by Nic Sheff
She takes another deep breath and exhales noisily. “I know that. But, I don’t know, it’s just so weird that it happened, like, right after that thing with you and me. Right after I left. I mean, wasn’t it after that?”
“Well, yeah, it was. But it’s just a coincidence.”
She rubs my arm a little. “I wanted to call you after I found out. I really did. Except . . . well . . . like I said, I thought you might be mad at me.”
“No, I was never mad at you—not ever.”
“I’m so happy to hear that,” she says, talking softer now. “I hope we can start hanging out again now that I’m back.”
I sit up straight and I’m not sure what to say, but I turn toward her and she’s leaning across the table, so I lean in, too, and then we kiss for real this time. Our mouths fit perfectly together, and I taste the warmth and sweetness of her and my body feels lifted off the ground.
We kiss like that until one of those kids from across the street whistles, like, “Woo-hoo,” at us.
“You wanna go?” she whispers at me, and I feel drunk or high or both.
We walk down the street together back toward the bus stop, and this time we are holding hands and leaning against each other, and it’s so strange because walking to the café we were just friends from long ago running into each other, and now we’re, like, a couple.
At least, I think we’re a couple.
I kiss her then, as if to ask her, and she kisses me back and she looks up at me and the fog is wet and thick around us and her eyes shine out and she smiles and I know the answer must be yes.
Only . . . only that can’t be the answer for me; not yet—not until I bring Teddy back home.
I stop and breathe and press the palm of my hand against my forehead.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “I just . . . I want this. I do. But . . . I can’t. Not right now.”
She tilts her head to one side. “But . . . but I thought you were better.”
“I am better. But it’s not that. I . . . I can’t talk about it too much. Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
I start to answer and then stop. As much as I want to talk to her about Teddy, I know that I can’t. She would try to stop me. She might even tell my parents. And that’s the last fucking thing I need.
None of them will understand. They’ll think I’m being reckless. And, anyway, I’m trying to keep them from dealing with the pain of all this. That’s the fucking point.
I can’t tell her.
So what I say is something completely fucking stupid.
“I just . . . uh . . . need to focus on my own stuff. I’m sorry.”
She looks up then, right into my eyes—taking hold of my hands in hers.
“Okay. Yeah, no, I get it.”
“You do?”
“Yeah . . . for sure.”
The bus lumbers up to the stop and the brakes exhale loudly and the door opens.
It’s her bus, the fifteen, not mine.
Eliza gets on board.
“See you tomorrow,” she tells me.
The doors close.
And the bus drives off.
22.
THERE’S NO LOCK ON my bedroom door, but that’s just the way the house was built; it has nothing to do with me.
I shut myself in and throw my backpack on the unmade bed. The light on the side table has been left on, but it’s fully dark outside, so I turn on the overhead light, too, sit down on the bed, and take out the pages.
My hands shake as I try to focus my eyes on the words and images. The photos are black-and-white copies, grainy. My eyes keep watering and I shiver, still not able to see clearly.
“Goddamnit,” I say.
I turn the pages over, upside down on the bed, and go up to the computer on my desk, putting on some music to try to calm down a little bit. The library is set to shuffle, and just by chance a John Lennon song plays and it is calming and I go back to the bed.
It’s a love song. John’s singing, Even if it’s just a day, I miss you when you’re away. I wish you were here today, dear Yoko.
Turning the pages back over, it looks as if the detectives have highlighted the names and addresses of the most likely suspects. The one sex offender on the list who fits Dotty Peterson’s description and drives a white Ford Explorer lives only three blocks from Ocean Beach, so that seems like a pretty damn good lead. And as I’m reading about the man’s alibi—the alibi that cleared him—I notice, unbelievably, that the cops got the date of the actual kidnapping wrong. No wonder Teddy’s never been found. These police are seriously incompetent. The date they’ve written is exactly one week later than the day in question. So the alibi of the man, Simon Tolliver, is totally meaningless.
That breeze comes clear and cool in my mind.
Half the junior class is taking a trip down to Ocean Beach tomorrow to clean up trash. Hopefully I can slip away for a minute to check out Tolliver’s house. For all I know, Teddy is there right now.
Reading more about Tolliver, though, I have to admit, I’m a little scared to go confront him. The guy sounds like a total psycho. And while the report states that he’s been compliant with his parole officer for almost a decade, he’d been in prison for fifteen years before that.
So he’s obviously a bad fucking dude. And honestly, even though I know I should go and scope out his house, I’m kind of scared about having anything to do with a crazy-ass psycho like that.
But I will.
I’ll go there tomorrow and I won’t get caught.
There’s a Joy Division song now playing on the computer speakers.
And then the door swings open and I jump a fucking mile—turning the pages from the police files over quickly and covering them, as casually as possible, with my backpack.
It’s Janey.
She bursts into my room, jumping onto the bed.
“Miles!” she shouts. “That movie was so good!”
I stand up and sit down and knock my bag and the papers back more so they fall off the other side of the bed and onto the ground.
