Below Zero

cant. robert will get mad.

who is robert?

the son. i don’t like him. i like his dad. hes nice to me. he saved me.

Why r u in aspen?

Wedding & footprints.

who? what?

G2G. bye.

Joe looked at the time stamp: 12:58 A.M. He sat back, his mind racing, trying to put together what he’d just read. There was a lot there; locations, names (Robert), disjointed facts. “I’m tempted to call the number.”

“Don’t!” Sheridan said from the hallway. She was in her nightgown and her feet were bare. “If you call they might hurt her, Dad.”

“Hurt who?” Lucy asked, looking from her sister in her nightgown to Joe and Marybeth in their robes at the kitchen table. Lucy was dressed for school in a denim mini, a white top, flip-flops. She narrowed her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Hey, what’s going on? Why isn’t Sherry dressed for school?”

Sheridan said, “April’s alive.”

8

“I CAN’T EAT,” LUCY SAID, SITTING BACK IN HER CHAIR AND dropping her fork on the table in front of her with a deliberate clatter. “I just keep thinking about April.”

They were at the breakfast table. The morning was dawning crisp, clear, and cool outside. Sheridan and Lucy had met Tube and thought he was sweet and hilarious. Tube showed his astute political instincts by curling up equidistant between their chairs. Joe had never been around a dog that was so self-assured and manipulative. Tube’s acceptance was instantaneous, and Tube knew it.

“You need to eat something,” Marybeth said. “I can’t send you to school without breakfast.”

Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up. “I’m not going to school. Sheridan isn’t going, so I’m not going.”

“She was up half the night, Lucy,” Marybeth said softly.

“And I didn’t sleep the other half,” Sheridan said.

Joe and Marybeth exchanged a quick look. Had she heard them when they went to bed? Sheridan gave no indication she had. Joe breathed again.

“April calls and no one tells me,” Lucy said, looking from Marybeth to Joe to Sheridan, accusing them all.

“It’s not like that,” Marybeth said.

“It’s exactly like that. Sheridan told me she wanted to talk to me.”

Sheridan turned from her sister to Joe. “I wonder what she meant by ‘footprints.’ Do you think she remembered what you always tell us when we go camping?”

Said Joe, “Leave only footprints, take only memories.”

“Yeah—that. Do you think she remembered it?”

Joe was cognizant of Lucy’s smoldering at once again being left out of the conversation. He said, “I don’t know. What do you think, Lucy?”

She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest and refused to be drawn in by such a transparent ploy.

“Honey,” Marybeth said to Lucy, looking to Joe for help, “we weren’t sure it was April at the time. We still aren’t completely sure.”

“Sheridan is. Right, Sherry?”

Sheridan looked away, confirming Lucy’s statement.

“Lucy,” Joe said, treading into dangerous waters, “we aren’t sure. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re still trying to figure out what’s happening.”

“You people always leave me out,” Lucy said, her face a mask as she fought back her emotions. “My foster sister calls and you don’t wake me up.”

There was the silence of the guilty.

“She was my sister,” Lucy said. “I think about her every day. Nobody else does. I never really believed she died.”

“Lucy!” Marybeth said, raising her fist to her mouth.

“It’s true. I never believed it.”

Said Marybeth, “Don’t talk like that.”

Joe and Sheridan watched the exchange in chastised silence. Lucy had always been happy-go-lucky, fashionable, pretty, and very observant of Sheridan’s mistakes so she wouldn’t make them herself. In many ways she chose to make herself peripheral. She kept her own counsel. And she was so rarely righteously angry that Joe was slightly stunned.

“I want to talk to her,” Lucy said.