The Waystation was a dive bar where, once upon a time, kids from high school had been able to pay some of the regulars a little extra cash for them to buy them beer.
“Okay. I’ll see you later, then, huh?” she said with a brilliant smile. Icky Vicky had had some dental work done over the years, it appeared.
Jamie hurried over to where Emma was still just standing by the car.
“I saw him,” Emma said.
“Who?”
“The guy who did this to me.”
“What?” Jamie froze in the act of pulling out her keys. “Who did what?”
“Why I have trouble.”
“Who are you talking about?”
She pointed up the street. “He just drove by. Going to the police station. That’s where he works.”
Jamie’s mouth formed the word, “Who?” but she never said it. She only knew one guy from high school who’d gone into the police force.
“Cooper.” Emma’s mouth quirked. Maybe a smile. “You had a big crush on him.”
Jamie fleetingly felt surprise that Emma had known, but there was too much else to unpack in her statement right now. “What do you mean, he did this to you?”
“He was there. You know he was there.”
“The night you babysat for the Ryerson twins?”
Emma nodded.
“A bunch of the guys from your class were there, trying to scare you,” Jamie pointed out. That had been established long ago, though none of the boys had been at the scene when Emma was attacked.
Emma cocked her head, frowning.
“They all came forward to the police,” Jamie reminded her. “You saw them. They admitted to it, and you said so, too. But that was before you were . . . hurt.”
“But he came back?” She asked it as a question, clearly confused.
“I never heard that. You never said that before. He’s a police officer now.”
“They came back,” she said, looking past Jamie as if to the long-ago past.
Jamie waited. She realized her heart was pounding triple time, like she’d just run a blisteringly fast race. Emma had never said as much about the night she was attacked, at least not to Jamie’s knowledge.
And there was no way Cooper Haynes had attacked her. No way. As she’d said, the man was a police officer now, and he’d been a decent guy in high school, too. After Emma’s attack, a group of her male classmates had come forward and told the authorities that they knew she was babysitting and had decided to scare her. Emma was a popular girl they all liked. Halloween had been less than a month away that night, so they’d decided to spook Emma and therefore tapped on the Ryersons’ windows, rattled the garbage cans, found one unlatched window that would creeaaakkkk when they seesawed it back and forth. It was teenage high jinks; nothing sinister. According to them, Emma had come out on the porch and good-naturedly told them all to go back to fourth grade where they belonged. Two of the guys, Race Stillwell and Dug, who was really Patrick “Dug” Douglas, had been on their way to “haunt” Emma when Jamie ran into them leaving the Stillwell party just as she was arriving to it that night. In fact, they were the two boys Emma had yelled to as she stood on the porch, but there had been a number of others there, too, Cooper Haynes among them.
Jamie, like almost everyone else, had learned this information when it was reported in the paper. She could still recall Mom swearing softly beneath her breath after reading it, crumpling up that newspaper into a myriad of tight, little balls, her face a cold, stone mask. Jamie had gathered the pieces of newspaper surreptitiously from the trash and unwrapped all the little balls till she found the offending piece of print about Emma’s classmates. She, too, had felt a wave of fury at them. How could they? How could they? And yet, it was clear that whatever had happened to Emma was after they’d all left.
Now she looked at her sister and asked cautiously, “Who came back?”
Emma, who’d been gazing in the direction she’d said she’d seen Cooper go, jerked as if goosed. “Who?”
“The night you were hurt at the Ryersons’? You just said ‘they came back.’ You mean the guys from your class.” She swallowed and added, “Cooper.”
“Cooper Haynes. You had a crush on him. That’s why you wanted to go to the party.”
“Yes,” Jamie admitted. Clearly, Emma had that information, so it was no good denying it. “But was he one who came back?”
“He liked me.” She sounded wistful. “They all did.”
“They did,” Jamie agreed. “You said they came back,” she reminded her, opening her driver’s door. Emma remained outside, staring down the road, almost as if she were waiting for something. “You’d better get in before it starts raining again.”
“It won’t rain.” She turned her face to the sky.
“Or hailing.”
Emma took a few more minutes and then finally climbed into the back seat again.
Jamie drove away from the school and in the direction of the Thrift Shop, a route that took her past the police station.
“No one ever said they came back,” Jamie said, hoping for even the slightest bit of further information.
“No one ever said they didn’t,” said Emma wisely.
“Who came back?” Jamie was tired of this pussyfooting game.
Emma’s eyes were glued to the police station as they went by. Jamie flicked a look at the unimposing, one-story, tan brick building, but her gaze came right back to Emma in the rearview mirror.
“We should tell Dad that Mom died,” Emma said, meeting Jamie’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “That’s the right thing to do. You always need to do the right thing.”
“Dad knows,” Jamie told her.
Emma nodded gravely. “He’s an asshole, but Mom still loved him. He should be with us, too.”
Jamie clamped down her frustration. It felt like there was something very important in Emma’s revelations about “they all came back,” but maybe it was blither-blather. A lot of what Emma said was. Sometimes she
