The Night My Sister Went Missing Read online

  She wondered aloud to me whether it had been the ghost of Kenny Fife, or if it had been an angel—or just some total moron who went surfing after dark when there was only a trickster half moon. I don't speculate on that, except to reflect on how no guy ever showed up at the police station to report that he'd helped a girl onto a surfboard and then lost her in the swells, and no dead surfer ever washed up. The bottom line is that my sister is a sadder but wiser, more realistic person.

  She put her fist on my knee after we sat in the pew for a few minutes. She was utterly baked on pain pills, so she slurred. "D'you see how everyone kissed me?"

  As we'd been heading up to the balcony, most of the Marvels were coming in. She'd asked them, please, not to hug on her back brace, so everybody had kissed her and told her how great she looked and how lucky they all were that she was still with us. They asked her questions about her brace, and they clucked over her a lot.

  "Yeah. They were okay to you."

  She blasted out her nose, "To my face. Rumor's already circulating that this is my fault somehow. My melodramatic exit off the pier caused the police to be distracted, or they might have had more time to help Stacy. Insane ... but normal for these parts."

  I wondered where she had heard that, didn't exactly care, and said nothing.

  But she slurred on, "So I think I'm next in line to be the Fallen Queen."

  I liked the way she giggled evilly. We'd talked about the Marvels a lot yesterday, how she'd given the crowd its famed nickname, how a night at sea had changed her. We were both still messed up, to the point where I don't think we ever finished a sentence. We didn't really have to.

  "So ... are you expecting to stick around and accept the honor?" I mumbled.

  Another little snort escaped her. "I haven't made up my mind how weird I actually want to be yet. I just know, based on what I have saved up this summer, I only have enough in my budget for four piercings. Where should I get them? All places that show, thank you. Stacy would be mad if I were, um ... vulgar about it."

  They say people get weird urges to laugh at funerals—along the lines of laughing and crying being the same release. I felt the corners of my mouth wanting to turn strangely up, but I fought off the impulse. "Just don't put a plate in your bottom lip."

  She shifted. Her back had stung so bad last night, she'd slept on the couch on her stomach, with her face hanging over onto the ottoman—with just enough room between the ottoman and the couch for her nose and mouth, so she could breathe. She never complained, though. After her halo rantings, that seemed miraculous.

  "Duly noted," was all she said, and we slipped into silence.

  We got to see how strange it looked for something huge to be happening on the island without Mr. DeWinter being at the center of it. Because Drew and I had been the only Marvels present to hear Mr. Kearney set the whole thing straight, the funeral was a very surreal time of limbo. Mr. DeWinter had not been arrested yet. I don't know if the cops were dotting all their i's and crossing all their fs, but it was three weeks until the arrest actually took place and the media storm hit. So at the funeral, the only word on the street was that he was in the hospital. Most people still thought Stern was the father.

  I started to notice, as this endless line of people kept coming, that very few of them were hugging Mr. Kearney and Stacy's brothers. It pissed me off to the point that I felt the urge to stand up and announce the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. I figured the arrest of Mr. DeWinter was coming—Lutz had stopped by the house and told us in confidence that testing had confirmed him as the rapist. So I just watched. Everyone hugged on Stacy's mom—the drug addict, the one-time victim, the person who probably had every reason to guess what was happening to Stacy from having lived through it herself. She probably "remembered" it all when she came back here, my dad says, and chose to lace herself up to believe it couldn't happen again.

  And to everyone Mr. Kearney was still "the slug" who had looked for all the grossest jokes to tell at the famed DeWinter garden parties, until the garden parties were no more. I could see totally why he acted like such a pig. It was a protest against the well-behaved. There was something gallant about the thought that had come the closest, over the past few days, to making me smile.

  And I remembered the haze of someone saying in the questioning room that pedophiles often consider their rela tionships sacred. What was Mr. DeWinter going to do besides quit throwing parties after the Kearneys came to live with him? Throw Mr. Kearney out and risk losing Stacy? He never threw Mr. Kearney out until he'd been caught like a cat on the prowl. I thought again of the "settlement" Mr. DeWinter had offered him to leave Mystic. I wondered if Mr. Kearney bothered at that point to call it blood money to the old man's face. He'd had no proof then of wrongdoing. It was probably another of those stunning facts that never got said.

  I still freeze up and sputter over the idea of all that probably was never said—by anyone, but especially not by Mr. Kearney. My dad and I had discussed how Mr. Kearney had been in a real jam. How do you ask your daughter if her grandfather is that sort of evil? If the dad gets the nerve to ask and the daughter is too afraid or psyched-out to tell, what do you say then?

