by Sarah Porter
When I woke up, everyone was gone. My bowler hat had rolled away and come to rest in a patch of moss.
what was i supposed to do?
There was a blue sky slamming through the trees and I tried to stay calm; he’d gone off with his new friends, he didn’t see me and assumed I’d headed home. I called and got his voicemail—Who do you think you are, calling me? Just kidding, you know I love you!—three times in a row. Panic started blasting at me with the blue. My phone seemed to jump in my hand.
Worried, I texted. Call right now! He’d think I was being too smothery, probably, but it wasn’t like him to leave without me, and without a word. It was already after eleven; I’d been out a long time. Maybe he’d gone under too, somewhere out of sight, curled beneath a pine’s feathery arms. I walked back and forth for a while in the direction where I’d seen him weaving away into thickening shadows, calling his name and poking at the undergrowth. It was useless. Birds nattered in their nerve-shaking soprano and there was no sign that anyone but me had been here last night.
Then I thought that he might be back at the house—Mitch and Emma’s demure, butter-yellow split-level ranch—where we’d lived for the last six years. His head burrowed under pillows, his eyeliner smudged halfway down his cheeks, sleeping it off. So I ran, even though every footstep drummed it into me: that it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t there, that I’d find his bed empty. Then I told myself that was just paranoia ragging at me. He’d be there. He had to be.
I had three long miles to get through, under foliage and past peonies and enough vinyl siding to encase an iceberg, and the whole way my thoughts rolled back and forth like dice: from Josh is gone to Josh wouldn’t do that to me.
It hadn’t yet quite occurred to me, or I wouldn’t let it, that they might have stolen him. Kids don’t kidnap each other, do they? Maybe his friends at the gorge were older than they looked, but they couldn’t be more than twenty-one or -two.
I’m a good runner, but pelting at this speed I was still out of breath and streaky with sweat. Sunspots bounced off parked cars like a shining pulse. By the time the yellow house hove into view I was getting dizzy and I almost had trouble picking it out, as if I’d been away for years and my memories were confused.
My hand shook and at first I couldn’t fit the key into the lock, but then I was inside: rooms that seemed too gray-dark after the sunlight, silence that sounded brick-hard.
Down the half flight of stairs and then the hallway, my footsteps mute in the heavy mustard-gold shag. I flung open Josh’s door like I still thought I’d find him there, but the truth is that I knew. The emptiness was already inside me before I found it in his room. Messy bed and wadded black jeans and the plastic horses he’d slathered in glitter and rhinestones, but no sleeping boy and no breath but my own, heaving out of me.
I stood there, sick with my own abrupt stillness, stunned by the next impossibility: deciding what to do.
Who knew what drugs they’d fed him? He could be with them, having the time of his life, so high that he hadn’t remembered to text me. That wasn’t like him, though; for all his ingenuous manner Josh was keenly aware of his impact on people. So maybe he was trying out a new degree of thoughtlessness. Maybe with Mitch and Emma gone he felt like I was being too clingy or too protective, and this was his way of rebelling against me. Maybe he just wanted me to miss him. If that was it, then calling our foster parents, or the police, would be the worst thing I could do. I’d get him in trouble for nothing but a little attitude.
But it was my job to look after him, to replace the family he’d lost when he was small. That was what I was good for. And if the strangers at the gorge had taken him—it was the first time I let that thought sit in my head, let it leer at me—then the sooner the search began, the better our odds would be of finding him unharmed.
It was precisely noon. I decided to give it an hour or two. Give him a chance to sober up and say, Oh hell, Ksenia must be flipping out by now.
I made myself coffee, slugged it down, and ten minutes later puked brown bitter acid into the toilet.
It seemed like the strangers must have slipped me something, but how could they? I hadn’t touched their wine. So why had I passed out like that on the stones?
