She woke to sunlight on her face. From down the hall came the roar of the vacuum. Aunt Lynne's Saturday morning scour. Her aunt believed dirt had a place all right—outside her door and well away from her stoop. Saturdays were made for cleaning from top to bottom, Lynne on her knees scrubbing, dusting every crack and corner, polishing everything that could shine, before heading out for groceries.
"It's the only way to live in a small space," she'd told Blue when asked why she didn't sleep late, or at least drink a second cup of coffee and try her hand at the Saturday crossword. "You let things go and you may as well move into Gus Thompson's barn."
Gus's barn smelled of hay and ammonia, and his rooster crowed from sunrise to sundown. That was bad enough, but then there was Gus's tendency to start his chain saw up first thing in the morning on weekends to work on the sculptures of bears and eagles he sold to tourists venturing away from Vacationland's coast. By comparison, Lynne's neat streak ranked as a minor irritation.
Most everything about her aunt counted as a minor irritation. Lynne had fed them and clothed them and made sure they went to school, kept them up-to-date on vaccinations and left presents under the Christmas tree. She wasn't Mama, though. You'd never open a drawer in her house and find an old bird's nest where you expected the silverware to be. Lynne was meant to be the relative you visited at Christmas, not lived with year-round.
Family was Cass, and Cass was gone.
Blue sat up and touched her feet to the floor gingerly. Last night, walking home, they'd ached. Not like when she used to cover for Teena at the diner, before Teena stopped talking to her and started talking about her. No, this ache ran deep and strong.
Nothing happened, though, when her arches sank into the soft rug. Just her feet, plain and normal, second toes longer than the first, one big toenail only half grown back from when she'd dropped a brick on it over the summer. The same as always.
If her feet were fine, then … She called out to Lynne. Tried to. Her mouth made the right shapes, but only air escaped her lips. No words, no whistle, no nothing. Not fair. No voice meant she should also have the homing device the woman in the red dress had described. Otherwise, it wasn't a game, it was torture.
The noise of the vacuum grew. She jumped back into bed, pulled the covers up to her nose. A few more swipes and Lynne would reach Blue's door. She'd crack it open same as always, to confirm Blue was there. There, yes. Able to talk, no. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to sleep speed.
The vacuum turned off. A whiz as the cord retracted, a tap at the door. "Blue, you awake?" A creak as the door opened, the smell of pine soap and lemon.
Two years ago, it must have been the same. Lynne knocking and calling to them, only that time Blue had been asleep. Lynne had shaken her awake to ask if she knew where Cass was. Then they'd found the note. Cass was gone.
A retreat, a gentle click as the door shut behind her. Ten minutes more, and the front door opened and closed, followed by the sound of Lynne's Subaru starting up.
Her voice. What had happened? Last night there'd been the woman in the red dress, and the deal, and the kiss. They couldn't possibly be real. She tried summoning it again, attempting everything from a whisper to a yell. Still nothing came.
She hurried into the bathroom, where she started the shower, washed her hair, and breathed in steam, waiting for her throat to loosen up and her voice to come pouring out. No luck. Clams made more noise than she did.
Showered and dressed, she headed to the front door out of habit. All the way through last summer, Teena would pick her up on Saturdays. They'd shop for groceries for Teena's gram and clean her house. She insisted on giving them a little money in exchange—pocket change—but Blue would have done it for free. Anything for Teena's gram, who smelled of violet perfume, had papery skin through which you could see the bones of her hands, and told stories of feeding hoboes during the Great Depression. Blue's own grandmother had died before she'd been born—the one on her mother's side, at least. On her father's—well, her father's side didn't really exist. Family wasn't part of a sperm donor's donation.
She studied her feet as she sat to put on her boots. Encased in gray wool socks, they looked like feet. No sparks of magic, no weird tingles, nothing more special than bones and muscle and skin waiting to do their job. Her hiking boots rested on the plastic floor protector by the door. She unlaced them, thinking about walking out along the trail through the pines or maybe going all the way back to Somerset Hill and up, away from everyone.
She slipped the first boot on her foot. The feeling came fast, as if she'd stuck her toes in an electrical socket. It was the same aching need from last night: the call to move. Only in the booted foot, though. The other stayed unchanged, just a foot in a sock on a rug.
Last fall she'd gone with Teena to the outlets in Kittery, where they'd picked through the remnants the tourists had turned down. She'd just finished reading a book about a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in California, and she'd longed for something similar. She didn't yearn for Augusta, or Portland, or even Boston, the way Teena did. Used to be that Teena's dreams were hers, too—that she was happy to follow Teena's course for their future. Little by little, things had shifted, and she'd found herself between racks of fleece and flannel and sweaters with moose on the front, asking for a good pair of boots.
"Hiking boots? Whatever," Teena had said, but they'd gone through every shoe section of every store. None of the boots were right—too big, too small, way too expensive—until Teena groaned with frustration and made a U-turn into the Goodwill parking lot. There, on the third shelf from the bottom, perched a pair of reddish-brown leather hiking boots. Blue's size. No wear marks. Ten bucks.
