I Hope You're Listening

by Tom Ryan

  17.

  I hear Burke yelling after me. “Dee! Are you okay? Delia!”

  I turn. “I’m fine,” I manage to call out. “I’ll text you later!”

  He hesitates, and I can tell he’s considering following me, but I turn away and continue to the edge of the woods, and he must think better of it. When I glance back again a few seconds later, he’s still just standing there, watching me leave.

  When I finally step out of the trees, it takes me a moment to realize where I am. I’m in a backyard one door over from my old house, Layla’s house. This one has obviously been neglected for a while, if the boarded windows and dilapidated back deck are any indication. I glance across at my house—Layla’s house—and realize with a shock that there’s a couple standing in the kitchen window, staring out through their backyard at the woods and the random collection of people wandering through the trees.

  I freeze, and then the woman turns her head and looks out the side window at me. It’s Layla’s mother. She sees me, but her expression doesn’t change; she just stares blankly at me before turning and putting her head back on her husband’s shoulder.

  I jerk out of my trance and hurry out of the yard and onto the street.

  “Delia?” The voice comes out at me from nowhere and I jump. “Delia Skinner?” A man, probably in his late thirties, approaches me, smiling, his hand reached out to shake. I realize now that he’s been standing on the sidewalk waiting for me.

  “Who are you?” I ask. I don’t have the time or the energy to be polite.

  His smile doesn’t fade, but he drops his hand. I realize that he’s holding a notebook in the other one. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Jonathan Plank with The Brighton City Vanguard.”

  “You’re a reporter?”

  He nods, and he looks almost sheepish. “Yeah, I’m here with the other media.” He jabs a finger at his notebook, then gestures back to the cluster of news vans and well-coiffed men and women who are milling about holding microphones as if waiting to go onstage for their chance at karaoke.

  “You all travel in a pack?” I ask, noticing them for the first time.

  “No,” he says. “We just kind of end up collecting together wherever there’s a development, and right now this search is the most interesting thing happening with this story.”

  Story. I want to say it’s not a story; it’s a life, a bunch of lives, but I realize how hypocritical that would be, and so I keep my mouth shut, wondering what he wants from me. He must realize I’m not going to just start talking to him, and so he clears his throat.

  “I heard someone call after you,” he says. “I was just over here trying to collect my thoughts, and I heard that guy call your name.”

  “I’m just leaving,” I say.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asks. I don’t, but he doesn’t wait for my answer. “I wouldn’t think so. You were so small, and it was such a crazy time.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, although I’m starting to get the idea.

  “I was here,” he says. “Ten years ago. I’d just started at the Vanguard, and they sent me in to do a series of stories on the aftermath of the disappearance. I mean, I was here when it was happening, but I came back a year later. I came to your house, your new house. You and your father were going inside from the car. I think you’d been grocery shopping.”

  “I didn’t talk to any reporters,” I say. “I was a minor. Still am a minor. You shouldn’t know my name, let alone be talking to me.”

  “I know that,” he says, “but your name was common knowledge among all of us back then. This is a small town. We weren’t allowed to mention you by name in our stories, but we were allowed to print comments from your family if they came willingly. I tried calling, emailed both of your parents, talked to the neighbors, but nobody would give me the time of day.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you now either,” I tell him, turning away.

  “They’ll find out,” he says. I stop, waiting for him to finish. “Someone will make the connection between this case and the Sibby Carmichael case, and then they’ll come looking for you.”

  “You haven’t told them?” I ask. I glance past him at the news crews lined up, waiting for something sexy to film. I notice for the first time that he doesn’t quite fit their image. In his rumpled clothes, gripping his grubby little notebook, he looks more like a substitute teacher than an ambitious reporter.

  “No. So far nobody has made the connection, and to tell you the truth, that gives me a leg up on them. Talk to me. Just do the one interview, and we’ll call it an exclusive. That’ll keep the rest of the vultures from hunting you down.”

