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Authors: Moïra Fowley-Doyle

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BOOK: The Accident Season
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Sam stops us right before the riverbank, and when I notice what’s wrong, we both just stand there and stare at the water.

The river is frozen. The current is still. The occasional rock pokes through the ice like a broken tooth, but the rest of the river is a shelf of frosted glass. Sam drops his boots and reaches for my hand.

This can’t be possible,
I think.
This is a dream
.

And it does feel dreamlike, all of it: Sam’s hand in mine, the warm air on my cheeks, the warm grass beneath my bare
feet, the bright sheen to the cloudy sky, the river that has frozen on a strange mild night. This couldn’t be anything but a dream.

That’s why I hardly hesitate when dream-Sam’s hand tightens on my dream hand and we walk out onto the ice. The cold numbs our feet. Our skin sticks to the frost like it would to a Band-Aid, but we walk out anyway. When we reach the middle of the river, we start to laugh. We face each other and hold hands, and we laugh and laugh as if we are the river, as if we’re making the sounds it makes when it isn’t still. We stare down at our bare feet on the frozen-over water, and when we look back at each other, our eyes are wide and we are so close, and for just the tiniest moment I think that Sam might bridge the distance between our mouths and kiss me, and for an even tinier moment I kind of wish he would.

I freeze like the water beneath us. Sam is like my brother. Where are these thoughts coming from? I try to blink them out of my head, but all I can see are the freckles on his skin.

A crazy thought comes into my head:
This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a dream and I just thought about kissing Sam. This isn’t a dream and I’m out on the ice of a frozen river in the middle of the accident season.

That’s when the ice cracks.

I give a little scream. Our grip on each other’s hands tightens. For a few heartbeats we stay still as statues, as ice sculptures, but when the ice cracks again we start to slide
carefully toward the riverbank. We try to spread our weight. We tread carefully. The ice cracks. We move faster. It cracks again. Soon we are running, our hands still gripped together, our feet freezing and slipping, and the cracks are multiplying like music notes and Sam is falling but I’m pulling him along until we finally reach the grass of the riverbank, where we collapse, panting, hands still held.

We lie on our backs and look up at the clear night sky. Our feet are still touching the ice. We don’t ask
Is this happening?
; we don’t look at each other reassuringly and say
It’s always happening
; we don’t say anything and Sam doesn’t move to kiss me again. If that’s even what he was doing.

We realize it immediately when we sit up: We’re on the opposite side of the river. Somehow we must’ve got turned around. On this side, the trees look down at us like the ridiculous children that we are. From the other side, our boots wave their laces. The wind is picking up.

“No way I’m crossing that again,” Sam says. His voice is husky, as if from sleep.

“We can go the long way and cross at the main bridge,” I tell him. “But without our boots . . .”

“It’s either that or drowning.”

“I’ve never been the biggest fan of drowning.”

Sam kisses the knuckles of my hand he’s holding. “Come on, then, little sister,” he says. “Let’s go home, out of this weird night.”

“I’m not your sister,” I remind him, and I lead him into the forest, where it’s easier to follow the path than to navigate the rocks on this side of the river.

The path brings us to Elsie’s clearing. The dream catchers are still there. They spin in the wind like exotic birds dancing. Their feathers are weather-tattered now, though, and they are missing strings and beads. But there’s something else tacked on the trees; something new. A lot of somethings. I walk up to one of the trees to look closer. Sam follows, naturally, as our hands are still joined. “Paper?” he says, with uncertainty.

They look like sheets of brown paper, hundreds of them, stapled to every tree. “More like sandpaper, actually,” I say to Sam, noticing their texture. He holds out a hand and touches one. His fingers come away sticky.

“Flypaper.” One summer when we were little and my mother’d had a particularly successful run of painting sales, we all went on vacation to the Pyrenees. We rented a little house outside a village and spent our days hiking and our evenings using sugar to bait flies into our hands. My mother hated the flies; she hung flypapers on the ceiling and above every door, and Christopher, who is taller than any of us, kept getting his hair caught in the stuff with the flies. I look quickly at Sam, wondering if he’s remembering the same thing, but he’s still staring at the flypaper, deep in thought.

“I just don’t get it,” he says finally.