Blue had worked oil into the leather until they darkened up nice and ripe. She'd gone on day hikes to break them in, until they fit her feet as if they'd been made for them. The extra half inch of height they gave her, the firm way they met the ground—in them she became just shy of invincible. Different, too. The kind of girl who might start dreaming things on her own, whether she wanted to or not.
Thanks to the woman in the red dress, now they'd become something more. With the second one on, the sensation ran like a current straight up both legs and into her heart, telling her it was time to go.
Time to go.
When Cass left, she'd wanted to sweep everything off her sister's dresser, to toss the expensive makeup out the window to be crushed on the gravel drive. It had felt as if every layer Cass had applied was one more coat sealing in her anger. "Our mother," she'd said, sitting on her bed the summer before she'd gone, "could have left us with a lot more than Eliotville, Maine, and Lynne's trailer if she hadn't insisted on playing music no one wanted, with frigging Tish Bellamy as a partner. I'm never going to be that stupid. I deserve more than this."
She'd said it as if she were talking to Blue, sure; but it felt like a conversation Cass was having with herself. As if Tish were the root of everything bad—as if she could have even planted cancer in Mama. Cass—the same girl who could spend forty-five minutes gently unsnarling Blue's hair when winter hats and scarves conspired to tie it in knots—had given herself up inch by inch to fury. All Blue knew how to do was to watch, until that day, when she found what she shouldn't have and showed it to Cass.
Now it was time to fix what she had broken. She pulled out her day pack and started stuffing it. T-shirts, jeans, underwear, a couple of flannel shirts worn soft and cozy. Socks, three pairs of wool ones Lynne had knitted her for Christmas. She put on the oversized Guatemalan sweater she'd impulsively bought last year in a little hippie shop in Portland only to cast it aside, too shy to wear it. It was itchy as hell but warmer than anything. She threw her barn coat on over it. What else? What do you pack when you have no clue where you're going?
She picked up her phone but put it back down. If she brought it, Lynne would call it. It could be used to track her, too, and she didn't want that. The one reason to bring it was in case Cass called it, but Cass had called the house phone every other time. Better to leave it and buy a new one once she was away from Maine.
That left just a few things. Her velvet keepsake bag. Hidden in her dresser, it contained the sorts of treasures only she could appreciate: letters and pictures, comfort and memory. She took out Mama's silver ring with the turquoise detail and slipped it on her finger before placing the bag in her backpack. Mama's guitar, safe within its hard case, came next. A notebook; some pens and pencils. Without a voice, she'd either need to write or become a mime to rival Marcel Marceau.
Lynne's trailer had seemed like a dream when Blue visited it as a little girl, with its shag rugs and vases with silk flowers, every petal free of dust. It was so different from the apartments she and Mama and Cass and Tish had drifted through. Those had been carved out of corners of ramshackle houses—drafty spaces with water stains on the ceilings and mice running along the floorboards at night.
They'd moved in for good the year Blue turned nine, the year being sick had become Mama's full-time job. Mama'd died in Lynne's room, on Lynne's bed, a year later. They'd known the end was coming, and Blue had tried to stay through the hours, days, but Mama had held on so much longer than anyone had thought she would, her harsh breathing slowing and speeding again and again. When the spaces between the breaths began to stretch further and further, Blue felt herself strangling, desperate for air. She'd run from the room, outside, into the pines where she'd hidden behind the biggest one she could find. No one had followed—they couldn't, wouldn't have left Mama—and she'd come back alone to the terrible nothingness left where Mama's breath should have been.
That was the only time she'd seen Lynne cry. Not in the year before, when Mama was sick. Not later, when Cass had left. Lynne had done lots of things then—called the police to report Cass as a runaway, talked to the social services people, questioned Cass's friends herself to see if they knew where she was, continued to change the sheets on Cass's bed once a week—but crying hadn't been one of them. After the first call from Cass, a month after she'd left, Lynne had said that Cass was old enough and smart enough to make her own choices.
"She's not here, Blue," she'd announced, when Blue got home from school that day. "She's not in Maine anymore. She's not a fugitive. She hasn't been kidnapped. She knows she can come home. She's almost eighteen, and she doesn't want to be here anymore." Was that what Mama would have done? No, because Mama wouldn't have let Cass fill up with anger. At least, that was what Blue thought. It was hard to know, with no one to help sort out her real memories of her mother from her imagined.
She opened to a blank sheet of paper in an unused green notebook.
Dear Lynne, she wrote, taking pains to be neat. I've got to go for a while. I think I know how to find Cass. I'm okay, so you don't need to look for me either. I'll be in touch when I can. Love, Blue
She meant more: something about thanks for taking care of her, and for the socks Lynne knitted, and for the handful of times she'd driven them out to the ocean to wander along the rocks or taken them to pick blueberries on the hill up past the edge of town. She meant I'm sorry, too, because even if Lynne didn't cry, Blue knew she still hurt inside. It was obvious in how she looked at Blue sometimes, or called her by Mama's name when she was tired. They'd each lost a sister; only, Blue had a chance to find Cass now, while Mama was gone for good.
She ripped out the sheet and folded it, wrote "Lynne" on the outside, and left it on the coffee table. Then she shouldered her backpack, grabbed the guitar, and headed out the door.
