That was then. This is now. If you can call this period of time anything at all. It feels like simply waiting. I guess all that exists is the present. We know what the past got us, and the future . . . well, the future is unwritten. All I know is that I’m almost out of time. I’ve got less than twelve hours to save myself and to make sure no one, absolutely no one, has to go through what Ally went through. I’m hoping she told me everything she knew, but given the things I found out—the things I know she didn’t or couldn’t tell me—that seems unlikely. If I could only get the details straight. If only there wasn’t something ominous and terrifying floating just below the water’s surface out by the slips.
But if I’m going to wish, if I’m going to say “if only,” I would go back much further than that. I’d go back to when Ally and me were just kids and I’d fix things before they got bad.
When I go over it in my head I always start with the morning we met Graham.
I was up early helping Mom get the house ready because the ladies from Rockland Historical Society were coming to look at our widow’s walk. Dad had restored it just the way it was in the town’s records from the 1920s and now you could go and stand up there and see the whole harbor; you could actually see some of the boats Dad built out in the slips, tall and majestic, and rocking easily on the cold waves. It was beautiful.
I baked some muffins and made some lemon curd and then helped clear up some of Dad’s junk. One of the ladies visiting that morning was my boss, Ginny Porter, who owned the Pine Grove Inn. I still couldn’t believe I got to have a job in that old mansion. There was a glorious view from nearly every window. On one side you could see the close majesty of tall pines, on the other there were cliffs and the rocky shoreline and the lovely old lonely lighthouse standing tall in the harbor. Because of that job I also got to meet interesting people coming to our town from all over the world. People passing through for a night, or staying for a few days to take it all in. People trying to get away from the city and just relax.
Mom was mortified thinking that our guests would show up early that morning and Daddy would still have his blueprints and models spread all over the dining room, but I was more worried about Sydney, who could be unpredictable when we had company. Either she would say something rude or sulk around in her black skinny jeans and uncombed hair looking like someone owed her something. And if people talked to her God only knew what she’d say. It could be brilliant—like really brilliant, reciting some poem or doing some cool card trick Dad taught us when we were kids—or it could be just plain vicious, calling people snobs or philistines. She loved the word philistine. I’d had to look it up. I never heard anyone but her and maybe my social studies teacher use it. This was the thing with Syd: she seemed all dark and tough and low-class if you didn’t know her, but she spent so much time with her face in a book she had this vocabulary that shocked people. Since we were little she was like this. Anyway, the word means someone who is hostile to culture. Which I think is completely the opposite of Mom’s friends. They all care so much about culture and about the town’s history and about genealogy. But whatever. It’s not like Syd and I ever really saw things the same way.
Sydney was lying around our room in her black tank top reading (of course) and listening to Bright Eyes or Death Cab or some other weird emo band that sounded like they were whining all alone from the bottom of the ocean. Not exactly the right music for ladies deciding if our house will be designated a historic landmark.
I walked in and handed her a muffin on this cute patterned china plate that we used to have tea parties with, and she sat up, her black tangled mane falling around her shoulders. She had her lost-in-another-world look and she was reading a book that sure wasn’t part of the summer reading list for school. Winter’s Bone I think it was, some creepy thing where everyone’s poor and everyone dies. Her side of the room was plastered with posters of the same emo bands plus Brody Dalle from the Distillers, all tattooed and screaming, and a big poster of Tony Hawk upside down above a flight of concrete stairs holding his skateboard, looking like he was about to come crashing down right on Sydney’s bed. Which I’m sure she would have just loved.
“Hey, cutie, can you turn it down a little?” I asked.
“Why?” She yawned. “Those blue-haired mummies won’t be here for hours.”
“Mommy’s trying to concentrate on her presentation.”
“You’re seventeen, Ally. You really should stop calling Liz Mommy.”
“And you should not call Mom Liz,” I told her. “It’s disrespectful.”
“Whatever.” She shut her book and took a bite of the muffin and smiled in spite of herself.
I sat down on the bed and thought I could smell cigarette smoke on her clothes, or worse, pot. Great, I thought, just great. I needed to get her out of the house for a while so she wouldn’t embarrass Mom or say something weird to Ginny.
“C’mon, smarty,” I said, poking her in the sides a little to make her jump. “Let’s go pick some berries.”
She groaned and made a big show of getting up and putting on her shorts.
Syd can be really difficult sometimes but I’ve found that if you get her used to an idea there will be less fighting later on. I hated fighting with her. Honestly, I love her too much and don’t really have the heart for it. Unlike Syd I’ve never really been much of a fighter. I remember seeing her when Mom brought her back from the hospital. Her hands already balled into tiny fists. But her birth was a blessing in so many ways. The year she was born was the year I learned how to say no. And that’s an important skill for a girl to have.
I dragged her out of the room that morning and we went down the back stairs and rummaged in the pantry for baskets and then headed for the wooded edge of our property. Movers were coming and going from the house next door and Syd wanted to spy and see who our new neighbors would be. I left her by the big old pine and went to pick berries by myself. At least she was out of the house.
The next thing I knew she was shouting. I looked up and saw a tall, sweet-looking kid walking out of the garage across the driveway, cleaning his hands on a rag and carrying a neat little tool kit. He was handsome, his neat blond hair parted on the side and swept across his forehead. He had broad shoulders and you could see his muscles and ribs beneath his shirt. He had that same faraway look Syd gets when she’s reading.
“Hey, loser,” Sydney called to him. “Nice haircut. You know most Justin Bieber wannabes are twelve years old, right?”
I could see she’d hurt his feelings, that he was a sensitive boy. He started heading for his house, cleaning what must have been the rest of the engine grease off his hands as he walked between the two fancy cars that were parked in his driveway.
“Wait,” I called. “Wanna come over here and eat some blueberries? We just picked them.”
He stopped and smiled tentatively, tucked the rag into the back pocket of his jeans, and came into our front yard. He smelled clean, like citrus and laundry detergent, and the air around him was cool, as if he had just come out of an air-conditioned room.
Sydney stood close to him, her arms folded across her chest, sizing him up. The sun shone between the needles of our giant pine, creating a beautiful pattern of light across the ground, dappling their faces with sunshine.
“I’m Tate,” she said, in her tough, abrupt way.
He looked at us and then laughed shyly. “I’m Graham,” he told us.