You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  If Dad hadn’t confiscated my phone, I could call Jet, but my phone—at least what’s left of it—along with my laptop, is currently locked in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in his study. Right where they’ve been for the past two weeks.

  Supposedly, this is not a punishment.

  Supposedly, this is for my own good.

  Supposedly, ignorance is bliss and a little space will be healthy. That’s what my father claimed the night I’d gotten upset enough to throw my iPhone across the room—something that would have gone completely unnoticed if my aim had been just a little bit better. Pro tip: If you’re going to throw an iPhone, make sure you don’t accidentally throw it at your closed bedroom window. And if you are stupid enough to throw it at your closed bedroom window, don’t tell your father the reason.

  A woman with a too-tight perm and thick glasses appears in the station doorway. “You waiting for someone, sweetheart?”

  “My aunt.”

  “Have you tried calling her?”

  I shrug. “Can’t find my phone.”

  “Do you want to call her? There’s a pay phone inside, but you can use the phone in the office.” As she speaks, I notice a missing poster taped next to the door—identical to the one I had seen at the border.

  My stomach twists. Sure, a poster at the border could easily be forgotten, but if Riley had been found, wouldn’t they have taken down the posters around town?

  I open my mouth to ask, but the woman is summoned back inside before I get the chance.

  Ten minutes later—ten long minutes of trying not to stare at the poster, of trying not to think of what it might mean while reminding myself that Riley Fraser isn’t someone I’m supposed to care about—I have to accept that Aunt Jet isn’t coming.

  I could take the woman up on her offer of the phone, but it’s not like my bags are that heavy, and the house isn’t all that far.

  I adjust my backpack and my grip on my duffel bag and start walking.

  It’s been five years since my last visit to Montgomery Falls, and as I make my way through the small downtown core, I try to catalog the differences between present and past. There are more empty storefronts than I remember, but the art store is still here, as are the town’s two bookstores—one Catholic and one not. The record store is dark and has a For Rent sign in its window. That hurts: the record store was one of the few things I was actually looking forward to. Lacey claims I’m a nostalgia nerd, and maybe she’s right because I love old things. Especially if they’re music related. Bands, posters, records—my room is filled with flea market and thrift store finds. Once, Lacey caught me smelling one of her father’s albums—he has a seriously impressive collection—and called me a “vinyl sniffer,” like it was something perverse.

  I guess there won’t be any vinyl sniffing in my near future. It’s like I’ve literally gone to the place where music died.

  At least the movie theater is still open—though it has just two screens. One is playing a horror flick, the other a romantic comedy. A girl sits in the glass booth at the front of the building, chin resting in her hands.

  My steps falter in front of another missing poster. Rain and wind have torn the paper and left Riley’s face smudged, but it’s a word scrawled in red marker that makes me stop.

  Cocksucker.

  The letter s snakes around a rough drawing of something that is clearly supposed to be a part of the male anatomy.

  I spot another poster, yards off. Even at a distance, I can make out strokes of red.

  Something takes hold, and before I completely realize what I’m doing, I reach out and yank the first poster down. Maybe it’s lingering childhood loyalty—a few last dregs that haven’t, for some inexplicable reason, completely faded. Maybe it’s just that I hate the way the word is scrawled: ugly red letters that make it clear that whoever wrote it was stupid enough to think it was something bad. Maybe it’s simply that I’ve had so many insults of every kind thrown my way over the past few months. Whatever the reason, I crumple up the poster and shove it into my bag.

  When I glance up, the girl in the ticket booth is staring at me.

  I walk away, cheeks burning.

  I know I don’t owe Riley Fraser anything—not after the last things he said to me—but I still rip down the other poster.

  “Wait!”

  I keep walking.

  “Hey!” A hand falls on my shoulder, forcing me to turn.

  I’m short, but the girl from the theater is pint-sized. Up close, she looks like she stepped out of some gothy comic book. Her long dark hair is pulled into two pigtails, black liner sweeps over her eyelids in wings, and a thin velvet ribbon has been looped around her neck and tied into a sloppy bow. Her pink uniform is adorned with buttons that look innocuous on first glance but say things like M Is for Monster or have pictures of Bela Lugosi or creepy girls climbing out of wells.

  Loser, says a voice in the back of my head—a voice that sounds a lot like Lacey. Or, at least, the way Lacey has started to sound over the past year.

  Having successfully stopped me, the girl seems weirdly at a loss for words. She rocks back on her heels and swallows before finally saying, “They’ll just do it again. The poster in your bag? The one in your hand? More will go up, and someone else will come along and write on them.”

  More will go up.

  Even though I was already sure that Riley must still be missing, I find myself gripping the crumpled poster a little more tightly. “They?”

  The girl stares at me, blankly.

  “You said ‘They’ll just do it again.’ Who? Who’s they?” I guess those dregs of loyalty really do exist because there’s a harsh edge to my voice that I can’t otherwise explain.

  “Just . . . people. People from school.”

  “So they what? Go around trashing someone who’s missing and everyone’s fine with that?”

