The Accident Season (20 page)

Seth turned suddenly and looked at Alice again. “Why?” he asked, his eyebrows drawing together slightly. “Do
you
like him?”

Alice’s breath caught in her throat. She told herself Seth was just asking her the same question she’d asked him, but something about the way he was looking at her—kind of concerned but almost not surprised—made her want to tell him even more.

Out in the water, Mom was laughing. Christopher circled Sam and Cara, pretending to be a shark. Alice glanced back at Seth, who seemed to still be waiting for an answer. She shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. Still, Seth looked from her—huddled fully dressed on her towel—back to Christopher in the water, and he was frowning.

“Seth! Seth!” Cara called. “Help! The shark is going to get us!”

Seth waved at Cara and said, “Just a minute, I’ll save you,”
but before getting up from the towel, he crouched and looked right into Alice’s eyes.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked her.

Alice didn’t say anything, but she forced a smile and a nod. Alice didn’t say anything, but she thought she saw a hint of understanding creeping into her uncle’s eyes.

W
hen my mother comes back into the kitchen, I ask about Alice, but she shakes her head. “She needs some space,” she says. “Time. Something.” She looks at me, but her eyes are unfocused, so it’s more like she’s looking through me.

“When you nearly drowned that time,” she says, as if from far away, “he said he’d rescued you. He pulled you back to shore.” She can’t seem to make herself say his name. “He pushed you in.” It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer. “He . . .” My mother looks like she is about to pass out.

“Mom, where’s Alice?” I ask her again.

“She’s gone to . . . she needs to . . .” my mother says vaguely, “process . . .” She wanders out into the hall. Her feet tread heavily on the stairs. I make to go and follow her, but Sam speaks up from where he’s sitting crumpled on the floor.

“Don’t leave me alone right now,” he says. His head is
in his hands like it’s too heavy for his neck. Like his whole body is too heavy to even sit up straight. “Please don’t leave me alone right now.”

There is too much. There is just too much. Sam looks so lost. There’s a big difference, I imagine, between having a father who walked out on you and having a father who is a monster. But I don’t know what to say to him. I want to ask whose nose he broke, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer. And I have no idea how to feel about it.

I sit back down. I take a breath, then I take out my phone. I try Alice’s number first, but she doesn’t pick up. Then I call Gracie.

She guesses by the sound of my voice that something’s not right. She says, “I’m coming over.” A little voice in my heart tells me I’m glad that my mother has someone like Gracie to rely on. I think about Bea tangled on a mattress with Carl while Alice ran away from the wolf. I wonder who Alice has to rely on. I wonder who I have. I look down at Sam. He is looking up at me. His eyes are muddy puddles. I sit down in front of him and put my hands on his knees.

“Sammy.” I have too much I want to say and too much that I don’t want to say but I feel like I have to. My voice jams in my throat, so I swallow to make it come out. I don’t know what to do. “Maybe we should ask Bea to read the cards for us,” I say.

Sam leans back and gives me that sad, sad smile I
know so well now. “Bea doesn’t know everything, Cara.”

“But the cards—”

“Bea doesn’t know everything.” He says it again, with finality. “She’s just another lost kid like us.”

I take my hands off Sam’s knees and put them into my pockets. “I know,” I say in a very small voice. “I know.”

By the time Gracie arrives, my mother has joined us in the kitchen again. We drink microwaved coffee and Sam starts to sober up. He and my mother don’t talk about Christopher. It’s like he’s here, sitting at the table between us, like he’s a ghost or the elephant in the room.

I remember Alice, younger, skinnier even than she is now, all bundled up in her accident clothes—hurt, but not by accident. I remember seeing Christopher with her, and it’s like a scene playing over and over in front of my eyes, but not real, and mostly the girl in the scene is a foresty woodsprite and the man is all metal. Metal hands on leafy skin, metal mouth telling lies. Metal teeth, metal heart. Metal breath saying it was all my imagination. Metal arms holding me under the water. I can’t fly away from that kind of thing anymore. I have no wings. I am not the little fairy girl bouncing on her silver Converse.

I knew all along
. I type it up on Elsie’s antique typewriter and I think that it is the biggest secret of all. Then I look at Sam, and there is far too much going on in my heart for any of it to come out through the typewriter keys.

I try to call Alice again, but she doesn’t answer. I try Bea’s phone with the same result. I call Kim and Niamh and even Nick—although just hearing his voice makes my skin squirm—but none of them have heard from her. Finally Sam and I decide to go look for her. My mother and Gracie stay in the house and Gracie, echoing my mother’s words from earlier, tells us that Alice will come back when she’s ready, that today was a lot to process. My mother looks slightly reassured, but Sam and I go out anyway. When the front door closes, Sam breathes deep for the first time tonight. The ghost of his father hasn’t followed us out here.