“What movie was it?” I ask, hugging her to me. She smells like clean laundry and maple syrup.
“Moonrise Kingdom,” she tells me.
“I wanted to see that. Was it great?”
“So, so great. Where were you, anyway?”
“Nowhere,” I answer. “Just walking around.”
“We tried calling you.”
“Oh, yeah? I guess my phone was off.”
I pause for a moment, think, stare at the floor.
“Jane,” I say distractedly, “I know things have been hard around here. But . . . I just . . . It’s gonna get better. I promise. I’m going to fix everything.”
Her eyes open wide at me. “But everything is okay, isn’t it?”
“Sure, yeah, of course. But . . . you know what I mean.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about that.”
“No, you don’t worry. That’s what I’m saying.”
I am so close now to finding Teddy. This endless hell—this endless waiting—is almost over. I just wish I could tell her. I wish I could tell somebody.
But they will know it soon enough.
When I bring our brother home.
I kiss Jane on the forehead, and we go out together to eat the hamburgers they brought back from Bill’s Place on Clement.
The rain is falling outside, and I can hear it like static, loud across the rooftops.
Water drops bead and sweat from the cracked ceiling overhead.
But tonight we eat and we are happy.
Teddy is coming home.
23.
BY LATE MORNING THE rain has stopped.
The school has rented out a bus for us to tak
e down to the beach. It’s part of a community service project where each class has to go work somewhere in the city every month. Going to pick up trash at the beach is definitely one of the easier jobs. And thankfully, Eliza’s in tomorrow’s group, so I don’t have to worry about seeing her today.
Preston, too, is in tomorrow’s group.
But I do get Jackie with me. We’re sitting together on the bus, playing Words With Friends back and forth on her iPhone.
The sky is silvery gray as the sun breaks through the low-lying clouds in places.
Jackie has a hat pulled back on her head and a big parka zipped all the way up to just under her chin. It’s seriously cold, and the heat in the bus is broken, so we can see our breath when we talk. I have on a long-sleeve undershirt, a hooded sweatshirt, and my army jacket, but I’m still fucking freezing. The bus rattles and shakes as it snakes down the winding cliff road to Ocean Beach.
I’ve actually been avoiding coming here ever since Teddy was taken, just ’cause it’s been too painful, I guess. The day has replayed in my brain so many times, I didn’t want to be forced to think about it any more than I already do. Besides, there are plenty of other beaches to go to north of the city and on the bay.
But now, as we drive along the concrete breaker wall covered in graffiti—the ocean raging loud so we can hear it over the rumbling of the bus’s straining engine—I can’t help trying to pick out exactly which bathroom I locked myself in and where it was that I last saw my brother—somewhere out on the very edge of the shoreline.
Through the scratched hard plastic bus windows, spattered with mud and smeared with rain not yet dried, the rocky sand and windswept dunes look like images from some postapocalyptic dreamscape. The ocean seems to be moving in every direction at once, waves washing back out to sea from the sloping shoreline so they slam against the incoming breakers and spray up a hundred feet high.
The bus turns into the deserted parking lot past the entrance to the beach on Noriega, and then I become aware that Jackie has been talking to me for some time now, though I haven’t heard one thing.
“What?” I ask, turning back toward her.
She bites down on her lower lip and looks me over. “Weren’t you listening to me?”
“Yeah, I was . . . I just . . .”
She laughs at my inability to come up with anything. “Uh-huh. Sure. Are you all right?”
That question again.
Am I all right? Am I all right? Am I all right?
Yes.
Yes, I’m fucking all right. I know I am.
I’m better than all right.
I have hope now. I have hope that Teddy is just a few blocks from here.
And all the rest of it doesn’t matter.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, totally, I’m fine.”
She studies me a little more, as though not convinced.
“Hey,” I continue, “would you do me a favor? I’ve gotta go check something out up on 46th street for a second when we get split up into groups. Do you mind covering for me if anyone asks where I am?”
She remains skeptical. “What are you doing?”
“I just gotta sneak away for a little bit to check something out. It won’t take me long.”
Her eyes go narrow at me. “Yeah, sure. But what is it?”
There is a moment where I almost tell her. It would be such a relief.
Only I know I shouldn’t.
Jackie would worry just like Eliza would. She’d tell my parents and they would freak the fuck out. And then they’d all try to stop me.
I’m sure Dr. Frankel would tell me I’m fucking crazy for even considering doing this. Although he’d say it a whole lot more eloquently than that.
But what he doesn’t understand—and what nobody can possibly understand—is that this, doing this now, is the only chance at a sane, healthy life that I’m ever going to have.
So even if this Tolliver guy is a psycho, pedophile, fucking lunatic, I have to face him—and I have to find out. I can’t move on with my life until I do. I can’t move on until I bring Teddy home. Then I will finally be able to start over.
Telling Jackie is not an option.
So instead I just say, “Nothing. It’s a stupid errand I have to run.”
“During a school field trip?”
