Blind Lake Read Free Page A

it always sounded like:
What’s the matter with you? Is something wrong
? She never had an answer for that.
    “I’m working late tonight,” he said. “I can’t take you to Mom’s. You’ll have to phone her and have her pick you up.”
    Tonight was the night she changed over to her mother’s house. Tess had a room in each house. A small, neat one at Daddy’s. A big messy one at her mother’s. She would have to pack her school stuff for the change. “Can’t you call her?”
    “It’s better if you do it, sweetie.”
    She nodded again; then said, “All right.”
    “Love you.”
    “You too.”
    “Keep your chin up.”
    “What?”
    “I’ll call you every day, Tess.”
    “Okay,” Tess said.
    “Don’t forget to call your mother.”
    “I won’t.”
    Dutiful, and undistracted by the blank video panel, Tess said good-bye, then whispered “Mom” at the phone. There was an interlude of insect sounds, then her mother picked up.
    “Daddy says you have to come get me.”
    “He does, huh? Well—are you at his place?”
    Tess liked the sound of her mother’s voice even over the phone. If her father’s voice was distant thunder, her mother’s was summer rain—soothing, even when it was sad.
    “He’s working late,” Tess explained.
    “According to the agreement he’s supposed to bring you. I have work of my own to finish up.”
    “I guess I can walk,” Tess said, though she made no effort to conceal her disappointment. It would take her a good half hour to walk to her mom’s place, past the coffee shop and the teenagers who gathered there and who had taken to calling her Spaz because of the way she jerked her head to avoid their eyes.
    “No,” her mother said, “it’s getting late… Just have your stuff together. I’ll be there in, oh, I guess twenty minutes or so. ‘Kay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Maybe we’ll get takeout on the way home.”
    “Great.”
    After she deposited the phone back in her schoolbag, Tess made sure she had all the things she needed to bring to Mom’s: her notebooks and texts, of course, but also her favorite shirts and blouses, her plush monkey, her plug-in library, her personal night-light. That didn’t take long. Then, restless, she put her stuff in the foyer and went out back to watch the sunset.
    The nice thing about her Dad’s place was the view from the yard. It wasn’t a spectacular view, no mountains or valleys or anything as dramatic as that, but it looked out over a long stretch of undeveloped meadowland sloping toward the road into Constance. The sky seemed immensely large from here, free of any borders except the fence that encircled Blind Lake. Birds lived in the high grass beyond the neatly trimmed lawn, and sometimes they rose up into the huge clean sky in flocks. Tess didn’t know what kind of birds they were—she didn’t have a name for them. They were many and small and brown, and when they folded their wings they flew like darts.
    The only man-made things Tess could see from her father’s backyard (as long as she faced away from the mechanical line of the adjoining town houses) were the fence, the road that led across the rolling hills to Constance, and the guardhouse at the gate. She watched a bus driving away from Blind Lake, one of the buses that carried day workers home to their houses far away. In the fading dusk the windows of the bus were warm with yellow light.
    Tess stood silently watching. If her father were here, he would have called her inside by now. Tess knew that she sometimes stared at things too long. At clouds or hills or, when she was in school, out the spotless window to the soccer field where white goalposts clocked the hours with their shadows. Until someone called her back to the world.
Wake up, Tessa! Pay attention
! As if she had been asleep. As if she had
not
been paying attention.
    Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as