Don't Breathe a Word (10 page)

Gerald said something to Sammy in a low voice. Sammy ignored it, but the other boys laughed.

Lisa shoved her damp, sandy feet into her sneakers and waited for her brother. At last, he was out of the water, pulling on his shirt. “Let’s go,” she said.

“See ya, Sam,” Pinkie said, as they hurried by her, Sam carrying his shoes. He gave her a half wave.

When they got to the fire road at the top of the hill, both of the bikes were still there, but Evie was nowhere in sight.

Chapter 11

Phoebe

June 5, Present Day

T
he one good thing about the chaos of their day was that Phoebe hadn’t had much time to obsess about the possibility of being pregnant. But now that they were back in the car, racing up to Burlington on Interstate 89, it was all she could think of.

Once again she toyed with idea of saying something to Sam—but he had enough on his plate at the moment. She needed to know for sure before she talked to him. She’d go to the drugstore and get a pregnancy test. Maybe she could sneak away tomorrow, but if not, it could wait until Monday, when they both went off to work.

Relieved to have a plan in place, Phoebe looked out the window to her left. They were driving through Waterbury, and in the dying light she could see the old state hospital complex with its giant smokestack, the letters
VSH
climbing up into the sky.

She looked over at Sam driving, his hands on the wheel, eyes on the road ahead. There were so many little things about him she loved: the long, almost feminine eyelashes; the way he licked his lips before answering a hard question; how funny his pale legs with their knobby knees looked each summer when he finally got hot enough to take off his jeans and put on swimming trunks. She loved the raised scar above his collarbone that no one could remember the origin of. Sometimes she’d kiss him there, her mouth covering the thin white line, making it disappear.

What if she was pregnant? Would they keep the baby? Sam had never come right out and said he didn’t want kids, but whenever she brought up the idea, his face clouded over and he quickly changed the subject, or sometimes he nuzzled her neck and said, “But you’re my family, Bee. You’re all I need.”

And what about her? Could Phoebe really be a mother? It was such an absurd idea that she found it impossible to visualize. But the alternative, the idea of actually having an abortion, scared her too. Her mother had had an abortion once, when Phoebe was in fifth grade. What Phoebe remembered most was her mother finding out she was pregnant. She’d bought a test, gone into the bathroom, and come out pale and shaking. She didn’t look overjoyed, that was for sure. But she didn’t seem shocked or surprised, either. What it looked like to Phoebe was that her mother was frightened. Terrified, actually.

“Ma,” Phoebe said, “did it say yes?” Phoebe was torn. Part of her secretly wished for a baby brother or sister, but she knew, deep down, wishing to bring a helpless baby into her sorry excuse for a family was just cruel.

Her mother didn’t speak, went straight for the vodka, drinking until she passed out on the couch. Phoebe went out to cover her with a blanket before going to bed herself. Her mother stirred, squinted up at Phoebe, and said, “You poor thing, you.” Phoebe smiled at her mother, let her raise up her hand with its broken nails and nicotine-stained fingers to stroke Phoebe’s hair. Her mother smiled back, said warmly, with love, “I should have drowned you at birth.”

Phoebe took a step back, letting her mother’s hand fall back down to the couch.

Her mother closed her eyes, murmured softly, “That would have saved you.”

In the morning, she made the appointment and went off to the women’s health clinic in Worcester. Her ma had acted like it was no big deal—like she’d had a rotten tooth pulled at the dentist. Phoebe knew it wouldn’t be like that for her. But shit, she probably wasn’t even pregnant, in which case she was running her brain in frantic circles for no reason at all.

She closed her eyes, heard her mother’s smooth, low, bourbon-slurred voice in her head:
Ain’t no point worrying about what’s been or what’s gonna be. You just gotta do your best right now. And trust everyone else is doing the same.

Maybe the only smart thing her ma ever told her.

Most everything else was complete horseshit. Like what she said when Phoebe first told her about the Dark Man.

