Vanishing Girls

I shake him off. “Come on, Parker. Forget I asked.”

“Wait.” This time, Parker’s voice stops me. He exhales a long breath. “Look. I loved Dara, okay? I still do. But—”

“But what?” I wrap my arms around my waist, squeezing back the sudden sensation that I might be sick. Why do I care? Parker can love whoever he wants. He can even love my sister. Why wouldn’t he love her? Everyone else does.

“I was never in love with her,” he says, a little more quietly. “I’m . . . I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.”

There’s a long pause. He stares at me as if waiting for me to say something—to forgive or congratulate him, maybe both. Something passes between us, a wordless message I can’t begin to decipher. I’m suddenly aware that we’re standing very close—so close that even in the dark, I can see stubble on his chin, and see the beauty mark dotting the outside corner of his left eye, like a perfect pen mark.

“Okay,” I say finally.

Parker looks almost disappointed. “Okay,” he echoes.

I wait by the water while Parker turns off the wave pool again. We retrace our steps to the parking lot in silence. I listen for the voice, for the singsong call of a ghost in the darkness, maybe crying out for her father, maybe crying out just to be heard. But I hear nothing but our footsteps, and the wind, and the crickets hidden in the shadows, singing for no goddamn reason at all.

JULY 28

Text from Parker to Dara

Hey.

I don’t know why I’m texting you.

Actually, I do know why.

I really miss you, Dara.

JULY 28

Dara

Before we were born, the master bedroom was downstairs, and featured an en-suite bathroom with a massive Jacuzzi tub and cheesy gold fixtures. The bedroom was converted first into a den, and then into a combined office/massive closet for all the random shit we accumulated and then outgrew: paper shredders and defunct fax machines, broken iPads and old phone cords, a dollhouse that Nick was obsessed with for .5 seconds before deciding that dolls were “immature.”

But the tub is still there. The jets stopped working when I was about five and my parents never bothered to replace them, but with the water running from all four faucets, the noise is thunderous and has almost the same effect. The soap dish is shaped like a scalloped seashell. There are divots in the porcelain where you can rest your feet. And for about ten years, my mom has kept the same jar of lemon verbena bath salts perched next to the tub, the label so warped with steam and vapor it has become unreadable.

When we were little, Nick and I used to put on our bathing suits and take baths together, pretending that we were mermaids and it was our private lagoon. Somehow the fact that we wore bathing suits—and goggles, too, sometimes, so we could go under and blink at each other, communicating through hand gestures and laughing out big bubbles—made it fun. We were so small we could both stretch out easily, side by side, her feet at my head and vice versa, like two sardines packed together.

Tonight, after I’ve completed the ritual—all four faucets running, a scoop and a half of lemon verbena, wait until the water’s so hot it turns my skin pink, then ease in and turn the faucets off one by one—I take a deep breath and go under. Almost instantly my pain evaporates. My broken put-together body turns weightless, my hair fans out behind me, brushing my shoulders and arms, tendril-like. I listen for echoes, but all I hear is the rhythm of my heart, which sounds both loud and strangely distant. Then a secondary rhythm joins the first.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The sound reaches me even underwater. Someone is knocking—no, pounding—at the front door. I sit up, gasping a little.

There’s a temporary break in the knocking, and for a moment I think, optimistically, that it was a mistake. Some drunk kid has mistaken our house for a friend’s. Or maybe it was a dumb prank.

But then it happens again, slightly quieter but still insistent. It can’t be Nick; I’m almost positive Nick is home and asleep, no doubt mentally preparing for our family dinner tomorrow. Besides, Nick knows we keep a spare key under a fake rock next to the planter, like every other family in America.

Annoyed, I haul myself out of the tub, moving carefully on legs that go quickly stiff. Shivering, I towel off, then pull on a pair of thin cotton sleep pants and an old Cougars T-shirt that belonged to my dad in high school. My hair hangs wetly down my back—no time to dry it properly. I grab my phone from the back of the toilet. 12:35.

In the hallway, the latticed windows cut the moonlight into geometric patterns. Someone is moving just beyond the glass, backlit by the porch light. For just a second I hang back, afraid—thinking, irrationally, of Madeline Snow, of hysterical rumors about perverts and predators and girls caught unawares.

Then someone cups a hand to the window to peek inside, and my heart contracts. Parker.

Even before I open the door, it’s obvious he’s drunk.

“You,” he says. He leans heavily against the house, likely to keep himself on his feet. With one hand, he reaches out as if he’s going to touch my face. I jerk away. Still, his hand lingers in the air, hovering like a butterfly. “I’m so glad it’s you.”

I ignore the words—I ignore how good they feel, how badly I’ve wanted to hear them. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” He straightens up, runs a hand through his hair, swaying a little on his feet. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m drunk.”

“That’s obvious.” I step out onto the porch, easing the door shut behind me, and cross my arms, wishing now that I weren’t wearing my dad’s old T-shirt, that my hair weren’t wet, that I had a bra on, for Christ’s sake.