The woman looks up from her computer screen and shakes her head. She looks way too friendly to be working here, asking for inmate names all day, from behind a plastic shield. “You’re not on the list.”
“I’m his sister,” I say. “Family.” I point to the ID so she sees the name. Last name Jones.
Her face softens even more. “I know, honey.” She pivots the computer screen my way so I can see. There’s a column of approved names: I see his lawyer’s name and Joe’s name, not that Joe has ever visited, to my knowledge. And then a column marked Unapproved. There’s only one name on it. She taps her purple fingernail against the screen. “There’s a note here, with your name. It says, specifically, you’re not approved.”
My teeth grind together, and I can feel the people behind me in line growing restless. “Who would do that?” I ask, thinking of Joe. Or Elliot’s lawyer. The police. “Let me talk to someone—”
She shakes her head. “It won’t help. Also, darling, you can’t come in regardless without a guardian present. You’re a minor.”
“A guardian.” I almost laugh. “That’s him.” I point to the computer screen. I have no guardian anymore, not one that counts. Technically, Joe is the person to put on the school forms, and he can probably claim me as a tax deduction or something. But my true guardians are either dead or locked up behind that wall. Elliot, at eighteen, should be my legal guardian.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” she says, already looking behind me, to the next person.
I pull the envelope out of my pocket, the one with the readout from the radio telescope inside. The thing, I’m sure, only he can decipher. “Can I get this to him? Please. He won’t…” Call, accept my letters, anything. I need him to see this. To tell me what it means. He built it; he would know.
She seems to be debating something, and it’s awful, the hope that precedes her words. “No, Ms. Jones. The inmates set this list.” She waits for me to understand, and when it seems I haven’t gotten the point yet, she lets out a sigh. “This list, this decision, is from him.”
I shake my head, not understanding. Elliot won’t see me? Elliot won’t let me visit? Not the lawyers, or Joe, but Elliot? Elliot, who never acted like I was a pain in his butt, even when I so obviously was. I don’t understand. I need him to give me answers.
Suddenly I feel a hand at my elbow. A voice at my ear. “Come on,” he says. It’s Nolan, beside me, the line of people growing louder behind us. They’re completely unsympathetic to my cause, and I get it, I do. Look where we are; everyone’s got a problem. We’re at a jail. They’re probably immune to scenes like this. To people like me.
He leads me back into the sunlight, against the barren landscape. I hold the paper out to him so he understands. “He built it. The satellite dish. The computer program. He’ll know what it means.”
Nolan frowns. “Can’t you email or something?”
I feel my jaw clenching. “He doesn’t have email. He doesn’t use the phone. I don’t know if my letters get to him.” I used to send them, but eventually they were returned, unopened. I didn’t understand. I don’t understand.
The lawyers, Joe, none of them would let me see him. I thought it was because of them. Or because I’m working with the district attorney. For the facts. Just the facts. That’s what I told them. When his lawyer starts in on cross-examination, I’ll be able to tell them there must be another explanation. Elliot, who had never hurt anyone in his life, not even me. Elliot, who once tried to help me clean a cut on my knee (a slip off the railing, the first time I tried to sneak out), and who almost got sick just from looking at it. Mom called me her wild one, which made Elliot the stable one, the reliable one.
Elliot with his prints on the gun; Elliot, covered in blood. Elliot, running from the house, running away.
My nails dig into my palms.
“Maybe there’s someone else who would understand…,” Nolan says.
But I shake my head. “When Lydia looked at the program, she said something about the date,” I explain. “The date the program began.”
“What date?” Nolan asks.
“December fourth,” I say, and I stare at him until I see the information process.
December fourth. Before. After. The split in my life, in the universe.
Something happened then. Elliot Jones was not himself.
“Don’t you see? This signal has to be some sort of warning. Something happened that night,” I explain. “Something dangerous.”
He’s shaking his head, but then he stops. He looks me over carefully.
“You see, don’t you?” I ask, but he seems to be somewhere else. I can tell from his expression, though—he does. He must.
December fourth. The day, according to the papers, that Elliot Jones killed his mother and his mother’s boyfriend, and then ran; schools remained closed in both their county and ours, for safety, until he was found the next day.
The story was this: Elliot’s mother and her boyfriend, Will Sterling, another professor at the college, were at some holiday event. Something happened when they came back to the house after midnight. The daughter—Kennedy, arriving home, sneaking back inside—saw Elliot running from the house. And then she found the bodies on the stairs.
It was a near miss, Sutton said. That Kennedy wasn’t home. That Kennedy was late. He knew her, he said, the girl who survived it. She was at her boyfriend’s house when it happened. Marco, I now know.
I’d seen the pictures in the paper, on the news: the two professors—the woman, with dark hair, smiling in her photo, with the sky and ocean behind her, and the rest of the photo cut away; and the man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard covering a square jaw.
But Elliot’s photo is the one that haunts me the most: the dark, hollow eyes; the expressionless face as he stared back through the lens of the police camera.
