The Leaving Part 28

With everything.

Had to start now.

She said, "She told me she thinks she remembers not liking me."

"I've been feeling like I'm not sure I like her," he said. "So just us?"

She nodded. "Just us."

The words felt familiar.

Just us.

Just them.

Against . . . the world?

What?

She said, "I have something inside me, Lucas. Something I swallowed but of course I don't remember doing it. It's metal and oval. Turned up on the MRI."

He touched her arm softly. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Yes." She nodded.

"Are you in pain?" he asked.

"No."

Had he even thought about kissing her?

"So you're just . . . waiting?"

She nodded again.

"I have a tattoo," he said. "It's like a camera shutter."

Click.

Say cheese.

Tried to picture what that would even look like, in ink.

"Where?"

He pointed.

Where he pointed.

Intimate.

All of this too intimate.

Showed her a picture on his phone.

Made her stomach flip.

"We're going to figure this out," he said. "So we'll go in the morning?"

"Yes."

They lingered there a moment, and then he said, "Can you take me somewhere now, actually? I don't have a car and-"

"Of course." Thinking anywhere. "Where?"

He said, "I want to buy a camera."

Lucas

He left her reading in the car and went into a large electronics store. They hadn't been able to find a proper camera shop close enough, so this would have to do.

He'd wanted her to come in with him.

He could tell her all about the book, already had.

But no, she wanted to read it herself, couldn't wait. Because what if only she could make the connection?

The news was on a wall of televisions inside, and they were talking about The Leaving. Apparently nothing else was happening in the world, or at least in Florida.

". . . explain the distrust?" the anchor was saying.

A man in a suit was saying, "The whole community down here was a part of this thing, you know? You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn't deeply impacted by this when it happened."

Lucas stopped for a moment, watched.

"People came from miles away to help with the search; there were vigils and there was a whole ribbon campaign if you recall, with people tying ribbons on trees and mailboxes."

All too strange.

"Even years later, the turnout at those anniversary vigils at Opus 6 was huge. This was not a personal tragedy. So there are a lot of people who feel very emotional about this, and to have them come back . . . but not all of them. It leaves a sour taste."

Lucas turned away from TVs to find cameras.

"People want the happy ending, they want answers, they want, mostly, someone to blame. And if we can't blame the person responsible, there's a tendency, yes, to blame the victim."

There was a good-size selection-a long row of cameras loosely wired to the display shelf-but Lucas couldn't spend a fortune, so he narrowed the choices quickly. Ryan had given him some cash to keep him going while they waited for their father's estate to be settled, at which point Ryan guessed they'd have enough to live on for a year or so if they were lucky.

Lucas began handling the cameras in his price range to see how they felt. He liked the styling of some and not others and didn't like snap and shoots, felt drawn to more elaborate machines with manual lenses. He held up a SONY he liked the feel of and peered through the view-finder, one eye closed.

"I see we have a shutterbug." A saleswoman leaned on the display with a bony elbow.

"Excuse me?" He lowered the camera.

"Most people these days just hold it up and look at the screen."

"Oh," he said, scrolling through some controls to see how intuitive or not the setup seemed. "Yeah. I guess so."

"Do I know you?" She tilted her head; her name tag said her name was Meg, and she looked maybe forty, forty-five? "You're real familiar-like."

Her voice had shifted in a way he didn't like; the wall of TVs still blared that there were no new developments in the case of his life. He said, "I think I'm going to take this one."

She unlocked a cabinet beneath the display and slid out a SONY box.

He followed her to the register and she rang up the camera while studying him curiously. All at once the TVs switched to a baseball game. He handed over a wad of bills.

"I just figured it out." She held out his change. "I do know you."

"No offense"-he took his change, folding the bills around the coins and shoving them in his front pocket-"but you don't know me."

Her lips curled with offense.

"Maybe you recognize me," he said. "But don't for a second think you know me."

He grabbed the camera bag and turned to go.

"No one believes your story," she called out after him.

The automatic door slid open and he stepped out, heart hammering at his ribs.

Camera crews had the car surrounded.

He had to fight his way through them to get to the pa.s.senger-side door.

Inside, Scarlett was in tears.

"What do you think it is?" a reporter shouted. "Why do you think you would swallow something?"

Then another, louder: "Why aren't you doing more to help find Max?"

"Start the car," Lucas said.

She nodded but didn't move.

"Start the car," he repeated.

This time, she turned the ignition with a shaky hand and put the car in reverse and inched back; the reporters pulled away and scattered and banged on the car some, but she just kept going, slow and steady, and in a moment they were free.

"I like your haircut," he said at a stop sign, and her hand went to her neck.

She said, "Thanks."