“There’s something in my room,” she’d cried, heart pounding, hands sweaty. She was seven years old and they were in the Belcher Street apartment. It was just past midnight and Phoebe had closed her eyes and run from her room, finding her mother in the kitchen. Her ma staggered back against the counter, scrunching her face so that she was looking through one eye and a haze of cigarette smoke.

“What?” she drawled. Her ma had only lived in North Carolina till she was eight, but sometimes, when she was good and drunk, Phoebe could still hear a southern twang.

“A man,” she said.

“And what’s he look like, lovie?”

“Dark. Like a shadow.”

Her ma looked startled, then smiled. “Where did he come from, this Dark Man of yours?”

“Under my bed. There’s a door there.”

“You’d best figure out a damn good way to keep it closed. Once the Dark Man comes, he’ll be back. And once he gets inside of you . . .” She shivered, turned to pour another drink. “Have a nice big sip of this, lovie. It’s like medicine. It’ll help you sleep.”

“S
am?”

He took his eyes off the road and blinked at her.

“Did you ever think Teilo was real?”

He shook his head. “Not then. But I do now. I don’t think he was a fairy or anything like that, but I do think there was a guy out there, messing around with my sister.”

“And Evie, what did she think?”

“She thought Lisa should stay the hell out of the woods.”

“Why did you stop talking to Evie?” Phoebe asked. “I mean, it sounds like the two of you were really close as kids.”

Sam turned to look at her, his face lit by headlights of cars from the southbound lane.

“Sam,” she said, “we’re in this together. You’ve gotta give me a little to go on here. There are these whole huge chapters of your life I know nothing about.”

“You’re not exactly an open book,” he said.

Touché.

“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” Phoebe said. “You start letting me in and I’ll do the same. Shit, I’ll even start.” Her mind went right to the possibility of her being pregnant, then she jerked it away, let it wander, grasping for something else, some big reveal that would help build a bridge between them because a pregnancy might only tear them apart.

“Okay,” she said, latching on to the next best thing. “You’re always asking about my mom, and the truth is, I haven’t exactly been all that honest. My mom was—well, she was kind of a drunk. Not a well-dressed, martini-drinking socialite kind of drunk, but a drooling, stinking, wake-up-in-your-own-puke kind of drunk. She was a terrible mother. She lied all the time, said horrible things to me, messed with my head. Once I graduated from high school, I got the hell out of there. Didn’t go back for anything. Not even the one time she asked me to. Right before she died. She begged me. Said all kinds of crazy shit, but I wouldn’t go.”

Sam was silent a minute.

“Your mom is perfect, Sam. I just look at her and know you came from someplace good. I was scared that if you knew the truth, if you actually knew the kind of person my mom was, the kind of person I was around her, you’d see me differently. I mean, we’re talking about a woman who was such a pathetic drunk that she drowned in her own bathtub with all her clothes on. Shit, they were even on inside out. She couldn’t even get that part right.”

Phoebe’s chin quivered. She shut her eyes tight, thinking about the details she’d left out: all the weird stuff her mother had in the tub with her—kitchen knives, a cast-iron frying pan, nail clippers, a box of bolts and washers. How the landlord had to break down the door when the water from the overflowing tub began dripping into the apartment below. He found her facedown in the tub, the drain plug in, shower running full blast.

Sam reached out to put his hand on her arm. “Phoebe, I’m so sorry.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want your sympathy or your pity. That’s why I don’t tell people this shit. It is what it is, Sam. Can’t change where you came from, right? Just got to make the best of where you are.”

Sam nodded. “I would never think of you differently,” he said. “No matter what you told me.”

What if I told him about the shadow man?
Phoebe wondered.
What would he think of me then?

“So now it’s your turn,” she said. “Tell me about that summer. About you and Evie.”

