them is holding a red cloak out to me, offering to help me into it. Yes, I want to tell them, I’m one of you.
They help me onto a flat-bottomed boat and seat me in the stern. I look for Rudy and can’t find him but then one of the red-cloaked figures squeezes my hand and says, “It’s okay, Mom.” He sits with me in the stern while the lost girls pull the boat along a rope stretched taut between the island and the mainland.
As we move away from the island I feel as if I’m being pulled back through time. The island vanishes in the fog. I picture that other island, on the lake. It too has vanished. I was never there. The five years are gone. Luther never hurt me or Rudy. Rudy never struck his father. We go back to my last night at Haywood. After my interview with Woody Hull, Jean takes me aside. She tells me that what Headmaster Hull said to me was wrong and asks what’s going on with me. I’ve changed this semester. I’m so quiet and withdrawn. I break down and tell her everything—about Luther, about being pregnant. She calls my father—he yells at me and he’s upset but then he breaks down and cries and tells me he’ll be there in the morning. We’ll work it out. I can have the baby or—
I could not. I know that this might have been the best choice. If one of my students came to me pregnant at seventeen, I would tell her to consider not having it. If I could truly go back in time, would I choose not to have Rudy?
I might as well ask if I’d go back before the very first time Luther came into my tent—
Or six months before my mother found the lump in her breast.
The boat is floating on a sea of fog, tethered between past and future. The tide is wiping the sand below us clean of all missteps and stumbles. All I have to do is let go.
So I do. I rise above the boat and look down. The me in the boat is wearing a ridiculous red suit—a survival suit, I think they’re called—but the me in the air feels light and warm. Returning to my body means returning to that terrible cold, the burn of flesh coming back to life, and, worse, Rudy hating me for what I’ve done. It would be easier to just let go. Rudy will be all right without me. I can see how strong he is. He doesn’t need me. Harmon might well be better off without me.
I can see one of the red suits leaning over, calling my name, pounding my chest. I can see Rudy’s face, tear-streaked, grief-stricken. The fact that he’s mad at me won’t make mourning me any easier. In fact, as I know from losing my own mother at Rudy’s age, it will make it worse. He’ll blame himself. And that is what tugs me back. Rudy should get to be angry at me, not mourn me. I owe him that. And that obligation is a thin, unbreakable cord, the thinnest filament tugging an airborne kite that lands me smack back in my body with an explosion of heat and cold and pain. I know how much pain is in store for all of us and I’m ready to bear my share of it.
Chapter Thirty
I awake cocooned in something that feels like a body bag. I’m dead, I think, I waited too long to come back. When you go missing it’s not so easy to return. Maybe you never really do.
My next thought is that death should not hurt this much. Every muscle in my body aches; my skin feels like it’s on fire; my throat burns like I’ve swallowed a gallon of seawater. When I move my head the room spins and a dozen Harmons lean in to say, “You’re okay. You’re wrapped in heating blankets to restore your core temperature.”
I swallow and try to ask for Rudy. Only a croak comes out but Harmon understands me. “Rudy is fine. He had mild hypothermia but he warmed right up. The resilience of youth, right? He’s being debriefed by Kevin Bantree—don’t worry, Morris is with them and Bantree’s assured me that neither I nor Rudy are persons of interest anymore.” He looks at me gravely. “You took an awful risk telling Bantree about the sweatshirt. What if Luther hadn’t confessed?”
“It was the