You Were Never Here

by Kathleen Peacock

  The kettle on the stove continues to wail. As I cross the room to turn off the burner, I realize all four are on. It’s lucky she hasn’t burned down the house. I switch them off and then look for a clean mug and a tea bag. Not finding either, I settle for pouring her a glass of water from the tap.

  I set the glass in front of her. There’s a small, white paper bag on the table—one that looks identical to the bag I saw Noah carrying the other day.

  Mrs. Fraser wraps her fingers around the glass, but doesn’t drink.

  “Is Noah home? Or the housekeeper?”

  “Ruth doesn’t come anymore,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “Have you come to play with Riley?”

  Before I can answer, before I realize what she’s about to do, she sets the glass on the edge of the table and reaches for my hand.

  I have a single moment of clarity—a moment when I try to pull away as her nails dig into my skin—and then a roaring sound overwhelms me, filling my ears and my head as I’m thrown back.

  The kitchen ceiling becomes a slate-gray sky as a gaping hole, six feet deep, opens up in the floor below me.

  Dirt pours into my mouth as I try to cry out. It floods my throat and nose and slips into the space between my eyelids and my eyes. I can’t breathe. I can’t see. I can’t—

  Suddenly, air comes rushing in, and the kitchen slams back into place.

  I gasp as tears blur my vision and roll down my cheeks. Noah is there, pulling his mother away. She doesn’t look at him. Her eyes are locked on me as she says, “I hear him. At night. He comes home to sleep in his bed. He wants to be here.”

  Taking a step back, I accidentally knock over a chair and send it crashing to the ground.

  Noah glances at me. He opens his mouth as though to say something, but then gives his head a sharp shake and guides his mother from the room.

  I will myself to move, to get out of the house. My mouth and throat feel bone-dry. I swear, I can still taste grit; the remembered sensation is so strong that if I were to spit, I think I’d spit mud.

  I manage to take a step toward the back door, then another. I slip outside and across the screened-in porch and then around the house. By the time I’m through the gap in the hedge, I feel a little bit steadier. Still shaken, but steadier.

  It’s not the first time I’ve been buried alive, but it’s the first time in a long while.

  “Cat!”

  I don’t turn around. I keep going until I reach Montgomery House.

  Noah calls my name a second time, closer now, and adds “please” at the end. It’s the “please” that does it. The way he sort of trips over the consonants.

  I turn at the bottom of the porch steps, putting the house at my back.

  My eyes keep watering. I scrub at them, annoyed; I know it probably looks like I’m crying when, really, it’s just the memory of all that dirt. The second my feet stop moving, I become aware of the headache. It pulses in bursts of three—faintest, fainter, faint.

  Noah catches up and then stops just in front of me. Red marks run down his cheek. Scratches, I realize. My hand tingles in response. When I glance down, I notice three red crescents in my palm. “Is she always like this?”

  Noah follows my gaze and mutters something under his breath. He reaches for my hand and flinches when I pull away.

  There’s something wary and a little wounded in the way he looks at me. The wariness isn’t new: he had it years ago, always looking slightly startled whenever someone spoke to him, more comfortable with books than people. But the wounded edge? The wounded edge is definitely new.

  “It’s not you,” I say, surprising myself. “I just don’t like to be touched.” I reach into my back pocket and pull out the envelope. “This got delivered to our place by mistake. I was supposed to give it to your mom, but . . .” My voice trails off as a particularly strong burst of pain flashes through my head.

  Noah takes a deep breath as he reaches for the letter. His eyes are darker than I remember. A brown so dark they look almost black. “Thanks.”

  I stand there, torn and confused. It doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t Noah want Riley to be found? How can someone who is capable of such a horrible thought get that hurt look in his eyes? On impulse, I hand Noah the letter and then touch his wrist.