“I know what you mean.” We walk away and leave the
clearing behind. The flypapers gleam wetly on the trees and the dream catchers shake in the wind. Twigs stick into the soles of my feet, the flesh too soft from always wearing shoes. “I just wish I knew where she was.”

“We have to find her, Cara,” Sam says. “Seriously.”

“I know,” I whisper. I am so glad he agrees with me. I feel the need to speak to Elsie like an urgency; my blood beats with it. “We have to find her soon.”

10

G
racie is too hungover to drive us to school the next morning, and my mother can’t drive with a broken arm, so the four of us walk all the way, our own heads tight and pounding from last night. We squint in the weak morning light. Alice and Bea, who seem to be in a slightly better state than me and Sam, walk a little way in front of us, heads inclined toward each other, deep in conversation. Sam and I walk silently, farther apart.

We don’t talk about leaving the house last night, but I think it is more so that we don’t persuade each other it wasn’t real than to pretend it didn’t happen. It would be too easy to let logic tell us that the river couldn’t be frozen on a warm night, that there couldn’t possibly be a spooky clearing in the woods filled with dream catchers and flypapers and a tiny doll version of a possibly missing girl set like the bait in
a mousetrap. But maybe we also don’t talk about it because of our hands held, our bodies close, Sam’s eyes aligned with mine as we stood on the ice.

We woke up with our hands side by side but not touching, and this morning it’s like we’re being careful not to get too close. My thoughts tangle between the words
brother
and
ex-stepbrother,
first focusing on the difference between the two and then rejecting it.
It’s the same thing,
I tell myself firmly.
Sam is my brother. It’s beyond wrong to be thinking like this.
My brain ends up tangled with so much shame and confusion that I just try to leave it be, ignore any thoughts that flash through it and just concentrate on the straps of my school bag on the bruise on my shoulder, on the taste of cold toast in my mouth as I walk, on the feel of the road under my Converse. (Sam and I silently pick up our Docs from the riverbank on the way to school but they are waterlogged with morning dew and entirely unwearable, so we are both stuck with thin-soled footwear for the day.)

Elsie’s invitation to the party sits in the front pocket of my school bag. I touch it throughout the day like a talisman. The need to find her haunts me, taunts me with how easy it should be and how difficult it actually is. And I don’t know why, but I feel as though we are running out of time.

I tell Bea about the flypaper trees during math class, but she doesn’t seem to be listening. She keeps texting under the table and won’t tell me who she’s talking to.

“Ugh. Please don’t tell me you’re ignoring me to text Carl Gallagher,” I say with a grimace.

Bea smiles mysteriously. “Every good witch needs a couple of secrets.”

I am about to remind Bea that she never keeps secrets, when it hits me. “The secrets booth!”

Sam turns around from his seat in front of us. “What about it?”

“Of course,” I say, mostly to myself. “There are always articles and local news stories about it, right? Elsie’s bound to be mentioned in them.”

“Of course!” Sam smacks the desk with the palm of his hand. “It’s a good thing one of us has a few brain cells left,” he says, before quickly turning back to his math book when the teacher looks our way.

Sam and I spend our lunch break in the library, looking up articles about the secrets booth and printing them out to read after class. We also photocopy every school newsletter from the past five years and spend a frustrating fifteen minutes quizzing the extremely unhelpful librarian about Elsie.

“She’s here every day,” I exclaim, waving my arms at Kim, who is sitting at the secrets booth by the window. “Right there! Every day!”

“I don’t know the girl,” says the librarian for the seventh time. “I can’t help you. Now, that’ll be five-fifty for the photocopies.”

***

When we get home after school, Bea calls me because she is having a fight with her mother. This happens fairly often: Bea and her mother have similarly dramatic personalities that can’t seem to help but clash. While I talk to her in a soothing voice, Sam sits up on the newly bubble-wrapped kitchen table (Alice crashed into it earlier, slipping on a bump in one of the mock-Afghan rugs) and eats slices of plastic-looking cheese straight from the packet.

My mother, who is in a surprisingly good mood, is playing a bunch of 1950s rock ’n’ roll songs. She turns the volume up so that the whole house is jitterbugging under its felt and plastic wrapping. She has spent the day hiking in the mountains with Gracie. She tells us how good it feels to just let go for the first time in weeks, to not worry where you put your feet, to know someone’s there to hold you if you fall. Gracie has written a haiku about the walk on the cast on her arm. It is silly and sweet.