  My worst thought, while watching Mrs. Kearney get hugs and Mr. Kearney get frosty handshakes, was, Did Stacy think of my dad? Had she thought of all the people like him who had got DeWinter money over the years—and would now get nothing if she sent his butt to jail? It would seem like an insignificant thought in comparison to her own predicament, but that's one thing my dad confirmed for me about victims like her: The ways in which they are messed up are beyond tragic. They can adopt the minds of angels to make up for their physical world being a hell.

  On that note I lost it, and my crying felt like a train wreck. I was glad to be in the back with no one but my sister, who had heard me bawl enough over the past few days to view it as normal.

  The Kearney men got tired of being snubbed, I gathered. They excused themselves and five minutes later showed up beside Casey and me. We all sat together in the balcony, which, if nothing better, prevented any of the Marvels from coming up to chat with us. Except Drew.

  He came up and sat with us for a while. But sensing, I think, that Casey and I needed to be left alone, he wandered downstairs. He didn't ask any questions. I was about to leave this church and begin a life in search of originality, which for months would include thoroughly disliking any person who looked too normal. But I sensed even at the service that Drew would be one mindless conformist I would always forgive, because he's got special gifts. He had stayed with me the whole night Casey was missing, and he never left me the next day until noon, when I finally crashed out on my family room floor and slept twenty-four hours straight. If you're the nicest guy in the world, you can have a whole lot of shortcomings.

  I watched Alisa Cox leave after saying her good-byes to Stacy by the casket. She had the classic nerve not to cry at all. She didn't say good-bye to anyone else, and I don't know what became of her. No one on the island has seen her again, though the rumor flies that she, too, committed suicide, and the service that followed was private. Casey tells the more likely story, considering that Alisa's parents still smile smugly when seen in the supermarket but seem other wise reclusive. They wouldn't be smiling if their daughter died. The less popular rumor is that Alisa did her senior year at a boarding school for precocious gifted kids who want a sure deal into Harvard. Sometimes I wish I knew more.

  Maybe five minutes after the Kearney men sat down beside me, I spotted Crazy Addy coming up through the mourners' line, getting ready to hug Mrs. DeWinter. I almost shot up in the pew to shout a warning at her to keep her big mouth shut. I'd been scared she would start in on some self-righteous loud trek about predicting how a girl would die at dawn. She had been right again with her predictions. But she merely hugged the family silently, then took a place in the balcony not far from us.

  She looked down at Casey, and then at me. I sensed there was some recognition in Crazy A
ddy's tearful eyes, though she hadn't seen me at the police station, hadn't been parading herself all over the beach when Stacy died, like she had after the Van Doren debacle. I'd been in her place a couple times years ago, but so had every other teenager on Mystic, so it probably wasn't any memory that made her smile at me.

  I waved and she waved back. I wished I hadn't. For whatever reason it inspired her to get up, come over, and sit down on the other side of Casey. I had the Kearneys sitting on my left, which was enough; I didn't need a drama developing to my right. I got ready to say, "Do not freak out my sister by telling her anything clairvoyant." But Crazy Addy seemed content just to sit there and not say anything. I got a twitch that maybe she was just lonely. Everyone around here is lonely.

  When the priest finally started in with the Lord's Prayer, I simply could not pray at first. I sat there numbly, watching the Mystic Marvels, noticing how not many of them were praying, either, and caught myself before gloating over their hypocrisy.

  I wouldn't have had a chance, anyway. Mr. Kearney had his worst breakdown yet as he was reciting the Catholic prayers, and I don't remember who grabbed for whose hand first. But me, my sister, this row of Kearneys, and Crazy Addy held hands for those prayers, and I got the deep impression Mr. Kearney had recited them over and over and over throughout the years, looking for something—sense maybe, strength maybe, forgiveness for defaulting to playing a pig role, maybe.

  Memories of Stacy claiming to be a devout Catholic shot through me—despite that she'd always been given to moments of extreme mouthiness and self-defensive outbursts—and I figured she'd followed her father's example, the only example in her life that held much meaning.

  And I prayed for Stacy, maybe half to her, and Casey heard me, and she started praying just as loud as Mr. Kearney and his two sons.

  That was the first experience in my life that made me understand religion—as much as you can "understand" religion. I was sending out words that had little to do with sense but had everything to do with communicating, with belonging. I was in a row with two slobs; their father, who was a pig; a girl ripped to shreds by barnacles; and a woman who was probably as embarrassed by her talents as she was proud of them. And we were praying our fool heads off. And it should have looked pathetic, and it probably would have if we hadn't been in the dead back row for no one to see.

