Cassie took off her sneakers and socks and dangled her feet in the water, while I fussed about whether she’d get her dressed hand wet in a puddle at the water’s edge, until she told me to shut up. It had been a hot walk, even under the trees, and I was tempted to strip off and plunge in, even for a minute, to make the swelling in my fingers and ankles go down. (Some people swell in the heat, and some people don’t. Needless to say, Cassie didn’t.) But I’d made myself the promise that I wouldn’t, so I too sat on the hot stone and dabbled my puffy feet, listening to the cicadas scream and wishing for more. It had taken almost an hour to get there from my house, and it would take as long to get back, and we hadn’t brought so much as a bottle of water.
As Nancy spread her wings and tucked her legs, lifting off like an airplane with barely a splash, Cassie threw back her head and narrowed her eyes. “It’s good here,” she said.
“Even better when we can swim.”
“It’s so deep, isn’t it?”
The water, in its gray-green-ness, was intensely clear; and yet you couldn’t see the bottom. “What do you think is down there?”
“Stone, of course. It’s a quarry.”
“Ghosts, though? Do you think there are ghosts?” We both knew the story of the teenager who’d drowned there, long before we were born. Back in the 1980s. A bunch of kids had come skinny-dipping at night, drunk or high or both, and this boy had dived in headfirst and hit his head on a rock and never come up again. The kids were so rowdy that they didn’t even notice he wasn’t with them until it was time to go home. And the police couldn’t find his body until the next day. In Royston, we all knew that story from very young, although we knew it like a myth, not like a fact. We didn’t know his name or anything. It was why there was a big sign at the parking lot that said NO DIVING.
“Ghosts?” Cassie squinted at me in the bright sun. “Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t.”
“Of course I don’t.”
“What about your dad, then?”
Cassie shook her head and was quiet for a minute. “That’s not ghosts. That’s angels. It’s totally different. And it’s not some stupid joke.” She pulled her feet out of the water and turned her back to me, crossing her legs and hanging her head like a turtle tucking in on itself.
“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean . . . Cass . . . I’m sorry, okay?”
She didn’t turn around straightaway. When she did, she had a funny set to her mouth. I thought she was angry with me, and only afterward did it occur to me that she was trying not to cry. “It’s time to head back, don’t you think?” she said. “Didn’t your mom promise grilled cheese?”
“And milkshakes. Chocolate.”
CASSIE’S FATHER was as much a myth as the drowned boy. Not in the sense that he might not be real, but in the sense that she’d never actually known him. Or rather, that she couldn’t remember him. Except his face: she said she had a memory of him leaning over her crib, his blue eyes, and of feeling safe held in the crook of his arm—infant memories, dark around the edges like an old photograph, but indelible. He had chosen her name, Cassandra, because he thought it was the most beautiful. And her bird bones came from his side, and her aptitude for math, or so Bev had told her. Her love of onion rings. Her stick-out ears.
My father is so present in my life that I don’t really even look at him. Not properly. I love him, fiercely, but in some way I barely see him. He makes bad puns and my mother and I groan. He gets angry about my gear cluttering up the front hall, and I roll my eyes. I know his face so well that I can’t tell when it’s changing—my mother pointed out the other day that more than half his hair is gray now: when did that happen? How could I not have noticed? He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen. He made out it wasn’t just because I hadn’t been looking.
Whereas for Cassie, it was as if her father stood behind a thick black curtain with a few tiny holes in it. She had to get up close to those pinpricks and peer through, trying to glean her father’s overall shape from the little she could glimpse.
Bev had told her the story a thousand times, about how he died. They were living in a farmhouse about forty minutes northwest of Boston when Cassie was born, and Bev, though she’d finished her coursework, hadn’t yet qualified as a nurse. Cassie’s father, whose name was Clarke—“Clarke Burnes, that’s a good name, right?” Cassie whispered, whenever we talked about it, like he was a movie star, like Clark Gable or Harrison Ford—worked two jobs so they’d have enough money until Bev could start working too. He was a biology teacher at the junior high in Belmont, Massachusetts (we looked it up on Google Earth, once, just to see the building), and then three nights a week he worked as a bartender at a pub in Brighton, which, as Bev explained to Cassie, and Cassie to me, is basically in Boston. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays—Cassie even knew which days. Late on a Friday night, when he was driving home from Boston in bad weather, a February night when Cassie was just eleven months old, another car came across the median and hit him head-on. A drunk driver. Bev would tell how she’d fallen asleep and woken at four in the morning with Cassie cozy in the bed beside her, and no Clarke. He hadn’t come home, and he didn’t answer his cell phone. She wasn’t a worrier, so her first thought was that he’d stayed over in Boston at a friend’s, which he sometimes did, and she felt annoyed, because it was going to be Saturday and they’d had plans and now everything would be late. She went back to sleep feeling annoyed at Clarke and she woke up again around seven still feeling annoyed and then at 7:30 the police called and she found out that Clarke was dead. All the years since, Bev had told my mother, and my mother had told me, she’d felt guilty about being annoyed, about not thinking the best of him, when of course he would have been home if he could have been—he’d been on his way.