Vanishing Girls - Page 4/79

It’s been five days since THE KISS and today in school he didn’t even breathe in my direction. Like he was worried I would contaminate his oxygen circle or something.

Mom and Dad are on the shit list this week, too. Dad because he’s acting all serious and somber about the divorce, when inside you know he’s just turning backflips and cartwheels. I mean, if he doesn’t want to leave, he doesn’t have to, right? And Mom because she doesn’t even stand up for herself, and didn’t cry once about Paw-Paw, either, not even at the funeral. She just keeps going through the motions and heading to SoulCycle and researching goddamn quinoa recipes as if she can keep the whole world together just by getting enough fiber. Like she’s some weird animatronic robot wearing yoga pants and a Vassar sweatshirt.

Nick is like that too. It drives me crazy. She didn’t used to be, I don’t think. Maybe I just don’t remember. But ever since she started high school, she’s always doling out advice like she’s forty-five and not exactly eleven months and three days older than I am.

I remember last month, when Mom and Dad sat down to tell us about the divorce, she didn’t even blink. “Okay,” she said.

Oh-fucking-kay. Really?

Paw-Paw’s dead and Mom and Dad hate each other and Nick looks at me like I’m an alien half the time.

Listen, Dr. Lick Me, here’s all I have to say: It’s not okay.

Nothing is.

JULY 17

Nick

Somerville and Main Heights are only twelve miles apart, but they might as well be in different countries. Main Heights is all new: new construction, new storefronts, new clutter, newly divorced dads and their newly bought condos, a small cluster of sheetrock and plywood and fresh paint, like a stage set built too quickly to be realistic. Dad’s condo looks out over a parking lot and a line of skinny elm trees that divides the housing complex from the highway. The floors are carpeted and the air conditioner never makes a sound, just silently churns out frigid, recycled air, so it feels like living inside a refrigerator.

I like Main Heights, though. I like my all-white room, and the smell of new asphalt, and all the flimsy buildings clinging to the sky. Main Heights is a place where people go when they want to forget.

But two days after the skinny-dipping incident, I’m heading home to Somerville.

“It’ll be good for you to get a change of scenery,” Dad says, for the twelfth time, which is stupid because it’s the exact thing he said when I moved out to Main Heights. “And it’ll be good for your mother to have you home. She’ll be happy.”

At least he doesn’t lie and say that Dara will be happy, too.

Too fast, we’re entering Somerville. Just like that, from one side of the underpass to the other, everything looks old. Enormous trees line the road, weeping willows fingering the earth, tall oaks casting the whole car in flickering shadow; through the curtain of swaying green, enormous houses ranging from turn-of-the-century to colonial to who-the-hell-knows-how-long-ago are visible. Somerville used to be the seat of a booming mill and cotton factory, the largest town in the whole state. Now half the town has been granted landmark status. We have a Founders’ Day and a Mill Festival and a Pilgrims’ Parade. There’s something backward about living in a place so obsessed with the past; it’s like everyone’s given up on the idea of a future.

As soon as we turn onto West Haven Court, my chest goes tight. This, too, is the problem with Somerville: too many memories and associations. Everything that happens has happened a thousand times before. For a second, an impression surfaces of a thousand other car rides, a thousand other trips home in Dad’s big Suburban with the rust-colored coffee stain on the passenger seat—a composite memory of family trips and special dinners and group errands.

Funny how things can stay the same forever and then change so quickly.

Dad’s Suburban is now for sale. He’s looking to trade it in for a smaller model, like he traded his big house and four-person family for a downsized condo and a perky, pint-size blonde named Cheryl. And we’ll never drive up to number 37 as a family again.

Dara’s car is in the driveway, boxed in between the garage and Mom’s: the pair of fuzzy dice I bought her at a Walmart still hanging from the rearview, so dirty I can make out handprints near the gas tank. It makes me feel a little better that she hasn’t thrown them away. I wonder if she’s started driving again yet.

I wonder if she’ll be home, sitting in the kitchen alcove, wearing a too-big T-shirt and barely-there shorts, picking her toenails like she always does when she wants to drive me crazy. Whether she’ll look up when I come in, blow the bangs out of her eyes, and say, “Hey, Ninpin,” as if nothing has happened, as if she hasn’t spent the past three months avoiding me completely.

Only once we’re parked does Dad seem sorry for off-loading me.

“You gonna be okay?” he asks.

“What do you think?” I say.

He stops me from getting out of the car. “This will be good for you,” he repeats. “For both of you. Even Dr. Lichme said—”

“Dr. Lichme’s a hack,” I say, and climb out of the car before he can argue. After the accident, Mom and Dad insisted I ramp up my sessions with Dr. Lichme to once a week, like they were worried I’d crashed the car deliberately or maybe that the concussion had permanently screwed up my brain. But they finally stopped insisting I go after I spent a full four sessions at $250 an hour sitting in complete and total silence. I have no idea whether Dara’s still going.