I can’t be, he’d said. What he should have said was, I will always love you. He should have held her hand and told her it was okay.
“I’m sorry, Katie,” he said to her then—too late. He strained for a sign that she’d heard. A breeze in his hair, a flower falling in his lap. Something. But there was nothing. Just the sound of the waves whooshing coquettishly onto the sand.
The island had helped the boys, he thought. From dawn to dusk, they were on the go. They ran races in the yard, learned to body-surf in the bubbling foam of the breaking waves, and buried each other in the sand. Lucas talked about Kate often, mentioning her in casual conversations almost every day. He made it sound as if she were at the store and would soon come home. At first it had disconcerted the rest of them, but in time, like the gentle, ceaseless roll of the waves, Lucas had brought Kate into their circle again, kept her present, shown them the way to remember her. Mom would have loved this became a common refrain, and it helped them all.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite right. After a week in Kauai, Johnny still had no idea what would help Marah. She had become a pod version of herself—same elegant beauty and commitment to personal grooming, but with a flat look in her eyes and an automatronic way of moving. While he and the boys played in the surf, she sat on the beach, listening to music and tapping her cell phone as if it were a transponder that could get her rescued. She did everything that was asked of her, and more that wasn’t, but she was a ghost version of herself. There and not there. When Kate was mentioned, Marah invariably said something like, She’s gone, and walked away. She was always walking away. She didn’t want to be on this vacation and she wanted to reiterate that point on a daily basis. Not once had she put so much as a toe in the water.
Like now. Johnny was standing waist-deep in the warm blue water, helping the boys catch waves on their Styrofoam boogie boards, while Marah sat in a bright pink beach chair on the sand, staring to her left.
As he watched her, a group of young men approached her.
“Keep walking, guys,” he muttered.
“What, Dad?” Wills yelled. “Push me!”
Johnny gave Wills a push into the gathering wave and said, “Kick,” but he wasn’t watching his son.
On shore, the young men gathered around his daughter like bees to a blossom.
The boys were older, probably college-age. He was just about to get out of the water, march across the hot sand, and grab one of the kids by his surfer-dude hair when they walked away.
“Be right back, boys,” he said, walking through the two-foot surf to the beach. He sat down next to his daughter. “So what did the Backstreet Boys want?” He tried to sound casual.
She didn’t answer.
“They’re too old for you, Marah. ”
She looked at him finally. Dark sunglasses shielded the expression in her eyes. “I was not having sex with them, Dad. We were just talking. ”
“About what?”
“Nothing. ” On that enlightening answer, she got up and walked back toward the house. The sliding door cracked shut behind her. They hadn’t had a conversation that lasted longer than three sentences all week. Her anger was a Teflon shield. He could occasionally see glimpses of her pain and confusion and grief, but those seconds didn’t last. She was hidden inside all that anger, a little girl crouched inside a teen with the perfect defense, and he didn’t know how to break through the façade. That had always been Kate’s job.
* * *
That night, Johnny lay in bed, arms wishboned behind his head, staring at nothing. A ceiling fan whirred lazily overhead; the mechanism caught once each revolution, made a clicking sound between the thwop-thwop-thwop of the turning blades. The louvered shutters on his door clattered quietly, buffeted by the breeze.
It didn’t surprise him that he was still awake on this last night of their vacation—if that was what a trip like this could reasonably be called—and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep. He glanced at the digital clock: 2:15.
He threw back the sheets and got out of bed. He opened the louvered door and stepped out onto the lanai. A full moon hung in the night sky, impossibly bright. Black palm trees swayed in the plumeria-scented air. The beach looked like a curl of tarnished silver.
He stood there a long time, breathing in the sweet air, listening to the sound of the waves. It calmed him so much he thought maybe he could sleep.
He made a pass through the darkened house. It had become his habit in the past week to check on his kids during the night. He carefully opened the boys’ bedroom door. They slept in twin beds, side by side. Lucas clutched his favorite toy—a stuffed orca whale. His brother had no time for such little-boy’s toys.
He closed the door slowly and went down to Marah’s room, opening the door quietly.
What he saw inside her room was so unexpected, it took him a second to comprehend.
Her bed was empty.
“What the hell…?”
He turned on the light and looked more closely.
She was gone. So were her gold flip-flops. And her purse. Those were the only things he knew for sure, but it was enough to tell him that she hadn’t been abducted. Well, that and the open window—which had been locked when she went to bed and could only be opened from the inside.
She had sneaked out.