The Twice Lost

Nick slammed the door behind him, leaving Kathleen alone and crying in the colored beams of evening light shining through the stained glass windows. Another fight, Kathleen thought; why couldn’t they ever seem to understand each other anymore? She’d always been a firm believer that honest communication and kindness could solve almost any problem. Now, it seemed, the more honest she tried to be the more outraged and impatient Nick became. Telling him her real thoughts was beginning to feel like a mistake. When she did he’d respond with words she found hard to forgive. Kath, one thing I can assure you of? Just one? Eileen is not a mermaid! I suppose I shouldn’t blame you, but honestly, it’s absolutely foolish to go around listening to some charlatan who tries to persuade you that your sister isn’t dead.

“Eileen,” Kath whispered as she sat on the bottom stair with her head in her hands, “Eileen, what I wouldn’t give to see you just for a second, one second before I die. Name it.”

Something about that mermaid she’d seen—No, not “that mermaid,” Kathleen told herself. Lucette. Lucette Korchak, no matter what Nick says—had reminded her of her lost sister. She’d had the same haunted expression, the same unwitting glamour that almost seemed like a kind of dark shimmer in the air around her. Especially toward the end Eileen had seemed both wounded and magical, and those qualities had only intensified as she’d deliberately taken all their mother’s abuse on herself. Their mother might be on the verge of hitting Kathleen when Eileen would deliberately fire off the most offensive remark she could think of to make sure the broom swung her way instead. Mom? You know, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to see if I can be the biggest slut in school.

Then Kathleen had run off with a boyfriend, and three days later her brave, insouciant older sister had vanished for good. And now—if only Eileen hadn’t died in some terrible way during all the intervening years— Kathleen was sure that she was darting through the waves somewhere, savage and free and still a freckled, impudent seventeen-year-old girl, only transfigured at the same time into something far beyond everyday experience. “Did you think I didn’t need you anymore, Eenie? I do, I still do.”

Kathleen heard her cell phone ringing where she’d left it on the kitchen table. Her first thought was that it must be Nick, calling to apologize for their fight. She hesitated on the step, not sure she was ready to talk to him yet. Or—suddenly Kathleen was on her feet—maybe, just maybe, it was Andrew calling her from some truck stop in the middle of nowhere. The thought of hearing his warm voice, of simply feeling certain for five minutes that someone believed her, was enough to send Kathleen sprinting precariously down the long hallway, knocking a few seashells from tiny tables as she went. Andrew didn’t have a phone of his own. This might be her only chance to talk to him for weeks. Any second now the ringing would stop and the call would go to voice mail and he’d probably feel too uncomfortable to even leave her a message.

Her pale yellow kitchen wheeled in front of her. The lilacs in the vase were turning brown, but for some reason she kept putting off throwing them out. The phone emitted what was surely its final ring, and she still couldn’t find it anywhere. Kathleen’s shoulders jerked in frustration. No, there it was, half-hidden by that dropped napkin.

A strange number. It had to be him, probably calling from some random pay phone in back of a gas station. She could picture him clutching the grubby receiver while the sunset glared off the nearby cars, his frown deepening as she didn’t answer. Kathleen was a little surprised by how hard her heart was pounding; she hadn’t run all that far. “Hello?”

Silence. She’d missed him after all.

Except the silence wasn’t perfect; it had a weirdly bubbly, echoing quality that reminded Kathleen of an abandoned swimming pool. “Hello? Anyone there?”

“Um, may I speak to Kathleen Lambert?” It was a girl’s voice overlaid by a hint of that watery quivering. Kathleen felt an icy tightness in her stomach; she thought it must come from disappointment.

“This is Kathleen.”

“Well, hi.” Now the strange girl’s voice took on a kind of smirking, self-conscious tone that made Kathleen wonder if this was a prank call. “Hi. I’m an old friend of Luce’s. Luce the mermaid? And I need to find her dad? Do you have his number?”

Of course those videos had provoked all kinds of people to e-mail and call Kathleen, to Nick’s utter irritation. Most of them seemed deranged or malicious, but there had been a few who were obviously sincere. Kathleen decided that this girl was probably lying, but she wasn’t completely sure yet. “I’m afraid Andrew doesn’t have a phone. If you’ll give me your name and contact information I could send him an e-mail, though I don’t think he checks it too often.”

“I . . . That’s not going to work!” The caller sounded petulant now, and the bubbling noise surged for a moment. Maybe there was something wrong with the connection? “Are you sure you don’t have a way I can call him? I have something really important to tell him about Luce. Like, I know he’d want to know, okay?”

Kathleen bristled at the girl’s snappish tone. “Andrew doesn’t have a phone,” she repeated. “You can’t call him. And I honestly have no idea where he is now.” The last statement wasn’t entirely true; he’d sent her a brief e-mail two days before from Portland. “Your name is?”

“Catarina,” the girl announced. “Luce was practically my best friend. I know all about her, like how she lived in that van while her dad was still a bum, and how her mom died when she was four. And I know exactly what her uncle did to her.”

Much as Kathleen was starting to dislike the caller, this was enough to make her hesitate. Andrew hadn’t mentioned any of that in the video they’d made together, but it did correspond quite well with what he’d told her privately. “I suppose I could give you his e-mail address if you’d rather write to him directly.”

“I need a phone number,” the girl sulked. “But—okay, you really don’t have one? I guess I’ll take his e-mail, sure. Maybe they can do something with that. Hold on. I have some paper . . .”

“They?” Kathleen thought. Then she heard something in the background that sent an unaccountable chill through her heart.

A splash.

Then another one, as if the girl was thrashing around in a bathtub. But it would be absurd to think that . . .

“Where are you calling from?” Kathleen heard herself ask shrilly. All at once her hands were trembling violently, and her body felt cold and hollow and as full of echoes as that watery space where—

“Wait. He said if you started getting suspicious, I should just . . .”

Kathleen’s hands jerked strangely as she tried to disconnect the call.

Her twitching thumb missed the button. The phone dropped and skidded face-up across the kitchen table, coming to rest against the vase of lilacs. And all at once the calm afternoon air was streaked by an unimaginable sound, a terrible metallic sweetness that buzzed through her ears and tore at them. Power, Kathleen thought in confusion. Power to reclaim Eileen, to punish anyone who ever hurt Eileen, anyone who tried to get in our way . . .

Power was beauty, power was the photons pummeling her with astounding vitality, power was her body’s atoms all waking up at once and pealing together like a million bells.

Kathleen didn’t know when she’d picked up the phone again. She squeezed it to her ear until her skull seemed charged by that music, until a stampede of notes bit at her brain and goaded it. It was exhilaration beyond anything she could have dreamed, but it was as intolerable as it was thrilling: intolerable, Kathleen realized vaguely, because she hadn’t yet reached to truly claim this power and this brilliance. It was all rightfully hers, every spark of it, though someone seemed to be trying to steal it from her. If she didn’t reach it in time . . .

Kathleen couldn’t have said quite what it was. She had an impression one instant of a castle made of stinging light, and in the next moment the castle morphed into a sort of crystalline, thundering horse with shifting facets, Eileen swinging on its back and calling to her.

It didn’t matter to her that she didn’t know exactly what it was, this electric bliss that the music kept promising her. She knew she had to hurry before she lost it forever. Most important, she knew exactly where it was waiting for her.

Out the kitchen door, down the sloping street, why, she was already walking—no, running, no, it was better to walk casually in case anyone else realized what she was after and got there first—the phone still crushed against her ear and the blood in her head throbbing fiercely in time with the song.