“Charlotte. Mom.” Sage took her by the hand and pulled her away from me, and they left, Sage with her arm around her mother as if she’d tucked her under her wing.

Marie and I stood in the aisle and looked at their abandoned shopping cart and our half-full one. Whenever someone mentioned my father, it went through me. I had hurt all these people who had treated me like their own and brought me into their homes. I started to shake. I had failed her idea of me, and my father’s.

Outside, I sat on a bench and watched the traffic flash up and down Route 202 and cried. There were cars everywhere, across the parking lot, on the highway, and construction and noise. Dump trucks trailed clouds of dust to and from the asphalt plant and building sites. Jackhammers clanged against rock, and bulldozer blades screeched metal on pavement. The sun was blinding and hot. I couldn’t stop crying.

A Rolling Stones line kept going through my head: I look inside myself and see my heart is black. Nothing could ever be put right. Marie was inside paying for the groceries, and when she came out, pushing the cart, we gathered the bags into our backpacks and walked over to the bus stop. Every few feet I had to wipe the fluid running from my nose, and Marie walked beside me and knew it was better to say nothing at all.

27

Thomas had practically become a celebrity on the mountain. Stories circulated about how he and Wilson took on the giant with the gun and Thomas struggled for the knife and stabbed him. Meredith Hunter came up to see how Ellen was, and even though Ellen was away, she stayed and recounted to us all the variations of the stories they’d heard. She said that one of the Walkers had told them that Thomas had stabbed the man over and over.

“No wonder they practically threw the pancake ingredients at me,” said Marie.

I barely played a role in these stories. It was all about how Wilson and Thomas had saved me and Ellen and pinned the guy down with a knife.

“Don’t worry,” Marie said. “They always make it about men heroes. The world makes better sense to them that way.”

I didn’t care. I wasn’t proud of any of it, and I didn’t want people to even know I’d been there. But in a weird way it was helping Thomas and bringing him back out into the world. One night he came home, and he’d been pool-hopping at the swim club. And he was spending time with Jack again.

“Was Sage there?” I asked. But he said he hadn’t seen her since the night at the police station.