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Meg only waited, unsure how to answer. What did he mean by that ... half visible and half unseen? Though it kind of reflected how she felt right now: half-confused, and half-intrigued.
Silas leaned back over his mattress, reaching under his bed to retrieve a well-thumbed paperback.Constellations of the Northern Hemisphere.“But did you know,” he said, turning the pages quickly, his customary enthusiasm building, “that if you could view Cassiopeia from Alpha Centauri—that’s the brightest point of the constellation Centaurus—then the sun,oursun, would appear as a star within her?” He pointed back at the W pattern of Cassiopeia on his wall. “There,” he said, “at the far-left end, would be the sun.” He turned, smiling triumphantly at Meg. “Quite a coup, huh? Unassuming Cassiopeia is actually a superstar—no pun intended—if viewed from the right angle.”
Meg looked from the chart to Silas’s face, glowing with its steady confidence. Her mouth quirked into a mischievous smile. She knew next to nothing about astronomy, but after years of reading every genre of fiction she could get her hands on, mythology was another matter entirely. She could dispel Silas’s theory in an instant, an opportunity that gave her a bit of a rush.
“Cassiopeia was a diva long before anyone viewing her knew she included the sun,” she informed him. Silas looked at her in surprise asshe gestured back up at the diagram, tracing the simplistic outline of the queen’s shape with one finger. “She’s upside down. Do you know why?”
Silas’s face sobered in an expression of anticipation that sent another small thrill of victory shooting down Meg’s spine. “She was so boastful of her beauty, Poseidon hung her that way in the sky, as a warning against vanity.” She scoffed then, unceremoniously lifting a loose lock of her hair and letting it fall back to the pillow in a tumble of auburn strands. “I’mnot vain. So, you see? Your theory is disproven.”
She shot Silas a triumphant grin and then felt it falter as she caught something that almost hinted at confusion in his eyes. “You’re right,” he conceded softly. “You’re not vain.”
For a moment Meg lay in place, absorbing this hollow victory, trying to make sense of an inexplicable tangle of emotions playing for dominance in her heart. And then Danny walked back through the door with a monstrous bowl of popcorn under the crook of his arm, and Silas high-fived him, and the three of them settled in to watch TV. By the time Danny and Meg gathered up their coats in the entrance of the lodge, Danny mislaying his car keys two times, it was full dark.
“Night, Cairns,” Silas called from the cavernous lodge kitchen, just like normal, but suddenly he was by Meg’s side, pulling her cap down over her head with a playful tug.
“Good night, Cassiopeia,” he added with a smirk, and even though he said this loudly enough to bring Danny into the loop, declaring that he was not the only one with a nickname now, the shared reference between them—just them—flowed over Meg like honey, seeping with a subtle warmth into every empty space under her skin.
“Good night,” she managed, and then stepped quickly out into cold air, welcoming the driving rain on her cheeks. She was not beautiful, and she was not luminous, that was ridiculous, and she had set the record straight, so why, Meg wondered the entire ride home, did she still feel the glow of being seen as such?
9
SILAS
Matheson search
November 20, 2018
7:25 a.m.
Marble Lake Staging Area
Silas looks directly into the sheriff’s eyes and wills himself to behave. He can’t lose his cool again, and he sure as hell can’t regress to the scared, cocky boy he was when the two of them last squared off, just like this, at this exact place. He’d been fifteen years younger, and Walters was serving his first elected term. That time, Silas blinked first.
But I’m not that kid anymore.And Meg and Danny, somewhere out on the trails right this minute, can’t possibly be the same scared kids they were in 2003, either, despite the instant pull toward them he felt the second he saw them again. They both may have been haunting him for years, but Silas tells himself it’s Walters’s presence here, at Marble Lake, that’s making it seem like no time has passed at all.
“What we need from you now, Mr.Matheson,” Walters says, “is as much information about the boys’ clothing, appearance, and habits as possible. Let’s start with Spencer’s shoes.”
“His shoes?” Silas says dully.
“Color, size?” This question comes from the man named Santos, who sits to Walters’s left, taking notes rapidly on a waterproof binder.
Silas wills the image of Spencer’s shoes to swim into focus. They won’t materialize. Instead, he still sees his onetime friends where they’d been standing among the searchers, readying to mobilize to find his boys. Maybe because he knows thinking about Spencer and Cameron right now will upend him. Send him careening even further out of control.
“Knowing the shoe size helps the trackers,” Sheriff Walters adds. His eyes are beady in his face. Alert and intense, but watery, too. Walters has aged. “You remember.”
Silas glances up sharply at this first acknowledgment of their shared history.That’s right, old man,he would like to say, had he any leverage today at all.Lay your cards on the table.Because of course it’s not lost on Walters that the two of them have circled this exact same question of sole treads and imprints before. Did Silas really harbor any hope that this would have been forgiven and forgotten? He hasn’t even forgiven himself.
“As you know,” Santos interjects in a much gentler tone, “time isn’t on our side. Anything you can recall will help.”
Shoes. Spencer.Silas squeezes his eyes shut tightly, reopening them with new focus. The air inside this canvas tent they’ve erected in the center of the staging area is stuffy beyond reason, making a mockery of the danger his boys face, right this very minute, out in the cold. Sweating through two layers of flannel, he forces himself to think. Was Spencer wearing his Nikes yesterday? Or had he insisted on those cheap Minecraft rain boots again, the ones that were too small? The kid’s feet were growing so fast. Who could keep up?
He blinks again, trying to clear his head, but a cottony feeling stubbornly clings to the inside of his skull. He wonders if this is what shock feels like. He knows it isn’t panic. Panic was what shot throughhis body for hours earlier, sending urgent arrows of alarm from the very center of his being to his furthest recesses, from the tips of his fingers to the soles of his feet. Panic was what got him through the night, first as he scoured the woods, then after dialing 911 and calling Miranda in Manchester only to have it go to voice mail. Instead of leaving a message that would undo her, he drove the rutted roads surrounding the lodge into the early morning, headlights flashing, horn honking, first with the response team and then with the sheriff patrol.Panic,unlike shock, is unmistakable.
“He must have been wearing his Nikes.” Yes, that has to be right, because Spencer just complained about the boots, didn’t he? Something about blisters. “Black-and-white low-tops.”
“Good. That’s a start.” Sheriff Walters tugs at his brown uniform vest, which is straining around his ample stomach. “And the size?”
Silas shakes his head. Miranda bought the Nikes. He remembers because it was just days before her flight out of PDX. Spencer acted out, throwing a fit when she wouldn’t buy him Heelys instead. She called Silas in tears, and he assured her he’d talk to Spencer. Make sure he understood that his mother wasn’t leaving forever. That he and his brother would be with her for Christmas, then again for summer break. And that in the meantime, they were in good hands with their ol’ dad. He remembers because that talk was the genesis of the three amigos.