  I touch his wrist, and as I get sucked down, I try to control what I see. I’m not really sure what I’m doing; I’ve only ever tried to do this once before. The pain in my head flares brilliant and bright and—

  A windswept hill. A slab of granite with Riley’s name chiseled above two dates. A sky that’s the exact same shade of blue as the bike Riley used to ride. Warm sun on my face and a soft breeze over my skin.

  Peace. It’s peaceful here . . .

  And then it all disappears. It rushes away with a popping sound, leaving me swaying slightly on my feet.

  Both of them think he’s dead, I realize. Both of them think Riley’s really gone.

  “What did you do?” says Noah. There’s no way he could have felt anything—as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, no one but Jet has ever felt anything when I touched them—but he’s staring at me with the strangest expression on his face.

  “You want him to be found. You don’t want Riley to stay missing.” Without giving Noah a chance to reply, I turn and climb the steps. I don’t look back, but I can swear I feel him watching me as I disappear into the safety of Montgomery House.

  Nine

  I MANAGE TO MAKE IT UP THE STAIRS AND TO MY ROOM, but the idea of crossing the extra few feet to the bathroom—even if it’s the only way to get to the pills in my backpack—is laughable. I get as far as my bed, and then my legs stop cooperating.

  The pain hasn’t been this bad since the night everything in New York blew up. Before that, it had been years.

  I close my eyes and try to lie absolutely still, desperately hoping that if I’m quiet and motionless, the pain will abate.

  After a while, someone knocks on my bedroom door. I start to glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand, but then think better of it: I can’t see the numbers without turning my head, and turning my head feels like a very bad idea. Turning my head would anger the microscopic armies that seem to be waging a very large war between my temples and behind my eyes.

  The door opens.

  Noah.

  I simultaneously try to push myself up and shove Pengy out of sight. The little warring armies are not happy, but at least Noah won’t see me cuddling a stuffed penguin. Don’t throw up. Don’t throw up. Don’t throw up. I cling to the three-word mantra and concentrate on breathing deeply through my nose as I somehow manage to raise myself to a sitting position. I turn on the bedside lamp and wince.

  The wince doesn’t go unnoticed. Noah closes the door partway, leaving it open a few inches so that it still lets in some light from the hallway. Then he crosses the room and turns off the lamp. “Better?”

  “Yeah,” I admit, studying his face in the dim light. He looks more or less like he did out in the yard, but the way I see him has changed.

  The images I get are tricky. Sometimes they’re undeniable—like what I saw when Mrs. Fraser grabbed me. Her greatest fear is that her son is dead. That he is buried somewhere, abandoned in the dirt. That he is turning to dirt himself.

  More often than not, though, their meaning isn’t straightforward. It’s like reading tarot cards or staring at those paintings of inkblots. A tombstone can be fear, but it can also be desire. Someone who wants to hurt themselves. Someone who wants to hurt someone else. Someone who is watching someone else suffer and who just wants the pain to end.

  Noah told me he didn’t want Riley to be found, so when I touched him, I tried to see desire.

  I had been prepared to see something awful, but it was peaceful, up on that hill. It didn’t feel like a bad place.

  Noah reaches into his pocket and pulls out a prescription bottle. “I brought you these.”

  “You expect me to take strange p
ills from a guy I don’t know?”

  That slightly wounded look slips back into his eyes; really, though, what does he expect?

  “That’s why I brought the bottle. So that you can see what they are. The doctor prescribed them for my mom’s migraines.”

  “How do you know I have a migraine?”

  “You used to get sick sometimes, if someone touched you. I didn’t remember that until Mom grabbed you—until I saw your face in the kitchen.” He hesitates, then adds, “Riley used to say you saw things. That you were some kind of psychic.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It’s stupid to feel betrayed, but I do. Even after everything that happened, I expected Riley to keep my secrets. Just like I had kept his.

  As long as Noah’s here, I guess I might as well take advantage of him. “I have pills. They’re in my backpack. In the bathroom.”

  He disappears into the Jack and Jill bathroom I share with Aunt Jet. He comes back with the pill bottle and a little paper cup filled with water, both of which he sets on the nightstand.

