The Bargaining (5 page)

“We'll search as long as we can. We're already tight on resources, and we'll be hard pressed to put any more people at risk sending them into the woods in that kind of weather.”

The three families and the Pierce County Sheriff's Department are offering an undisclosed reward for any information on the whereabouts of the missing children.

3

Summer 2013

T
HE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY
is a blur of greens and grays. I start fiddling with the focus on Linda, pointing her lens out the window and seeing the passing landscape from her perspective.

Mr. Jakes probably shouldn't have loaned his precious camera to me. I'm sure it crosses some ethical boundary or another. Except that Mr. Jakes doesn't have the emotional capacity to cross any sort of boundary.

“So what, does this make me your protégé or something?” I'd asked him as I held the camera the wrong way as usual. He looked like he might faint as he watched my fingers edge closer to the lens.

“No. You're absolutely not my protégé. You're not good enough to be anyone's protégé.”

“Awesome. So . . . I guess I'll just sell your precious Linda on Craigslist or something.” I started swinging it around by its strap.

“Don't you dare. Don't even joke about that.” He leaned toward the camera, hands flinching.

“The point is—the idea I have—is that you'll take Linda—­temporarily, and I mean that—and get better. And when I make it to my third mojito on my next night out with my friends, and we're all lamenting how we've exhausted every last hope of ever making a difference in a fraction of the lives we're supposedly helping to mold, I can tell them that I loaned one promising student a camera and a knapsack packed with bundles of photography lessons, and maybe, just maybe, that'll buy me a few more years of this miserable teaching existence.”

I blinked and considered Mr. Jakes's prematurely graying hair and sloped shoulders. He wasn't the first teacher I'd ever heard speak bluntly about his apathy toward teaching. But he was the first one whose act I didn't fully believe.

“You drink mojitos?” I said.

He sighed genuine exasperation. “I called you promising.”

“I caught that.”

“So don't blow it,” he said. “And treat Linda like the queen she is. She and I have been through some things together.”

As I started to walk out of his classroom he said, “And re-enroll in my class when you come back. You know absolutely nothing about ­photography yet.”

I just nodded.

“I'm not a psychologist,” he said.

“Right, I gathered that,” I said.

“I enjoy photography. That's why I teach photography.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm tracking.” He shifted in his chair behind his desk of faux wood, looking as uncomfortable in this spontaneous heart-to-heart as I felt.

“So I'm going to say this quickly, and after that, I'm not going to say another word. And frankly, I'd prefer it if you didn't say anything after I say this, because that's only going to make it that much more awkward for us both.”

“I'm getting the impression I should have left about two minutes ago,” I said.

“You need this,” he said, and I knew what he meant immediately, so I couldn't have said anything in response even if he'd allowed me to. “You need this in order to get past whatever you keep trying and failing to capture in a picture. It's why you're no good at it. Not yet. You need to start thinking about the story you're going to create for yourself. Think of it as your folklore. You have the ability to write your own legend, starting with whatever you see behind that lens. So you'd be stupid to give up that opportunity. Don't be stupid, Penny.”

“Penny?”

Now I turn the camera lens to April, the events of yester
day already growing stale, the sheen of photo paper adorning the walls only a trace memory. April's peachy skin is here now, bright against the blurring green-gray backdrop of the passing landscape. She eyes the phone I've abandoned in her Jeep Grand Cherokee's cup holder.

“Oh, right. You're on I-5 for, like, eight thousand miles,” I say.

“Sarcasm is a shortcut for saying what you really want to say,” she says, and I know from the way she says it that she recently read that somewhere.

“Sarcasm is my native tongue,” I say. “English is my second language.”

This at least gets a smile out of her, so I know she'll lay off long enough for us to maybe enjoy a playlist I've put together, one full of the Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Grouplove and enough Flaming Lips to make her say her head will explode if she hears one more screeching voice crackle in that way that gives me goose bumps.

We make it exactly three songs in before April declares her veto right.

“But we're five miles north of Tacoma!”

“But Point Finney's south of that, then west, then north, and no, Penny, I can't make it through one more song. No,” she says, eyes laser-focused on the road.

My phone vibrates, and my mom's face invades the screen.

April never bothered to send the address of wherever she's dragging you off to
,
her text says.

I type
Worried she's bringing me back to you?
and launch it back to her before I can reconsider. I shove my phone deep into my pocket.