I made myself take a shower, wash the leaves and clumped soil out of my jagged hair. I turned the jet as hot as it would go but my skin stayed clammy. When I was dried and in clean clothes just forty minutes had gone by, and I wasn’t sure I could stand to keep waiting. I sat at the kitchen table for ten more minutes, staring at my phone, in case I’d missed something.
When I called him again I didn’t hear his usual message. Instead there was a new recording: a peal of shrill bells. The sound of them brought some of last night’s needling static back into my mouth.
If he’d changed his outgoing then he must be awake, ignoring me, and that made no sense at all. We hadn’t fought. I hadn’t stopped him from doing whatever he wanted to do. A smolder took over my heart and entrails, like the stink of a chemical fire buried somewhere too deep to put out.
What’s wrong with you? I texted. This is bullshit. Tell me where you are!
Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. It rang in my ears, it bit at my tongue, its teeth sent a sympathetic resonance singing through my skull. I paced around the kitchen, stopped at the sink to rinse my mouth. I couldn’t wash out the prickling, or the acid tang of bile.
Maybe someone else had gotten into his phone somehow, slipped in those chimes. That didn’t seem good either.
I’m giving you ten minutes, I wrote. Then I’m calling the cops.
Because what was I supposed to do?
* * *
There were two things that came next: one that I did, and one that I didn’t do.
I didn’t contact Mitch and Emma. They hadn’t had a vacation alone together in ten years; why not let them enjoy their cruise, since obviously Josh would turn up soon? That spared me the boiling shame of telling them I’d lost him somehow, that I’d let him get drunk to where his judgment was impaired. That on my watch he’d fallen into the arms of strangers who’d do who-knows-what to him. As if I didn’t know what who-knows-what is like.
What I did do, when I was seated on Emma’s couch with its Tuscan Wheat Ultrasuede, the two officers across the coffee table so that their stares held me braced: I said I’d tried their wine. Only a few swallows, because it tasted wrong. I said I’d gotten dizzy soon afterward, lost consciousness, and come to on the ground. Everything I told them was true, except the dark wine going down my throat.
I wished horribly that I had drunk that wine. It would have made Josh’s disappearance a little less my fault. Even claiming it had happened was enough to ease the pain, very slightly. I almost started to remember the wine’s sullen zing.
I didn’t say that I thought the beautiful strangers might have drugged me, because I could let the cops tell themselves that. I saw it in the looks they passed: the woman with pinkish-tan puffed hair, exactly the color of her dust-dull skin, and thick slashes of terra-cotta blush; the bulky, sad-mouthed black man with cheeks as loose as pudding. I didn’t need to say I was afraid they’d drugged Josh too. The officers did the work for me; their eyes spun around to that exact conclusion. I could watch the movie playing on their faces: a naïve sixteen-year-old boy at the mercy of this band of freaks. Maybe the strangers were addicts, or pimps, or some kind of sick cult.
They were very interested in his new outgoing message, those brightly tolling bells, and listened to it again and again.
I waited for them to call Mitch and Emma with the news that their foster son had vanished, but oddly they didn’t seem to think of it. Maybe they assumed that I already had, but they never asked.
These were the kind of cops who work hard to prove that they’re human, compassionate. At all costs, that they’re not bad people, no matter what anyone thinks. They leapt at the crisis, the missing child, the missing orphan, and I encouraged them.
“Josh is so sensitive,
” I said. “So vulnerable. One problem with losing his parents so young is that now he gets impressed way too easily by people like that, who are older and cooler and confident.”
They took notes.
By nightfall half our town was on the move in shuffling bands, flashlights sweeping. Josh was a known entity around here: a weirdo, but such an innocent one, who carried in groceries for old ladies; a pansexual libertine, but so adorable about it that half his old hookups were vaguely in love with him. (“It’s not that I like both boys and girls,” Josh had vented once at Mitch in exasperation. “I like people!”)
So nearly all the high schoolers who weren’t on summer trips had joined in. Lexi was there, of course, though she seemed like she was avoiding me, even having trouble meeting my eyes. Did she blame me for what had happened? Despise me for losing her best friend? If she did feel that way, I guessed she had a good enough reason for it.