Suddenly, over all the 1950s rock, I can hear Alice’s raised voice from the stairs. It sounds like she’s shouting over the phone. When I go into the hall to ask her what’s wrong, she is putting on her coat.

“Be back later, Mom,” she calls into the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” I ask her.

“Just over to Bea’s.” Alice shrugs on her coat and frees her hair from underneath her scarf.

“Bea’s?”

Alice slings her bag over one shoulder. “Yeah, Bea. Tall girl, red hair, hippy skirts. You know the one.”

“She had a fight with her mom,” I blurt out.

Alice opens the door. “Yeah, I know.” She stops just long enough to stamp her heel properly into her boot and she is gone. “I’ll tell her you were asking after her,” she calls back over her shoulder. I stand in the hallway, stunned.

When I go back into the kitchen, my mother is singing along to something that sounds like it belongs in
Grease
and Sam is laughing at something she’s said and is trying to persuade her that he didn’t eat all the sliced cheese. I stand in the doorway and look at them like they’re on television or in a picture. I half expect to see Elsie’s foot hiding in the corner of the frame.

“Everything okay?” my mother asks, pouring milk into her tea. “Where’s your sister off to in such a hurry?”

“To Bea’s,” I say, and my mouth is kind of twisted.

“Bea’s?” Sam looks as surprised as I feel, only probably a lot less upset.

“Very good,” my mother says distractedly. When she bends to put the milk back in the fridge—one-handed, her other arm useless in its sling—her hair falls like a tangled purple curtain in front of her face.

Sam just sort of shrugs. Straightening up from the fridge, my mother bumps her head on the edge of the padded counter. She makes a face and rubs it.

“But,” I say, because I can’t let this go just yet, “I just talked to her. Bea, I mean. She’d had a fight with her mother. She didn’t want to come over.”

My mother takes a bottle of arnica pills from the cupboard and pops a couple under her tongue. “Maybe she wanted someone to come to her,” she says, lisping because of the little pills.

I start to feel guilty. “But she would’ve asked.”

Sam helps my mother peel a banana and carefully pours his own tea. (We stopped my mother from hiding the electric kettle two weeks ago. We are content to live without sharp knives and the gas burner, but living without tea is just impossible.) “I think it’s a good thing for Alice to be spending more time with Bea,” she says. “She spends so much time with Nick and his posse, and female friendships are so important.”

“But she’s
my
best friend,” I say, and then I feel silly and childish. My mother is right: Nick takes up so much of Alice’s time outside school.

“I know you feel left out,” says my mother, echoing my thoughts exactly. She comes over and puts her good arm around my shoulders. “But you’ve got your brother to keep you company. And me.”

“He’s not my brother,” I mutter, and my mother laughs.

“If you say so,
petite soeur,
” Sam says, and my mother laughs louder.

When she goes up to the attic to work, Sam and I sit in the living room and look through the newsletters and articles, searching for any mention of Elsie. She is almost as elusive in text as she is in person; we find mention of “a fourth-year girl” here, “a student” there, like glimpses of an ugly cardigan or a hint of mousy hair. I wonder if Alice is right about all this; I wonder again if there is such a thing as coincidence.

“I can’t believe Bea asked her over and not us,” I say to Sam after a while, as if I were talking to him in my head about Alice all along.

“I don’t think it was like that.” Sam flicks through the music library on his laptop while trying to find more articles online. “Alice probably asked Bea. Maybe she needed someone to talk to. And Bea’s good at that sort of thing.”

“Aren’t we?”

Sam looks at me. “Not always,” he says with aching honesty.

I look around the living room, wrapped up like a fragile package, and I think about all the secrets hiding in the sharp edges of things. “I guess,” I say. “I guess Bea doesn’t really do secrets.” I think Bea could set up her own secrets booth, sell all the unsaid things for ten cents a pound. How many secrets would fit into a pound? I wonder.

“She kissed me,” I find myself saying. From the laptop a woman’s voice sings softly. The guitar notes accompanying her song are like plucked heartstrings.

Sam is very still. “Bea?” he asks.

I nod. “In the ghost house.”

Sam sort of shrugs it off. “You guys have kissed before,” he says. “At parties, in spin the bottle.”

