The Shimmers in the Night (3 page)

Getting ready for bed after she finished packing for the trip, Cara decided the chaos in her room had finally gotten out of hand. These days, when she or Max or Jax
did
consent to tidy up, it was usually only because Lolly was threatening to use her powerful vacuum to suck their personal belongings off the floor, never to be seen again.

Lolly did a little housework, but she concentrated on the first floor and usually came into the kids' bedrooms only when (as she put it) she was forced to.

Cara started to pick up her room by the soft orange light of her old bedside lamp, patterned with seashells and starfish. Her mother had bought it for a dollar from a motel that was going out of business. The briny smell of the ocean wafted in a half-open window, mixed in with the faint bayside odor of fishy things—probably horseshoe crabs in mid-decay. She lifted clothes off the floor, straightened her desk and closet, then decided she could even change her sheets.

Hey, once every few months, why not?

After she pulled back the flowery turquoise coverlet and the jumble composed of the top sheet and blankets, she also lifted her pillow, and there, lying on the bottom sheet, was a small, blue eye on a silver band. Her favorite ring, a good-luck charm made of blown glass that her mother had given her. A
nazar
, they called them in Turkey, to ward off the evil eye—a good eye to ward off evil ones. She'd been missing it since the summer, and it'd been here all the time.

Huh
, she thought, and picked the ring up to slide it back onto her finger. She thought ruefully of the fairy tale about the princess who slept on a pile of twelve mattresses and could still feel the tiny pea beneath.
Not much of a princess, am I?

She found she was thinking of Jax again and what he had said about their mother's work: a source,
an unknown source.
Where and what could this source be? And what did it have to do with what had happened to them in August?

Her fingers still held the ring, settled now in its familiar place. Without knowing how she'd gotten there, she was lying on her bed—aware of her grimy sheets, the usual few grains of beach sand at the bottom—but she wasn't seeing her room anymore. She was shifting through the turquoises and blues of her covers without touching anything, and in front of her was darkness, and out of the darkness came bubbling, roiling black columns of what looked like smoke.

The smoke was dispersing strangely—through water, she thought, not air. It must be water.

The black clouds were coming out of bumpy black and brown and white chimneys, not manmade but maybe mineral, she guessed—towers jutting out of rock piles on what she thought must be the seabed. The black smoke came billowing out of these rough castle-like pillars—billowing and billowing in clouds that spread and bubbled up again until she felt hypnotized watching it.

But then she was moving closer to the rocks, right up to the towers and into the dark of the smoke and then emerging from it on the other side. There were tubelike creatures capped with plumes of red; there were lit-up floating animals that reminded her of shrimp. Others looked like jellyfish, and others, yet, the single-celled organisms she'd seen in biology class. They swirled around her until she passed them, too, and went farther down, burrowing through the ocean floor. Then it was black again and she couldn't see anything for a while—until she could.

She could see, but she couldn't understand. There was movement here, there were spaces—caverns maybe?—and streaks of light through the darkness like rivers of fire, she thought, but it was all too surreal; she couldn't see much beyond the blurs and flashes. She felt as though she were inside a volcano. Then she saw a line in front of her, an impossibly sharp, vertical line of gray, unlike anything else, that held her gaze. It was something recognizable, though she couldn't put her finger on it….

But she was in her bedroom again. Her old, familiar bedroom with its cozy disorder. She was sitting upright in a pile of rumpled bed linens, feeling a little dizzy. Outside she heard the crickets, the faint rhythmic wash of the tide. A low drumbeat from Max's room, where he was listening to music without his headphones.

She held up her finger, still faintly tanned from the summer, with its short, chewed nail and the blue-and-white nazar ring.

Definitely not a coincidence.

She'd mislaid the ring after what happened in August; now that she thought about it, she'd had no visions since then. Not a single one, at least that she remembered.

Until now.

Although…maybe the nightmares had been pieces of visions, trying to come through.

Not that she knew what she'd seen. But it had been a glimpse into
something.
She hadn't made it up.