The next day, while the search parties were still out, Elliot suddenly appeared, walking up the driveway, like nothing at all had happened, seemingly with no memory of the event. He was allegedly in the same clothes, dirty, shaken, the blood still under his nails. Sutton said Elliot made it almost all the way to the crime scene tape across the front door, asking, “What happened?” before someone stopped him.
He had no idea there was a manhunt under way for him at that very moment.
There were a lot of rumors: that he was high; that he was furious, that it was a chaotic attack; that he was completely calm and collected and carried out the crimes with a chilling precision. No one knows what really happened, only that he did it. But his trial is starting next week, so I guess we’re about to find out.
I tap my fingers on the steering wheel in the silence. “Um, are you hungry?” The clock gives us more time. A few more hours until she needs to be back, and I can see she does need something else. Something not in that ranch house with her uncle and the overgrown yard.
“Yes, actually,” she says. She sighs, like she’s irritated at her own hunger.
“Pizza?” Right at that moment, there’s a sign just off the highway for the World’s Best Pizza, which I think is probably optimistic, considering we’re in the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, half a mile from a jail. But who am I to judge?
“Pizza,” she repeats, which I guess could be taken as either a Yes, pizza, please or a Pizza, are you serious? but I’m choosing to see it as the former, because I’m starving.
At the pizza place, we stand in line together, and she’s silent. I’m seriously the worst person for this. I’m terrible at knowing what to say, finding the right words in a crisis. Sorry your brother is in jail, but would you like extra cheese? She saves me from the awkwardness by ordering for both of us, only looking at me after the fact to make sure it’s okay. Well, I was right about one thing: she likes to be in charge.
I pull out my wallet. I have no cash, like seriously none. Like
right now I have to decide between gas and dinner. I have a credit card for emergencies, though, and this suddenly feels like an emergency.
But she offers to pay instead. She insists, actually. “No, you drove, I’ll feed.”
I carry the drinks, and she takes our order number and props it on the table, where we wait for our pizza (pepperoni and sausage) to be delivered.
“So,” I say, waiting for her to continue. It may seem odd—I know it probably does to anyone else, to the me who existed before all this—that I have just accompanied a near stranger to the jail where her family member awaits trial for the death of another family member. It seems so much, so intimate.
But something happens after a big event like the ones we’ve both been through. Something we can both understand. A brother disappearing, followed by a thorough investigation into all of our lives. I’d imagine it’s the same sort of thing that must have happened to her. She was a witness to a crime that happened in her house, a death.
Sorry, I have trouble just saying it: a double homicide. A murder.
Anyway, this is what tends to happen to us: a recalibration of sorts. Of what embarrasses you, versus what you try to hide. I mean, I live in a house covered with the faces of other people’s missing children. Her house is a crime scene, her brother the alleged guilty party. There’s a reordering of what matters.
She needed a car, so she asked me; we needed answers, so we went to the jail.
“I was with Joe already,” she says, unprompted, “when they found Elliot. When he came back to the house. We never got a chance to…he didn’t tell me what happened. It doesn’t make sense.”
He’s been awaiting trial; the evidence, according to the papers, was pretty cut-and-dry. A witness who puts him at the scene when the crime occurred, his fingerprints on the weapon, the blood under his nails. He hasn’t denied it, not that I’ve heard.
But that can’t be true, because it’s going to trial. It’s going to trial, to prove he’s guilty, because he hasn’t admitted to it, either. And Kennedy is the only witness.
Oh, I think.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because what else is there, really, to say? Sorry your brother is in jail for killing your family. Sorry you have no one else. Sorry he won’t see you, still.
“My mom and Will used to go out every weekend. Started out as once a week, then turned into twice, after Will convinced her we were too old to need her around all the time. It was just…routine,” she says, like she’s trying to get me to understand. “That night, it was the same as every other time. Nothing was different. There was no reason. It doesn’t make sense.”
I sit back and listen, trying to picture it—the faces I’ve seen in the paper, all in the same room, with Kennedy. Talking to one another, maybe laughing. She’s right, it doesn’t make sense. None of this does. It doesn’t make sense that, at a house one county over, my brother was here one day and gone the next, with no reason.
She sighs. “Elliot is seriously the most patient person. The most logical. Meticulous.” She shakes her head, as if because he’s logical and meticulous, he could not do such a thing.
“There was nothing logical or meticulous about it,” she whispers. I see her eyes widen and wonder what she’s imagining. The staircase, the lightbulb changed, the scent of paint. Chaos. Now I’m imagining it, too. The staircase. The horror of it. I wonder how a person can recover from that. From the knowing.
I’m not sure which is worse anymore: the not knowing, or the knowing. Her hand trembles as she reaches for her cup, and she moves the ice around absently with the straw before taking a drink.
“My brother,” I say, “was perfect.”
She’s got the straw in her mouth, but she stops drinking, just freezes.
“Not the perfect brother. Not that. Just how everyone else saw him.”
She nods, like she knows. Then moves the ice around with her straw again.
