Time Flies (29 page)

“I keep telling you, without their reading glasses, nobody’s even going to be able to tell them apart. They’ll see a blur of tattoo and go immediately to being completely impressed.”

B.J.’s phone rang.

She reached for it. “Hey, what’s up? Are you sure? How long? Okay, okay. Hang tight, we’ll be right there.”

B.J. poured the rest of her glass of wine down the bathroom sink. “Come on, throw your clothes on. Fast. Veronica can’t find Fawn.”

CHAPTER 30

I took a long skip to catch up with B.J. We were both wearing flip-flops and carrying our high strappy sandals.

B.J. unlocked Mustang Sally and climbed in. She leaned across the seats and unlocked my door for me.

I jumped in and buckled my seat belt carefully so I wouldn’t wrinkle my peasant blouse. “She’s probably just playing a game. Listen, how about if we give it a little more time. We can go to the reunion early and give Veronica a call from there to check in with her.”

B.J. gave me a look. “Do you really think she would have called us right before the reunion if she didn’t need us?”

“Has she called the police?”

B.J. put her blinker on and took a right toward the highway. “She’s afraid to. Apparently Fawn was taken away from Veronica’s
daughter at one point, and Veronica’s afraid it’ll look like she wasn’t watching her, either.”

“Of course the police won’t think that,” I said.

“Can you guarantee that?”

I shook my head. “It’s a crazy world.”

“That’s for shit sure,” B.J. said.

Most of the crazy world must have been heading to the Cape. We crawled along so slowly I barely felt any anxiety. When we finally pulled up to Veronica’s house almost two hours later, it was dusk and the outside lights were already on. The burned-out light on the porch had been replaced.

B.J. turned off the car and looked at me. “I’ve been trying so hard not to think about this. But what if Fawn heard me talking about her right before we left?”

I reached for my door handle. “Let’s hope not.”

Veronica met us at the door, gripping a mug of coffee. Her hair was a mess and she looked exhausted. She looked like a grandmother.

B.J. and I both leaned in to hug her at once.

Veronica took a step back. “Don’t. I’m trying to keep it together.”

“Is Mark here yet?” I asked.

Veronica pursed her lips together and shook her head. “I haven’t called him yet. I just kept thinking she’d show up and there’s nothing he can do from there except worry and by the time he got a flight . . . So I called you.”

B.J. closed her eyes. “I think this might be my fault. I said some stupid things in front of Fawn. I’m really sorry.”

Veronica crossed her arms over her chest. “Like what?”

“Ugh,” B.J. said. “I think I said something about how my caretaking days are over and I couldn’t have handled five more minutes here. Damn my stupid smart-ass mouth—I didn’t even really mean it. And Mel and I had no idea she was hiding under my car.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture us standing out in the driveway. “And then I said something about how they say it’s different when it’s your own grandchild.”

“And then I said something about hoping you could find a way to ditch the kid and meet us at the reunion.” B.J. hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’m an idiot.”

Veronica turned and walked away from us.

B.J. and I looked at each other. Then we followed Veronica across the kitchen and into the family room. We climbed the narrow wooden staircase behind her up to the second floor.

She pushed open the door to a small bathroom. We all walked in and stood elbow-to-elbow. A Hello Kitty shower curtain had been pulled all the way over to one side. A message was scrawled across the bottom of the white porcelain tub in a child’s handwriting.

“Is it backward?” B.J. said.

“It’s mirror writing,” I said. “If you hold the words up to a mirror you can read them, so I guess that makes it reversed but not really backward. I used to spend hours and hours practicing mirror writing when I was a kid.”

“Go play with your friends,” B.J. read.

Veronica shook her head. “I’ve called the family of every single child she’s ever played with around here, not that there have been many of them. Plus her swimming instructor, the bookstore where we go for story hour, her favorite ice cream place. I don’t know what else to do but keep looking.”

I shook my head. “What if she was telling you she was leaving so you could go play with
your
friends?”

B.J. and I were crisscrossing the yard with the rays of our flashlights.

“Ally ally in free,” I yelled.

“Yrros os m’i,” B.J. yelled. “Please come here so I can apologize to you, Fawn. And after that I’m going to buy you your weight in ice cream.”

We walked to the end of the driveway and yelled Fawn’s name.

“Fawn,” Veronica yelled from the other side of the house.

“Listen,” I whispered to B.J. “I think we have to convince Veronica to call the police. We can tell them how responsible she is. I mean, it’s not like she’s a drug dealer. She’s a
teacher
.”