  “Someone who’s . . . ?” Confusion fills her eyes and then shifts to something else as a blush creeps across her cheeks. “You thought they were saying Riley was . . . that he . . .” She shakes her head. “They write on the posters around the movie theater because I work there. So that I’ll see them. They mean the word for me.”

  She stands in front of me, small and dark, and as her blush bleeds away, she raises her chin a tiny fraction of an inch.

  There’s something in that tiny fraction that I almost envy. She doesn’t apologize for the word or what other people say. She stands there, chin raised, like it doesn’t matter what they—or I—think.

  And it doesn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t.

  Whether it’s true or not, that word—and what it represents—shouldn’t be an insult.

  A deep male shout comes from the direction of the theater, breaking the moment. “Skylar—there are customers!”

  When she doesn’t immediately move, the voice booms out, again. “Skylar! Customers!”

  She turns and runs, pigtails bouncing, and I’m left alone, holding a ruined poster.

  Three

  AUNT JET CATCHES UP WITH ME A FEW STREETS LATER. BY that time, I’ve counted eleven other posters, none of them defaced. Some have ribbons or homemade cards pinned beneath them. One sits above a small stuffed lion—the local high school’s mascot. I’m standing there, staring at that silly lion, when Aunt Jet pulls her whale of a car up to the curb.

  She leans across the passenger seat and pushes open the door. “I’m so sorry, Mary Catherine,” she says. “I told them I had to leave at five, but they’re so short-staffed, and I just couldn’t . . .” She cuts herself off and shakes her head as she looks at me, eyes wide. “Wow. You look so much older. So grown up.”

  Between social media and the occasional video chat on birthdays and holidays, my appearance really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, but maybe there are some things that pictures and video can’t capture, because as I stand there on the curb, I can’t help but notice how much older Aunt Jet looks herself. She and Dad are twins—born thirteen minutes and
three seconds apart—but you’d never guess it. Dad looks young for his age. In fact, few people realize he’s old enough to be my father. Aunt Jet, on the other hand, has streaks of gray in her long red hair, and there are faint lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. Lines I don’t remember seeing when I last visited. She’s still beautiful, though. If possible, the lines and hints of gray actually make her more so.

  I don’t make any move to get into the car, and Jet’s gaze slides to the poster behind me. Her thin shoulders rise and then fall as she lets out a deep breath. “I was going to tell you.”

  “When?”

  A woman with a stroller waves to my aunt as she walks past. As her gaze shifts to me, it fills with barely suppressed curiosity.

  I debate walking away, but I don’t exactly love the idea of people in town talking about my poor aunt and her difficult American niece. I’ve had enough people talking about me over the past few months to last a lifetime.

  With a sigh, I toss my bags into the back of the Buick and then climb into the passenger seat.

  Despite the heat, my aunt is wearing a sweater over a pair of burgundy-colored scrubs: her unofficial uniform as a personal care assistant at one of the local nursing homes. It’s broiling inside the car, and I can feel my own clothes sticking to me in seconds, but she doesn’t put the air-conditioning on. Given how old the car is, I’m not sure the air-conditioning even works.

  I stare at her expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  “Your father and I talked about it,” she says as she signals and pulls away from the curb. “We thought it would be better to wait and see what happened before telling you.”

  “You mean he thought.” It really shouldn’t surprise me. My father doesn’t like things that are unexpected or unpleasant. Things that are unexpected or unpleasant tend to distract him from his work. Which is, I suspect, one of the reasons I’ve been sent here for the summer.

  Aunt Jet flexes her hands around the steering wheel. She’s always hated confrontations. Big ones, little ones, ones that exist only in her head—they all set her on edge. Silence fills the car, heavy and awkward. “It wasn’t just your father,” she says finally. “There are things he’d rather I not talk to you about, but holding off on telling you about Riley was a decision we made months ago, together.”

  “Okay, but you’ve known I was coming for the past two weeks. Didn’t you think I’d see the posters when I got here?”

  Her cheeks flush. “We were wrong—I was wrong—and I’m sorry.”

  “What other things doesn’t Dad want you talking to me about?” I ask as the other part of what she said sinks in.

  The look Aunt Jet shoots me makes it clear she thinks I should already know the answer to that. And I do, actually. I was just curious about what she would say. “No talking about the family legacy,” I say, imitating the crisp, slightly fake-sounding voice my father uses in interviews. “No filling my daughter’s head with nonsense about old houses and strange gifts.”

  Aunt Jet shoots me a small, tight smile. “Something like that.”

  So, basically, the same stuff my dad has been fighting with Aunt Jet about since I was twelve.

  “The posters say Riley’s been missing since March.” A little of the anger creeps back into my voice; I can’t help it.

  Aunt Jet loosens her grip on the wheel and then reaches out to touch my hand. I pull away before she can make contact. I want to stay angry—I have a right to be angry—and people have a very hard time staying angry when my aunt touches them.

  Jet places her hand back on the wheel. “They think he got lost in the woods outside of town. He went walking there a lot, apparently. There was a late snowstorm the day he went missing. It made searching hard.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” I shake my head, recalling how fascinated Riley had been with the forest around Montgomery Falls the summer we spent together, how much time he had spent trying to map them. “Riley knew those woods. Really well.”