We walk along the river. We are silent, maybe so that the ghosts and memories can’t hear us. Maybe because we don’t know what to say. The rain isn’t heavy enough for us to put up our hoods, but little beads of water mist our hair. Our shoes slide through puddles. My left foot aches every time I put my weight on it, but I concentrate on the swing of my arms and the beat of my breath and the sound of the river, and it soon becomes bearable. The pain in my chest, not so much.

We climb down to the river walk and Sam stops at one of the picnic benches by the big stone bridge and lights up a cigarette. He takes a drag and hands it to me. I can taste his lips on the filter. My cheeks grow warm. Sam clears his throat. When he speaks, his voice is frail like cigarette smoke. Whatever I originally expected him to say, this isn’t it.

“When I kissed you that night,” he says. “Did you . . . did you want me to?”

I thought he’d want to talk about Christopher. That, I’m prepared for. This is a surprise. This is a whole new set of secrets.

“It’s just . . .” Sam says. “I didn’t want to become—” He stops, backs up, starts again. “I don’t want to be like Christopher.” His eyes are more haunted than the ghost house. When he holds out the cigarette to me again, both our hands are shaking so much I almost drop it.

I push past the cloud in my throat. I say, “Of course I wanted you to.” My voice is a shadow, but I know that Sam can hear me even over the river and the rain. “Of course I did. You’re nothing like him.” My voice gets stronger. “Nothing.” When I think about his kisses, my heart speeds up and fills out. I almost wish I could tell him that.

Sam says, “I’m just . . .” And he drops his hands to his sides. Between two of my fingers, the forgotten cigarette drips ash onto the riverbank. Sam looks like a lost boy, like he’s lost in the woods and he doesn’t know how to get home. He says: “I’m just so ridiculously in love with you.” The tear in my world is getting bigger. Soon it’ll blow the whole universe apart. “I try to hide it, I try to stop it, I try to bloody kill it, but it just won’t go away.”

I shake and shake my head. I stop thinking about his kisses. I don’t look at his freckles. I don’t look at the blue
streak in his dark hair. “But I’m like your sister, Sam.” I think:
Stop looking at his lips. Stop seeing his hands. Stop imagining his arms around you
.

“You’re not my sister.”

I’m so confused and turned around by all this that I laugh out loud. “You say I am!” I throw my hands up. The cigarette flies out of my hand and lands in the grass beside the picnic table. The rain quenches it quick. “You say I am all the time! You call me little sister, I tell you I’m not your sister, you say,
If you say so, petite soeur
.” I dip my head and look at him in disbelief from under my eyelashes. “It’s this whole big thing.”

Sam doesn’t laugh along with me. My smile dies slow. He looks down at the ground and says, “That’s because I have to—I try to tell myself that as much as I can.” His voice is quiet. I drop my arms and take a step closer so I can hear him. “I know I shouldn’t feel like this,” he tells me. “I know that. So I say it to remind myself. Every time I feel—” Sam breaks off and shakes his head. “Every time I want to kiss you,” he says quickly, then he sort of laughs. “Which is all the time, by the way.” His voice is strange and strangled. “Every time I want to kiss you, I tell myself you’re my little sister and I shouldn’t want that because it’s fucked-up and wrong.”

The anger in his quiet voice surprises me. “Does it work?”

Sam looks right into my eyes like he’s testing himself. “No.”

Sam is like my brother—that’s what I’m supposed to think. His bedroom is across the hall from mine. We do our homework together. My mother takes care of him when he’s sick. His father was once my stepfather, but he turned out to be a monster. I want to take a step back, tell Sam to keep trying. I want to tell him that this is wrong, that he’s wrong, that no one’d ever accept it and that I shouldn’t either. Instead, I take his hands. Sam breathes in fast like the time I let him kiss me. Like the time I kissed him. All the secrets I’m frightened of are coming out tonight, so I unglue my lips and say it.

“I’m so ridiculously in love with you too.”

I reach out and touch him, lightly, my fingertips slipping through his hair and brushing it away from his face. It falls right back down over his forehead once I take my hand away. He takes a step toward me, carefully, like he’s afraid he’ll trip in the mud. The rain touches us as softly as Sam’s hands touch me. The side of my neck, my shoulders, the length of my arms. The scrapes and bruises underneath my coat sleeves beat with blood. I know my face is flushed. In front of me, Sam’s cheeks are reddening. He puts his hands on my waist, palms wide. I run my fingers through his hair again. When I step forward, it’s deliberate. I close my eyes and tilt my head.

