Okay, the truth: They run a nonprofit foundation for missing children throughout the Southeast. They’ve channeled their grief into action (so said the local paper). But if you ask me, they just feel at home in it now. And so they’ve willingly inherited the cause of every grief-stricken parent.
Meanwhile, I’ve inherited Liam’s old sedan, which was my father’s before that. It’s kind of a toss-up each day whether it will start, and beyond that, whether the air will kick in. Please start, I beg the car. Especially because Abby’s apparently home from college now, currently in running gear, tying her sneakers in front of her parents’ front door, doing her best to look like she hasn’t noticed me—and I’d really prefer to do the same. Nothing’s quite as awkward as casually waving to your brother’s old girlfriend, who accidentally—and only once—in a moment of weakness, or grief, or whatever, ended up in the back of this car, with me. Not something either of us would really like to relive. Betting it’s worse for her.
The engine stutters and then catches, and even the air kicks in, the scent of Freon bordering on intoxicating.
I don’t look at Abby as I drive past. Today will be a good day.
* * *
—
The ranger at Freedom Battleground State Park thinks he’s got me all figured out. EMF meter? he once asked when I pulled the gear from my backpack. You got one of those infrared cameras, too?
Apparently if there are enough ghost stories in your area, you’re bound to get some amateur ghost hunters. I guess I wasn’t the only one roaming the woods, looking for signs of the unexplained. I don’t have one of those infrared camera things, though—or a temperature gauge—because I’m not looking for cold spots or orbs or anything. I’m not even looking for ghosts, exactly. But I let the ranger think that’s what I’m up to, because he mostly leaves me alone. I must seem harmless enough.
But, like he assumes, I am measuring, and mapping, high-electromagnetic spots, and I also have a Geiger counter to detect radiation pockets, and an extra-low-frequency meter, all of which are typically associated with the other side. With signs of ghosts. Or spirits. Honestly, I’m not exactly clear on the proper terminology.
That psychic my parents hired came out here with us, and she said she could feel some energy, that something happened here—well, of course it had, we’d told her as much. And she gave us some hard sell about her colleague who was an expert and could help pinpoint spirits, or energies or something, and this was the point where she lost my parents. She preys on the desperate, my father said when we got back home, and my mother, with her silence, agreed.
But I looked it up after, which is how I stumbled onto all this stuff, but also how I stumbled onto the Quest for Proof: a group of people devoted to proving the existence of anything paranormal. Not just showing on some questionable video, or explaining with a persuasive paper, but proving.
I know there’s something here. There’s a reason for all the stories. There’s a reason for the ghost hunters.
My brother and his dog disappeared with no earthly explanation. And if I can prove it, I’ll have the backing of people who will admit, finally, Yes, this is what happened to your brother.
Because what the police kept stressing when Liam first disappeared was that the only way to find a missing person was to first understand what had happened to them.
So, step one.
I guess at the end, I do want the same thing as my parents: answers. A way to understand. It’s just that I’m pretty sure they’re looking in all the wrong places.
A dream. A premonition. An unexplained disappearance. A forest of ghost stories and legends, and my brother vanishing into thin air. There are things that have happened since that make it clear there is no rational explanation.
But I’m not here to chase ghosts. There are enough people who’ve taken that angle, coming up empty. I’ve got a different plan: drop a rock, and the same thing happens over and over again, predictable.
But what if it doesn’t? What if there’s something unexpected, some failure to predict?
The unpredictable, the unexplained—that’s the proof. That’s my plan. I know I’ll find it here. I’m the one who felt it, after all.
* * *
—
What I don’t like to admit to myself too frequently is this, the second half of what the police were implying. Step two, if you will: if we understand how my brother disappeared, then it follows that maybe we can get him back.
* * *
—
I’m in the northwest corner of the park, a section I’ve never scanned before, when it’s finally time to call it quits.
I stop taking readings when the visitors begin arriving. Their cell phones might interfere. The walkie-talkies of the other rangers. I leave my own phone in the car, every time. I know I should really be doing this at night, when nobody’s around, when it’s just me and the stories, and the dark.
But then it’s just me and the stories, and the dark.
So, I’m a coward.
I pull out the map to mark off my progress, jot down the readings, before heading back for my car. The park spans three townships, a four-mile area, drawing the line between counties and school districts. Where I stand, the woods stop abruptly, giving way to open field, a split-rail fence, a barn. A house.
The Jones House.
A shudder rolls through me. I know about the Jones House because everyone knows about the Jones House. Because Sutton went to school with the girl who survived it, because he made himself a part of the story, told pieces at a baseball clinic this winter to anyone who would listen. And because it was splashed across the headlines for weeks, just like Liam’s disappearance two years ago. It was the train wreck from which people could not look away.
And apparently, I’m no different.
There’s nothing paranormal about what happened in that house. But I remember what the psychic told my parents, about energies. I think about what could be left behind in a place like that. It could be useful for some sort of comparison or something. But mostly, I think—What can it hurt?
