Мэгги Стифватер - Lament

I swallowed. "He wasn't in the car?"

Peter was silent a long, long minute, and then he said, voice breaking, "Dee, they think he crawled out. They think he crawled out and died somewhere. There's blood everywhere--I saw it.

God, Dee!"

My nails dug into my skin. I wanted to say something to comfort him, but it seemed false coming from someone who needed comfort themselves. "Pete--I don't know what to say." It felt horribly inadequate. We both loved James--I should have had something more insightful to say.

Then I thought of what I wanted to ask. "Will you help me look for him?"

Peter hesitated. "Dee--you didn't see how much blood --I--God."

"If he's alive, I can't just sit here."

"Dee." Peter's voice shook, and when he spoke again, it was in simple, clipped sentences, like I was a little kid he was trying to make understand. "He's dead. There was too much blood.

They're looking in the river now. They didn't even tell us to keep our hopes up. He's dead. They said he was."

No. No, he wasn't dead. He just wasn't. I wouldn't believe it until I saw his body. "Tell me where it was, then. I want to go."

"Dee, you don't. I wish I hadn't gone. I can't get it out of my head."

"Tell me where."

I didn't think he was going to, but he did. I wrote it down on the back of the envelope from Thornking-Ash and hung up. Now I had to find some way to get there.

I dialed Luke's number, letting it ring twenty times before I hung up. There was some sort of large gooey lump in the back of my throat that I kept trying to swallow; it wouldn't go away, and only seemed to get bigger when Luke didn't pick up. Giving up trying to swallow it, I put on some crappy jeans and my scuffed Doc Martens. I felt the need for busyness, the desire to prepare myself for the search. And all the while I got ready, I was amazed at how cold I felt inside, how calculating. I was watching the entire thing on Dee TV from a million miles away.

I went downstairs, pausing at the sound of raised voices in the living room.

"Terry, you aren't going to cater your own mother's wake. Let Julia or Erica do it." Delia's voice was condescending and loud as usual; she took her coffee black with an extra scoop of superiority.

"Like hell I won't!" Mom's voice was near-scream. "I'm not having my family fly in to eat soggy canapé's over my mother's coffin."

"Our mother."

Mom laughed, high and wild. "You're a piece of work!"

I didn't really want to walk in on that right now. Maybe I could just steal the car while they were fighting. Maybe Dad would take me. I edged into the kitchen and found Dad swallowing the last of a cup of coffee and stuffing his wallet into his back pocket. He looked hunted.

"Dee, are you okay?"

The stupid lump was still there. I talked around it. "James--" "Delia told us."

Of course she did. Probably smiling the whole time. I wondered if she had a soul. "I want to go look for him."

Dad set down his coffee cup and looked at me. I realized I must look crazy, standing there with my wild eyes and the crumpled Thornking-Ash envelope held tightly in my hand. His voice was gentle as he tapped his cell phone on the table. "Dee, I talked to his parents while you were upstairs. They said he was dead."

"They haven't found his body." I knew I sounded like a stubborn kid, but I couldn't stop myself.

"I want to look for him."

"Dee."

"Please take me. Just let me see the car."

Dad's eyes were full of pity. "Dee, you don't really want to see that. Trust me. Just let the police do their work."

"Peter told me they'd already started looking in the river! They aren't looking for him anymore, not really! He's my best friend, Dad! I don't need protecting!"

Dad just looked at me and shook his head.

I didn't know what to do. I'd never been refused anything before--because I'd never asked. If I'd had my own car, if I'd had my own license, I could've been gone already. "I hate being treated like a kid! I hate it!"

It felt so weak. Not at all what I needed to scream to make myself feel better, but it was all I could think of. I stormed outside and sat on the back step, picking at a thread at the bottom of my jeans. It seemed wrong for the sky to be so blue, for the summer sun to feel so good on my skin, like I could be fooled into thinking this day was just like any other summer day. It wasn't. They would never be the same.

I couldn't just sit here.

I took out my cell phone and scrolled down through the calls I'd received until I found Sara's number. I only hesitated a second before I hit send.

"Yeah?" That one word, said in Sara's usual voice, pulled me back to the ground.

"This is Dee."

"Ohmygod, Dee, I heard about him. James Morgan, I mean. God, he was on the news! I am so sorry."

Weirdly, her emphatic words brought me closer to tears than any I'd heard that day. I swallowed them. "I don't think it was an accident."

"Oh--whoa--what? You think he was drinking?"

"No. I think the faeries did it."

There was a pause, and I was afraid she had decided that Freckle Freak was just a sketchy boy.

Then: "Shit. No way. Seriously?"

Relief surged through me. "Seriously. They haven't found the body yet, so he could still be alive.

I want to go look for him, but my parents are being all--"

"--crappy about it. Yeah. Sure. I can see that. Parents suck."