And that meant the ring had to have powers: her mother had given her a talisman, not just a good-luck charm. She'd suspected before, but she hadn't known for sure. In a way, she thought curiously, she hadn't wanted to know. In a way, she had ignored the evidence.

The vision had to have something to do with Jax's theory about her mother's discovery, the so-called source. Which she'd been thinking about when she slid the ring onto her finger. That wasn't a coincidence, either.

It was all starting again, she thought, and felt the tiny hairs lift along her arms. She didn't know whether to feel excited or stubbornly rooted to the ground.

It wasn't that regular life fell away; it was that new elements appeared without warning.

It was the possible, opening up in midair.

Two

Clothing-stuffed backpack over her shoulder, Cara rang
Hayley's doorbell for her ride to school. There they would get on the charter bus that would take the team onto the mainland and finally into Boston.

It was so early it was dark out, with the first pale streaks in the sky; Cara was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes when Hayley's mother answered the door with her lips lined in purple and her hair done up in a sixties beehive.

Hayley's mom ran a beauty salon along Route 6, a salon with a lot of fake flowers in it where young women got their nails done and old ladies got their hair washed a lavender color and set into wavy helmets. Cara and Hayley had asked her what the reason was behind that old-lady blue hair situation, but Mrs. M never explained it too well. It seemed like a ritual from ancient times—the equivalent of a secret handshake. In any case, Mrs. Moore's own hair was always elaborate and tacky, like a Gaga wig but maybe without the irony.

“Come on in, Cara, hon!” she enthused in her Georgia accent.

It turned
on
into
own
and
in
into Ian. Come own Ian!

“Thanks,” said Cara.

Hayley's mom often made Cara feel a bit embarrassed—though not as embarrased as Hayley felt. Mrs. M. was nice, no argument there, but she was also shiny and loud and stood too near, where Cara's mother was soft-spoken and, like a chameleon, always seemed to match wherever she found herself.

“Would you go on up and get her, sweetcakes? I'll be waiting out in the car,” said Mrs. M, and pulled on a lumpy fur jacket Cara really hoped was fake. It had animal tails dangling.

Cara dropped her bags and took the stairs two at a time. Hayley was one of those people who always made you wait—at least, if she was involved in a momentous decision such as what to wear. In restaurants, she was the one still studying the menu when everyone else already had a plate in front of them.

“Hay! Time to go!” called Cara as she swung past the shag-carpeted landing and into the upstairs hallway.

Hayley's door was open, showing a wall of celebrity collages. She cut up the gossip and fashion magazines her mom's clients left in the salon.

“I'm coming! Geez,” said Hayley.

In fact, she wasn't coming at all. She was posing in front of her full-length mirror, admiring herself in a leisurely fashion and rocking an eighties outfit. She had feathery earrings dangling from her ears and an asymmetrical, triangle-shaped coat that looked, to Cara, on the ugly side.

Of course, she would never say that to Hayley. It wasn't that Hay's feelings would be hurt or anything. Far from it. She'd just roll her eyes at Cara's poor fashion sense and give her a lecture on glamor and trends and the importance of retro. But Cara also knew that Hay's elaborate outfits were carefully chosen at thrift stores. They didn't have the money for brand-new clothes.

“We have to
go
now,” said Cara. “It's a bus. Not a personal taxi service.”

“So my goal is like an early Madonna, sleazy gutterslag kinda look,” said Hayley.

“Nice,” nodded Cara. “Yeah. I can see that. But let me ask you this. Did you pack your swimsuit?”

Hayley stopped popping her gum and snapped her fingers. She swished by Cara, down the hall to the bathroom (where everything was fluffy and/or made of conch shells and beach glass and a really bad poster showed two sets of footprints turning to one in the sand, along with some motto about Jesus carrying you) and grabbed a threadbare Speedo dangling off the shower rod.

“Good thought. Kudos,” she said.

