You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  I think about Riley. About how guilty he felt anytime I ended up scraped or bruised after one of our adventures in the woods. “That doesn’t seem like something he would do.” Even after what happened between us, that doesn’t sound like Riley.

  “You were twelve the last time you saw him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People change.”

  I guess I should know that. “What’s the deal with Skylar and the posters by the movie theater?” I ask, partly because I want to know and partly because I don’t want to start thinking about all of the ways I’m different from how I used to be. “What’s the deal with her and Riley?”

  “Ahhh,” says Aidan, drawing out the single syllable. “Skylar did mention you saw the posters, didn’t she?” He seems to think about how to answer for a moment, then says, “The two of them hooked up at a party last March. Before Skylar was with Joey. Skylar thought it meant something. Riley didn’t. Riley’s girlfriend, Amber, definitely thought it meant something.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happens when mean girls get meaner? Amber and her friends posted stuff online about Skylar, wrote stuff on her locker, sent pictures and dirty texts to her phone, and called her house so many times her parents had to change their number. That was just in the couple of days before Riley disappeared. After that, it got really bad. They acted like she had something to do with it. They told everyone she had been stalking him. The police even searched her house. Everyone was acting like she was capable of murder. You’ve met Skylar. She cries when she steps on grasshoppers.”

  The actual circumstances might be different, but the texts and phone calls, the posting stuff online—it all sounds horribly familiar. Maybe I hadn’t originally done it for Skylar, but I’m suddenly glad I’d torn down the posters. Maybe if there had been someone to take down some of the things that had been said about me, the last few months wouldn’t have been so hard.

  “Anyway,” says Aidan, “Joey had been spending some time with Skylar before that—all of us had, I guess—but that was when we officially took her in.”

  “You make her sound like a stray.”

  “We’re all kind of strays.” The crooked grin makes a reappearance. He pulls out his phone, checks the time, and then stands. “Four minutes to midnight. I’d better get you inside.”

  I push myself to my feet and then cross the porch. When I reach the door, I wrap my hand around the knob, but pause to turn back to him. “Because you don’t want to sleep on the porch?”

  Aidan leans against the doorframe. “Because I don’t want your aunt thinking I’m a bad influence. She might not want you coming out with me again.”

  Again? I shake my head. I’m no good at this. I’ve never known how to figure out if the things boys say mean what it seems like they might.

  Aidan shifts his weight forward, and I have the sudden, panicked thought that he’s going to try to kiss me. And I can’t kiss him. I can’t kiss anyone.

  I fumble with the doorknob. My palms are sweaty and they slip against the metal, throwing me slightly off-balance. The door flies open and I stumble over the threshold.

  I turn, face scorching.

  Aidan stands on the other side of the door, looking vaguely amused. He smiles and bows slightly at the waist like he’s in some sort of movie based on a Jane Austen novel. “Good night, Miss Montgomery.”

  Too embarrassed to come up with anything resembling a reply, I practically run for the stairs.

  I swear I can hear him humming softly as I flee. I’m not certain, but it sounds like an old Velvet Underground song.

  I reach my room and close the door. I’m sweating, but I’m not sure how much of that is the June heat and how much is the thought of kissing the boy who lives down the hall and who listens to the Velvet Underground and can identify international folk duos.

  Making friends is a bad idea, and crushing on someone—anyone—is even worse. Especially when it’s someone you’ve known for less than thirty-six hours. Besides, I think as I change into a tank top and sleep shorts, even if I do like him and he does—for some strange, improbable reason—like me, nothing can happen.

  Nothing ever happens. I always make sure of that.

  I climb into bed and pull the sheet up to my chin, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t sleep. If sending me to Montgomery Falls was supposed to get me away from trouble, then it’s beginning to feel like a wasted effort.

  Eight

  “CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?” I TIGHTEN MY GRIP ON THE bottom of the stepladder as Aunt Jet struggles to change a light bulb in the upstairs hallway.

