Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  I spent hours today thinking I’d lost my mind, but then a memory I’ve silenced for months began murmuring to me while I was loading the dishwasher. And now that I’m alone in the rosy night, that memory is getting louder, as if an orchestra of breaths and bells and marching steps were steadily approaching me. At the time it was all so utterly bewildering, it made such a havoc of reason and emotion, it was as if the whole town silently agreed to pretend it never happened. We conspired to brush the memory of it out of all our minds and never mention it again. But the fact is, this isn’t the first time that there have been inexplicable occurrences in connection with Joshua Korensky.

  He disappeared over nine months ago; that, everyone can agree on. The town threw itself into a frantic search for him; that, too, is part of our accepted history.

  The part that nobody likes to talk about is that bizarre interval when we all believed—was it only for twenty-four hours, or less, or more? In any case, it wasn’t very long—that Joshua had been found.

  It was the third night after he’d vanished, when everyone had started to give up, when there was a low rustle of insinuations that Ksenia must have killed him, that it must have been a crime of passion, and it seemed I was the only one convinced she was innocent. That the guilt, such as it was, belonged to me, or at least that it was shared between me and Joshua.

  For almost everyone, though, it seemed to be very, very easy to believe that a brusque, chilly foster-care girl like Ksenia—one taken from a mother who was approximately a prostitute and certainly an addict, one eventually raised by bighearted pillars of the community who should have known better—would have turned out to be a homicidal, compulsive liar.

  Xand knew how worried I was, so he didn’t wait to call me. My phone’s ring broke through my sleep at five in the morning. “Lexi! They found him! He’s—not totally fine, I guess, but he’s alive! They brought him to the hospital a few hours ago!”

  Maybe this was where the feeling of restless, relentless craziness began—when Xand’s voice scattered those words through my fading dream. Or maybe it had started earlier, on the night Josh went missing? Had everyone’s behavior not seemed just a shade unstable, distorted, in the days since then? Even halfway drowsing, I knew immediately who Xand meant. “Who found him?”

  “Kezz did! She called 911. He was back in the exact same place where they ran into that party, is the freaky thing, right where we searched a million times.”

  The day before Xand had said that he didn’t believe in the party, didn’t believe in those strangers Ksenia claimed she and Josh had met under the trees; there would be some kind of evidence, necessarily, if she were telling the truth. Apparently Josh’s return had made Xand change his mind.

  I breathed out. My sense of relief kept coming, unspooling like a thread; as Xand explained how the news had come to him, through Derrick’s mom, who worked in the emergency room, then through Derrick to Dylan, and Dylan to him, I kept feeling more and more that I had barely escaped from a horrible fate. So much tension slipped out of my muscles that I thought I might fall apart.

  I interrupted. “Can we go see him?”

  “Visiting hours aren’t until noon,” Xand said. “Noon to three. I’m going to head over there as soon as they’ll let us in. And maybe you could make those vegan brownies?”

  I remembered something. “I promised I’d go see Grandma Claire. She bought matinee tickets in the city for me and Marissa, and then we’re all supposed to go shopping.” At that moment, it didn’t seem so urgent anymore to reach Josh as quickly as possible. He was back, he needed rest, and he would be around from now on. More than that, I was still just a touch ashamed of what I’d done, even now that it seemed we’d been spared the consequences I’d been dreading; I wanted to see Josh, I truly did, but since I had such a good excuse … maybe not right away. “I’ll send you the brownie recipe. You need coconut oil. And could you tell Josh I’ll come see him as soon as I can?”

  “Sure,” Xand said. “And Kezzer too? Now that you don’t have anything to feel bad about, you’re not going to keep avoiding her, right?”

  I hesitated, just for a moment. “And Ksenia. Yes. Tell her I’ll call.”