  As I down two pills, Noah sits—not next to me on the bed the way I imagine Aidan would, but on the floor, making sure not to invade my space more than he has to.

  “Don’t be angry at Riley for telling me,” he says. “He worried about you.” Silence stretches out between us, and then he adds, “I worried about you, too. You were so little and scrawny, and sometimes you’d have these fits where you just sort of keeled over.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, crumpling the cup and returning it to the nightstand. “I was an adorable child.” It’s hard to imagine I ever met Noah’s description, but there are pictures to prove it. If my life were a Judy Blume novel, getting my period would have heralded the start of a magical time. Instead, I gained psychic powers and thirty pounds, and I had to start using my allowance to buy tampons and acne facial washes—you know, things I shouldn’t have been embarrassed to ask my dad to buy but somehow was . . . probably because of the patriarchy or something. I twist the edge of the comforter between my fingers. “You noticed me?”

  “You were at our house practically every day. Hard not to notice.”

  “I don’t know why Riley told you I was psychic. It was probably a joke or something. He was probably just messing with you.”

  “So you didn’t see anything when you touched me?”

  “Why did you tell me you don’t want Riley to be found?” I counter.

  He glances at my hand as though checking for a trace of those red marks. “You saw my mother. She thinks she can still hear him. That he’s out there. That he comes to the house at night. Her doctor says she’ll get over it, but the thought that he might be alive is the only thing holding her together. Once they find him, once she realizes he’s dead, I won’t be able to stop her from completely breaking. I put up posters because she keeps asking me to, and I pretend he’s still out there, and I wait for the day it all falls apart.”

  “You don’t know that he’s . . .” I can’t quite bring myself to say the word “dead,” but I don’t need to: Noah knows what I mean.

  “It’s been three months. Some people say maybe he ran away, but he wouldn’t have done that to Mom. He wouldn’t have put her through that. And he sure as hell didn’t get lost in those woods.”

  I stare at him. “What are you saying?”

  I think maybe I know, but the idea is so big and horrible that it hovers just out of reach.

  Instead of answering, Noah pushes himself to his feet and walks over to the window. He doesn’t say anything for a long minute. “You can see his room from here.”

  I swallow. It feels like there’s a lump in my throat. “Yeah.”

  He turns back to me. “If you were psychic, would you tell me?”

  “Psychics aren’t real.”

  “Then why did you just look away?”

  I force myself to meet his gaze. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for the kind of guy who believes in stuff like that.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “What changed?”

  “Desperation.” The expression on his face is so intense that it feels like I might burn up under the heat of it.

  “Why would it matter? Even if I was psychic, which I’m not because they don’t exist, why would it matter to you?”

  “Two years ago, a kid was murdered in Charlotte County. There was a local woman—a psychic. She helped police find the body.”

  I sit up a little straighter as something twists in my stomach. “Murdered? You don’t think . . .” One look at his face, though, and it’s clear that’s exactly what he does think. “But who would do that? Who would want to hurt Riley that badly?”

  There is a fierceness in Noah’s eyes that makes me shiver. “I don’t know, but I’m hoping you can help me. I can’t find Riley without it destroying my mother, but I can find whoever hurt him. Because someone did. There’s no way he ran away or got lost. I don’t care what anyone says. Someone out there hurt him—either on purpose or by accident—and then covered it up. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. I’m going to find them.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’m going to make sure they can’t hurt anyone else.”

  It’s the kind of line you expect to hear in a bad movie. The kind of line that should be delivered by a burly action star. It should sound ridiculous coming from Noah Fraser. But when he says it, it doesn’t sound ridiculous. It doesn’t sound like a line at all.

  “I need your help, Cat. You were Riley’s best friend.”

  “Five years ago.” I push myself unsteadily to my feet. “And, anyway, I’m not psychic.” A sharp, stabbing pain drives through my temples. Too much movement before the pills have had a chance to really kick in. I squeeze my eyes shut, and because they are shut, I don’t see Noah cross the room and reach for my arm in an attempt to steady me. I don’t see him, and I don’t try to move away.