  “You’ve never been out there in the winter,” says Aunt Jet, not ungently. “Things look different. It gets dark early and stays dark until late, and the snow plays tricks on people. Even without getting caught in a storm, it would have been easy to get disoriented. And there aren’t that many cell towers outside of town. You’d be surprised how spotty coverage gets.”

  I guess it’s a fair point. Montgomery Falls really is a tiny speck in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. Even when Riley used to drag me out on hikes, we’d lose service if we ventured too near the logging roads or went the wrong way.

  And once you’re past the logging roads, well, then it’s just open wilderness for hundreds of miles.

  “Noah’s been back since it happened,” Aunt Jet says.

  Noah. Riley’s big brother. He’s two years older, so I guess that means he was away at college. Probably the Canadian equivalent of an Ivy League school given how smart he’s always been.

  Jet launches into awkward small talk. I don’t exactly tune her out on purpose, but my thoughts keep distracting me. All I can manage are monosyllabic responses, and after a few minutes, I can’t even keep those up.

  It wasn’t just topography Riley was obsessed with that summer. He was fascinated by the things people lost among the trees. Discarded soda bottles. Old tires. Pennies and pocketknives. Broken axes and rusting bits of equipment near the logging roads. He almost never touched the things we found; he just recorded them in a small, black notebook.

  The Book of Lost Things—that’s what I called it. His parents had another name for it. He had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder a few months before moving to Montgomery Falls, and they worried the time he spent in the woods was unhealthy, that it was tied to his OCD.

  Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  I don’t know. I don’t know if Riley knew.

  They fought about it sometimes, he and his parents. They fought about the amount of time we spent out there. Hours and days and weeks—if you added it all up. Lost time spent exploring lost paths and examining lost objects.

  How could someone who had been so fascinated with lost things step into the woods and become lost himself?

  It takes Aunt Jet pointing out a new sign—the words “Montgomery House: Vacancy” set in neat black letters against an off-white background—to pull me out of my thoughts. If she hadn’t spoken, I might not have realized that we had turned off the street. I might not even have realized we were driving up the long crescent that leads to the house she and Dad grew up in.

  “The historical society tried to make me take it down,” she says, speaking of the sign, “but I did a head count of all the plastic flamingos in the neighborhood. And I asked one of the boys in the house to take photographs of the new basketball hoop the president of the society attached to the carriage house at the end of his driveway.”

  Riverside Avenue is a street that’s been undergoing an identity war for decades. Back when the town was at the center of a small industrial boom, the rich built their homes here, but as industries folded and fortunes dried up, the houses sat empty. At one end of the street stand rambling Victorians that have been restored to their former glory by new owners, and at the other are houses that have been drawn and quartered into apartments, their manicured lawns paved over and their iron gates taken off the hinges. Spanning the gulf between the two factions are places like Aunt Jet’s.

  A year ago, Jet renovated and started renting out rooms to supplement what she makes at the nursing home. She’s hardly alone. The university is one of the few industries in town that’s still booming, and people have turned making money off of students into an art form. People say that half the mortgages in town are paid for by undergrads renting rooms in basements or attics. Without the university and the military base forty minutes away, Montgomery Falls would probably be a ghost town.

  If Jet had been renovating almost any other building, no one would have cared. But it was Montgomery House. Home of the found
ing family. One of the oldest structures in town. The historical society had not been happy with the changes my aunt had made; my father had been even less so.

  Dad and Aunt Jet both left Montgomery Falls right after high school, but when their mother—my grandmother—got sick, Jet came back. She gave up her studies, a fiancé, and her whole life so that she could take care of things here. She was twenty-one.

  My grandmother hung on for fourteen years. More than long enough for Jet’s old life to have passed her by while my dad finished school, met my mother, and started his career. In a way, Jet giving up those fourteen years made it possible for my father to have the life he wanted, away from the town he had always been desperate to escape.

  That much guilt and resentment between them makes things . . . complicated.

  In the end, all Jet had was an old house and a fickle-tempered black cat named Brisby. Five years ago, Dad tried to get her to sell Montgomery House. He said it wasn’t healthy, the way she clung to it. He said it was foolish not to try to get as much as they could while the waterfront property was still worth something. He was thinking of the both of them, he claimed. He wasn’t being selfish. He was thinking about her.

  He had been charming. He had been persuasive.

  His pleas had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he—or, I guess, we—were having money problems. Nothing at all.

  Aunt Jet refused.

  Montgomery House is one of the two reasons my aunt and father have barely spoken in the past five years. I’m the other.

  “Most of the university students have left for the summer, so it’s quiet,” says Jet as she parks in two deep ruts in the lawn. “We only have three guests until September. You’ll barely notice anyone is here, and hardly anything’s changed.”

  Living with three complete strangers doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you barely notice, but I don’t say so as I slide out of the car and grab my bags.

  Aunt Jet heads straight for the porch, but I stay where I am for a moment, staring up at the house.