  I never liked calling her Kezzer, though almost everyone, even the Delbos, had picked up the nickname from Josh. It sounded so harsh to me—and even if she seemed like a harsh person sometimes, it didn’t feel right to emphasize that sharpness and roughness over all her other qualities. She was also luminous, precise, and fragile, like frost-flowers vining up a windowpane in January. And my mom’s mom, Grandma Claire, is the only other person I’ve ever known who can look so perfectly elegant, so composed, no matter what she’s wearing.

  Ksenia’s real name captured more of her personality, I thought.

  Marissa and I got up half an hour later and took the train into New York, and spent the afternoon with our grandma; we always followed the same program, lunch, the theatre, sundaes, shopping, then a late evening of movies and takeout at her condo in Brooklyn Heights. My dad comes from a poor background, but my mom’s parents are driven and very successful, even a bit snobby, and sometimes refer to themselves as African-American aristocracy, with just the lightest touch of irony. They would have been appalled to know that I had a friend as low-class as Ksenia, and I had never mentioned her to them, because how could I describe her without lying? “What are her parents like?” would have been their very first question. I love Grandma Claire far too much to listen to her call Ksenia trailer trash, and I knew that was the phrase she would use.

  Josh’s parents had at least had the good taste to die, the front half of their car crushed in a rockslide while their four-year-old son wailed, barely scratched, in the backseat. So it was safe to allude to him in passing, now and then.

  Once that afternoon Xand texted me: Brownies came out great! Josh says yum!

  Marissa and I got through the whole day without saying a single word about the drama that had swept through our town—my little sister is exceptionally sensitive about knowing which topics to pick, and which to leave alone—and the next morning we got back on the train and went home. It’s a long ride, but I thought if I rushed I could make it to the hospital for the very end of visiting hours. And that I really should show up, even if I only had ten minutes, or Josh would be terribly hurt.

  My mom met us at the station, but she agreed to drop me off at the hospital. “I don’t think that boy is there, though.”

  “You mean he already went home?” I said.

  She hesitated. “I’ve … been hearing different things, sweetie. Why don’t you go ahead and check? If you don’t find him, it’s not much of a walk back.” She let me out at the corner and I turned up the wide front walkway.

  Xand was sitting on a bench just outside the entrance, a row of red and saffron lilies blooming just behind him. There was a look on his face that I had trouble sorting out, because it seemed to be mixed from too many emotions, with a morose crumpled mouth and pinched, angry brows and a glaze in his eyes almost as if he were drugged. Whatever it meant, it couldn’t be good.

  He saw me, jumped up, and rushed to catch me in his arms. “Lexi, Lexi, Lexi,” Xand breathed out. “Please don’t go in there! It’s not safe!”

  “It’s not safe in the hospital?” I asked. “Xand, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  He leaned back to look at me, one hand curled on my cheek. His gaze seemed to clear, to gust like sideways wind, to cloud again.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said at last, though his voice sent shivers down my back. There was a wavering frenzy to his tone, a madness that stirred my perception of the flowers, the broad glass doors, the reception desk’s tan lip. “I just mean—that Josh isn’t here. Don’t go in.”

  “You mean they released him?” I asked, but from Xand’s awful, flickering agitation I knew it couldn’t be that; something terrible must have happened. God, had Josh died in the night? “Xand, tell me what’s going on!”

  “Nothing,” Xand i
nsisted. “Nothing is going on. It’s just that—they never found Joshua, after all. He’s still missing. They said Kezzer was here overnight, but she went home this morning.”

  “What do you mean, they never found him?” I asked, and there was a trembling unreality to the view, as if I could see every molecule in those red lilies shaking loose and wandering into hysteria. “But you saw him, Xand! You texted me!”

  Xand hitched up his shoulders and looked away.

  “Josh wasn’t actually here. I just asked at the desk, and they said there’s no record that he was ever admitted.” Xand delivered those words with what I can only describe as a desperate finality, like he hoped they might settle everything.

  “But—look at me, Xand! You saw Josh, right? You talked to him? You said he liked the brownies!”