  Aidan’s door is open a crack, but I know he’s not inside. I overheard him tell Sam that he was going for a run.

  Aidan is gorgeous. He’s smart. He listens to decent music, and okay, maybe having two bands in common isn’t a lot to build on, but each time he looks at me, I have the feeling that he’s seeing me. Really seeing me. Not Lacey Chapman’s best friend or Elliot Montgomery’s daughter or any of the other labels I hide behind. Just me. Cat.

  But what do you say to a guy who maybe—just maybe—wanted to kiss you when you know you can never kiss him back?

  Even if you want to.

  And there’s a distinct possibility that I do want to—or, at least, that I would if circumstances were different. If I were different.

  But I’m not different.

  And so I’ve done the only sensible thing: I’ve spent the past few days avoiding him—which is not easy when you live in the same house.

  Jet mumbles a curse under her breath as she struggles to twist a new, high-efficiency bulb into the socket. She has a shift in a few hours, but for now she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and her long hair is held back by a blue bandanna. She looks younger than she did the day I arrived—younger than she’ll probably look when she gets home from work. Over the past couple of days, it’s been hard not to notice the fact that she looks years older after a shift; not for the first time, I wonder if maybe she’s been using her own Montgomery talents to somehow help the people she looks after. As far as I know, Jet’s abilities don’t have the same physical impact mine do, but that doesn’t mean using them is entirely without consequence.

  “Do you want me to try?”

  “No. I’ve got it.” She lets out a puff of air and adjusts her hold. With one final twist, the bulb is in.

  “Is it even safe to use those?” I ask. I’m all for combating the climate crisis, but I’m pretty sure most of the fixtures in Montgomery House are at least a hundred years old.

  “It’s fine,” she says, climbing down. “Riley helped me replace the ones downstairs last fall.”

  “Riley helped you around the house?”

  “Sometimes.”

  That surprises me. Given what happened the last time I saw Riley, it’s hard to imagine him ever setting foot inside Montgomery House again. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you think, says a small voice in the back of my head. I ignore it.

  We move the ladder to the next fixture, and then I backtrack to get the package of new bulbs as Jet climbs back up. “What was it you wanted to ask me?” she says.

  “Do you ever find it hard? Being a Montgomery and, you know . . . being around other people?”

  “I think being around others can be challenging for anyone.”

  “Right. But, like, when you were my age . . . say you wanted to touch someone. But things happened when you did. What would you do about that?” My face flushes so red that I’m kind of amazed the hallway doesn’t fill with smoke. This was a bad idea. A stupid idea.

  Aunt Jet abandons the light fixture and steps down. “Is that what happened in New York?” she asks hesitantly.

  The expression on her face looks perilously close to pity. Which does not make this conversation easier. I don’t want anyone pitying me. “This doesn’t have anything to do with New York. I was just curious.”

  Aunt Jet opens her mouth. Closes it. Frowns.

  Dad and his stupid rules,
I think. It’s impossible to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I don’t even try. “You know what, never mind.”

  “Mary Catherine . . .”

  Before she can say anything else, I’m gone.

  I’m not the first Montgomery to be different.

  Jonathan Montgomery left a tiny island with a suitcase of silver—stolen from a shipwreck, according to what Jet told me when I was little—and a new bride: Eleanor Morgan Montgomery. He built Montgomery House for her. He built it before Riverside Avenue had a name. Before the town was anything more than a glorified logging camp on unceded Wolastoqiyik territory. Some people say Montgomery Falls exists only because Eleanor Morgan Montgomery wanted to live in a town and Jonathan Montgomery wanted to make her happy.

  Strange things are said about Morgan women from Mercy Island, and strange things were said about Eleanor. While her husband had brought a suitcase full of silver, she had brought a deck of cards wrapped in silk and tied with a blue ribbon. She used the cards to tell the future and see into the past—at least that’s how the story goes.