The pizza is finally delivered, the scent practically intoxicating. While waiting for my slice to cool, I decide to map with my phone how long it will take to get home. “Oh crap,” I say, my cell in my hand. My phone has been off since we arrived at the jail. Since we turned them off and left them in the locker before walking through security.
I turn the phone on, holding my breath. Three new messages. I groan, holding the phone to my ear. The first is from my father, asking me where exactly I am, because they need to talk to me. The second is my father again, this time agitated, telling me to call him as soon as I get this. As soon as, he repeats. And the third message is static—nothing there. Time for my parents to get a new line. I can only imagine the state of my father during that call, though. How things might have escalated when I didn’t respond.
Sorry, I mouth to Kennedy, hitting the call-back button for my dad’s cell.
“Nolan?” he asks right away, as if my number hadn’t just shown up on his display.
“Sorry, Dad, I didn’t realize my phone had lost charge.”
Kennedy makes a face at my lie. Like I didn’t just see her do the same to her uncle, coming up with an excuse about who I was and where we were going.
My dad talks so fast I can’t keep up. “What? Dad, calm down. What?”
“The picture,” my dad says, and I can hear his breath, the restraint in his words. “You need to come home and look at the picture, Nolan.”
Kennedy raises her eyes to mine. His voice is so loud that she must’ve heard.
“You need to go?” she says, the pizza slice inches from her mouth, propped up in both hands.
“Sorry, I do,” I say. I grab a box from the counter behind us so she can take it to go. “There’s something happening at my house. My brother’s case.”
She holds up one finger, takes a bite, closing her eyes. As if the fate of the universe can hold on for just one moment. One simple moment where the only thing either of us is thinking about is the state of the world’s best pizza.
She starts to laugh then. “Nolan,” she says as I’m gathering my things. “I don’t know how to say this, but I think it is.”
“What?” I’m already mapping the course home. She pushes the half-eaten slice my way.
“The world’s best pizza. I’m not lying—it’s really good.” She’s really laughing, and it makes me pause. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh.
I take a bite to humor her, feel the warmth, the flavor, the grease in my mouth. “Oh shit,” I say around the bite, and she laughs. I can feel my eyes bugging out of my head. I change my mind, finishing the slice.
“We should come back here one day,” she says, “just, one day.”
“Yeah,” I say as she grabs the to-go box. “Let me know, though, if it’s as good reheated.”
She shakes her head. “Come on, you already know the answer to that.”
Joe is sitting at the kitchen table when Nolan drops me off, much like when I got home from school. I wonder if he’s moved at all since then, except I see a beer there instead of a soda, so…
“I come bearing dinner,” I say, the rest of the pizza still lukewarm in the box.
“I thought you were studying at the library?” he says, half question, half accusation.
“We took a dinner break,” I say, sliding the box onto the table. I open the top, contort my hands into the best impersonation of a magician revealing her tricks. “Ta-da,” I say.
Joe picks up a slice halfheartedly, not realizing he’s in the presence of the self-proclaimed World’s Best Pizza. He takes a bite, puts it down. Takes one more, then chases it with a beer. I frown. I make a note to tell Nolan: Not as good. The subject is unaffected.
I get myself a paper plate from the pantry, to join him.
“Who was that, Kennedy?” he asks as I sit down across from him.
“Nolan, I told you.”
“I’m just wonderi
ng if…you know.”
I raise an eyebrow. I do know. He wants to know if this Nolan is my boyfriend. As in, have I broken his no boys rule officially. “He’s just a friend of mine, Joe. I am allowed to have friends, right?”
He nods, and I take a slice from the box. I scrunch my nose, chewing carefully. It’s missing something, outside the restaurant. It’s not just the heat. It’s something else, and I can’t put my finger on it.
Joe puts the bottle down, spinning it on the table, not meeting my eye. “The call that came in earlier,” he says, “it was the Realtor.”
I stop chewing. Wondering if they told Joe I’ve been messing around with the house. That I’m spooking the prospective buyers.
“There’s an offer,” he says.
“What?” I say around a bite. Not possible. No one would want to live there. “Who wants to live in that house? You don’t even want to live in that house, Joe, and it belongs to us.”
He shakes his head. “From what I understand, they want to take it back to its roots.” He spreads his hands out, as if this is something that should clarify everything. It doesn’t.
“What does that mean, take it back to its roots?”
“Turn it back into a working farm. I guess.”
“And how does one do that, exactly?”
He takes a deep breath. “They just want the land, Kennedy.”
The acreage, stretching from the road to the fence to Freedom Battleground State Park. It’s what drew my mother to it in the first place. That, and the fact that we’d never had land before, growing up closer to a city. She said it would be good for us, the space, the air. The house, quirky and charming, was full of history, which she loved. But she’d given me and Elliot control over the paint, the furniture, deciding what each room would be used for. That first summer, we painted it ourselves, steamed the carpets, hung the porch swing, dug the garden. Before the start of the school year, Will showed up with flowers—the kind ready to plant—and helped us transfer them to the side yard himself, the knees of his khaki pants covered in soil afterward. It was the first time we met him, the first time he’d asked Mom to dinner. It worked; they left us there to finish the garden ourselves.
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