  Xand kept his gaze stubbornly averted. He was hyperventilating and I could feel his legs vibrating against mine.

  “Xand!”

  “I thought I saw him, Lexi,” Xand croaked at last. “I thought—but he was never here, okay? When I said Kezzer found him, I was—just wrong.”

  “So why was Ksenia here, if Josh wasn’t?”

  No answer.

  “I’m going to ask the receptionist myself, Xand. If you thought you were watching Josh eat brownies, then that means he was here. Maybe they just—mixed up his records somehow.”

  Xand tightened his grip on me and his gaze finally flashed into my eyes. “Please don’t, Lexi. Don’t go in that building!”

  “But why not?”

  He stared down again. His cheeks were bright and hot.

  “You think, if Josh could vanish from the hospital, then anybody else could too? That if I walk up to that desk, you’ll see me melt right into the floor?”

  Xand heaved a deep, tremulous breath. “Joshua was never in there, Lexi. Kezzer never actually found him. Maybe—that was just a lie she told 911. Or maybe she’s having some kind of mental breakdown, and she really believed it.”

  “But you believed it!”

  “Please, Lexi. Please. Let’s just get out of here.”

  Maybe I should have refused; maybe it was a moment of weakness on my part, that I didn’t wrench myself out of Xand’s arms, march up to the desk, and demand to know what had become of my friend. But Xand’s madness was sliding into me; I took in his shivers, and the rush of his fear made my blood course faster. How did I feel such dread on a sunlit walkway in June? The incoherence of it all shimmered on the pavement and turned the bright petals into monstrous flicking tongues.

  I let Xand lead me away. I let him hold me and caress my hair while I cried my eyes out on his bedroom floor. I was grateful for the comfort then. On some suppressed level, I was even relieved that Xand had been there to protect me, though I didn’t know from what. Somehow the amazing perversity of what had happened—that Josh was found and unfound again, seen and unseen—deepened my sense that he must have died. When I imagined staring down at Josh’s empty hospital bed, an icy shiver crawled through me. I had the irrational impression that, if Xand hadn’t stopped me outside, I might have caught some ghostly infection of the mind.

  And I wasn’t the only one who suspected that Josh had appeared after his death. Later that night I talked to Eleanor Leigh; she thought she’d visited Josh in the hospital too; she thought he’d seemed almost fine, even if his face was bruised; he’d eaten chocolates with her, laughed at her stories of the search.

  “But he was never even there, Lexi. That whole time? How crazy is that? So you know what I think? I think what we all saw was Josh’s ghost.”

  So was that what I saw earlier today? Did I follow a ghost onto Whistler Drive?

  If Josh is nothing but an apparition now, then I suppose that would explain why he hasn’t done anything new with his hair in so long.

  * * *

  It’s already after two, and I know I’ll never sleep tonight. I watch the mauve dusk, how it suspends cloudlike above me. So shapeless, so smudged, as if someone were hard at work erasing everything I know of reality.

  And then I lean out of bed and reach for my phone, and touch a number that was disconnected months ago. It rings, and it comes to me that his number almost surely has been assigned to someone else by now; it might belong to anyone, anywhere, in the quiet of their own private night. I’m about to embarrass myself by waking up a perfect stranger, just because I felt like indulging an impulse that I have to admit is insane. I shake myself and move my thumb to hang up the call.

  “Lexi!” Josh’s voice bursts into my ear. “I am so, so happy you called! Oh, you have no idea how much we’ve missed you.”

  “Josh?” Am I dreaming? “Is this real? Did I actually see you today?”

  “I—didn’t have time to stop and talk. I knew once we started there would be way too much to say, is the thing, but I still felt terrible about leaving you hanging like that. But you know once we start talking for real, we’ll just go on for years.”

  It’s really his voice. Isn’t it? Has unreality braided itself into the radio waves streaming through my phone?

