Clarke Burnes was like an angel for Cassie. She believed that he watched over her and kept her safe. She had dreams where they were together, always good dreams, where they toasted marshmallows or rode bikes, or where he tucked her into bed at night and she’d memorize his face, the face she remembered from when she was a baby in her crib. When she was eight, she’d heard his voice in her head—she’d known it was his voice, somehow—telling her not to go out onto the ice on Long Pond in January. She was walking the Audubon loop with her mother but had run on ahead and wanted desperately to go sliding; and as she was about to jump off the bank, the voice said, Stay with me, baby doll. Stay here on the shore. That’s what Cassie said: he’d called her “baby doll,” and just hearing the words made her feel safe. He was with her; she was never alone. Which was totally different from some cartoon phantom haunting the quarry. “Sometimes,” she once told me, “I’m totally sure he’s alive. Not just in my mind, but really out there. Like he’s just around the corner, waiting for me, for real. Because I can feel him so close by, you know? Like he’s with me. Angels,” she’d whispered fiercely, “are real.”
I’d seen his picture: Cassie kept it in a plastic baggie in her underwear drawer, and sometimes slept with it under her pillow. It was strange to me that there weren’t pictures of him all over their house, pictures of him and Bev together, or him holding Cassie as a baby, but Cassie explained that her mother’s grief had been so intense and so deep that for a long time she couldn’t bear to look at photos of Clarke, and had hidden them all. They didn’t even have a grave to visit, because he’d been cremated, and Bev told Cassie about their winter trip to the seashore, Cassie not even walking yet, to scatter his ashes in the Atlantic. Flecks had blown back in their faces, Bev told Cassie, and probably they’d swallowed a few. It wasn’t disgusting, she said, it was a miracle of nature, that he was always inside them.
Miraculously, that one photo had survived, tucked into the back of the family Bible, where Cassie had found it when she was about seven: she was using the Bible to build a racing run for Matchbox cars and it had fallen out. They’d never spoken about it, although her mother had surely seen it in her underwear drawer—Cassie wasn’t trying to hide it.
In truth, it was hard to tell exactly what Clarke Burnes looked like: the photo was from a long time ago and blurry, taken in front of what looked like a barn on a gray fall day. The man in the picture had a square face and floppy blondish hair over one eye, and his hands were stuffed in his jeans pockets. He’d been moving a bit when the shutter snapped, so you couldn’t even tell that his eyes were blue (Bev had told Cassie they were); and you couldn’t really describe his expression: like he was on the verge of something, in between moments rather than in one. He wore a blue T-shirt with a peace sign on it, and over top a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt. The shirt always seemed to me the most definite thing in the photograph, the only thing you could be absolutely certain you’d recognize, which was strange because it looked like a million other plaid flannel shirts. In the fall, in tiny Royston, you might see half a dozen of those shirts on any given day. I never said that to Cassie—why would I? It wasn’t what she needed to hear. So instead when we looked at the photo together, we’d try to pick out which of his features she’d inherited, which blurry bits she carried around in her body.
Knowing all this and how she felt about him, I should never have brought it up the way I did, as if I didn’t understand what he meant to her. She didn’t mention it again, but it was one of those events that was little and big at the same time.
We made our way home for grilled cheese and chocolate shakes, then we filled a plastic basin and gave each other pedicures until Bev came to pick Cassie up. I painted Union Jacks on her toes—I’d watched a YouTube video on how to do it—and they came out well except on her baby toes, where the nails were too tiny.
She couldn’t do anything nearly so fancy for me because of her hand, so she just painted my toes dark blue and I stuck on little silver star stickers. My feet looked like the night sky.
THE NEXT DAY we returned to the quarry. We packed a picnic lunch so we could stay longer, maybe even all day. My mother, in the middle of writing an article, wasn’t paying much attention, but I told her we were going for a hike in the woods and might be gone a while.
“Don’t go near the highway,” she said, which was absurd, because the quarry was on the other side of town from the highway. “And take your cell phone in case you need me.”
“You got it.”
“You know you can count on us, Mrs. Robinson,” Cassie said.
We didn’t stop at Bell’s, and we didn’t stop at the Rite Aid, and when we passed the high school, Cassie gave Beckett the finger from too far away for him to see—“Just a precaution,” she said.
“Like warding off vampires with garlic,” I said.
Turning off the road into the woods, up the trail to the quarry, was like stepping into a dream. Sweat ran down my spine between the hot backpack and my skin, and my fingers, striped red and white, were twice their normal size, but the shade and the rustling leaves made the heat bearable, and the rippling light shot wavery spots of sun onto unexpected patches of bark or mounds of leaves. The vegetation, green-and brown-smelling at the same time, filled our nostrils. The woods were at once very quiet and not quiet at all: things popped or flicked or thudded, birds chirped and hooted, the breeze spoke through the leaves. We stopped to listen, and Cassie pointed out that when a car passed back on the road, it sounded like a great wave at the shore.
As we approached the quarry, we could hear voices and the sound of splashing. Not buoyant kid splashing, boys doing cannonballs, but sedate splashing, and quiet, grown-up voices. Old Mr. Kirschbaum and his wife, we realized as we came near the water’s edge. Originally Austrian or something, they were formal and a little scary. He had a pointy gray beard and smoked a pipe—he didn’t have the pipe that day—and wore a blazer even in the summertime, so it was surprising to see him in a bathing suit, his saggy old man’s bosoms speckled with white hair. His elegant wife, Adele Kirschbaum, who taught piano to the talented kids like May Hwang, wore a black one-piece and an old-fashioned custard-colored bathing cap with a strap under the chin. When we arrived, she was swimming up and down, a careful matron’s breaststroke that didn’t involve putting her head anywhere near the water. (As Cassie said later, “What’s the crazy cap for, then? A fashion statement?”)
Cassie and I hung back in the trees. I started to whisper but Cassie put her finger to her lips. We both knew that Mr. Kirschbaum would be a stickler for rules—he was old, wasn’t he, and, crucially, Austrian—and he’d know that neither of us belonged to the quarry club. My mother had written an article a couple of years before decrying the private membership of what she felt should be public spaces, spaces in nature; so anybody who knew who I was (which the Kirschbaums would, being patients of my dad’s) would know that the Robinsons didn’t belong. As for Cassie, she just wasn’t the sort. They’d know that by looking at her. One of those things we were too young to know we knew, but we knew it just the same.
We froze for what seemed like minutes, then Cassie tapped me on the arm and began, with exaggerated steps, to retreat backward into the undergrowth.
“Around,” she mouthed, without making a sound. “Around to the asylum.”