  For all Eleanor’s supposed ability to see the future, though, she hadn’t seen the influenza outbreak that would take two of her children or the fire that would burn Montgomery House to the ground with her inside a year later. She’s buried in the old cemetery on the edge of town. Local kids dare each other to walk over her grave at midnight.

  The second Montgomery House—this Montgomery House—wasn’t built until a decade later when Jonathan and Eleanor’s oldest son returned to Montgomery Falls to establish a textile mill. He had three children: a boy who was stillborn and twin daughters who claimed to be able to speak with the dead, but only on alternating days.

  Ask my father about any of this and a pained expression will cross his face. According to Dad, there were no suitcases filled with silver or cards tied with ribbon. There were no psychics and no one ever talked to the dead.

  You would think someone who makes his living conjuring worlds out of thin air would have a little more imagination—especially since his own mother had a way of knowing things she didn’t have any earthly right to know and his twin sister can calm people with the touch of her skin. But for Dad, all of that stuff is just superstitious nonsense. One of the reasons people in town treated him differently.

  Still, even though he thinks it’s all nonsense, you would think he might have noticed what started happening to me a few months before my twelfth birthday. You would think he would have noticed when I stopped hugging people or when I started wearing long sleeves no matter how hot it got outside. When I started flinching whenever anyone got too close.

  Things like that, after all, can be signs of all kinds of different trouble.

  Me? I thought I was losing my mind.

  Imagine you’re eleven years old. You know there’s something wrong with you. Really, really wrong. You know you’re seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. But it’s not all the time. It only happens when you touch someone else. Only ever as long as you touch someone else.

  You’re not sure what’s happening. You don’t know what to do. You think maybe you should tell someone, but you don’t know how to explain what’s going on.

  You stop touching people—just to be safe. You stay away from your friends until they’re not really your friends anymore. You find excuses to skip school. Maybe you start praying, even though you’ve never really prayed before.

  It was Aunt Jet who figured out what was happening. She noticed how withdrawn I was when Dad and I arrived that summer. How quiet and scared.

  “Moodiness”—that’s what Dad told her when she asked him about it. “Typical preteen stuff.”

  Unlike Dad, Aunt Jet has never been in denial about what can happen when you’re a Montgomery. Unlike Dad, she paid attention and asked the right questions. She tried to help me—at least until Dad found out and accused her of putting foolish, dangerous ideas in my head. “Delusional”—that’s what Dad called her, even though she was one of only two people who had paid enough attention that summer to know that I needed help.

  Riley was the other. Riley, who didn’t have any sort of second sight but who still seemed to see everything.

  The memory of his voice drifts through my head. I tell it to go away, but it’s stubborn.

  What if we start recording it when it happens? We know you see things when people touch you, but we don’t know what or why. If we start writing it down, we could find a pattern. We could crack it like a code.

  I don’t want to crack it, Riley.

  It’ll be better if we figure it out. I promise.

  “Mary Catherine?”

  I jump. After retreating to the study, I’d curled up in one of the chairs with a book, but I’ve been staring at the same page for the past hour.

  Aunt Jet stands in the doorway. She’s dressed for work: burgundy scrubs, sturdy white shoes, hair pulled back in a neat bun.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “About earlier.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it’s really not. Jet is the only person I know who might have some idea of what it’s like to be me, but because she’s too interested in reestablishing peace with my father, I can’t talk to her about it.

  Sometimes I think I might hate my father. Just a little bit.

  “I was wondering,” she says hesitantly, “if you could do me a favor.” She crosses the room and hands me a white envelope with CONFIDENTIAL stamped across the front in angry red letters. “Would you mind running this next door? The mailman delivered it here by mistake. I’d take it over, but I have to be at work in fifteen minutes and I don’t think it should wait until tomorrow. It looks important.”

  I glance down at the envelope. It’s addressed to Riley’s mother.