“You heard what she told us,” B.J. whispered. “The last time the police came here, it was to arrest Fawn’s mom. What if Fawn’s out there and she sees them drive up and thinks they’re coming for
her
?”

I sighed. “But we’re going to miss the whole reunion. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I—”

“Mel, it’s a freakin’ reunion.”

“I know, I know, but I really . . .”

Even in the dark I couldn’t miss the look B.J. gave me before she walked away.

I stood at the edge of Veronica’s driveway by myself for the longest time. Like B.J. had never been selfish before. Like it hadn’t been a zillion years since I’d had any fun. Like Finn Miller might not be the last guy who ever waited for me to walk into a room.

“Have you ever taken her to see Minot’s Light?” B.J. was saying when I found them on the front steps. “You know, the one that flashes one–four–three for ‘I love you’?”

Under the soft glow of the front light Veronica nodded. “It’s one of her favorite places to visit when we go up to Marshbury. She and her pop even have this little ritual when he puts her to bed. Mark flashes one–four–three with her bedroom light on the way out the door.”

Veronica let out a little sob, then coughed to cover it up.

“I can’t shake the feeling she’s right around here,” B.J. whispered. “Maybe she’s watching our every move and just needs to be sure you really want her back.”

Veronica nodded. “Maybe I just want it to be true, but that sounds like her.”

“So,” B.J. whispered, “let’s go put on the biggest lovefest anybody has seen since Woodstock. Not that we’re old enough to remember Woodstock.”

Veronica and B.J. went into the house to get all the candles they could find. I felt left out, excluded in that awful junior high way when two friends align and leave you out in the cold. I wondered if that was how we’d made Fawn feel.

I followed the beam of my flashlight out to the backyard. The
drone of the cicadas was loud and eerie. A mosquito bit the side of my neck, and I swatted it hard. I knew Veronica and B.J. were a quick scream away, but I was still afraid—afraid of the dark, afraid of what I might find just around the corner. I could only imagine how alone and afraid Fawn must feel right now.

I found the Slip’n Slide. I unscrewed the hose from the back of the house, juggling the flashlight from one hand to the other and finally tucking it under my arm. I dragged the whole thing around to the front yard, stretched out the Slip’n Slide under the lights in front of Veronica’s house, and attached the hose to another water spigot. I turned it on so that the water trickled across the slippery blue plastic like an invitation.

I looked up at the pitch-black sky and wished on the first star I saw that Fawn was out there in the dark somewhere watching my every move. Veronica came out carrying a big tray of candles, mostly plain white votives and big fat hurricane candles. B.J. followed her with a black wrought-iron candelabra filled with long tapered candles. Crystals dangled from it like a throwback to romantic dinners of long ago.

I took the candelabra from B.J. and set it up on the highest step. Then Veronica and I arranged the rest of the candles on the steps. When we finished, it looked so much like a shrine that it was creepy. A shiver ran across my back.

“This is just her kind of thing,” Veronica whispered. “Oh, please, let her be out there.”

Veronica and I started lighting the candles with long fireplace matches. B.J. came out carrying her iPod. She held up a hot pink iPod dock. “I found this in Fawn’s room. Okay if I use it?”

Veronica looked up from lighting the last candle and nodded.

B.J. started scrolling through songs. “Ooh, ooh here it is. I knew I had it on here.”

B.J. turned up the volume full blast, and the night filled with the sound of seagulls. A wooden flute chimed in, followed by a rich, acoustic guitar and a soothing voice singing about sand dunes and sea grass and foghorns in the distance. And a guardian angel giving a blind ship back its sight with a lighthouse that flashes 1–4–3.

We did our best to flash the numbers with our flashlights to the gentle beat of the song, over and over again. By the time David Ogden had finished singing his “1–4–3 (Lighthouse Song)” all the way through, Fawn had walked up to the edge of the yard and stood there hugging her mother’s laptop to her like a blanket.

CHAPTER 31

“Faster,” I screamed.

B.J. leaned forward over the steering wheel. Mustang Sally roared.

“Stop!” I yelled.

We slowed down.

“Don’t listen to me,” I shrieked.

We sped up again. My heart started to beat right out of my chest. The skin on my arms prickled and my hands started to swell. The baby elephant sat down and tried to squeeze the life out of me.

“I don’t want to die,” I whispered. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth on every syllable. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Knock it off with the death talk,” B.J. said. “You’re killing me. I’ve never even had an accident that was my fault.”

“I don’t want to miss the reunion, I don’t want to miss the reunion, I don’t want to miss the reunion,” I whispered.