When we kiss, the water crashes on the rocks and the wind howls. The rain swirls around us like petals and we don’t
feel the cold. Sam’s lips are warm as swimming in summer and he tastes like forever, like fire, like wild wanting, like finally finding lost things after having waited too long. His arms pull me close and my hands grab on to him like I’ll never let go and he is pressing hard against me and he is there, and real, and beautiful. There is no way I could ever not love him.

I want the kiss to last forever, but we don’t have the breath for that. I feel like I’ll never breathe properly again, like my heart’ll never stop pounding. Still kissing, we back into the shadow of the bridge. We are hidden from the road by the slope of the ground and the stone is dark above us, and we move closer to it without letting go of each other, but suddenly I stumble on the uneven ground and fall, hard, on the riverbank just underneath the bridge.

Sam falls on top of me. I let out my breath in a whoosh. He looks concerned for a second, but when he sees that I’m okay, he smiles and kisses me lightly. Without really thinking about what I’m doing, I arch up toward him and kiss him back, a lot less lightly.

Sam leans down and our bodies press together and he kisses me, again and again, harder and deeper, and the warmth of his skin burns through my clothes and his lips on mine are like fire and soon we are a different kind of breathless. I run my hands up and down his back, his hips, back up to his shoulders. My fingers tangle in his hair, my heart beats against his. Sam rolls onto his side and pulls me with him
and we lie glued together like secrets, facing each other, pressing our hands through each other’s clothes. The rain falls, but we barely notice. There are rocks underneath us, but they may as well be feather beds, or the mattresses on the floor in the ghost house. We are out in the wet and the wind, but we may as well be alone at the end of the world.

We kiss like wolves, like we’re ravenous, like we’ll eat each other up. We can’t press our bodies close enough, so we shrug out of our coats and our legs tangle like bedsheets in the morning. We move against each other until Sam takes his mouth away from mine and buries his face in my neck, his breathing ragged and raw. We build up a rhythm. Sam moans low. He reaches down below the waistband of my jeans and lower, very slowly. He matches the movement of his hand to his hips and we rock like that together, his mouth at my neck, my hands in his hair, my legs tangled with his. The stones underneath us cut in through our clothes and our breath comes harder and faster and everything builds and builds like butterflies in my tummy until my whole body is filled with it and I feel like I am going to break open like a tear in the world.

I never thought that having my world blown right open would feel so goddamn good.

When we break apart, I see something move out of the corner of my eye. A flash of light at the other side of the river. Sam turns his head and he sees it too.

“Elsie?” he says, his voice uncertain.

Our eyes meet briefly and we stand up quickly. The light flashes again, then disappears. As one we run across the bridge.

The light dips and flashes ahead of us, as if someone is holding a flashlight, and we chase it straight into the clearing where Elsie hung her dream catchers, the one with the flypaper trees and the tiny Elsie-shaped doll on the mousetrap. When we reach the clearing, I drop Sam’s hand. He turns around in a circle, staring up at all the trees, but I only have eyes for the trap on the rock in the middle of the clearing.

“Cara,” Sam says.

“I know.”

In the middle of every dream catcher on every tree around the clearing, and stuck to each sheet of flypaper tacked up on the branches, there is a tiny doll. Brown-haired, dressed in denim and wool, it is unmistakably Elsie, but unlike the doll in the mousetrap, these have no faces, only blank paper skin where the eyes and nose and mouth should be.

The doll in the trap is bigger. It is one of those old-fashioned porcelain dolls, the kind with red bow lips and real eyelashes over glass eyes, but the eyes have been gouged out, the nose and lips scraped away. She still has Elsie’s mousy braided hair, and wears a shapeless tartan skirt and a white blouse. But that’s where the resemblance ends. The doll’s body has been shattered by the hunter’s trap. Porcelain pieces
litter the grass around the rock. When I run to the bushes at the edge of the clearing and part the branches, I see that the tiny Elsie doll on the mousetrap has suffered the same fate. The trap has snapped the doll right across her tiny chest. Little yellow dots swim in front of my eyes.

“Cara,” Sam says again, and there is worry in his voice. He comes over to me and touches my shoulders. “What’s happened?”

“She caught it.” I don’t know if I’ve said the words aloud or if I’ve only thought them. Sam wraps his arms around me. He doesn’t understand. “She caught it,” I say again. “She caught it.”

“Caught what?”

That’s when my phone rings. At first I don’t recognize the noise, but Sam puts his hand into my coat pocket and answers the call. I can’t believe my phone’s still working after everything it’s been through. I recognize Bea’s voice, tiny and muted on the other end of the line, but I don’t hear her words. As Bea talks, Sam’s face gets paler and paler. I realize that the tone of Bea’s voice is all wrong—I can tell that even from here. She doesn’t usually speak so quickly. There is a franticness to the beat of her words, but Sam isn’t saying anything.