  My mouth drops at his audacity. “I don’t have anything to do with this,” I say. “And I don’t want to talk to anyone. It’s not my style.”

  He looks like he’s trying to decide whether it’s worth pushing me further, but then his eyes shoot past me, and I turn to see my old neighbor Mrs. Rose standing in the half-open doorway of her house, just a few feet back from us.

  “Delia?” she calls out. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Rose,” I say, deeply grateful for her timing.

  “Come in for some cookies, will you?”

  She doesn’t need to ask me twice. I move toward her porch.

  “Wait,” says Plank. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a card, hands it to me. “If you decide you want to talk, call me. I’ll be in town for a while.”

  I take his card and shove it into my pocket without looking at it. Then I turn and walk up Mrs. Rose’s steps and follow her inside without looking back.

  Mrs. Rose has been living on this street since this development was first created. She and her husband bought the house when it was built, and after he died, she stayed. I never met Mr. Rose. By the time I was old enough to remember, he was dead and she was the nice old lady on our street. She liked to sit outside on her porch, drinking iced tea and watching us kids play. On Halloween, she would have special bags of treats for all of the neighborhood kids.

  When I walk into the house, I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia. Her kitchen looks exactly the same as it always has: pink-and-turquoise wallpaper, checkerboard tiles on the floor, the giant Boston fern hanging in the corner between two windows. All of it brings up long-hidden memories.

  Against one wall is a chrome table with a cheerful yellow top, and I have a sudden image of sitting at this table while Mrs. Rose poured tea and chatted. Was I with my mother? It couldn’t have been; my mother wasn’t the “hang out with old ladies and drink tea” type.

  Then it hits me. I didn’t visit with my mother. I visited with Sibby and her mother. I remember sitting in the living room with Sibby, no television, flipping through the books on the shelves, mostly romances and travel stories, playing with her little dog. Turning back to the kitchen door as Mrs. Rose entered with a plate of warm cookies, smiling.

  But as I glance around the room, the vibrancy of the colors dims, and I realize that the kitchen is actually much dingier than I remember. The smell is different too. Not the warm spice of cookies and the soft powder of an old lady’s bedroom, but a sour, dank smell—the scent of decay and neglect.

  Mrs. Rose gestures for me to sit, then grabs a kettle from the stove and walks over to the sink to fill it. “What did that man want?” she asks. There’s no attempt to catch up; she talks as if I step into her house every day, as if the last time we’ve spoken wasn’t almost a decade ago.

  “He’s a reporter,” I say, dropping gratefully into a chair at her small chrome and Formica table. I remember the table, too, as the fanciest I’d ever seen. The speckled, gleaming, lemon-yellow top, the shiny, grooved chrome edge and the metal maple leaves applied halfway down each leg. But now the yellow surface is stained and chipped, and the chrome around the edge is rusty. When I lean forward to put my chin in my hands, the table wobbles and I quickly pull back and sit up straight in my cha
ir.

  “Careful with the table,” says Mrs. Rose, walking across to put a plate of cookies in front of me. “One of the legs is loose, so you can’t put too much weight on it.”

  She sits across from me and waits as I pick a cookie up from the plate. It’s store bought, not the warm homemade ones from my memory, but it’s good, and I realize I’m hungry. I inhale the first one and reach for another, and Mrs. Rose smiles, as if this is what she’s been waiting for.

  “A reporter,” she repeats, picking up the loose thread. “Lots of reporters around these days. Reminds me of when that little girl went missing. Carmichael girl. Did you know her?”

  I stare at her, wondering if she’s joking, but she doesn’t look like she’s joking. She just looks a bit spacey, as if she’s trying to place a memory. Could she really not remember what happened?

  “Yeah,” I say. “We were good friends.”

  “She lived across the street,” she says, sounding pleased that she’s made the connection. “And you lived a couple of doors over from me.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “She and I visited you once, I think. With her mother maybe?”

