And later that night, sometime between the fair closing and six A.M., Corinne disappeared, and everything that had happened that day took on new weight, new meaning. In the weeks that followed, the potential for death became palpable. It was all around us, intangible yet suffocating, existing in every different permutation of events. She could always be dead, in a thousand different ways.
Maybe she left because her father abused her. Maybe that’s why her mother divorced him and left town a year later.
Or maybe it was the boyfriend, Jackson, because it’s usually the boyfriend, and they’d been fighting. Or the guy she was flirting with at the fair whom none of us knew—the one at the hot dog stand. The one who Bailey swore had been watching us.
Or maybe she stuck her thumb out for a ride home, in her too-short skirt and her long-sleeved, gauzy top, and maybe a stranger passing through town took her, used her, left her.
Maybe she just left. That’s what the cops finally decided. She was eighteen—legally, an adult—and she’d had enough of this place.
What happened, the cops asked, in those hours, with all of you? Lay bare your secrets, the Who and the What and the Why, between the hours of ten P.M. and six A.M. The same cops who broke up our parties but then drove us home instead of calling our parents. The same cops who dated our friends and drank beer with our brothers or fathers. And those secrets—the Where were we between ten P.M. and six A.M., the What were we doing, the Why—they wouldn’t keep with those cops. Not at the bar, not in the bed, not in this town.
By the time the people from the state arrived to help out, it was too late. We’d already turned inward, already had our theories set, already believed what we needed to believe.
The official line: Corinne last existed to everyone who knew her just inside the entrance to the fair, and from there, she disappeared.
But she didn’t, really. There was more. A piece for each of us that we kept hidden away.
For Daniel, she disappeared from outside the fair, behind the ticket booth.
For Jackson, from the parking lot of the caverns.
And for me, she faded to nothing from a curve of the winding road on the way back to Cooley Ridge.
We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.
* * *
THE CAFETERIA OF GRAND Pines is a great deception—hardwood floors and dark-linen-covered tables better suited for a restaurant instead of a long-term rehab facility. A piano in the corner, though it seems to be more for decoration, and faint classical music playing in the background during dinner. The food, I’ve heard, is the best in any rehab facility in the South—well, that’s what Daniel was told when he picked this place, as if that should make him feel better and make me feel better, by proxy. Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll visit. And the food is to die for.
Today the nurse near reception escorted me into the room, and I caught sight of Dad at a corner table for two. His eyes slid over the nurse and me, then refocused on his fork twirling in the pasta.
“He didn’t tell us you were coming or we would’ve reminded him to wait,” the nurse said, her mouth scrunched up in worry.
Dad looked up as she walked me to the table and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but the nurse spoke first, her smile practiced and contagious—my own and Dad’s stretching in return.
“Patrick, your daughter’s here. Nicolette,” she said, facing me, “it’s been so nice seeing you again.”
“Nic,” I said to the nurse. My heart squeezed in my chest as I waited, hoping the name caught, contagious as a smile.
“Nic,” Dad repeated. His fingers drummed on the table, slowly, one, two, three, one, two, three—and then something seemed to click. The drumming sped up, onetwothree, onetwothree. “Nic.” He smiled. He was here.
“Hi, Dad.” I sat across from him and reached for his hand. God, it had been a long time. A year since we’d been in the same room. Calls, for a time, when he’d drift in and out of lucidity, until Daniel said they were making him too agitated. And then just letters, my picture enclosed. But here he was now. Like an older version of Daniel but softer, from age and a lifelong appreciation for fast food and liquor.
He closed his hand around mine and squeezed. He was always good at this part. At the physical affection, the outward displays of good-fatherhood. Hugs when he stumbled in late at night, half drunk. Hand squeezes when we needed groceries but he couldn’t pull himself out of bed. Hand squeeze, take my credit card, and that should make up for it.
His eyes drifted to my hand, and he tapped the back of my ring finger. “Where is it?”
Inwardly, I cringed. But I smiled at Dad, glad he’d remembered this detail. It made me happy to know he remembered things I told him in my letters. He wasn’t losing his mind, he was just lost within it. There was a difference. I lived in there. Truth lived in there.
I flipped through my phone for a picture and zoomed in. “I left it at the house. I was cleaning.”
He narrowed his eyes at the screen, at the perfectly cut angles, at the brilliant stone. “Tyler got you that?”
My stomach dropped. “Not Tyler, Dad. Everett.”
He was lost again, but he wasn’t wrong. He was just somewhere else. A decade ago. We were kids. And Tyler wasn’t asking me to marry him, exactly—he was holding it out like a request. Stay, it meant.
And this ring meant . . . I had no idea what this ring meant. Everett was thirty, and I was closing in on thirty, and he’d proposed on his thirtieth birthday, a promise that I wasn’t wasting his time and he wasn’t wasting mine. I’d said yes, but that was two months ago, and we hadn’t discussed a wedding, hadn’t gone over the logistics of moving in together when my lease was up. It was an eventually. A plan.
“Dad, I need to ask you something,” I said.
His eyes drifted to the papers sticking out of my bag, and his fingers curled into fists. “I already told him, I’m not signing any papers. Don’t let your brother sell the house. Your grandparents bought that land. It’s ours.”
I felt like a traitor. That house was going to get sold one way or the other.
“Dad, we have to,” I said softly. You’re out of money. You spent it indiscriminately on God knows what. There was nothing left. Nothing but the money tied up in the concrete slab and four walls and the unkempt yard.
“Nic, really, what would your mother think?”
I was already losing him. He’d soon disappear into another time. It always started like this, with my mother, as if conjuring her into thought would suck him under to a place where she still existed.
“Dad,” I said, trying to hold him here, “that’s not why I came.” I took a slow breath. “Do you remember sending me a letter a few weeks ago?”
He drummed his fingers on the table. “Sure. A letter.” A stall tactic—I could feel him grasping, trying to remember.
I pulled out the paper, unfolded it on the table between us, saw his eyes narrow at the page. “You sent this to me.”
His gaze lingered on the words before he looked up, his blue eyes watery, slippery as his thoughts. That girl. I saw that girl.
I heard my heartbeat in my head, like her name, knocking around. “Who did you mean? Who did you see?”
He looked around the room. Leaned closer. His mouth opening and closing twice before the name slipped through in a whisper. “The Prescott girl.”
I felt all the hairs, one at a time, rise on the back of my neck. “Corinne,” I said.
He nodded. “Corinne,” he said, as if he’d found something he was looking for. “Yes. I saw her.”
I looked around the cafeteria, and I leaned closer to him. “You saw her? Here?” I tried to picture the ghost of her drifting through these halls. Or her heart-shaped face and bronze hair, the amber eyes and the bow lips—what she’d look like ten years later. Slinging an arm around me, pressing her cheek against mine, confessing everything in a whisper just for me: Best practical joke ever, right? Aw, come on, don’t be mad. You know I love you.