  I haven’t set foot in Riley’s house since I was twelve, and given what happened with Noah a few days ago, I’m not exactly keen on changing that. “I don’t think a day will make a difference,” I say, trying to hand the envelope back.

  Jet doesn’t take it. “It might be nice for Noah to see a friendly face. It might be good for the two of you to get reacquainted.”

  “Trust me, Noah Fraser does not want to see me.” Or possibly anyone, I add silently.

  Aunt Jet fixes me with a heavy, disappointed look. “He’s had a hard time, Mary Catherine. The whole family has.”

  My aunt may be a pushover, but she is surprisingly good at laying on the guilt.

  Reluctantly, I stand and set my book on the edge of the chair. According to Aidan, Noah spends most of his time skulking around town and hanging out at dive bars. He’s probably not even home.

  Aunt Jet nods approvingly. “Don’t just leave it in the mailbox,” she says as I follow her outside.

  Right. Of course. That would be too easy.

  I wait until she climbs into the Buick and drives away, then I cut across the lawn, heading for the tall hedge that separates the Montgomery and Fraser properties. The shortcut Riley and I had used all that summer—a narrow space created by a weird bend in the trunks and helped along by hundreds of crossings—is still here, though it’s a tighter squeeze than it used to be.

  I pluck a twig from my hair as I step out the other side and into grass so high that it hits me midcalf. All of the flower beds are filled with the shriveled remains of dead tiger lilies and hungry weeds. The yard was like this when they first moved in. It was wild and neglected—until Riley’s mother brought in a team of landscapers who left it looking neat and trim and just a little bit fake.

  As I climb the front steps, I think about ignoring Aunt Jet’s instructions and shoving the envelope into the mailbox, but having committed myself, I might as well see things through thoroughly.

  I reach out and ring the bell. No one answers. I wait and try again. Just as I’m thinking I’ll have to leave the envelope in the mailbox after all, the door opens a crack.

  Riley’s mother stares out at me through a four-inch gap.

  I swallow. “Hi, Mrs. Fraser. My aunt
asked me to bring this over.” I lift the envelope a little, holding it out in front of me. “It got delivered to us by mistake.”

  The one sky-blue eye I can see watches me unblinkingly.

  I shift my weight from one foot to the other. Thinking maybe she just doesn’t recognize me, I say, “I’m here visiting Jet for the summer. I’m Mary Catherine. Her niece? Elliot’s daughter?”

  She watches me for a moment more, then opens the door fully before heading down the hall.

  Unsure of what to do, I step over the threshold and follow her toward the back of the house. Outside, it’s early evening, the sun still bright and full, but inside, all of the curtains have been drawn. The Frasers have a housekeeper—or at least they used to—but even in the dim light, a layer of dust is visible on the half-moon tables that dot the hallway like stepping stones. There are pictures on the tables, but each frame has been turned facedown. I lift one of the pictures as Mrs. Fraser disappears through the kitchen door at the end of the hall. Riley stares up at me. Younger than he was when they moved in. Maybe only seven or eight. There’s a gap in his smile where one of his front teeth should be. Gingerly, I set him back down, just the way he was, and then head for the kitchen.

  I remember the kitchen, like almost everything else in the Fraser house, being immaculate. Now the island in the center of the room is covered in take-out containers and the dishwasher door hangs open. Mrs. Fraser sits at the table as a kettle on the stove begins to screech. She draws her thin, pale pink robe tightly around herself.

  Even like this—no makeup, not dressed, hair loose and a little wild, and acting like one of the living dead—she is startlingly beautiful. “Too beautiful for her husband”—that’s what people in town used to say. “Too weak to stand up to his crap”—I remember Noah muttering that once, when he didn’t know his brother and I were listening.

  “Mrs. Fraser?”

  She blinks, slowly, and seems to realize I’m here for the first time. “Hello, Mary Catherine.”

  “Hi.” I fold the envelope and shove it into my back pocket. I don’t know what it contains, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t something Riley’s mom can deal with. Not today, anyway.