  Mr. Kearney's fifteen-hundredth reciting of the Lord's Prayer hadn't managed to save his daughter, and yet he was bothering to pray it again—and something behind his lawn mower voice was making all of us say it, and to feel something that is beyond understanding. But I didn't feel pathetic. I felt like I was exactly where I belonged ... surrounded by people who had been through the worst, the most embarrassing, the most mysterious of life's dealings, and were willing to not sell their souls to have friends.

  After we said "Amen," Mr. Kearney wiped his eyes, but doing so was pointless, a major flood. He managed to say something directly to me, which I think had to do with how ridiculous we probably looked compared to people who seemed so stoically together, like the Marvels. He said with lawn mower force, "It ain't over till it's over."

  I have never seen him again. I want to see him, but I'm a far cry from where he is. I think he and his sons are back in Connecticut. I'm in California now. I spend a lot of time watching an ocean where the sun sets over it instead of rising over it. But I watch every sunset that I can, and I think of Stacy every time.

  I think of writing to the Kearney men, or calling, even, but something stops me. We'd collected ourselves as best we could at the end of the service, and the oldest son, Richie, exchanged e-mail addresses with me and Casey. But some people you remember as bigger than they are, and you don't want to break that up into smaller human pieces. They haven't written to me, either, so I leave it alone.

  Starting the first of August, I did a trek cross-country with nothing but a mountain bike and a thousand bucks in cashed-in college savings. I landed in Santa Monica sometime in early December. I've bused a lot of tables, learned to play the guitar, and kept blogging from my room in a little Santa Monica motel that backs up to the beach—the room I've called home all year.

  Casey e-mails that my blogs have become famous on the island, along with pictures I send that she shows around. She says that I've stirred up a shit storm with former friends and wannabes, what with all my liberal hair-mess guitar playing, with motel living and my West Coast surfer-boy life. I've wanted to stir up storms. I want people to remember what they did to Stacy—because she was a little too flamboyant, a little too rich, a little too poor, a little too giving, a little too bratty. I love thinking of what hells people go through over someone who doesn't conform well, but who happens to be out of firing range.

  Beyond that, I don't know what to say about what happened to Stacy. Would it help to run around high schools, giving speeches about not judging? Casey says that no mat ter where you go, there will always be Mystic Marvels, lots of people who refuse to know the difference between "good" and "the appearance of good." To most people, she says, appearances are everything. Maybe I'm pulling a cop-out, but I believe my sister. I'm not up for speeches.

  My dad came out in early May, to complete a second deal with Paramount. He's got major bucks all of a sudden, and he pays for this motel room. I've refused to go east and see their new digs in the beach block, but I'm happy for them.

  I was glad he came. Not only did I miss his blather about many aspects of the human condition, but I had some news that I wanted to tell him to his face. We got back to my motel from the airport, and out on the balcony I gave him a glass of two-buck-a-bottle Boone's Farm, one type of alcohol I can hack without puking, if I limit myself to one glass. I toasted the Pacific, and then him.

  "I'm going to school in the fall. I've even declared a major."

  He clanged glasses with me, looking hopeful. "Uh ... med school?"

  "Nuh-uh."

  "Engineering?"

  "Nuh-uh."

  He knows me better than that. When I got scared to say, he plopped down on my beach chair, and I sat on the concrete beside him.

  He drank fast, nervously. "Tell me no. Not my offspring"

  I had never really thought until then how much pressure to go to the Naval Academy had come from him.

  "Do you like peanut butter, Kurt?" he asked. "Do you want to spend fifteen years having your face smeared into the concrete? There's no politics in the writing world—I cannot pull strings for you. I cannot do it for you."

  I told him I don't want to write any bad novels, so I needed his help.

  "The only way around is through," he told me. "You'll write bad fiction for ten years. At least"

  Well, I've been blogging all year, and I'm trying to sidestep the "bad fiction" route with a "true story." And maybe it is still bad ... maybe this reads like so many flashback blogs with bad transition statements and a poor attempt at cleanup. But my life on Mystic is finished, my years in high school are behind me—though I'll never stop thinking about Stacy. If nothing else, in all these words, I have a memorial to Stacy Kearney that tells as much as you can tell about somebody whose life was a mystery, an endless secret, and yet, you know you're right to love her forever.

  And I guess when I'm a really good writer, I'll know how to end a story better. 'Cuz all I can think to say is, "Cheers to surf—she's another great and mysterious babe—and cheers to peace."

  Peace is good, brothers and sisters.