You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  Dressing quickly, I pull on jeans and an old Go-Go’s concert T-shirt—one that’s a little too tight but that, according to Lacey, makes my chest look fabulous. I tell myself that I’m not choosing the shirt just to see if the boy down the hall knows anything about classic girl bands or because it emphasizes certain parts of my body. That would be ridiculous.

  I give the shirt a small tug, making sure it’s not clinging too much, then I shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops and head downstairs.

  The nursing student—I think her name is Marie—looks up from a textbook as I step into the kitchen. “Summer classes,” she says. Her accent is different than Jet’s. The words are longer and softer. Acadian, I think. “Your aunt says you are still in high school?”

  I nod.

  “Lucky.”

  The girl at the table can’t be more than a few years older than I am—she has to remember what high school is actually like—but I just shrug noncommittally and ask if she’s seen Jet.

  “Basement,” says Sam, the divorcé, as he wanders in to grab something from the fridge.

  I head for the small staircase tucked between the refrigerator and the pantry. On the way down, I rehearse what I plan to say to Jet. Things like how she could have—should have—told me the truth even if Dad didn’t have the guts. About how, maybe, I wouldn’t have been so resistant to the thought of coming back if I had felt like I’d had any choice in the matter and if they had just been honest with me from the start.

  No matter how big of a mess I had caused back home, I still deserved to have a say.

  “Aunt Jet?” My voice comes out louder than I intend it to; it bounces off the walls of the cavernous basement and probably startles the mice that nest down here no matter how many traps get set.

  “Back here.”

  Bare bulbs hang from the ceiling at regular intervals, but they don’t do much to dispel the shadows. I work my way through a maze of old furniture, boxes tied with blue twine, and steamer trunks. My aunt used to raid those trunks with me when I was little, looking for costumes and treasure.

  Jet looks up as I approach. Her hair is pulled back in a loose bun, and she’s wearing a pair of paint-splattered overalls. A roll of masking tape circles her wrist like a bracelet, and there’s a black marker poking out from her pocket.

  She’s managed to clear a wide patch of floor by pushing furniture and boxes off to the side. Jonathan Montgomery—the man who founded a town and named it after himself—watches disapprovingly from a nearby oil painting, his thick, dark brows pulled down into a point. The ghosts of Montgomery House aren’t crazy about being disturbed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I thought it might be good to clear things out a bit. We could use the extra space.” Aunt Jet barely glances at me as she tries to drag the world’s biggest and ugliest antique desk off to the side. After a minute of trying to make it budge, she gives up.

  I step forward and peer at the desk. A piece of masking tape on the corner reads SELL in big, black letters. In fact, almost everything around me has a strip of tape attached—all reading SELL, DONATE, KEEP, or TRASH. It’s like two hundred years of family history have been reduced to those four words.

  “You’re selling stuff?”

  She passes the back of her hand over her forehead, wiping away a bit of sweat. “Mr. Jacobs agreed to come over and look at a few pieces. He runs the antique store downtown.”

  I mentally work out the ratio of sell to keep. The sell pile is winning. By a significant margin. “This isn’t just a few pieces.”

  She still doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “You should head back upstairs. Have you eaten? I thought it would be best to let you sleep . . . you must have been tired . . . Aidan took the car to run an errand for me, but he should be back soon. If there’s something you’d like that we don’t have, we can make a trip to the grocery store. Or I could run out on my own, if you’d rather stay here.”

  There’s a nervous, apologetic note to her voice, as though not having the right kind of cereal is some kind of affront. “I don’t need you to go to the store. Aunt Jet—what’s going on?”

  With a sigh, she finally meets my gaze. “I’m thinking of selling the house.”

  “What? How can you sell Montgomery House? Where would you go?”

  The words come out fast and loud, and Jet immediately glances toward the ceiling as though worried someone upstairs might have overheard. Voice notably softer than mine, she says, “I thought maybe I’d rent an apartment nearby. Someplace where I could still be close to the river. I don’t really know where else I could go.”

  I try to picture my aunt and Brisby in a small one-bedroom a stone’s throw from the house she grew up in. “But Montgomery House is your home. It’s the family home.” Sure, it doesn’t belong to me in the way it belongs to her or even Dad, but it’s always felt at least a little bit mine. I may have spent years telling myself I never wanted to come back here, but I always wanted there to be a here that I could come back to.

  “Between maintenance costs and the property taxes . . . there’s just not enough money to keep things going.”

  “What about the tenants? Aren’t you getting money from them?”

  “Not enough. The roof is leaking, the wiring is ancient, the whole heating system needs to be overhauled. These big old houses need a lot of attention. They need resources I just don’t have. Your father tried to warn me.” She bites her lip and twists the circle of masking tape around her wrist. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him . . .”

  “That you’re clearing out the basement?”

  Jet sighs and nods. “I’m sorry—I know it’s putting you in an awful position.” She really does look sorry. She looks downright miserable.

  And, just like that, there’s no way I can confront her over the fact that she and Dad waited all those weeks to tell me their plans—not while she’s standing in the middle of all this stuff, trying to figure out what can be off-loaded for cash. In an attempt to set my feelings aside, at least for a little while, I ask, “What can I do to help?”

