panting. "Rourke's dead, Pike. She opened his bloody throat."
"I know."
"A kid. A little four-eyes with a puffer."
"I know."
"What do we tell Vance?"
"We tell him nothing." The second voice was thick. "We find her."
The beam swung away. She heard them move along the bank, cursing, thrashing in the reeds. A branch cracked. A stone plopped into the water. She lay like a dead thing, with the cold creeping up through her legs and her heart slamming against the mud, and counted. Four in. No. She couldn't. Hold. She held. She counted the seconds they walked away. Ten. Twenty. Forty. A hundred. And at the end of it, a long way off, near the road, a car door slammed, and an engine started, and she heard the crunch of tires on gravel going away.
They've gone for help. They'll be back.
Move.
She moved.
It was nearly an hour before she dared to raise her head.
She had crawled along the bank, a yard at a time, up to her armpits in the lake, with her face turned to the sky and her arms tucked in, like a creature of the water. She had gone a quarter of a mile. She had lost her glasses and one shoe. Twice her chest had closed and she had lain still, with her mouth open, dragging in air as thin as paper, and pressed the inhaler again and again until it clicked empty. The stars had come out. She was shaking so hard that her teeth rattled, and she could not feel her hands.
She came up at last in the lee of an old wrecked dock, among the slimy piles, and looked back across the water toward the town.
It was dark.
That was the first thing. The whole of Alder Falls was dark. There was no glow on the hills, no lamps along the shore road, no lit windows in the houses on the ridge. She stared at it in dull wonder. The power had gone. The great black bowl of the lake lay under the stars with not a spark on its rim, and the silence over it was so deep that she could hear the whisper of the reeds.
Then she saw the lights.
They were small and white and hard. They were coming from the marina, a quarter mile along the shore: a ring of them, set in a circle, glaring, as if someone had planted a field of tiny suns. They lit the sheds, the docks, the black glittering water. In their glare she could see the shapes of men. Dozens. They moved about the lot like ants. A car with its lamps off crept across the gravel. A black launch lay alongside the middle dock, low and sleek, with its engines muttering.
Dad's shed.
She stopped breathing again.
She saw a tall figure on the dock. She would have known him anywhere, by the way he stood, a little bent, with his weight on one leg. He was alone. He stood facing the lights with his arms hanging, and beside him, a long way off along the planks, three men stood in a row. They held a woman between them. A small slim woman, barefoot, in a yellow dress. She stood very straight. And in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, there was something else.
"Mom," whispered Sofi.
It came out of her without sound. It was a shape in her mouth. She watched, through the lens of the dark, with her fingers locked on the rotten wood, as the men took her mother down the dock. She watched them put her aboard the launch. She watched a man lift the blanketed shape out of her arms, and a small white face turn, and a hand go up, the fingers spread, against the glare.
Ivy.
She wanted to scream. She wanted it so badly that her throat ached. She wanted to stand up in the water and shout, to run along the shore through the reeds with her arms flung wide, to throw herself at the launch. But her legs would not hold her. And her lungs, which had been so patient, so obedient, so brave in the last hour, gave way all at once with a long shuddering whistle, and she sagged against the pile, and the stars rolled over.
Four in, said a voice in her head. It was her mother's. Hold. Six out. I'm here. Breathe, baby.
I can't.
You can.
They took her.
I know. Breathe.
She breathed.
It took a long time. She lay with her cheek against the green slime and the water lapping her chin, and made her lungs obey, a thread at a time, while across the lake the launch backed away from the dock and turned, and its wake spread in two pale lines. She saw it go. She saw the white stern light dwindle. She saw her father fall.
He fell on his face, on the planks. A man in a charcoal coat stood over him. They talked. Then the man walked away, and the lamps went out, one by one, and the cars started and drove off into the dark, and in a little while the marina was silent and black.
Nothing moved.
She waited. She counted. She counted until the stars had wheeled a full hour, until she was certain the last engine had faded, and the lake had stilled, and there was no sound but the slow slap of water against the piles. Then she began, with great care, to crawl.
It took her twenty minutes to reach the dock.
She came in under the planks, through the dark, between the greasy pilings, with the water to her chest and the knife between her teeth. She climbed out at the foot of the ladder. She lay on the boards, in the starlight, and listened. There was a smell of blood and cordite and weed. There was a body a few yards along, and another beyond it, face down, in a spreading dark. And at the end of the dock, on his knees, with his back to her and his head bowed over a phone, a man was talking in a voice she had never heard.
It was low, and flat, and quite calm. It was the voice of a stranger.
"You killed Cody Bell," it said.
She did not move.
"He was seventeen."
Cody. She felt something in her chest give way. Cody Bell, with his sunburned neck and his crooked grin and his grandfather's compass. Cody, who had taught her to splice a rope. Cody, who had stood in the doorway of the party in his clean shirt and said, scarlet, I just thought she'd like it.
