Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay Page A

like some everyday ho-hum procedural thing when it isn’t. This isn’t an everyday thing.”
    Mom says, “She’s not my friend. I mean, we’re friendly—whatever.” Mom grunts like she’s frustrated with her own words. She adds, “She’s working hard, Mom. They’re all working hard.” In a lower voice, not quite a whisper, she says, “Is Kate still in the kitchen? Is she listening to her music?”
    Kate can’t see her mother from where she is sitting.
    Nana says, “What? Yes, I think so. Her earphones are in.”
    Kate loves that Nana calls the buds earphones . She takes them out of her ears and rolls them between her fingers.
    Mom asks, “Can she hear me?” Then she calls out “Kate? Kate!”
    Kate doesn’t answer. She hangs the buds over her shoulders, close enough to her head that she can stuff them back in her ears or pretend they fell out should either one walk into the kitchen. Kate calls up her Beautiful Noise playlist that begins with the only Sonic Youth song she likes. It’s the one with Chuck D in the middle.
    Nana says, “Do you want me to get her?”
    â€œNo. No, I—I don’t want her to hear the rest of this.”
    â€œAll right. Should I send her to her room?”
    â€œUm. No, it’s fine.” She pauses to yell Kate’s name twice more. “I don’t want her to think I’m keeping anything from her. No matter what happens, I want her to trust me.”
    â€œWhat’s this about?”
    Everyone is quiet for a few beats. The tinny screech of guitars and a steady drumbeat pulse out of Kate’s earbud speakers. Mom starts talking. She tells Nana she saw something in her bedroom late last night. She says there was a shadow or something between her chair and end table, like a ghost, but it was a dark shape, something made of more dark. Mom stops talking, and Kate turns that odd phrase around in her head, inspecting it for imperfections, like a jeweler, but finding none. It makes perfect sense to Kate. What else would a ghost be made of but more dark? Kate quickly calls up the tweets about the dark shape running through yards and looking into windows, and she wants to say something to Mom, show her what other people are saying about dark shapes, but she also doesn’t want to be caught eavesdropping.
    Nana says, “Okay, wait. What are you saying?”
    Mom then says that what she saw was Tommy, all huddled up, and then at the very end, something was wrong with his face, and sheknows that means Tommy is dead and that he’s never coming back home. She says it so plainly, Kate almost drops her phone. It doesn’t sound like Mom at all, but a narrator to one of those boring documentaries she watches sometimes.
    Nana clucks her tongue, and although she doesn’t raise the volume of her voice, she uses an argument-in-a-restaurant tone that’s downright poisonous. Kate sinks deeper into the hard, wooden chair, having never heard Nana sound this cold and angry; it’s terrifying. Nana asks how she could even think of saying such a thing about Tommy, and she says that Mom has to be stronger than this, that she thought she raised a tougher daughter, one that wouldn’t give up so easily.
    Kate says “Stop it,” out loud to Nana, but she says it too weakly to be heard. Nana should let Mom talk. Mom needs to talk, no matter what it is she says.
    Mom says she isn’t giving up and won’t ever give up, but she saw what she saw. She says, “I saw him, Mom. I saw Tommy. It was him. It wasn’t—it wasn’t anything else and I wasn’t dreaming and it wasn’t a breakdown or a hallucination and I wasn’t seeing things. I saw Tommy. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life, Mom. Tommy was there in my room last night.”
    Nana says, “What we’re going through, what you’re going through, it’s impossible,