  She frowns. “I don’t know, dear. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “You had a little dog?”

  Her eyes brighten, and she reaches out to rap the table twice. “I did indeed. I did. Tippy. If you remember Tippy, you must be right. You must have been here after all. It’s been seven years since Tippy died. My husband brought him home for me, a gift, then he up and died six months later. Not sure which one of them I miss the most.”

  It’s a very sad thing to say, but she sounds almost cheerful about it.

  “Come with me,” she says, standing up, not giving me an option to refuse.

  I step after her into the living room, and I see for the first time that the entire place is packed with stuff. Cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly on top of each other, piles of magazines, clear garbage bags stuffed with blankets and sheets and clothes. The only clear surface in the room is a ratty-looking old armchair that’s been shoved into a corner, directly opposite a huge old TV built into a wooden cabinet. Mrs. Rose, I realize, has become a hoarder.

  She doesn’t seem to register my discomfort at this state of things. Instead, she continues down a hallway, and after a moment, I follow. The hallway is also full of stuff, boxes and plastic cartons and overflowing bookshelves. She pushes open a door, and we walk into a small bedroom, equally crammed. Where does she find this stuff? I wonder.

  “Tippy,” she says, and I realize that she’s standing next to a small framed photograph of a tiny white dog.

  “Oh yeah!” I say with forced cheerfulness, trying to hide the weirdness of the scene.

  She gazes fondly at the photo for another few seconds, then her gaze shifts to the window. She pulls back the curtain and peeks out, then beckons me over with a finger, as if she’s about to tell me a secret.

  “Look out here,” she says.

  I join her at the window and realize we’re looking out into the backyard I just walked through. The empty beige split-level that sits on the other side of Mrs. Rose’s house from my old house. The DaQuinzios used to live there, but I think they moved out a few years after we left the neighborhood, and from the looks of it—broken glass, a sagging roof, and stained siding—it hasn’t had anyone living in it for quite a while.

  “It’s been empty for years,” she says. “The police were very interested in it.”

  I perk up. “They were?”

  She nods. “They spent a lot of time in there after they realized that girl was missing.”

  I look at her, wondering if she means Layla, or if she’s still stuck in the past, thinking of Sibby. She seems to know what I’m thinking, because she says, “The new one. The family who just moved in a couple of months ago.”

  “The Gerrards,” I say, and she nods.

  “Nice family. The father saw me trying to clear off my step one day and came over to help right away. Told me to let him know if I needed help with anything, so I asked him to come back and move some things around for me. Too many boxes. Hard to get rid of things. He brought the girl with him, and I gave her some cookies. Smart little thing.”

  I glance back out the window at the empty house next door. “What were the police doing in the house next door?” I ask.

  “Not rightly sure,” she says. “I watched them from here. They were in and out of the back door. Back and forth through my backyard too.”

  I can see that underneath the deck that juts out from the back of the DaQuinzios’ split-level, there’s a small utility door. It’s mostly sheltered from view, and from that door, it would only be a few steps across Mrs. Rose’s driveway, into her backyard, and into my old house, where the Gerrards live.

  It also doesn’t escape my notice how easy it would be to then take someone back through the shrubs and bushes in Mrs. Rose’s wildly overgrown yard and straight into the woods. There’s no question that the empty house would have made taking Layla a lot easier.

  She nods. “I pretended I wasn’t listening, but I was. They think that girl was taken into that house first, then whisked away into the woods.” She leans in toward me conspiratorially. “They think the kidnapper might have used my yard.”

  Beyond the back of the two yards, I can still see people milling through the forest. On the street, I’m sure, there are still reporters. I wonder if that man, Jonathan Plank, is still standing on the sidewalk, waiting for me to come outside.

  I step away from the window and sit down on the bed, suddenly exhausted, weary at what waits for me outside. Mrs. Rose lets the curtain drop and looks at me, concerned.

  “You look tired, dear,” she says.

