Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’ll find Jack Dennings’s address,” I say, ignoring the question. “We can go see him, too.” I’m beginning to feel desperate about all of this. I don’t even know how to solve the murder I witnessed, let alone a three-year-old cold case.

I close my eyes. I’ve been staying up late rereading articles about Mina’s murder and Jackie’s disappearance. Every time I make an effort to sleep, I’m back at Booker’s Point with her, and I can’t think about that. So I don’t sleep. Not when I can help it.

But I can’t fight it much longer.

There’s a hand. Warm against my shoulder.

Trev’s hand.

I tilt my head to the side so I can see him. He’s watching me, sitting beside me, and I don’t look away.

There’s a realization that’s settling in him, something I think he’s suspected but tried to deny for months, if not years. An acceptance that’s not begrudging, but hesitant. I can see it in his face, feel it when he touches me.

“Your back hurts?” he asks.

I tuck my hands underneath my chin and nod. He rests his hand on my shoulder, and that constant pressure, that bloom of heat, is another reminder of how present he is. How gone she is.

“Need anything before I go?”

I shake my head. I’m afraid to speak. Afraid I’ll do something stupid, like press into his touch.

I can’t do that to him—to myself, to her.

I won’t.

“Do you think she’s up there?” I mumble. The words are half-lost in the pillow, and he has to tilt forward to hear them. “Watching us from heaven?”

“I do.” He brushes hair off my forehead with his free hand, and the backs of his fingers graze my temple.

“Must be nice.”

“Sometimes.” Trev keeps stroking my hair, a light touch that spreads through me like a warm blanket. “Sometimes it’s hell, thinking of her watching everything and not getting to be a part of it.”

We stay like that for a while, with her memory wrapped around us. I’m half-asleep, eyes closed, when he leans over and presses his lips against my forehead.

His footsteps echo as he leaves my bedroom and I tell myself I’m crying from the pain.

ONE YEAR AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“You know, the whole point of being on a sailboat is to sail,” Trev says.

Mina laughs, and I can feel the vibration of it through my skin. She’s resting her head on my stomach, and the two of us are lying out on the deck of the Sweet Sorrow, Trev at the helm. Both of them are reading. Trev’s got some paperback mystery that he sticks in his pocket when he needs to get up and man the sails. Mina’s been absorbed in the same hardcover about Watergate for a week, taking precise notes in her journal. She props it on her knees, highlighting passages as she goes.

I am content to lie here and listen to them call back and forth to each other, their familiar, good-natured bickering more soothing than anything else could be. We’ve been dead in the water for an hour, Trev too absorbed to chase what little wind there is.

“I don’t see you pulling the rope things to get us going,” Mina says.

“It’s called the rigging, Mina. And I’m at a really good part.” Trev holds his book aloft.

She squints at the title. “I finished that last week. Want to know who the murderer is?”

“Don’t ruin it for him,” I protest.

“See, Soph’s on my side. Two against one.”

Mina rolls her eyes and turns a page.

I fall asleep eventually, lulled by the sun and the rocking of the boat—and by the pills I took before I got in the car this morning.

When I wake up, the sun’s sinking fast, and Mina has moved up to sit with Trev. I watch them for a moment, their dark heads bent together, legs dangling off the side of the boat. And I catch the end of Trev’s sentence, still half-asleep and hazy. “…worried about her?”

“It’s those stupid pills they have her on.”

I freeze. They’re talking about me.

“She needs them. She’s in pain.”

“I know, but lately…Never mind. I’m being stupid.”

“Hey, no.” Trev puts his arm around her, pulling her into him. She rests her head on his shoulder. “I get it. You’re worried. We all worry about her.”

“You worry about her,” she says pointedly. There’s resentment in her voice, and resignation.

A long silence. Trev pulls away from her, and they stare at each other. “Does that bother…Is that a problem?” he asks.

My heart thumps. I should cough, call out one of their names, anything to draw attention to the fact that I’m awake. It’d be the right thing to do.

But I stay where I am, eavesdropping in the worst possible way on the two people I love the most. I wait for her to answer. A part of me can’t help but hope that this will be the moment—when she finally tells him, when he finally realizes the truth.

“Of course it’s not a problem,” Mina says, and it’s so smooth, the way she says it, like there aren’t years of denial and heaps of lies and boys who touched our bodies but never had a chance at our hearts.

“You sure?” Trev asks. “I know she’s your best friend. If it’s weird—”

“Oh, whatever,” Mina says lightly. “You’ve never been able to hide things. It’s why you suck at poker. Everyone knows. Even—”

“Sophie,” Trev says. He’s glanced over his shoulder, caught sight of me. “You’re awake.”

I’m looking out at the water, away from the two of them, but my cheeks heat up. I’m still not sure what I ever did to inspire that need, that love in them both. I’m not honest and steady like Trev or bright and burning like Mina. I’m just me, with dirt underneath my finger­nails and a weakness for love and drugs. Somehow, though, I’ve managed to tie us all in knots, and I don’t know how we can break free.

“We should get back.” Trev is up and pulling at the rigging while Mina stays where she is.

I can feel her watching me.

But when I look at her, she’s turned toward the docks, blocking me out.

Cowards, both of us.

NOW (JUNE)

My mother’s in the kitchen the next morning, waiting for me.

“Where are you going?” she asks over her coffee cup.

“Breakfast with some friends.” I’d texted Kyle and Rachel the night before, and they’re meeting Trev and me at the Gold Street Diner before we head over to talk to Matt.

“Do those friends include Trev?” Mom asks. Her eyebrows practically disappear, they rise so high. “Your father said he was here yesterday.”

