“Zora.”
“Do you think there was something else?”
“Stop it!”
I jumped. Dad’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel; a muscle strained in his jaw.
“You’re eighteen, not twelve.” He sounded like he wantedto say more, but closed his mouth. He flexed his hands until his jaw stopped twitching, then said, “I don’t think we should talk about this right now. Let’s get home.”
If anyone was going to believe Mom was alive, it was him. For all his flaws, Dad always bet on Mom.
“No,” I said, and he glanced over at me. “I want to talk about it. Right now.” I swallowed hard. “You can’t tell me what I can and can’t think about Mom.”
He laughed, a harsh sound. “You can’t think she’s still—stillalive!”
“Like hell I can’t!”
“Have you believed that this whole time? Have you been tellingother peoplethat?”
“Yeah, I have. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’swrong—it’s nothealthy—”
“Oh, okay, nowyou’relecturing me on what’s right and healthy? The guy who had a mental breakdown and committed a major crime? Whose main career is stealing things from other people?”
“And I’ve had a lot of time to think about the things I did and why they were wrong—”
“—and while you were thinking about it, the entire town was punishingus! You got to leave! Sadie and I had to stay here. I bet it was nice in prison, being away from everyone who hated you, being able to come back cheerful and happylike everything in the world can be fixed. Things weren’t great for us before you did all that, but after was—was—” There were no words for it. Waiting in the trailer for someone to take everything we had. Fearing school because of the horrible things people said, learning how to skip. Hunting firestarters because it was the only thing that eased the anger, until I got sloppy. “First Mom leaves, and then you think it’s totally okay to fly off the handle and rob thewhole town? Did you even think about me and Sadie before you did it? I know you didn’t do it for the money, so don’t lie and say you did.”
His lips were pressed in a thin line. His eyes were glazed. He said nothing.
“If Mom were here,” I said, “she would never have done something to hurt us, not without good reason.”
A pause. A tremble in his voice. “I never meant to hurt you girls.”
“Save it,” I snapped, leaning my forehead on the passenger door. “You taught us how to lie.”
21
In my whole childhood I only saw my father cry once.
Lazarus Novak wasn’t an especially stoic man. He wasn’t hardened by bitterness, or cynical. He enjoyed having fun. He believed you won life by being happy, and he was always a winner. He never yelled when Sadie or I did something we shouldn’t have, and he didn’t have to—we understood our mistakes because he stopped smiling. He never, ever raised a hand against us.
He wasn’t the kind of man who cried because he was sad. It wasn’t that he’d learned to bottle it up in some show of masculinity. More like nothing dug so deep into him it struck sadness. He didn’t seem to have any sadness inside him. Sad things passed right through.
Neither Sadie nor I received this mystical power. Sadie cried often and for anything, sometimes just because the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch was empty. Once, because she’d accidentally bought wingless pads instead of winged ones, and decided maybe she should bite the bullet and wear tampons, even though she hated having something jammed inside her all day. I cried never and for nothing, but not because I didn’t feel like it. I felt like crying sometimes. Doesn’t everyone? I wanted to cry when I was angry, mostly, and I was angry a lot. It’s hard not to be, when people look at you like you shouldn’t be allowed to breathe. But I kept that bottled up, because I was apathetic delinquent Zora Novak, and I wasn’t supposed to cry.
So I didn’t cry when they told us Mom was gone. But Dad did.
Mom was a strange spirit, perching on top of the trailer, gliding around aloof and mysterious often enough that people called her a witch. They knew something was different about her. When she didn’t come back after a night of hunting, I was the first one to get worried. Then Dad. No one had seen her. Her phone couldn’t be reached. After a full twenty-four hours, Dad got Chief Rivera on the case. He tried to smile then, and I believed it, because he didn’t know what I knew, that she might have run into something much worse in the woods than a wild animal.
Then the chief came to the trailer. The Chevelle had beenfound by Black Creek Woods, abandoned. The windows were rolled down, the keys in the ignition, the driver’s door open, as if Mom had meant to return. A trail of footprints led north into the woods, and they matched Mom’s shoe size, but they disappeared near an offshoot of Black Creek. Her trail went cold. The chief tried to get a team together to comb the woods, but not many people offered to help.
Dad stayed out there longer than others. He only came back when the chief made him, and for days after he tried to form a group to go back and look. He would have gotten lost in the search if not for me and Sadie. I was thirteen. Sadie was twenty. The ghosts hadn’t acted strangely, so I went on as normal. Sadie walked around in a daze.
It wasn’t as if Mom had died, after all. She’d just gotten out of her car and walked into the woods. She was hunting, but she knew how to handle herself. She knew a lot more than me.
A week after she went missing, Dad was making macaroni for us in the microwave when he burst into tears. I’d never heard those noises out of him. They made my stomach turn and my eyes water, and when Sadie leaped up to cry with him, I wanted to crawl away and disappear.
