Eventually Susannah gets up to go pee, and that’s when I realize that the blue-and-green tartan bathrobe she’s wearing isn’t mine, at least not originally. It’s Dad’s. It’s a bit too big for me, but Susannah looks like an elfin child in it. Sitting on the floor in a pleasant bourbon haze, the memory of Marisa banished for the moment, I look up at my sister, the bathrobe pooling at her ankles, and realize that this is what we all do, eventually—we put on our parents’ clothes and try to act like them, like grown-ups.
I hope someone acts like a grown-up soon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I come to in a twilight gloom, my head thick as a tire. I’m in my bed and my stomach is a heavy, sour medicine ball, and I lie still, closing my eyes, because if I move too quickly that sour ball will start rolling around and I will most definitely be sorry.
“Susannah?” I croak. “Suzie!”
No answer. Then a tap-tap-tap on the floorboards and a soft whine from the bedroom door. Wilson. “Okay, boy, coming,” I say, managing to put one foot on the floor while still lying flat on my back. The effort required to sit up almost undoes me, but I manage it. Wilson is delighted and prances around my feet while I try to imagine making it to the front door without puking.
I shuffle down the hall and outside into a rose-red sunset, the kind where the clouds seem to be glowing from internal fires. Wilson investigates the yard, occasionally lifting a leg to mark his territory, while I sit on my front steps and endure being somewhere between drunk and hungover. Dimly I note that Marisa’s car is gone, although there are tire tracks in my front yard, raw gouges veering away from the driveway and then sharply back toward it. My car remains where I parked it, but now it sports a bright, jagged scar on the passenger door. Marisa must have keyed it on her way out. Uncharitably I think that maybe I should have let Susannah hit her with the poker. That reminds me that Susannah is gone too. Where did she go? And how?
Wilson finally finishes, and after I take him inside and feed him, I see the Post-it note on the television: Gone running, coming back. I shouldn’t be surprised; when Susannah is pissed off, her reaction is to go exercise herself to exhaustion. And despite everything, I smile—only my sister would leave a note assuring me that she is gone only temporarily, that she is planning to return.
I wander into the kitchen and see an empty fifth of bourbon in the trash can, which about makes me gag. I need to eat something, but toasting a bagel seems too complicated, let alone cooking dinner, so I settle for a dry bowl of Crispix and a cup of instant coffee.
I’m chewing a mouthful of cereal and contemplating another cup of coffee when my phone rings. Susannah. I look around the den for my phone and find it on the table next to the front door. I don’t recognize the number, but Susannah constantly loses cell phones and gets new ones. “Hello?”
“Hi, Ethan,” Marisa purrs in my ear. “Miss me?”
I almost scream. Instead, I jab my finger at the phone, ending the call. Then I block the number.
I’m on my way back to my bowl of Crispix when there’s a ding, like when my phone alerts me to a text. But it’s not my phone, which is still in my hand. Another ding. I slide my phone into my pocket and look around the den some more, checking under a Moby-Dick paperback on the coffee table, scanning the furniture. A third ding leads me to the sofa, where behind a cushion I find a newer-model iPhone encased in a pop-art-swirl OtterBox. I don’t even have to read the messages on the locked screen to know whose phone it is. But when I press the home button to see the texts, I almost drop the phone.
The first text at the top of the list is from Mom.
Ethan if u have my phone give it back
I stare at the phone, the back of my neck crawling as the hairs stand on end. There are two more texts, also from Mom.
I want my phone ethan
PHONE BACK
When I was a kid, my father let me watch Poltergeist on cable, and I remember the glowing vacuum closet and the killer clown doll and the other demonic things plaguing the family in that suburban house, but mostly I remember a slowly mounting sense of dread building up in me and finally crescendoing with the mom falling into the swimming pool with the corpses, sending me into fits of screaming. At the same time, I was utterly unable to turn away from the screen. I feel the same way now, staring at the phone in my hand.
And then, after a few moments, I grow calm, let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and bring my shuddering heartbeat down several notches. My mother is not texting me from beyond the grave. Instead, these texts are from Marisa’s mother, or more specifically from her mother’s phone. Marisa must be using her mother’s phone to text her own. Still, I look suspiciously at Marisa’s iPhone in its pop-art case. I am surprised she left her phone behind. Marisa’s phone is her lifeline. The thought that she was flustered or upset enough by our last encounter to forget her phone—and that she’s clearly angry that she left it—makes me feel a bit better.
My own phone rings in my hip pocket, startling me. Shit. Did Marisa find another phone? Mine rings again, and I