By the time they were getting into the car, Hayley was already irritated with her mom, who proceeded to grill them all the way to school—driving, as usual, like she was under the influence though all she was drinking was coffee—on the names and family histories of other kids on the team. Mrs. M was what you might call an extrovert. Extreme. She was sure to talk to everyone and bustle around everywhere, Cara thought. There was no way she'd fly under the radar.

“Rule Number One,” said Hayley as they pulled into the parking lot. “If you absolutely
have
to talk to people, at least do me one favor. Or all my work on the popularity situation will be wrecked. Do
not
constantly remind people you're my mother. In fact, if you don't refer to it a single time, that'd be awesome.”

“
Hay
ley!” chided her mother with a smile, as though her daughter was joking.

“Keep the relationship, like, under wraps,” said Hayley as they pulled into a parking space. “Because if you keep trying to tell
humiliating
baby stories about me, I'll have to end my suffering. All your years of bringing me up will be totally wasted in a tragic teen suicide.”

“Honey, people already
know
I'm your mama,” protested Mrs. M. “I mean”—
Ah main
—”I hate to break it to you, but that little kitty's already out of the bag.”

“What I'm
saying
is, don't rub it
in
,” said Hayley. “Let them forget a bit. You know what I'm saying?”

She popped her door open and shrugged her miniature backpack over her shoulders.

“Hi, guys,” said Jaye as Hayley plucked her larger bag from the trunk.

Jaye was Asian-looking from her mother's side, pretty and slim; she stood with her duffel bag placed neatly on the ground beside her, light-blue iPod buds in her ears. Jaye could be timid, unlike Hayley; she was comfortable with her two best friends but not too great at reaching out to other, new people.

But what all the approving parents didn't know—when they patted her on the back to reward her for being an A student and also for not wearing shiny purple lip gloss like Hayley—was how independent she could be, despite the shyness. She was the type you could depend on to know things like CPR without ever bragging about it. Recently she'd tried out for the school play because her mother had thought it would be a good way to conquer her shyness; she'd done it even though it terrified her, and she'd gotten a small role.

Her parents were well-dressed and reserved: her dad was an engineer, and her mother ran a plant nursery. Compared to Mrs. M, Jaye's parents were distinctly unembarrassing.

“God, you're
so
lucky to be solo,” said Hayley, apparently thinking the same thing. “I still can't believe my mom's tagging along. I'm having orphan fantasies.”

“Well,” said Jaye, and shrugged, “if you ignore them for long enough, sometimes they go away.”

She and Hayley laughed, and then stopped and both looked at Cara guiltily.

“Oh, wow,” said Jaye. “Slowly remove foot from mouth. I'm
so
sorry.”

“It's all right,” said Cara softly.

And it was true. It had been harder to hear things like that before she saw her mother and was reassured that she hadn't left them—or not because she wanted to, anyway.

Not that Cara didn't struggle with her absence. But at least it hadn't been caused by something that was wrong with their family. Hayley knew what had happened, too—that Cara's mother was out there fighting in some mysterious war, and had visited them; that there were
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
… (Max, usually a so-so student, had a thing for Shakespeare quotes).

But Jaye didn't know any of that. Cara and her brothers had talked to Hayley about it, and they'd all agreed not to say anything to anyone else—or not yet, anyway. The true story was too far-fetched, and Max, in particular, wanted to limit how many people heard it. Jaye's family had been away in Maine when the whole thing went down, and as far as she knew, Cara's mother had left back in June, and that was that.

Coach Essick was herding people into the charter bus, a tall black behemoth with a bright purple swipe on the side. The coach was a beefy bald guy who liked his swimmers to say daily affirmations.

“I'm a win, win, winner!” he said now, pumping a hairy arm. “Let's hear it!”

“…uh yeah, winner,” mumbled one of the guys, half-asleep and sheepish.

The affirmations weren't always a big hit.

“In you get, girls!” said Mrs. M in her too-perky voice.

