“She picked up,” he repeated, dully.
“She really misses you,” Cara put in quickly.
He was staring down at his hands, spaced out, now, on the desk in front of him as though bracing him against it.
“Cara,” he said. “This isn’t something to kid about.”
“Dad. Look at me,” she said. She realized she was twisting her good-luck ring, the nazar. “Do I look like I’m joking? I wouldn’t do that to you. Or myself, either. I’m not making it up. I’m not inventing or joking or fantasizing or anything like that. I talked to her. You need to believe me.”
He nodded slowly, gazing at her face. She saw how isolated he felt—as though the ground, all of a sudden, wasn’t so steady beneath him. And then he faded from view and she saw something more—two children, walking along the seacliffs together, where the wild roses grew. Their clothes were kind of retro—it had happened long ago, she knew. In the seventies, maybe. Then she recognized them: her parents. Their faces were so young. No lines on them or anything, clear skin and bright, perfect eyes.
They stopped at the edge of the cliff and looked out at the ocean together, smiling and holding hands.
“I know she promised once, on the cliffs, that she would never leave you,” she said softly as her dad came back into focus.
That was what they’d been saying, though she’d seen it rather than heard their words. It was almost shocking to see him again the way he looked now—old and complicated. And far more resigned than he’d looked then. Kids’ faces, she realized, had so much less in them than adult ones. Sure they were beautiful, but they were kind of blank, too.
It was the first time she’d seen something in the course of normal life, she realized. The first time a vision had come to her where it felt like her own.
“This was beyond her control,” she went on. “She can’t be in touch with you because it’s too dangerous for her here. There are people looking for her. People she doesn’t want to bring near … near us. She said it was her old life catching up with her, people she knew from way back. And she said to give you a message. Maybe so you know it was really her I talked to?”
Her dad raised his hands, spread open as though asking for something. He was the motion of his hands, she thought. Their gestures spoke for him when he couldn’t.
“She said, if you remember where you met? That those were her people, I think was what she said. And she’s been caught up in this—situation with them, this crisis.… She said something like: Tell him I have an obligation older than anything he knows. Something like that. It’s at the root of everything that’s going on, she said….”
As she told him the rest of the message, he listened without moving. His eyes were focused sharply on her, as though he was concentrating on remembering every word.
“And one more thing,” she finished. “It’s in another language. Dutch or—or Scandinavian or something? I just know how it’s pronounced. Die Tiere sind night, was sie scheinen.”
He picked up a pen and wrote something down.
“So, but, the thing is,” she finished lamely. “She’s alive. She’s OK. And she said to say, most of all … she, you know. She loves you. And all that.”
Her dad stopped writing. And then, without meeting her eyes, he turned around slowly, turned and stared out his big bay window toward the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Cara.
She waited. Her dad, his back still turned, gazing through the window with the light of late morning streaming past him, seemed grief-stricken. Dust motes swirled in the sunbeams, reminding her of the red tide … air and water, the world somehow the same in all its mediums … she stared at them. Maybe he didn’t believe any of it. After all, it wasn’t really what had happened….
But then he turned back around to face her. He was smiling slightly, but he also had something else in his face, something hard.
He wasn’t letting their mother off the hook, she thought. Not right now, anyway.
“Thank you for telling me, sweetheart,” he said. “I’d rather she’d spoken to me herself, of course. But thank you.”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“She—I know she wanted to,” said Cara.
“It’s not your responsibility,” he said. “You’ve done well. You’ve done just what you should, coming to me. So please, don’t worry.”
“There’s something else,” said Cara, nervous. “It’s—it’s something not good. Rufus is gone. He—he’s not in the house. We don’t know where he is.”
(Technically, that wasn’t a lie. Because who knew where the orca was now?)
“Well. All right, honey. We’ll take a walk around the neighborhood and look for him.”
He didn’t know it was serious yet, but that was OK. They could look for Rufus. They could go through the motions, for their dad.
They wouldn’t find him, of course.
Rufus had been twelve—a grandfather, in Labrador years. Maybe her father would come to believe he’d slunk off into a private place to die, as old dogs sometimes did.
“And we’ll get that pizza tonight, all right? We’ll rent an old movie. We’ll talk about starting back to school. Sound good?”
She nodded.
The walk to “look” for Rufus was worse than she’d expected. All four of them started out together along their street, away from the water, calling and whistling. That part was bad. Cara felt like a liar, felt bad they had to do the charade for their dad’s benefit. It seemed wrong, and somehow disrespectful of Roof. She still felt so guilty; Max and Jax had both said it wasn’t their fault, and her mother had said so, too, but it didn’t really matter what anyone said. There had to have been a way of saving him. And she hadn’t seen it. And now he was gone, and he didn’t