I’m across the field and over the fence before I can talk myself out of it. The house is abandoned, though there’s a FOR SALE sign in the front yard. I take out the EMF device when I’m far from the house, just for some baseline readings. Then I step closer, walk up onto the front porch, and press my forehead to the closest window, peering inside.
The curtains are pulled open, and I can see the outline of a couch, a lamp, pictures. But something registers as off in my mind, and I look again. The pictures hang crooked, and some have been knocked to the floor. The house is not right, and goose bumps rise on the back of my neck.
I steel my nerve and hold the device up against the stone-covered front wall, and then I hear it—
Footsteps. Lightning fast, but barely there.
My heart’s in my throat when a blur emerges from the side of the house, and it takes me a second to realize this is not a ghost but a girl. Long, pale legs and a dark tangle of hair and her back hunched over the handlebars of a bike.
A girl, the articles said, Sutton said.
I watch her go. She doesn’t even notice me standing there.
* * *
—
The pizza delivery car is pulling out just as I’m pulling in, and suddenly I’m faced with a weekly dilemma: have pizza and get sucked into the world of missing children, or sneak up the back steps to the comfort of my room and let the hunger eat away at my stomach lining. I’d love option three: go to the drive-through. But I’ve spent most of my savings on this equipment, and my job is a figment of my parents’ imagination, after all.
As I walk to the house, I imagine I’m a gazelle in the savannah. The hunger wins out. The lion pounces.
“They let you out early?” my dad says as my hand reaches into the box of pizza.
&n
bsp; “Uh-huh,” I lie. I said I was tutoring. I said it was a job at the library. I said I needed the money for college, since I knew my parents were running on fumes by now. They’d sunk so much into the search for Liam, and then into this foundation.
How can I be thinking about who would pay for college when these children are missing? Priorities, Nolan.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he says, handing me a plate. “We could use your help sorting through the tip line….”
I make some excuse about studying for finals and pile a few slices onto the plate. The finals part isn’t a lie. The studying part, on the other hand, will have to wait. I need to get upstairs and transfer the data points. Plot it out on one of the park maps on my computer. See if there’s any overlap, any pattern, any failure to predict within.
I grab a soda, and there’s a new face taped to the wall, just beside the fridge in my peripheral vision. I don’t look. Those pictures, man. They’ll gut you, or they’ll numb you, and either way, you die a little.
I have to get out of here. I’m surrounded by ghosts.
When I finally make it back, Joe’s up and in the shower. By the time he gets out, I’ve returned the bike to the garage and changed into pajamas.
I can’t believe I slept so long at the house. I woke with a start, with a feeling that someone was there, like a presence. As if the stories the other kids told in the dark, whispered low to scare one another, were real. But then the light filtered in, everything clarified—and I remembered that I was alone.
* * *
—
Joe says he has to be on campus for most of Saturday, but has to is probably an overstatement.
He does work sporadic hours, I’ll give him that. But occasionally I think he builds in some extra time, just to have an excuse to leave. I don’t even blame him.
Truthfully, we get along just fine for roommates thrown into an unforeseen living arrangement. And in practice, everything’s working out as far as the courts are concerned. But in theory, he hasn’t taken too well to suddenly being responsible for his sixteen-year-old niece. Can’t say I’ve taken too well to it, either. It’s hard to take him seriously as a voice of authority—he was always just my mom’s slightly irresponsible, much younger kid brother, who took a few years off before attending college to see the world, with a spotty attendance record when it came to family affairs—and my presence probably doesn’t help with his bachelor lifestyle.
But on the plus side, he pretty much leaves me to my own devices. He’s adopted a random assortment of ground rules, which he came up with on a whim one night, but I mostly try to stick by them so I can fight the good fight where it counts. No drinking (not a problem), no boys (also not a problem), and no skipping school (mostly not a problem). If he ever catches me sneaking out, I can tell him that technically I haven’t broken any of his rules and hope that holds. I’m fighting him hard, though, on the house thing.
He wants to sell it. I don’t. After a lifetime of moving around campus housing with my mom, this was the first time we’d had a house in our name, and land. According to my mom, it would be a place for us all to grow roots.
It’s the only place I can feel them, still.
Technically, the house is now mine.
Technically, it’s Joe’s decision, since he’s the one who’d have to send the checks.
All these technicalities.
* * *
—
We finally cross paths at breakfast. Lunch? I look at the clock: too close to tell. He’s got two different kinds of cereal out on the kitchen table—we shop separately but buy vaguely similar things. The one time we went grocery shopping together, the woman at the checkout gave him some seriously judgmental looks and pulled me aside to ask if I was okay. Joe’s too old to pass as my brother, too young to be my father, too unsure of how to act around me to look casual. Anyway, that store clerk’s comment? I mock-gagged and laughed it off. But Joe was mortified. Now he drops me off with cash for my own stuff while he “runs errands.” I think he just drives around for a while until I text him.