I nod. “Yeah. It’ll only take a second.”
She brings her shoulders up and then lets them drop again. “All right, Mie, I’ll try to cover for you.”
“Thanks.”
The chance for me to get away doesn’t come until after we’ve already been given gloves and plastic bags and little grabber tools so we don’t get stuck with hypodermic needles sifting through the sand. I bring my stuff up behind the public bathroom (not the same one I was in two years ago, I’m pretty sure) and try to hide it all as best I can behind the sea grass growing tall out of the cracked concrete.
I run fast across the Great Highway, dodging cars and not waiting for the light. No one calls after me.
The sky is clearing—or, at least, the sun is breaking through as the south winds blow the covering of clouds and fog farther inland. I put the hood of my jacket up over my head.
Simon Tolliver’s house is number 1921 46th Avenue, between Ortega and Pacheco Streets, just three blocks up from the beach. Honestly, it’s not what I expected. I guess in my mind I’d made the house up to be some creepy, run-down, dilapidated shack with rusty tools lying everywhere and taxidermy birds hung out front. But it’s not like that at all.
Actually, it’s a super nice–looking little Craftsman-style home with a pretty vegetable garden in front and a white picket fence surrounding the entire property. There is even a little trellised entranceway covered in purple morning glories and rosebushes in a tangle around the side gate.
It doesn’t look like the secret hideout of a deranged kidnapper.
But, then again, maybe he keeps it nice for exactly that reason. A little house like this would be above suspicion.
If he’s smart, this is exactly the kind of place he’ll live. And he must be smart if he’s managed to evade the police for over two years.
The buildings on either side of Tolliver’s are bigger, two-story Victorian-style town houses that are separated into upper and lower apartments, so it’s impossible to tell whether anyone is at home to see me sneaking around. I decide the best thing to do is just march right up to Tolliver’s front door and ring the bell. If he answers, I can always pretend I’m . . . what? Selling magazine subscriptions?
Something like that.
At least that way I’ll know for sure whether he’s home.
So I let myself in through the front entranceway and take a deep breath, feeling my hands and legs start to shake.
I walk jerkily past the planter boxes of squash and pumpkins and then up the uneven white wooden steps.
I press the buzzer and the doorbell sounds, echoing through the small house.
A dog barks in the distance.
I wait, holding my breath.
But no one comes.
The door remains closed.
Walking, then, slowly around the side of the house, I try to find a window I can see in through, but all the blinds are closed tight. Pressing my face up close to the clouded glass, I can just barely look into what turns out to be the bathroom, but that doesn’t help me any. The bathroom is clean. And I can make out the shower curtain printed with a map of the world done up in different colors.
Around the back of the house is a small yard bordered by a row of hedges at least six feet tall. There are patches of green grass, but it’s mostly all dead, and the stairs leading down from the back sliding glass doors are all splintered and broken. There is also, in the far corner, tucked up between the hedges and a low-hanging eucalyptus tree, an eight-by-ten-foot wooden shed—the roof covered in leaves an
d pine needles. The door is fastened shut with a lock, but the lock is left open. There is a dirty window smeared with something built high up on the structure. I can see movement against the glass—flashes of light in the darkness.
I imagine Teddy in there—tied up, gagged, trying to get free.
The clouds are racing past overhead so the shadows sweep across the yard and over the shed in the back, and I can feel my heart beating faster and faster in my chest, my whole body shaking badly so I have to hold my hands tightly together.
I get up to the shed and look in through the window, but it’s so dirty, I can’t see anything.
There is a noise, though, coming from inside, like newspapers being crumpled together and torn to pieces.
“Hello?” I whisper, pressing my ear up to the crack in the door. “Hello?”
Suddenly there is this feeling I get that someone is looking at me.
I swing around and freeze.
A dog, maybe fifty pounds, like some kind of border collie, is there, inching toward me, growling low and steady.
“H-h-hi, dog,” I say dumbly.
The dog growls louder, and I back up against the door of the shed.
“Easy now . . . easy.”
I get down on my knees on the damp ground. I avert my eyes and say, “Good dog. Nice, good dog.”
Shaking, I extend my hand out so I can feel the dog’s hot breath on the tips of my fingers.
The growling stops.
And then the dog’s nose presses up cold on the back of my hand.
“Jesus Christ,” I say, standing up.
I step back from the door and the dog comes over and lets me pet it for a second.
“Where the hell’d you come from?” I ask.
The dog then goes over to the shed and starts digging and pawing at the ground, whimpering.
I take one last look around before grabbing the lock out of the door and opening it wide.
“Hello?” I say loudly.
The dog goes rushing in ahead of me.
And then a whole shit ton of chickens goes flying and scattering back out.
The dog barks and barks and goes chasing after them, getting one by the neck and shaking it, and I yell, “Fuck!” closing the door just so at least a few of the goddamn things don’t get out. I manage to grab a particularly slow-moving chicken, but it pecks at me and squawks so loud, I can’t help but let it go again.