Dark Water - Laura McNeal [63]
“But if I leave now, won’t they notice me?” I pictured the aerial view of the river and how my head, like a moving figure in a video game, might call attention to the roof of Amiel’s house.
Amiel listened tensely for the helicopter, and I pictured the border patrol agents waiting in their cars along the highway in Rainbow, parked cars I saw so often that I barely noticed them. Now I wondered what would stop them from coming here.
Amiel pulled me to the wall, and he sat down. I sat down with him. He kept his knees close to his chest, and I sat in the same position, too scared to move. We waited like that until we heard nothing but the slosh of the river against the banks and the mourning doves in the trees. You knew, they always seemed to be sighing in their disappointment. You knew who knew.
I looked at Amiel’s face and felt the pull of him.
He kissed me once, soberly, and then he stood up so that I knew I had to go. His eyes had deepened now to shadows, but the trees outside his door floated in amber. The clouds had parted enough to let the setting sun gild the water. I crossed the river and turned to wave, but I saw nothing except willows and the orange spots that burned into my mismatched eyes.
Forty
School started. It was unremarkable except that Robby and I could now drive unchaperoned to school. He took us in his birthday car on the first day.
Me: How was Paris?
Robby: Oh, you know. Totally superior in all ways to the home sod.
Me: Really?
Him: No. I like the museums, though, and walking by the Seine.
He said Seine perfectly.
Me: How was Monsieur Pouf?
Him: Who?
Me: The ancient le tortoise. Your mother was telling me.
Him: He mostly hangs out in the garden. I was back there one time, just kind of giving my parents some space, and there he was, smoking the last Gauloise.
Me: The last what?
Him: It’s a French cigarette. They don’t make them anymore. Monsieur Pouf, though, he has his sources.
Me: So what’s the deal with the whole … you know, your dad and Mary Beth.
Him: I think I’ve persuaded her to switch.
Me: I know. She came to see me at Subway. To ask me why you dropped her.
Him: What did you say?
Me: I said I didn’t know.
Him: Good.
Me (feeling kind of mean): So how do you know, anyway?
Him: Know what?
Me: That she’s given him up?
Significant pause.
Him: I just do.
Me: But you didn’t specifically talk about it.
Him: No. Of course not.
Me (trying to make him feel guilty): She seemed really nice.
To this he had no reply. We were almost to the school and I could see the ag buildings in the wet morning light.
Him: What about you, though?
Me: Me?
Him: Have you been—hunh hunh hunh (Robby’s impression of Pepe Le Pew)—fabricating zee love while I was gone?
Me (turning a suspicious crimson color): Why would you think that?
Him: Lucky guess. What’s all that stuff in the tree house, by the way?
Me: The shells? Just stuff I found.
Luckily, we could hear the late bell through the windshield as he darted into a parking space, and we both had to make a dash for it.
Forty-one
My mother and Hoyt grew up in Idaho, and she says Fallbrook has two seasons: Green Grass, which lasts from January to April, and Fire Alert, which lasts the rest of the year.
For me, though, Fire Alert didn’t start until October. Summer was supposed to be hot, and if September was hot, well, that was normal, too, because in northern places, which I’d read about in novels, that’s when you had Indian summer.
But that September was a lilac bush roasting in the sun. Every day, the leaves baked