  Noah touches me, and I’m pulled back into his head.

  A short time ago, his greatest desire—a desire he probably can’t admit to himself because it contradicts what he thinks he wants—was for Riley to have a final resting place.

  But that was then.

  This time when I get dragged into Noah Fraser’s head, I see something darker. Violence and blood and the things he wants to do to whoever hurt his brother.

  I wrench myself away, and as I do, my arm hits the lamp on the nightstand. It crashes to the floor and breaks, sending shards of broken porcelain sliding across the hardwood.

  The bedroom door opens. “Cat?”

  Aidan stands in the doorway, hair wet from the shower, a plain black T-shirt clinging to his chest. He glances from me to the broken lamp to Noah. “Are you all right?”

  “She’s fine,” says Noah.

  “How about you let her answer?”

  I’m okay, I say—or at least I try to. My head is still full of blood and violence, and the pain is so intense that it makes my vision go black at the edges. Somehow, I manage to find my voice. “I think you should go,” I say. I can’t bring myself to look at Noah. Not after what I saw.

  “Will you think about what I said?”

  “I don’t have to. I can’t help you.” Even if he’s right, even if someone out there hurt Riley, there isn’t anything I can do to help.

  He stares at me for a long, painful moment. “Won’t and can’t aren’t the same thing,” he says before turning and leaving. His footsteps fade down the hall. A moment later, the heavy front door slams closed.

  It feels like the whole house lets out a sigh of relief.

  Aidan turns to me, face serious. “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing,” I lie.

  I’m not psychic. I’m not psychic, and I can’t help Noah Fraser.

  Ten

  AT LEAST ONE GOOD THING COMES OUT OF MY BIZARRO confrontation with Noah: it seems to clear the air between Aidan and me. The thought of the maybe-kiss still lurks in the background, but what happened with Noah is big
enough and strange enough that it gives us something else to talk about the next day. Not that I tell Aidan what really happened. Feeling only slightly guilty, I play the nighttime visit off as just another example of Riley’s older brother being, well, kind of weird before asking Aidan if I can borrow his laptop for a few hours after dinner.

  Maybe it’s a shitty thing to do, but I’m not blowing my carefully cultivated cover of normalcy because of Noah Fraser—no matter how sorry I feel for him.

  And I do feel sorry for him. Really, really sorry, I think as I stare down at his face on the screen. Someone set up a prayer page for Riley, and it’s filled with pictures from the vigils and search parties. Noah is in some of them, looking uncomfortable and angry in the background.

  In addition to pictures, there are comments. Hundreds spanning the past three months. I spend an hour reading them and barely make a dent. All of them seem normal. Supportive. None hint at the idea that someone out there might not have liked Riley, let alone have wanted to hurt him.

  The news stories I find aren’t any more help. Despite Noah’s insistence that someone out there had harmed—maybe even killed—Riley, none of the stories indicate the police have ever suspected foul play. Police have no clues. Public asked for help. No new leads. The same clusters of words appear over and over. The same people, too. Teachers and friends, but also people who didn’t seem to know Riley well but who obviously liked talking to reporters.

  The fact that I finally get on a computer and am looking up stuff about Riley instead of checking what’s happening back in New York is not lost on me. It doesn’t mean that I’m taking Noah’s request seriously, though. I’m not helping him. Definitely not.

  Even if I wanted to help, what on earth could I do?

  Noah’s voice echoes through my head. You were his best friend.

  A shout from Sam drifts up from the kitchen, mercifully cutting into my thoughts. “Mary Catherine! Phone!”

  I shove the laptop under a pillow and push myself to my feet. Technically, Jet hasn’t told me not to borrow any of the computers in the house, but given that she’s been keeping her own laptop out of sight, I can’t imagine she’d be happy to catch me online.