We listened as Diane moved from song to song and the sun fell. Once it was low enough, strings of white lights that lined the dock winked on automatically, surrounding us in a crystalline glow. Fairy lights. I remembered how Mom would hang them all through our back garden. Suspended within the flower patches and the vines, they filled the nighttime yard with a ghostly twinkle.
Kate gathered the remains of dinner into neat piles at the end of the pier. When she returned, she sat down beside me, the tip of her knee touching my arm. They looked strange so close, her leg smooth and white, my arm covered in old bruises and partially healed cuts just like the rest of me was. Kate lightly traced the boundaries of one of the bruises with her fingertip.
“Some of these are old,” she said quietly, her voice slipping in beneath Diane’s strumming. “You didn’t get all of them in the crash.”
I shook my head.
“You were taken,” Kate said. “Weren’t you? By the Path.”
I turned to her, her violet-colored eyes shyly searching.
“How did you know?”
“A guess,” she said with a shrug. “You said you were from New York but you were running from the West, which is mostly Path. How long were you with them?”
“Six years.”
“Six years,” she breathed, looking out at the water. “Since I was in… fifth grade.”
“Does everyone know?”
“No,” she said. “Not that they’d care, really.” She thought for a moment, tossed another chip into the water. “After a while, everything outside of here starts to seem sort of… unreal. You know?” She looked back at me with a smile. “I think you’re the most real thing that’s come along in weeks.”
Applause erupted as Diane finished one song and then launched into another, this one faster, punctuated by Christos stomping in time against the deck. Kate clapped along, moving closer to me as she did it, her shoulder warm against mine. The notes suddenly felt strident and jangling. Overloud. I thought of Nat and Bear lying alone in the dark.
“I should go,” I said. “Check on Nat and Bear. Bring them something to eat.”
“I’m sure they’re fine.”
“But—”
“It won’t kill you to rest for a second,” Kate said, a surprising command coming into her voice. “I promise.”
“I…”
Kate took my hand as the song played on. Across the lake I saw Alec and Reese pulling back toward us. They planted their palms on the pier and slid out of the water, slick as seals. Alec stood at the edge of the pier, his pale belly hanging out, and began a lurching dance in time to Diane’s playing. Reese and Kate cried with laughter and clapped along. Soon everyone was laughing, making a sound as crisp and bright as the fairy lights around us.
I felt Kate’s hand take my shoulders and turn me around. I flinched away but she was firm, lowering my head down into her lap. Diane stopped singing and her guitar rang out alone. The sound of it was so familiar and so sweet.
I breathed easy for the first time in what felt like weeks. I closed my eyes, feeling like we were locked away in a bubble lit by fairy lights and so still. And even as the world revolved, we remained.
I glided up to the house with the moon’s broad face above me. Diane and Kate were just behind me, talking quietly. The rest were strung along behind them down the hill, singing as they walked.
The glass door slid open and I stepped into the den. A second later, Reese and Alec came around behind me, heading into a hall at the dark end of the house. Alec brushed my shoulder as he passed.
“Night, buddy.”
He drifted away, humming quietly to himself. Diane and Christos followed them off.
“Night, Cal.”
“Sleep good, Cal.”
Kate led me back to my room, where the light from my open door made her pale skin and her violet eyes glow. An anxious buzz started in my head and moved through my body.
“I’m the third door down,” she said. “On the other side of the house. If you need anything.”
“Thanks,” I said, surprised to find my voice hoarse.
I expected Kate to go, but she looked at me intently for a moment and then down at the floor, her eyebrows drawn tight together. “I shouldn’t…”
“What?”
“It’s not my place,” she said, seemingly to herself. “But… you noticed that Alec changed the subject when I brought up New York earlier?”
“Did something happen? Is New York—”
Kate placed her hand on my chest. “No, it’s fine. It’s just… a few days ago Alec and Christos decided they were getting bored, so they talked their parents into sending a plane to pick us all up. It’ll be at a small airport not far from here in a couple days.”
There was a wooden creak as someone moved through the house. A door opened and closed.
“I don’t under—”
“Cal, we’re going to take the plane and go to New York.”
My heart pounded once, sending a tremor through my chest, and then everything seemed to go perfectly still, like the world was balanced on the edge of a cliff.
“I can’t promise that Alec will agree, but Diane and I talked about it. We’re going to tell him that if he doesn’t take the three of you with us, then we’re not going to go either.”
“I don’t know what to—”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. And we should probably be prepared for the possibility that Alec prizes Diane’s guitar playing and my sparkling wit a little less than we’d hope. In which case the five of us might be stuck here for a while. Anyway…”
Kate dipped in and kissed my cheek. Her face lingered alongside mine afterward. The scent of lavender clung to her as it did to me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the flowery scent. When I opened them she was gone. The house was shadowy and still, quiet except for the phantom strains of Diane’s guitar that replayed in my mind.
Something brushed against my calf and then Bear jumped up and planted his paws on my knee. He looked at me, his stump of a tail twitching frantically.
“You need to go out?”
Bear exploded out the porch door as soon as I opened it, disappearing into the trees. Even he seemed to be feeling better, his limping run a thing of the past. I went to the kitchen and filled one bowl with water and another with crumbled hamburger and leftover chunks of steak I found in the fridge. I carried the bowls outside and sat down at the end of the table. The sky was clear, so I found the North Star and used it to turn my chair due east.
I could feel Ithaca, sitting out there like a fire in the dark, tendrils of its warmth brushing my skin. I saw myself climbing onto a plane and rocketing toward it, a thrill in my chest so great it was almost an ache. I imagined finding Mom and Dad and even Grandma Betty out in the garden. Mom would have a glass of wine in her hand, listening as Dad played. Once dawn cracked the sky, we’d all drift toward the house and settle down to sleep. No one would ask about the last six years, no one would ask about James; we’d all slip into the future without a word.
Bear trotted out of the woods and threw himself into his food, snuffling and slurping as he ate. I looked across the table and saw that Diane had left her guitar behind. I popped the clasps of the case and pulled the guitar out and into my lap, leaning over its body.
“Want some dinner music?”
The Path didn’t allow music outside of Lighthouse, so it had been a long time since I had played. My fingers moved across the steel strings, stretching against the restraint of my cast to press into the frets. I played slow and mechanically at first, chord to chord, but then it started to come back to me. I meandered for a while until a song settled in.