  I nod. “Yeah. I am. I’m just…”

  “Why don’t you lie down and have a little nap?” she says. “I’m sure this has been quite a day for you.”

  “Oh I couldn’t,” I say. “I should really go home.” But even as I protest, I find myself lying down, putting my head on the pillow, and it must be only seconds before I’ve fallen into a deep sleep.

  18.

  Sibby is sitting beneath the window, cross-legged, playing with the little white dog.

  I sit up in bed and prop myself on my elbows, and she looks up at me, smiling.

  “This dog is dead,” she says. It barks at her, agreeing.

  “You haven’t grown up,” I tell her. “You look the same as you did then.”

  She giggles and stands up. “Your memory is messed up,” she says. “Watch. I’ll show you how old I really am.”

  She moves toward the door.

  “Wait!” I say, panicked. “Don’t go!”

  She smiles at me. “I’ll be right back. I just need to change, so you can see how different I am now.”

  She steps out of the room, and the door closes with a little click. I glance at the floor and realize the dog is gone.

  “Sibby?” I whisper.

  I get out of bed, stepping carefully, quietly. I don’t want to wake up Mrs. Rose. I don’t want Sibby to know that I’m following her.

  I open the door and step through, but I’m not in the hallway. I’m in my bedroom. It’s dimly lit, just the light of my laptop glowing through the gloom. I sit down in front of it and put my headphones on, then pull my microphone toward me across the desk. I tap the mic, which sends a hollow echo into my ears, then press record.

  “This is Radio Silent,” I begin. “I hope you’re out there, Sibby. I hope you’re listening.”

  Something is off. I stop recording and return to the beginning of the timeline, pressing play.

  The voice that speaks back at me is a child’s voice. My own, seven years old. Unfiltered.

  I jerk awake, slapped with panic as I take in my unfamiliar surroundings, then a long let-out breath as I remember where I am. My phone tells me I’ve been asleep for over two hours, and there’s a text from Burke asking if I’m okay. I’ll text him back later.

  Mrs
. Rose is in the living room, sitting in front of the television, watching some stupid game show. She looks up as I step into the room and smiles.

  “Thank you,” I say. “For letting me sleep.”

  “That’s quite all right, dear. We all need a good nap now and then.”

  I glance past her at the picture window that looks out onto the street. The news vans are gone, as are the throngs of vehicles from earlier today.

  “Is the search over?” I ask.

  “Seems to be,” she says, not taking her eyes from the TV. “I doubt they found anything, or it would have been on the news.”

  “Well,” I say, “I think I should probably get home.” I wonder if I’m being rude, just picking up and leaving like this when she’s been so kind, but Mrs. Rose seems completely content where she is.

  “It was nice to see you, Delia,” she says. “Come by anytime.”

  As I follow the narrow path between boxes and bags and piles of stuff to get to the door, I think with a twinge of guilt that it’s unlikely I’ll be back. I can only imagine how crowded with crap her basement must be if there’s this much stuff overflowing in the living area of the house.

  It’s started to snow by the time I get outside. Tiny, sparkling molecules puncturing the crisp, dry, suddenly very cold air. I remember something my mother used to say—little flakes, big snow—and I wonder if that means we’re in for a dump.

  I pull my phone out and see that I’ve just gotten a text from my father.

  Heading out to pick up the boys and take them to this afternoon’s game. Mom working late. Lunch in the fridge.

  As I walk home, I realize I feel more rested and relaxed than I have all week.

  It doesn’t last.

  As I round the corner onto my street, I notice a news van parked outside my house. I stop in my tracks, wondering if I can turn back without being noticed, but it’s too late. The passenger door opens and a flash of red swirls toward me.

  “Delia Skinner?” Quinlee Ellacott, moving astonishingly fast down the icy sidewalk for someone in heels, approaches with her microphone thrust out in front of her like a sword. Behind her, a young woman gets out of the driver’s seat, hoisting a camera over her shoulder and hurrying to keep up.