“What are you doing today?” he asks, drinking the remaining milk directly from the bowl.
“Nothing,” I say.
He nods like I’ve somehow given a satisfactory response.
“The Albertsons wanted me to tell you that you’re welcome to use their pool whenever you want—it’s the yellow corner house, you know it? They have twin girls who are about your age.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. I do know the Albertsons’ house, and I also know the Albertson twins (for the record: two years younger, not my age), and not even the stifling heat could get me into their backyard pool.
He takes his bowl to the sink, rinses it out, and puts it in the dishwasher, then pulls open the freezer. “I’ll bring back something for dinner,” he says.
“Okay.”
He’s in jeans and a gray T-shirt, apparently acceptable attire for a postgrad at the university. I don’t know what he does exactly—some sort of anthropology research, along with a bit of teaching, I think. He used to travel a lot. Yet another thing I’ve disrupted. But his presence there was one of the main reasons my mom accepted that teaching position. He’s why we’re here, in West Arbordale, Virginia, after I spent most of my life in the suburbs of DC. Same state, very different reality.
Joe lives a little like a student, too, which is not nearly as glamorous as I’d imagined, in anticipation of college. Mostly it means ramen noodles and a lot of caffeine and a questionable laundry situation. I tried to get him to move to my house instead—more room for both of us—even suggesting we renovate, so we wouldn’t have to be reminded of the things that happened there. But he, like most people, won’t set foot in there any longer. “We can use the money from the sale to get a bigger place,” he suggested after our first couple of weeks together, when the realities of sharing a bathroom with a teenage girl, and vice versa, bordered on cringe-worthy.
As if I intended to stick around any later than graduation. “Let’s not make any long-term plans,” I said.
He looked relieved.
But now we’re still cramped in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch, when there’s a sprawling house with land and an observatory just a handful of miles down the road. He’ll cave. I know it. The sting will pass. But in the meantime, that house can’t sell.
“Okay, well, call if you need anything. Or if you go to the Albertsons’ house.”
“Will do,” I say. We do that awkward dance where he can’t decide whether to pat my head or my shoulder and I hold up my hand to try to wave him off with a halfhearted goodbye before he gets started. Too late. He goes for the top of my head today, patting it twice, like I’m a puppy.
I’m trying to cut him some slack. He’s doing me an enormous favor—yet another technicality, if we’re keeping track. There was a brief discussion back in December about whether it would be in my best interest to live with my father.
It would not have been.
The things worth knowing about my father could be tallied on one hand: he gave up parental rights when I was just a baby; he currently lives in Germany with a new wife; I hadn’t seen him in over seven years by the time he showed up in December.
Though Joe was listed as guardian in my mother’s will, he still had to agree to the responsibility. There was another option, if it proved too much for Joe. My father and his new wife (Betty? Betsy? I’m still not sure) came to visit after Joe called, to offer their brief and awkward condolences, and to sit down with Joe and discuss what was to happen to me. I heard them talking it over at night, in the living room. A list of pros and cons, of which I was the subject.
It would only be another year and a half, I told Joe the next day, desperate to tip the scales. A year and a half until I was eighteen, off to college, out of his hair. We could make it work, I promised.
Joe pretended he hadn’t been thinking it over. He said, Of course, Kennedy, it’s not even a question. But come on. The walls here are not as thick as he would like to imagine.
He’s twenty-nine. I’ve thrown his life into chaos. He’s missed all the nuance of the first sixteen years of parenting. So. I’m trying.
* * *
—
I retreat to the cramped space that used to be Joe’s TV room but now fits my bed, desk, dresser, and boxes. The only décor in here is a framed picture on the windowsill beside my bed, a photo from last fall: me and Elliot and my mom at the top of a lighthouse, my hair blowing in Elliot’s face, Elliot trying to push me away, my mom laughing. The last photo I have of all of us together, when we went with her on a long-weekend work conference.
The photo was taken by my mom’s colleague-slash-new-boyfriend, Will. The outing had been Will’s idea—I don’t think he was expecting us to be there. Honestly, at the time I would’ve preferred to spend the last day at the hotel pool, but my mom insisted, and so there we were.
Two hundred and twelve steps to the top, with my mom talking about the history of the place, and Elliot reciting facts about the construction, Will correcting them both, and me trying to tune them all out, my hands on the cold, spiraling concrete walls as I counted in my head, my mother’s voice echoing through the stairwell.
I wish I could focus on her words, remember them. But all I have in my memory now is the tone of her voice, over the count I was keeping. Elliot was probably listening, and not just because he thought he was supposed to. He was probably actually interested, as he was in all things new to him. For two people who shared so many physical traits, we were so different at the core. My mother used to joke, I swear I raised them the same. Elliot used to joke, I locked her in the closet whenever you were away. Which is a lie. He would never. But that was just like Elliot, taking the blame for setting the bar a little too high for my life.
Come Find Me Page 2