“I guess.” I want to tell him about the way she kissed me—like she wanted to prove something, like it wasn’t really me she was kissing, and how she hasn’t talked about it since that one time in PE class (not that I have either), but instead I ask, “Did you ever kiss her?”

“In spin the—?”

“Outside of that.”

Sam’s fingernails drum on the keyboard. “Once.”

“Oh.” I realize the second he says it that I don’t want to know, but he tells me anyway. I try not to listen without actually blocking my ears.

“It was at that party in Joe and Martin’s house this summer. You and Alice’d gone to the liquor store and the others were in the kitchen getting ice cream.”

I remember the night. Alice had taken us to the party Joe was having because his parents were out of town. It was one of the first times we’d properly hung out with her friends, and it was mostly because Martin had invited some people in our year too. We’d been sitting out on the veranda and Bea’d read the cards for us in the light-hearted way she does sometimes, when all the questions are about love and sex, and none are about anything serious. (But is there anything
more serious, I wonder now, than love and sex? Not hardly.)

“Anyway,” Sam says. “Everyone else left and she still hadn’t read my cards, so she did, and then I kissed her.”

I make a choked sound in my throat. “
You
kissed
her
?”

Sam doesn’t look at me. “Yeah. I just wanted to . . .” He sighs. “Her cards’d said something that I didn’t want to believe, so I kissed her to prove them wrong.”

Now I really want to cover my ears. I reach up and brush my hair away from my face instead. “How does that even—?”

Sam speaks louder over me. “I didn’t feel anything.” He is staring resolutely at the newsletter pamphlets in front of him.

My hands drop into my lap. I want to say a hundred things, but I end up with a sarcastic “Yeah, right.”

“Yeah,” Sam says simply.

“But . . .” I look up at the ceiling as if it’ll give me answers. It’s unresponsive, however, blank and white. It’s the only part of the house that doesn’t look bandaged. “But you like her.”

“So do you.”

“No, I mean you
like
her like her.” I feel like I’m twelve again. “You kissed her.”

“Yeah, but it was just a kiss. It was just to see . . .” Sam sort of laughs. “I’m not in love with Bea, Cara.”

I look down at my hands. “I thought you were.”

“Well, I’m not.” A new song comes on. “Never have been.”

All of a sudden my heart feels funny. Sam isn’t in love with Bea.
Not that it matters if he was,
I tell myself.
He’s my ex-stepbrother. He’s like my brother. He’s my brother.
Sam is still talking, but I almost can’t listen to him.
Never have been,
he said.
There’s only one wench I want
.


Cara,
” Sam says, and I quickly realize that it’s not the first time he’s tried to get my attention in the last few minutes. He is holding up one of the school newsletters from several years ago. The original pamphlet we photocopied was slightly torn. All that’s missing is part of a paragraph about the bridge the council has been saying it’ll build across the river for the last twenty years.

I scan the page quickly, looking for a mention of the secrets booth. I shake my head. “What?” I hand the pamphlet back to Sam, who turns it toward me again and points at the torn-off piece about the bridge.

“I bet they won’t even build the actual bridge now,” I say, thinking of the way the wooden one crashed into the water. “They’ll probably just repair the old one.”

“Cara,” Sam says again. “
Look
.”

“At what?” I read the torn article quickly, muttering the key points out loud to let Sam know I’m paying attention. “
Construction of bridge halted yet again . . . years since original bridge collapsed . . . town mayor putting pressure on county council . . . says it’s a travesty it hasn’t been rebuilt yet . . . local girl Elsie—
Wait, what?”

The article stops there. It’s the line immediately below the quote from the mayor, but the rest of the article has been torn away.

I look up at Sam. “Do you think it’s our Elsie?”

“It’s worth a shot. It’s not a very common name.”

I twist my mouth, trying not to look doubtful. “It doesn’t tell us much.”

“Right now it’s all we have to go on,” Sam says. “If we can find the rest of the article, we can see if it is our Elsie.”

I look back down at the pamphlet doubtfully. It looks like a newspaper article pasted into the school newsletter. “It could be from the
Telegraph,
” I say with uncertainty. “Or
Western People
. But their offices are in Castlebar and Ballina. We won’t be able to get out there before they close. It’s almost half past four.”

Sam shakes his head. “There’s this magical place,” he says with mock solemnity, “called a library—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but they have books, and also newspapers, and back issues of newspapers . . .”

BOOK: The Accident Season
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