I gathered courage. "I was wondering if, maybe, since you have your license, if--" Sara surprised me and finished my sentence. "Give me, like, two seconds. Where do you live?

Yeah. I gotta get out of the house anyway, I'm going crazy. Gimme two seconds. Promise."

Two seconds actually meant twenty minutes, but Sara did come. She stopped at the end of the driveway like I'd told her to, and I ran out to her old Ford Taurus before my parents could realize she was there. We stopped a few miles away and consulted a stained map book from the back seat, tracing the crooked back roads we'd have to take to get to the scene of the accident.

"That's the middle of super-nowhere. What the crap was he doing back there?" Sara asked, but I didn't have an answer. In awkward silence we headed out of town and drove down endless identical Virginia back roads: narrow, twisting paths dappled by the hidden sun. What short glimpses of the sky I saw revealed brilliant blue, broken by perfectly white clouds. I couldn't believe anything bad could happen on such a beautiful day.

I hunched in the passenger seat, scrolling through every option on my phone. Received calls, missed calls, dialed calls. Voice mail, text messages. The letters blurred in front of my eyes, meaningless strings of words to my churning mind. Then my fingers stopped and I gazed dully at the message I'd unconsciously surfed to. d. i love you.

I blinked my eyes dry. I had to keep my cool.

"Thanks for taking me," I said finally, breaking the silence.

Sara seemed relieved that I had spoken. "Oh, yeah, no problem. I mean, seriously, what was your parents' problem anyway?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess ... my grandmother died last night, too."

"Wow. That's crap timing." Sara stopped at a stop sign and craned her neck to look both ways.

I swallowed, the lump still stuck in my throat. I didn't know what to say.

"I think it's nice that you're sad about her," Sara said.

I looked at her, eyebrow raised, quizzical. I wasn't offended, but it seemed like such a stupid thing to say.

"My grandmother--the one I have left, I mean--she's invisible." Sara shrugged. "It's like she's from another planet. She doesn't watch movies, she doesn't know any of the music I listen to. We talk about the weather and stupid shit like that, 'cause I can't think of anything else she notices.

The other day I thought about her and I realized I couldn't remember a single thing she'd ever worn. How awful is that? I feel bad that I don't feel anything about her, but it's just like she's-like she's already dead. The world changed and left her behind."

It was the most personal exchange we'd ever had, and it was weird. I felt like I ought to say something to clinch the moment, to forever lock us in the bond of friendship. But I couldn't think of anything. Too late, I said, "Makes you afraid to get old, doesn't it?"

"And ugly. Like, when I get too ugly to wear a miniskirt, just shoot me."

I sort of laughed. She sort of did, too.

Then I saw a sign up ahead and said, "I think this is it." Sara blew past the street and had to make a U-turn to drive down a narrow, dark road marked Dun Lane.

We drove out of the dappled sun into complete darkness, the tight-knit tree canopy looming high overhead like a massive green temple. I didn't know where James' gig had been, but I couldn't think of any reason why he would have been on such an out-of-the-way road.

"I guess they'll have towed the car. We'll have to look for the place where the wreck was."

That was the longest minute of my life, scanning the green-brown darkness for a glimpse of destruction, looking for any sign that everything I'd known was gone forever. And when Sara stopped next to a tree that looked like any other of the massive oaks that lined the road, I couldn't tell what she'd seen to mark the spot.

She turned off the ignition. "Do you mind if I stay in the car? Blood totally makes me pass out."

I nodded. "That's okay."

I got out of the car. Standing out on the crumbling edge of the road, the smell of wet leaves and forest filling my nose, and almost cold in the perpetual shade of the trees, I saw what had made her stop: the bark stripped from the near side of the closest oak tree, and, lying on the leafy ground beside it, a driver's side mirror the tow company had missed when they took the car. And then I saw the dark stain on the road, the sort of stain you see after a deer has been hit and taken away by the state crews. Only this wasn't from a deer.

It was a horrible shape, too; the smudged line of blood spelled struggle.

I closed my eyes and shut out the blood. I wasn't going to think about James. I was just going to do the job.

I went to the base of the tree. I thought about picking up the driver's side mirror and taking it with me, but stopped myself just before I picked it up. It wasn't important. James was important.

Leaving the tree behind, I slowly made my way through the ferns and leaves. Everything became formless in this still, everlasting dimness. The only sound was the muffled calls of birds in the canopy overhead. My progress was painstakingly slow--I wouldn't miss a clue beneath the ferns.

About fifty feet from the crash site, my Doc Martens scuffed against something hard in the soft undergrowth. I knelt down, squinting, and saw a white object glowing in the darkness.

I gingerly picked it up, and my stomach squeezed. It was an unmarked bottle of eye drops. When I opened it, the sweet smell of clover drifted out. A thousand new memories, all run together--of Luke putting the drops in his eyes, Luke laboriously making the drops, Luke shoving the bottle into his pocket--clicked through my mind like a slide projector.