  Relief flashes across her face. Aunt Jet turns back to the desk. “Maybe if we both lift and pull?”

  I go to her side and curl my hands around the edge of the wood. The thing really is a monster. In addition to being bigger than any desk has a right to be, the clawed legs twist and turn until they rise and form four scowling faces—one face for each corner. I can’t imagine who on earth would want to buy it. It looks like the kind of desk you’d find in the home of the world’s wealthiest, antique-loving serial killer.

  “Where did this thing come from?”

  “It belonged to Sarah Montgomery. Your great-great-aunt. She had it commissioned in New York and shipped here. She used to sit at this desk and—” Jet abruptly cuts herself off.

  “And?”

  She shakes her head. “I promised your father.”

  Right. No filling my head with nonsense. “I wouldn’t actually tell him if you said anything. It’s not like he would ever know.”

  A slight blush darkens her cheeks. “I would know.”

  “So?”

  She ignores the question and tightens her grip on the desk. I’m not sure what else I was expecting: with very few exceptions, Jet does what other people want.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  Suppressing a frustrated sigh, I lift my corner, managing to get it at least a few inches off the ground.

  “Pull!”

  The two farthest legs screech against the floor and then make a sharp, cracking sound.

  “Stop!” Jet begins to lower her corner, but as she does, her hand slips and brushes mine—

  A battered cardboard box. My name scrawled in black. My aunt’s voice. “I can’t do this . . .”

  Jet quickly pulls away from my touch, and the world comes rushing back. We both lose our grip on the desk, and even though we had managed to lift it only a few inches, it lands with a loud thunk and the sound of breaking glass.r />
  Aunt Jet closes her eyes and pulls in a deep breath through her nose. Her expression is one of saintlike patience, but the lines at the corners of her mouth deepen as she says, “Guess I should have checked the drawers before we tried to move it.” She shoots me a small, wan smile that is not at all convincing. “It’s not your fault.”

  I wait for her to ask me what I saw, but she doesn’t. She would have, before, I think. I guess asking now would violate my father’s rules.

  The phone upstairs rings.

  “I’ll be right back.” Jet heads for the stairs but pauses to turn when she’s halfway there. “I haven’t told the boarders that I’m thinking of selling. I don’t want to upset them before we know if we can even find a buyer. I need the money they bring in.”

  “I won’t say anything.”

  “Thank you, Mary Catherine.”

  A faint headache blossoms along the edge of my skull as Jet slips from sight. Thankfully, the contact between us had been so brief that the resulting pain isn’t that bad. The meaning of what I saw seems pretty straightforward. Jet may have agreed to take me for the summer, but she’s not happy about it. With that realization, the anger is back. Anger and frustration and, maybe, a little bit of hurt. If she had put her foot down—if she had just stood up to Dad—I’d be back in New York. I wouldn’t be her problem. A small voice in the back of my head asks if that’s what I really want. I ignore it.

  Needing a distraction, I begin emptying out the desk. The top drawer is filled with old travel guides. Paris, London, Rome. I open a book with a picture of Tokyo Tower on the cover. There are notations on every page. Little exclamation marks and tiny plans in Aunt Jet’s small, elegant script. A picture falls out from between the pages and lands at my feet. I pick it up. It’s Aunt Jet, but younger. My age, even. Her hair is cut short and she’s smiling widely. A tall, thin boy stands next to her, close but not quite touching. I’ve never seen the boy, and I’ve never seen Aunt Jet smile like that.

  The other travel books are all similarly full of plans.

  As far as I know, though, my aunt has never left North America.

  I set the stack of books on top of an old steamer trunk that’s been tagged for the keep pile and then turn back to the desk.

  The second drawer is filled with leather-bound journals and ledgers, all resting under an old curved knife in a leather sheath. The knife looks like something a big-game hunter would have carried on his belt while on safari; I have a dim memory of it being on display somewhere—the study, probably—when I was a kid. I lay it on the corner of the desk and turn my attention to the journals. The first few are blank—like someone ordered a stack of journals in bulk a hundred years ago and then forgot about them. I set them aside, next to the knife, and then flip through a journal that’s filled with diagrams and sketches of the old textile mill. The mill my family had owned and operated for decades.

  There are notations about equipment and floor plans and even maps of the tunnels that exist underneath the main structure and the surrounding outbuildings—the ones my great-grandfather built when he had delusions of setting up a smuggling empire and wanted to move things around the grounds without being seen. According to family lore, he spent more money on the tunnels than he ever made on crime. Thirteen men had died in those tunnels in 1944 after a fire broke out in the mill. Their lungs filled with smoke and their fingertips turned raw and bloody as they tried to claw through the tunnel walls.

  People in town like to say that the fire was the beginning of everything that went wrong for the Montgomerys, but Dad says things started falling apart long before that, that the money had been running out for more than a generation—hence the attempt to turn to crime—and that the mill would have closed in another year or two anyway.

  But blaming the fall of the town’s founding—and formerly richest—family on a tragic fire and thirteen dead men makes for a better story.