“You're not going to believe the trees around this place,” April says. “The woods border practically the entire peninsula around there and then some.” It's her way of dangling something sparkly in front of me as a distraction. Which is why it pisses me off even more when it works.

“What kind of natural light does it have?” I ask before I feel ready.

“Perfect for photography,” she says.

The sign says
POINT FINNEY 5 MILES
, but I'm way more interested in the sign that follows:
REST STOP 1 MILE.

“I have to go.”

“Can't you hold it? We're practically there.” April has been going over the architectural details specific to the Carver House, a home built in 1844 by none other than the Carver family, a little known threesome of two parents and a child who fell in love with the woods and built a house there, a house that became known by their name because
the address would mean nothing to anyone who asked. If the Carvers were ever hoping to have neighbors, it sounds like they would've been disappointed.

April's rambling on about original cedar flooring and a nonoriginal wood-burning stove she'd like to have removed. And from what she's seen in the photographs of the kitchen, it'll likely have an original Stewart, otherwise known as an older-than-dirt, unusable contraption masquerading as an oven. It's only now I realize that she hasn't ever seen the house in person. And now it's hers.

But right now, I don't care much about that, and I couldn't possibly care less about the architecture of this house. I'm having this feeling like I'm rising to the top of a deep pool and I've forgotten how to breathe on land, which is the same feeling I stopped getting when I was taking the little white pills the doctor gave me after the shit hit the fan back in Phoenix. I thought maybe I was through feeling this way. And then, suddenly, April was talking about nineteenth-century furnishings and I remembered that time Rae pronounced century like “cent-tree,” and for some reason that was the most hysterical thing either of us had ever heard, and we laughed so hard tears cut a path through the powder on my cheeks, and now I can't feel my hands and I think I might throw up, and April's going on and on about inspections and resale potential.

Which is how I know she would never understand. She believes I could take even the slightest interest in a fucking house when I know Rae will never mispronounce another word again. Because of me.

I just shake my head—no, I can't hold it. I'm sure April thinks I'm sulking because she sighs and pulls off at the next opportunity.

“Just hurry, okay?” she says. “I want to get there before dark. Apparently it's hard to find even in the daytime.”

A wave of nausea threatens to crush me, and I keep myself from barrel-rolling out of the jeep, but only barely. Once the cool, damp air hits my face, I feel the claustrophobia from the car begin to dissipate. A pretty terrible smell takes its place.

The rest stop is one of the grungier I've seen. Not one of those sparkly new stops with vending machines on the outside and folded maps courtesy of the state tourism office.

Fat black flies hover low around the cement wall shielding the door to the ladies' room, which is conveniently locked.

“Hey, Penny!”

I come back around the corner to find April holding her phone far above her head.

“I can't get any reception out here, and I need to let the agent know we're on our way so she can meet us at the house.
I'm going to try moving toward the road. Just wait for me in the car when you're done. I'll let your dad know we're almost there, too. Any messages for him?”

“Gosh, not a single one,” I say.

Her lips pinch over her teeth, but she turns without a word and heads for the road.

I consider telling her that the reception was pretty spotty on the highway, too, but the thought of a few minutes alone in the jeep with some of my own music and not much else is too good to pass up, so I nod before moving on to the other side of the rest stop.

The men's room door was clearly locked at some point, but it appears to have been jimmied open by force. The door's bolt is hanging by a screw, and the frame is gashed deeply by what might have been a crowbar. I'm starting to hear that warning voice in my head, the same one that tells you to lace your keys through your fingers like metal claws when you walk to your car at night. I turn back to the gravel parking lot, the two-lane highway just beyond. Not a person in sight, not a single car besides our jeep. It's strange to go from the company of so many cars on a highway to sudden isolation on the side of the road. The forest around the rest area encroaches on the restroom as though resentful of its intrusion, and when I nudge the
bathroom door open and cringe against its groan, I see that I'm not altogether wrong.

Vines have begun to twist through the tiny openings where the walls meet the ceiling. I think those spaces are meant to create some ventilation in the bathroom, but they're doing a horrible job. It doesn't just smell like waste. It smells like
old
waste. I clench my jaw to keep from heaving.

Welcome back, nausea.

A clouded mirror above a bone-dry sink distorts my reflection, bulging my forehead and midsection. Someone's scrawled in blue letters across the glass “Tami B Sucks Great Dick,” to which someone responded below in red “I heard you couldn't even get it up!,” to which someone else wrote “That's not what your girlfriend said!!”