Page 5 of The Last Thing You Said

Ben dives into the water and swims toward the island, toward Clay, toward where Trixie should be. Ben resurfaces, shouts, I can’t see her, call for help. I splash to shore, crying, shaking. A woman puts a towel around my shoulders, says she’s already called 911, tells me to breathe.

Breathe.

I don’t tell Emily this story, but someday I will. Someday she will want to know all the sad parts, too, not just the happy, silly stories of two girls growing up.

When Tami gets home from running errands, Ben’s car is no longer in the driveway. She asks if I’d like a ride home since it’s been drizzling off and on the last couple of hours, but I tell her I’ll swing by the Full Loon and catch a ride with my mom.

“You’ll be lucky if they don’t toss you an apron and put you to work,” Tami says. “It’s opener weekend. And your mom told me that Rita quit.”

I roll my eyes. “Not much of a loss, if you ask me.” Mom had called me in countless times to cover for Rita at the last minute, but she completely freaked out when her most veteran waitress left them high and dry.

The Full Loon Café, the restaurant that’s been in my mom’s family since the 1940s, isn’t far from the resort. Nothing’s far from anything in this town. The café parking lot is crowded; even the overflow lot behind the Oasis gas station is packed with vehicles. A half-dozen people crowd onto the two wooden benches next to the front door, waiting for a table. Saturday night, fishing opener, Mom’s down a full-timer, and her summer part-timers are new and green.

I should go in, grab an apron, and help them out of the weeds.

But I don’t.

I keep walking, past the café and the Oasis, through our touristy downtown with its candy store and T-shirt shop and old-fashioned, single-screen movie theater.

I speed up as I walk past Ben’s house. The house where he grew up with Trixie. The house where I spent so much time—sleepovers and birthdays and special days and ordinary days—like I was part of their family.

There have been days since when I walk past that house and wish, wish, wish that I were brave enough to stop, to touch the wheels of Trixie’s bike, still hanging on its hooks in the garage, to have tea with Jane, Trixie’s mom. To ask her for the Book of Quotes, the notebook Trixie and I filled with lyrics and quotations and poems.

Brave enough to talk to Ben, more than the tense, polite things we say to each other when it can’t be avoided. More than the shallow “How’ve you been,” when really I want to reach into his heart and ask him everything.

He told me once that I could ask him anything, one night last summer before Trixie died—a game we played to keep me from freaking out as we climbed the one hundred thirty steps of the Fire Tower.

“What’s your middle name?” I asked.

“Alistair. Didn’t you already know that?” He stood close behind me on the steps, like he’d block me from falling backward.

I did know. His full name, Bennett Alistair Porter. His birthday, April 11.

“Were you named for anyone?”

“Yes. My grandfather’s name is Alistair.”

“Favorite meal?”

“Mum’s fish-and-chips.”

“Favorite candy?”

“Maple fudge.” I could hear the smile in his words.

At this, I stumbled a little, and he put his hands on my waist to steady me. I was glad that he was behind me, that he couldn’t see my face, hot with embarrassment and from his touch.

Now, down the block from the Porters’ house, I sigh with relief that no one was home. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to stop anyway.

The First Day of Kindergarten

Once upon a time, there lived a happy little girl named Beatrix, but everyone called her Trixie. Trixie lived with her mum and her dad and her big brother, Ben.

One day, when Trixie was five years old, she went to kindergarten. She knew all the other children in her class, from church and the park and preschool, except for one little girl with curly brown pigtails. And on that first day of school, Trixie marched right over to the girl with the pigtails and stuck out her hand.

“Hello, I’m Trixie. What’s your name?” she asked.

“My name is Lucy,” the little girl said. She was very nervous, even though Trixie smiled at her.