About an hour later the bus was crossing the bridge to the mainland, an educational video about reptiles playing on the TV monitor. Hayley was talking to older kids near the rear of the bus, at what she considered a minimum safe distance from her mother; Cara and Jaye were getting ahead on their homework in a seat near the front.

The text alert on Cara's phone went off. Jax.

F
OUND SOURCE
, read the text.

Wht source?
she typed back.

“Lizards are robust, adaptive creatures…”
droned the British narrator.

No reply.

He was probably busy.

She put her phone away.

“…but, due to global warming, at least 40 percent of the world's lizard populations are expected to go extinct by the year 2080. Overall, if current emissions trajectories persist, one-quarter to one third of
all
the world's species are projected to disappear by century's end.”

“That's really scary,” said Jaye quietly.

Cara looked into her friend's eyes. It was good to have Jaye beside her; Jaye understood a few things that Cara really worried about but Hayley didn't seem to be interested in.

“I
know,”
she said.

“Hey, Cara!”

It was Zee, Max's girlfriend, leaning out of her seat a few rows back.

“Hi, Zee,” said Cara, twisting around.

“Max said to keep an eye on you,” smiled Zee.

“Huh,” said Cara. “Thanks, but…there are kind of a lot of babysitters around here already.”

They both glanced up to where Mrs. M was standing in the aisle and leaning over the double seat that held Coach Essick and Mr. Abboud. She stuck one hip out, swirled her egregious Garfield keychain on an index finger, and chattered gaily to the two men as Coach Essick grinned and nodded and Mr. Abboud stared miserably out his filmy window.

The poor guy had to avert his eyes, Cara realized: not only was Mrs. M not wearing a headscarf, but she was showing major tanned, freckled
cleave
, as Hayley would put it if she noticed. Cara didn't know whom to feel bad for—Mr. Abboud, Hayley, or Mrs. M herself.

“See what you mean,” said Zee. She smiled again, and Cara thought she could see why Max liked her so much. There was a warmth to Zee—an easy friendliness. “But just so you know, I'm here if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” said Cara.

Her phone buzzed, so she turned around again, slipping it out of her backpack pocket.

Another text from Jax.

W
HERE R U
?

Sagamore Brij.

She waited till an answer came up.

C
OME GET ME
.

Oh
no
, she thought. Now?

On bus!
she typed.
Y? HOW?

S
CARED TELL NO 1 PLZ COME
!

She spent the rest of the bus trip using her cell to figure out how to get to the Institute from the hotel, then from the big school where they were going to be competing. The team had its first races this afternoon, and she was supposed to be there, of course; but she wasn't slated to be
in
any of today's races unless someone swimming the backstroke fell violently ill. The relay wasn't until tomorrow—heats in the morning, finals in the afternoon if the team made the cut. Maybe, she thought, just maybe she could slip out without anyone noticing once they were all sitting there in the bleachers—at least, if people were focused on watching the races.

Distraction was the only way. If she distracted Mrs. M, she thought, she could do it. She'd
have
to distract her, because Mrs. M was directly assigned to her and Jaye and Hayley, among others. Cara could sneak out and get on the subway—it looked like there was a T station a few blocks from the host school, and then it was only a couple of stops from there to the Institute. She could take the T by herself—she'd taken it before, though admittedly with her mother or her dad—and go find Jax and bring him with her. Maybe she'd take him back to the meet; maybe she'd send him to the hotel room she'd be sharing with Hayley and Jaye. She'd work that part later.

But she was going to need Hayley's help, she realized, if she wanted to get away with it. There was no way Mrs. M would give her permission to take off. Ever since her divorce, she didn't even let Hayley walk around the neighborhood by herself, much less get on a public transit system in a city of millions. She was obsessed with true-crime shows and seemed to watch in morbid fascination when it was a show about a missing kid.

When the bus pulled into the parking lot of the hotel—a blocky place with not a single tree or bush in sight—and Mr. Abboud went to get them checked in, Cara waited till Mrs. M was busy flirting with Coach Essick again, then got out of her seat and went to the back of the bus to talk to Hayley, in the very last row.