I grab the coffeepot and pour some into a travel mug. It’s only a ten-minute drive to the diner, but I’d slept badly. “Yeah.”

“Does Mrs. Bishop know?”

I dump too much sugar into the cup, popping the lid on it. “Mrs. Bishop’s in Santa Barbara. Anyway, Trev’s twenty. I don’t think he needs her permission to hang out with anyone.”

“Sophie.” Mom’s got a worried look on her face. “You and that family…” She stops.

Mom isn’t forgiving. After the crash, she’d tried to separate me from both Mina and him, and it hadn’t worked then, either.

“What about me and ‘that family’?” I demand. “I grew up with Trev. I’m not going to throw that away.”

“I know how that boy feels about you,” she says. “Are you still on birth control?”

Anger spikes inside me. It isn’t any of her business. I hate that she automatically assumes this is all about sex; like with me, that’s the only thing it could be about.

“I’m not sleeping with him,” I say. And I wait until the relief pulls across her face. I wait, because I want to hurt her like she’s hurt me. “Not anymore, at least,” I add.

Mom flinches. I tell myself I don’t care, that this is what I wanted, but I regret it almost instantly.

“I’ll be back later.” I walk past her and out of the kitchen before she can say anything.

I lock the front door behind me and swing my bag over my shoulder, my coffee in my free hand. Trev’s getting out of his truck as I walk down the path.

“We’re meeting Matt in an hour at his apartment,” Trev says. He pauses, his eyes darting to his truck. “You want to drive to the diner?”

I know it makes him nervous to drive with me, so I say, “Sure.” I catch the keys when he tosses them and climb into the driver’s seat. Trev slides in next to me, buckling his seat belt as I turn the key in the ignition.

“I forgot to tell you last night—I talked to Mr. Wells, the reporter in charge of Mina’s internship.”

Trev’s been carefully looking out the window, concentrating on the trimmed hedges and tidy older houses that fill my neighborhood. But at the mention of Mr. Wells, he turns to face me so fast, I’m afraid he might strain something. “Tom Wells?” he demands.

“Yes.” I turn off my street and head toward the railroad tracks.

“Don’t talk to him,” Trev says, and it sounds like an order.

“Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“He was bugging Mom, after Mina…after it happened. Showing up at Mass, trying to get her to talk, wanting to do a profile on Mina. I told him to leave us alone, but then he started calling the house, saying he had some of Mina’s stuff from her desk after the cops searched it. He wouldn’t stop until I came and got it.”

“I just went over there to ask him if Mina had talked to him about Jackie,” I say. “He said she didn’t. But he tried to get me to talk about Mina on the record.”

Trev’s hands clench and unclench rhythmically; I can see it out of the corner of my eye as the truck rumbles over the railroad tracks and I turn onto a side street lined with dingy industrial buildings. The road’s rough here, bad asphalt that the county’s never bothered to replace, and the truck jerks back and forth when I hit the potholes.

“I didn’t talk to Wells about anything important,” I assure him.

“I know you didn’t,” he says, and relief unfurls inside me that at least he still knows that hasn’t changed. He still trusts me with some things.

“What did he give you?” I ask as I pull into the parking lot. The diner in front of us is a squat little building made up of two big rooms with the bathrooms on the outside instead of in. It’s painted an eye-smarting shade of yellow, with wind chimes made out of old silverware dangling from the porch.

“It was just a bunch of half-filled notebooks, some pens, and a few pictures. I didn’t really look carefully through it,” Trev admits. “I haven’t…It was right after, and Mom was still…” He stops, looking away from me. “It was hard,” he says finally. “Afterward. You were gone, and I was so mad at you, and Mom was…I didn’t have anyone. And I just—I couldn’t. I kept the door to Mina’s room shut and I put the package in the garage and tried to forget about it.”

I want to reach out and grab his hand or raise my own to squeeze his shoulder, like he’d do for me. But I’d probably make things worse.

All we ever do is hold it in. It’s the only way to keep going.

“Kyle and Rachel are waiting for us,” I say.

Trev nods. We get out of the truck and head into the diner. It’s noisy inside, the counter lined with old-time regulars on their stools, sipping black coffee and reading the local paper. The dining room is crammed with tables and mismatched chairs, with just inches between for the waitress to navigate. Rachel and Kyle are sitting in the corner next to the picture window.

“You must be Trev.” Rachel smiles. “I’m Rachel.”

“What happened to your eye?” I ask Kyle as Rachel and Trev shake hands. He looks up from his coffee, his right eye swollen and purple.

“I punched him,” Trev says.

“What?”

Rachel laughs. “Seriously?” she asks Kyle.

“It’s not a big deal,” Kyle mutters.

Trev shrugs and sits down. “He deserved it.”

“Okay, no more punching,” I say, shaking my head. Punching wasn’t going to solve anything. “Let’s just all get along. We all want the same thing.”

After we order our food, we get down to business.

“I asked Tanner about Amy,” Kyle says. “He told me that she has soccer practice tomorrow from five to six. I figured you could talk to her then.”

“I just hope she’ll talk to us,” I say. “If she didn’t want Mina recording her interviews, I don’t know why she bothered to do one in the first place.”

“Her family probably just doesn’t like reporters,” Trev says with a scowl.

“Do you want me to go with you to see Matt?” Kyle asks. “He knows me pretty well because of Adam.”

“Trev’s coming,” I say. “But thanks. I think we’ve got another job for you.” I nudge Trev with my elbow. “Do you think it’d be okay if Kyle and Rachel went over to your house? They can go through the package from the Beacon. Maybe there’s something in Mina’s notebooks.”