  “That’s what you’re worried about? I thought you were dead!”

  A pause. “I don’t know if you can understand this, Lexi. But there were so many choices that I didn’t have. I know I probably hurt people, but please—remember that you don’t know everything. Try not to blame me!”

  “Do—have you told your foster parents? That you’re all right?”

  Silence.

  “If you haven’t told them, Josh, then you know I have to!”

  “Don’t do that.” Quickly. “At least, don’t tell anybody yet, Lexi, okay? Because you might change your mind once you see me!”

  “Once I see you.” Will Josh warp the fabric of the world again, be found and unfound, witnessed and obliterated, the way he was before? Because even if he’s begging me not to blame him, I think I do. Why did he stay silent for so long? How could there possibly be a legitimate reason for his wounding everyone this way? I’ll still take my share of the responsibility—it’s a point of pride with me to own my choices, both good and bad—but now I’d say the lion’s share of the guilt belongs to him. “Do you know about Ksenia?”

  “We really shouldn’t discuss this on the phone,” Josh says, a bit fretfully. “Lexi, just come talk to me in person. Today at five? But you have to promise you’ll come alone!”

  I give up; whatever is happening, however unsettled my mind might be, there’s nothing to be gained from resistance. “Where?”

  Silence. Did Josh hang up? Did I talk to him at all? Then I hear him sigh.

  “Meet me at the gorge.”

  a velvety, minuscule death

  “Lexi?” Marissa says in the morning, when our parents are out of the kitchen—and how wide and deep her eyes are, watching me, and how shy is her hand, reaching for mine. “Did something happen?”

  “It’s okay, Mar-Mar,” I tell her. “Just—I had an argument with Xand. I think I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore. These things happen when you get older, and it’s not anybody’s fault.”

  She nods. “That’s what Daddy said. He said I shouldn’t say Xand’s name unless you mentioned him first. But I meant something different.”

  You have to watch out for this one; she’s small even for eight, and quiet, and wistful, but there’s no telling how far she’s seeing into you at every passing moment. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s like you’re not seeing us. You’re looking at something else.”

  I’m looking into the shadows of my own room last night, into that moment where Josh’s voice came gushing out of my phone. The call was there in my phone’s history when I checked earlier, it certainly went out, but possibly I sleep-dialed and only dreamed up the conversation that followed.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I think it was just a nightmare.”

  She comes over and nestles against my side, rests her little head on my shoulder. Just for a moment before my mom calls us, and we
have to leave for school. I’m tempted to ask if I can skip, which is not something that usually would be tolerated in my family—but at this point class for me is just a formality, and what difference would one day make?

  Then I pull myself together and go—more than anything so I can watch and listen. If anybody else sighted Joshua, or heard his voice where it shouldn’t be, then the gossip will be all over school.

  I pause once in the quad, and call the same number that conjured up Josh last night. Three harsh tones, and then once again there’s the old recording saying that the number has been disconnected. That seems to be solid evidence for my theory that what I heard last night was only in my mind.

  And then what about what I saw?

  Xand corners me once, all too predictably. “We need to talk.”

  “You mean, you do,” I say. “And I believe the verb you’re searching for is want, Xand. You want to talk to me, but you’re not going to until I decide I’m ready. Acting pushy won’t make that happen any sooner.”

  “Why are you treating me like this? I’ve been so completely loving and supportive—and I knew you were still upset about Kezzer—but I really thought with us everything was fine.” His voice is rising. I’ve always thought of Xand as basically one of the good guys, maybe with some issues but generally considerate, generally kind. He’s always been a bit too judgmental for my taste, a bit smug, and there’ve been things I let slide before. Maybe too many. Now I’m wondering if I’m going to wind up with a stalker.

  “I’m not ready to talk to you, Xand. Your job for now is to work on respecting that.” I can see the struggle in his face; he truly means to be sensitive, to do the right thing, but at the same time—he wants what he wants, and he expects to get it.