  The Montgomerys hadn’t exactly been beloved before that, but the fire made us downright hated. And people in small towns tend to hold on to their hate for a long, long time. Dad was born more than three decades after the fire, but he said he could still feel that hate every day as he sat in classes with kids whose grandfathers and great-uncles had died in the tunnels.

  The same is true of Aunt Jet, I guess, though she seems to have made peace with it better than Dad has. I guess that probably went along with staying in Montgomery Falls.

  I start to slide the journal back where I found it, but as I do, I notice a smaller book wedged against the side of the drawer. I pull it free and then haul in a sharp breath as I recognize the torn Marvel sticker on the cover.

  Riley’s book.

  The Book of Lost Things.

  A fragment of a memory fills my head.

  Riley reaching out to touch me and then thinking better of it. Crouching down in front of me instead, that book in his hand. Waiting for me to look up at him. Making me look up at him. “You’re amazing, Cat. You’re like one of the X-Men. Like Professor X.”

  I trace the sticker with my fingertip.

  How on earth had his book ended up down here?

  Swallowing roughly, I flip to a random page, to a list of lost items, each accompanied by a description, a location, and the date we came across it. Some of them I can remember clearly—the engine from an old van, a broken hacksaw, a doll with one blue eye missing—but others are so mundane they left no impression: Doritos bag, striped sock, broken pen.

  I turn the pages until I reach an entry that reads: Saint Anthony medal. Mill. August 12. The day he and I and Noah slipped through the fence at the mill. The day everything began to change.

  It’s the last item on the list. Had Riley started a new journal after that day, or had August twelfth and the week that followed marked the end of his obsession with lost things?

  I flip to the end of the book, to the other list Riley had kept that summer—a record of each time I had lost my grip on reality. It’s not there. The pages have been torn out, leaving only jagged edges behind.

  Like I had never existed.

  Five

  I SPEND THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON TRYING NOT TO THINK about that small black book and the entry for that long-ago August day—with limited success. Without a laptop or phone, I eventually turn to the TV in the common room for a distraction, but Marie and Sam are binge-watching some sort of weird Canadian costume drama. Sam keeps chuckling at the wrong moments, like some strange, delayed laugh track.

  I only last two episodes before I give up and head to the study to tell Aunt Jet I’m going out for a walk.

  “It’s only your first full day in town,” she says, frowning nervously at me from her position in one of the huge, wingback armchairs. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Montgomery Falls isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s just that I promised your father I would take care of you.” Brisby slips into the room, headbutts Jet’s leg, and then mewls until she closes her book and scratches him under his chin. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Mary Catherine; it’s just that I don’t want it to be another five years before you’re allowed to visit again.”

  The study is one of my favorite spots in Montgomery House, but as I envision spending my time in Canada negotiating every outing, it feels like its book-lined walls are closing in. This one moment could set the tone for the next few weeks.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Jet says a little more firmly, a little more decisively.

  I quickly run through arguments and counterarguments in my head. Assurances about being home before it gets late. Promises to stick to the good parts of town and not talk to strangers. But one look at the way Aunt Jet is staring at me—her face sharp and owlish, her thin shoulders set in a straight line—and I suspect not a single assurance or promise will work.

  Because she dislikes confrontation, it’s easy to assume my aunt is a pushover. And she is—sometimes. But she
stood up to Dad when he first wanted her to sell the house. And she spends each week taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves anymore. That takes strength.

  And the look she’s giving me right now is not that of someone who’s going to cave.

  Footsteps sound on the stairs. Inspiration strikes as I glance over my shoulder in time to see Aidan heading down the front hall. “I’m going out with Aidan and some of his friends,” I say quickly. “They’re watching a movie. Aidan asked me to go.”

  Aunt Jet sets her book aside. “Aidan?” She waits for him to appear in the doorway and then says, “You asked Mary Catherine to the movies?”

  The smallest flicker of surprise flashes across his face, there and gone so fast that Aunt Jet doesn’t catch it. Surprise and something else—something that might be amusement. “A few friends and I are hanging out and watching movies over at Chase Walker’s house,” he says. “Chase’s dad is the principal of the elementary school. You probably know his mother—she volunteers at a bunch of places around town. I thought it might be nice for Cat—Mary Catherine, I mean—to meet some people. We get together every week. Mr. and Mrs. Walker order pizza for us and let us hang out in the rec room as long as we don’t make too much noise.”

  He’s good. Really good. It’s hard to imagine I can get into much trouble at the home of the local principal and the official town do-gooder. Aidan even managed to imply there will be parents present without Aunt Jet having to ask. The only other person I know who’s that good at spinning things is Lacey.

  Still, Aunt Jet hesitates.

  “You said you trusted me,” I say. A tiny little push.

  She doesn’t look entirely happy or convinced, but she picks up her book and finds her place. “Be home before it gets too late, please. Remember the house rules.”

  Once Aidan and I are safely outside with the door closed behind us, I remark, “That is an impressive talent for bullshitting.”

  A faux-wounded look crosses his face. “Nothing I said was an untruth.”