At first it seemed like no one else had seen the strangers—They weren’t from around here, everyone said. Those weren’t kids from State U.—but as the darkness wore on, people began to sidle up to me, to tell me they’d sighted them earlier yesterday evening, buying gas or drinking milkshakes at Denny’s.
I didn’t believe any of them. They’d been thinking too hard about the story I’d told, that was all. Their minds were infected by the dream and they were starting to see what I’d seen: the billowing white jacket, the mink frozen in mid-snarl, the rainbow bends on peacock leather. They watched visions seeded by my words, then said, I remember now!
It made me feel a little better, though, that I wasn’t the only one rocked by waves of panic. That I wasn’t alone with the lash of pink dreadlocks and Josh’s look of round-mouthed delight as they led him who-knows-where. It soothed my fear enough that I could almost ignore the unending fact that we still hadn’t found him.
A group combed the bottom of the gorge, edging down the treacherous path along the cliff’s face to the dried-up creek and patchy willows at the bottom. I hadn’t let myself think about that, either, and I stared after them for a while, too afraid they might be right to follow. But they didn’t find a broken body on the stones, or dangling in the branches.
One funny thing: it wasn’t just the cops who didn’t mention Mitch and Emma, the importance of keeping them informed. No one did. As if the two of them leaving town amounted to a wisping away into oblivion, and a ten-day trip equaled utterly gone.
I couldn’t stand the way Lexi wouldn’t look at me, though. Even if I had it coming, couldn’t she at least pretend to act supportive? I finally worked up the nerve to walk up to her. “Lexi. Hey.” It wasn’t enough. “I really did pass out. I know how you must feel, but I seriously would have done anything—if I’d just thought in time—”
That got me a sidelong glance out of her black almond eyes. “Oh. Ksenia, it’s not that.”
Her voice was low, broken. She was trying not to cry—obviously to protect me from seeing just how much harm I’d done, to her, to everyone who cared about Josh. I watched her for a minute, not saying anything, because how useless would it be to prattle I’m sorry, I’m so sorry? She was looking down again. Intermittent sweeps from a flashlight limned her dark-brown profile in golden strokes, caught in the twists of her hair. Out of everybody, I realized, she was the one I needed to forgive me. I just didn’t know how to make that happen.
“I know I screwed up,” I tried at last. Stupid or not, it was all I had. “Lexi, I’m so sorry.”
She was dying to get away from me. I could tell by the lift of her shoulders, the twist of her head. “It’s not that,” she repeated; Lexi’s voice is always soft, but now I could barely make it out. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
Xand waved to her from another group, just turning right along the edge of the gorge, and Lexi shot me an apologetic smile and practically ran after him. I knew then that, if I wanted her to forgive me, words weren’t going to cut it. Nothing counted except for finding Josh, bringing him back again. Memories kept projecting on the darkness: how hard Lexi had laughed after Josh hid out in the school all night, to write creep pervert scumbag in neon pink all over Sean Miller’s locker. Sean had pawed Lexi in the hallway, and the writing was Josh’s idea of revenge. He’d even added a few smiley faces with fangs, just to bring home the point. It’s totally not water-soluble, Lexi. He’ll have to scrape at it for hours! He’ll have to use his teeth!
Once we had Josh back, I knew how it would go. The rescued orphan boy would eat homemade vegan brownies and sop up hugs and then we’d all say to ourselves, You see? I’m not a bad person. After all. After everything.
we need to be happy while we can
By two in the morning everyone was peeling off, giving up for the night. There was a feverish tinge to the air, stars suppurating in the dark, and one person after another offered me a ride home or a place to stay, so I wouldn’t be alone. And I fended them off, one at a time, standing on the roadside near the gorge. Of course we’d searched the site of that party time and again, we’d paced between the trees in widening rings, kicked up the dirt outside the clearing. No one liked to say it, but after a while I realized they were testing for churned soil. For a shallow and hasty grave.
