Summer Skies

01. Summer Dawn

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IT'S 5 A.M., AND THE STREETS ARE EMPTY. He's cruising leisurely, slowing to a soft halt at each stop sign, waiting out every red light, as if we're not the only people awake in Back Bay. Everything seems still; it's a dead-quiet morning.

There's only clicking and beeping and radio fuzziness and tap-tap-tapping.

"Birdie..."

My gaze is somewhere else: skimming apartment buildings on Elm Street. My brain wandering.

Dani and I would've been walking ba—

"Birdie, I believe you, you know," he says.

"Mmhm." I hum. Right. Okay. They believe me, huh?

"It's just..." Officer Livingston sighs. "I have nowhere to begin."

"I know."

I hadn't given up anything useful. I couldn't explain anything, I could barely quit repeating myself over and over and over. Like I'd been scratched, skipping on a loop. My legs hurt. My hips ached. My eyes and nose and lips stung. My skull kept panging, banging, clanging. I'd kept shaking my head angrily. No. No. No. All I knew was what I'd been able to say. They took her.

It was in my gut, deeply rooted in my subconscious.

They took Dani.

Officer Livingston had given up eventually.

He's pulling along my curb, scraping a rocky dust, engine dying in a squat spot on May Street. Home looms at an eerie angle, shadowed by a hazy dawn. Its pale blue siding and dark windows and leaning porch I'd spent so many nights sitting with Danielle.

"Couldn't get ahold of your Ma," he grumbled, shifting awkwardly. He's gazing at it, too. Dark. "Probably sleeping, huh?"

"Yep," I mutter under my breath, glancing away.

I'd always woken Ma up with bad calls. Hospitals. Police. We've got your daughter. Yeah, hitchhiking on Route 1. Skinnydipping off Banks Buff. Broke an arm at Rolling Park. Concussion. Stealing from 7-Eleven.

"Well." I hold a hand up, as nonchalantly as I can. "Thanks," I say, before I push my door open. Officer Livingston had let me sit up front. Weird. I hop down an—

"Hey, Birdie."

I look back.

His gaze reflecting off a tinted window, locked on my unlocked apartment. It's dark. "Is she really around?"

"Yep."

I slam his door.

I wait on my porch until Officer Livingston drives away. Then I look up. The sky is gauzy, dewy. Dawn. There's a distant light, though, and I see it, I know I do.

They took Dani.

Morning is bleeding in, and I'd been sitting in soaked clothes all goddamn night—being questioned relentlessly. It had been hours and hours and hours of hopelessness. Dani is gone, and I'm fucking lost.

So I sit down, drop my head in my hands, and I cry.

I sob.

When I'm finished, stuck with a raw throat and stinging eyes, I stand up. I turn around and I step inside, closing our door softly. I keep it low: "Ricky?"

We live below an elderly couple I've never spoken to. They probably hate us anyway. Sometimes, it's an all-hours household of shuffling and shouting. Sometimes, it's respectfully considerate, capable of neighborly behavior.

Ma had taken off again.

It was three weeks last time—over an incident with Cheez-Its. Ma just... up and left. Then reappeared at the end of May, rattling our sticky doorknob and breaking in like a ghost at 3 a.m.

Bitching: It's a fucking mess.

But Ricky and I had been relieved. We'd been scraping by. I spent long days at McMacnoy Library, begging for scraps by O'Reilly's Bakery. They had crushed little bags of day-old cookies Ricky and I would buy for a quarter each and eat slowly. My stomach growling. We'd sit on a curb; poke our fingers in a payphone coin slot around the corner for any kind of spare change; hang out on a grassy knoll behind Hyde Bank.

(Until I met Danielle.)

We were basically a bunch of feral wolves circling Jay's Variety on Main, pocketing Snickers and Moxie. We're lucky. Jay didn't hold it against us—Jay hired us.

"Ricky," I hiss.

Because Ricky is sitting in a dark spot of a darker living room, half-dozing beside a buzzing police scanner, listening for Ma. Its needle ticks in a dull way. Red. Blue. Voices. Fizzy.

"Hey, loser"—I jerk my chin—"thought you were staying at Jack's."

"Thought you were staying with Danielle."

My heart kicks. Dani.

Finally, Ricky Lane, only a year older, but significantly younger mentally, looks up. His expression is contorted, draped in a shadowy blanket—a window behind him lights bluish-grey contours of an unshaven jaw.

"Wait, are you..."

"Yeah." I walk away.

Everything feels stunted: shutting the bathroom door calmly and peeling my shirt off numbly and showering silently and dressing in a daze and forcing myself not to think of Danielle.

I open up the fridge and sigh.

"There's no food," Ricky says what I already know.

It's all a tinny yellow glow. Grimy. There's dry residue on an empty shelf, a half-opened carton of eggs below.

I grab an egg.

"Where... is Danielle?"

They took her.

"I don't know."

I turn the burner on with a quick flick.

"Thought you were meeting her at Gulls Rock."

"I was."

"And..."

"Come—" I jolt as I hear it interrupt him. It's his—Ma's—police scanner rustling and crackling. Noise. Ricky bolts upright, already shucking its volume up. "This is a— a 10-150: Possible Endangered Minor..."

Fridge echoes as I thud it shut, spinning around, around, around. Dani.

Nobody... was running away.

Endangered

"Alright, just... keep your eyes open," he's saying tiredly. Reluctant. His voice is gruff, buzzing. "We've got, uh, report of a young female, around seventeen-years-old, wearing denim shorts and a black tank top—"

What Danielle was wearing. What I saw her wearing.

"5'3". Mixed. Brown hair, dyed red. Brown eyes. Possibly alone."

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