Oh, Cody.
She crept forward on her elbows, along the boards, while the voice went on above her in the dark. She heard only her father's half of it. It was low and level and dreadful, and it dropped, now and then, into silences so long that she thought the call had ended. What does he want? it said. And later, in a tone she did not understand, You want me to give you a child. And once, sharply, her own name: Sofia. And, For my family. And, You'll kill her. And last, after a very long pause, so quietly that it was hardly sound, Tuesday.
Then a click, and nothing.
He knelt at the end of the dock with the phone against his ear, quite still, for what seemed a minute. Then it slid from his fingers. He bent forward until his forehead touched the planks.
She had never seen anything like what followed. It began in his shoulders. It was a tremor, and then a heave, and then a long, slow, violent shuddering that took the whole of his big body and shook it like a dog in the rain, and he made no sound at all. His mouth was open. She saw the cords stand out in his neck. She lay ten feet away in the dark with her hand over her own mouth, a wet shivering girl with a bloody knife, and watched her father weep as a man weeps who has not been allowed to in thirty years.
It lasted a long time.
When it was over he lay without moving. A little wind rose off the lake and stirred his hair. Far out, a loon called.
She waited until his breathing slowed. Then, in a voice that cracked in the middle, she whispered the only word she had left.
"Dad," said Sofi.
It was hardly a word. It cracked in the middle. But he heard it. She saw the whole of his back go still. He did not turn. For a long moment he knelt there, quite motionless, in the starlight, with his shoulders rising and falling; and then, very slowly, as one turns toward a thing one is afraid to see, he looked round.
His face was wet.
She had never seen it so. It was a gray, ruined, naked face, gaunt as a skull in the starlight, with the eyes sunk in their sockets and a smear of blood on the cheekbone; and on it, as he looked at her, she saw a thing happen that she would remember for the rest of her life. She saw the stranger go out of it. She saw the flat dreadful calm crumble away like plaster, and under it, white and shaking and unmistakable, her father's face, the one that had held her in the hall that evening, looking at her as though she were a miracle.
"Sofi?"
"I stabbed a man," said Sofi. "I'm sorry. I stabbed him in the neck. I didn't mean to. He had me by the hair. He said the lighthouse was out and he didn't know the word." She began to cry. "I killed him, Dad. I lost my glasses. I lost my shoe. They took Mom and Ivy and I couldn't, I couldn't breathe—"
He was across the dock before she finished.
He knelt on the wet planks and took her in his arms, all of her, mud and weed and blood and shivering, and pressed her face into his shoulder with a hand on the back of her head. She felt him shake. She felt his breath come out in a long ragged sob against her hair. He didn't say anything. He didn't say, it's all right. He didn't say, you did nothing wrong. He held her so hard that her ribs ached, and rocked her, once, twice, like a very young child, and murmured against her ear, over and over, in a cracked whisper, the only word he seemed to have left.
"Alive. Alive. Alive."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't."
"I did a terrible thing."
"You did what I taught you." His voice broke. "God forgive me, you did exactly what I taught you."
She pulled back.
She looked at him. In the starlight his face was a foot from hers, and she studied it, for the first time in her life, as one studies a map. The gray at the temples. The deep lines. The long scar on the inside of the arm, where she used to trace rivers. The eyes, her own, enormous and wet. And behind them, something old and vast and tired that she had never seen, and could not name, and understood all at once she had been looking at, every morning, over the pancakes, for eighteen years.
"Dad," she said. "Who are you?"
He closed his eyes.
"I'll tell you," he said. "Everything. I promised, in the hall." A long breath. "But not here. Not yet. We have to move."
"Where?"
"Somewhere safe. Somewhere I can sew you up and get you dry." His voice steadied. "And then I'm going to go and get your mother, and your sister, and you are going to tell me, very carefully, in order, everything you saw."
"I saw Ivy wave."
"Yes."
"She held up her hand."
"She does that." He wiped his face. He got slowly to his feet, with her under his arm, and she felt the wound in his shoulder pull, and the wrist hang strangely, and saw how he swayed. "Come. You can walk?"
"I think so."
"Good girl."
"Dad?"
"Yes."
"I want to come with you." She lifted her chin. It trembled. "Not to be looked after. To help. I'm not good at it. I'm useless in a fight, I can't run, I can't even hold my breath. But I notice things." A damp, cracked, miserable smile. "You said it runs in the family."
He looked at her for a long time.
And Sofi, standing on the end of the dock in the cold, with the lake black at her back and the whole of her life lying in pieces behind her, saw something in her father's face that she could not have imagined, even in her worst dreams. It was fear. It was the plain naked fear of a man who has just been handed the one thing he cannot afford to lose, and who knows that he is going to have to carry it into the dark.
"Yes," he said at last. "I suppose it does."