You know I won’t live that long, Kezzer, Josh had said. We need to be happy while we can. His voice kept incanting those words in my head while we searched, until I thought my flashlight beam could claw up the ground.
We’d found nothing: not a dropped cup, not a scarf, not even the scuffs of dancing feet. I was half aware, or more than half, that the lack of any sign of those strangers made me look bad, like I’d invented the whole thing. I could hear people murmuring doubtfully just out of view, behind the trunks or hidden by boulders, and I almost wished I’d faked some kind of evidence. I knew it had happened, I knew it was true, and I wanted them to feel it with me—quickly, before they stopped imagining that they’d seen pink dreadlocks hanging out of a van’s window—at a traffic light, that was it, down on Fulton Street.
But that wasn’t why I felt the need to search one more time, alone.
What was it in the night—something like a quality of reserve or shyness, something like a voice not quite ready to speak—that gave me the sense that the time wasn’t right for Josh to turn up, but that he might soon? That, even if he was injured or unconscious, the swarm of people stomping around and yelling for him might have scared him off?
No matter how irrationally, I thought I might have better luck alone. I sat down, cross-legged, just where I’d seen him squeezed by the two strangers, swaying with them. Muggy blue air; dripping stars snagged in the branches. Shrill intermittent wind.
“Josh?” I said. “It’s me. You can come out now. Even if you’re…”
But I didn’t know how to finish the sentence—what did I think he would be, if not a warmly smiling, chubby boy with dyed-red bangs and long wavy hair layered blond over chocolate? I felt like there was something I needed to say, but I couldn’t guess what. I gave up and waited. I felt the ground until its coolness smacked my own pulse back at my palms.
Some time went by, I couldn’t tell how much. My thoughts began to list in my head like foundering ships. My bowler hat tipped over my face.
Then I heard a voice crying out. I sprang to my feet still in a state of flawed, sleep-smudged consciousness, shoving my hat back, and spun in the direction it had come from: a mess of moonish trunks and slotted darkness, just like every other direction.
I knew the voice didn’t sound like Josh’s, not really. It was more like a little girl’s, distraught and weeping. But it didn’t feel like a meaningful distinction. In that darkness, anyone in trouble seemed like Josh to me. I went in pursuit.
I went in desperately, thrashing at the undergrowth and shouting. At first I completely forgot there was a flashlight in my pocket, and stumbled on in the moon-specked dark. The voice wailed again and I shoved forward, crying to her that I was coming, I was coming, and I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
; That was when I caught the side of my foot against a stone. My ankle twisted under me with a brisk twinge and I went down, onto my hip and then my ass. The back of my neck took a scraping thwack from a branch, and then I was sprawled against the sticky roots, gasping and laughing.
Because as I’d fallen the voice had come into focus in my head and I’d recognized that it wasn’t a sobbing child at all. Some kind of night bird, its call filtered through my longing for someone I could help. The bird cackled again and I wondered how I’d made it into something human, something that was almost my missing brother.
I turned on my flashlight, scooped up my fallen hat, dragged myself upright. The ankle wasn’t so bad, just tweaked enough to give little chirps of pain when I circled my foot. That was good, since I had to walk the three miles home.
Once I was alone in the lighted kitchen I tried calling Josh one more time, and heard the bells pealing. They made me sick. I needed sleep. I stretched out on the sofa near the front door instead of going to my room, just in case he came back.
In the morning the cops came rapping on the glass beside my head. Would I answer some questions.
Sure I would, Officer.
It felt like I’d heard them in my sleep: the things they were thinking. I felt like I’d been eavesdropping on their mental process in my dreams, so I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t ask what the problem was. I didn’t ask for anything, not even time to get changed. I’d gone to sleep in my clothes—a ruffled vintage tuxedo shirt, gray skinny jeans—and that was what I wore to the station. I probably stank.