He nodded and looked forward again. “Everything changed after Lisa disappeared,” he said. “And before. That summer. My mom and Hazel had a big fight. Hazel was taking care of my dad. He’d had this . . . nervous breakdown, I guess, when we were all away in Cape Cod. Anyway, we got back and he’d overdosed. We called 911 and he got his stomach pumped and was okay. Sort of. He wasn’t talking or . . . acting normally, but he was alive.” Sam bit his lower lip and took in a breath before continuing. “When he got out of the hospital, we brought him home and Hazel was looking after him—she was a nurse, so it made sense. It’s not like she didn’t know he was at risk for suicide—I mean, he’d tried before, right? His medicine was supposed to be locked up. It was always locked up. But somehow, one night, just before Lisa disappeared, it wasn’t. And he found it and took everything there. He didn’t pull through. My mom blamed Hazel.”

“Did you?”

Phoebe had rarely talked about her mother, and Sam was the same way with his dad. Phoebe knew almost nothing about David Nazzaro, and the little bits she had gleaned came from Sam’s mother, not from Sam. She knew that Sam’s dad was a potter and that he’d struggled with bipolar disorder for years. She also knew that young Sam worshipped his dad and would spend hours in his workshop, just watching his father work, studying him really. “I would catch Sammy looking at his dad sometimes and think, ‘There he goes again, trying to solve the riddle of Dave,’ ” Phyllis had told her.

“Nah,” Sam said. “I didn’t see it that way. But we didn’t see much of Hazel and Evie after that. I guess I should have been sad, but I wasn’t really. Evie betrayed Lisa big time. She told people about the fairies. Shit, she even showed Lisa’s fairy book to all the neighborhood kids. I guess that was the last straw. Lisa stopped speaking to her. I used to think that if Evie hadn’t done that, then maybe Lisa wouldn’t have gone off to the woods that night. She and Lisa were so close. It was like she lost her biggest ally. And her dad had just taken a shitload of pills and it was pretty obvious he wasn’t going to survive. Who wouldn’t want to leave all that behind?

“You know what I used to think?” Sam asked, white-knuckling the steering wheel, digging into it with his thumbnails. “That Lisa had it easy. She got to be the one to disappear. She didn’t have to say good-bye to Dad or go to the funeral or deal with things after. She got to just slip away, and I was jealous. That’s totally fucked up, right?” He looked over at Phoebe, then quickly back at the road. She reached over and stroked his arm.

“No,” she said. “Not at all. I would have felt the exact same way.”

T
he address Hazel had given Sam was a basement apartment on Loomis Street, not far from the university. There was a teetering stack of pizza boxes outside the door that led down the stairs.

“This is the place?” Phoebe asked, thinking maybe they’d found a frat house. She remembered the tattoo on Elliot’s leg—not a Greek letter but the symbol of Teilo.

“Are you sure?” Sam had asked when she told him about the tattoo.

Phoebe nodded. “Positive.”

Whatever was going on, Evie and this guy Elliot were deeply involved.

“This is the place,” Sam said, ringing the bell.

They hadn’t discussed what they’d do when they found Evie, which suddenly seemed like bad planning. Shouldn’t they have rehearsed some lines? Decided on a good-cop bad-cop kind of interrogation technique to break her down, get her to tell them what the hell was going on?

They heard someone coming up the steps, then the curtain in the windowed door was pulled aside and a gaunt-faced woman with bruised-looking circles under her eyes glared out at them. Her shoulder-length dark hair was coming out of its loose ponytail, the bangs falling across her face.

“What do you want?” she shouted through the door. Her lips were so raw and chapped that they were bleeding.

“I’m looking for Evie,” Sam shouted back. “I’m her cousin, Sam.”

The woman squinted at them, chewed on a fingernail a minute, considering, then opened the door. She turned her back and headed down the poorly lit stairway before they could say anything more. Sam shrugged at Phoebe and they went in. At the bottom of the stairs, they followed the pale ghost of a woman through another door, which brought them into a living room.

The apartment they found themselves in was small and dark and smelled of mildew and body odor. There were a few narrow rectangular windows that would have given a street-level view, had you been able to look out. They were covered in heavy red cloth that had been stapled over.

The furniture was beat up, the rug stained and worn through in places. There was another stack of pizza boxes by the lower door. Along the ceiling of the living room ran a heavy white PVC drainpipe. Someone in an upstairs apartment flushed a toilet, and water ran through the pipe over their heads. Sam looked up nervously.