I Hope You're Listening

by Tom Ryan

  My skin crawls as I register the predatory look in Quinlee’s eyes. Has she made the connection between me and the podcast, or is this just an awful coincidence? I put my head down and duck past her, moving toward my front door, but she and the cameraperson spin around on their heels and follow me.

  “Delia!” Quinlee yells. “Dee? Do you prefer Dee? People are wondering, do you think this new case is somehow connected to the disappearance of Sibby Carmichael? Are you worried for your safety?”

  I realize that Quinlee has deftly stepped around so that she’s now on my other side, in the middle of the sidewalk to my front door. Her camera operator is also good at this, and together the two of them duck and weave, blocking me from my path, like a couple of sheepdogs.

  “Excuse me,” I mutter, trying to move past her. With practiced agility, she walks backward down the sidewalk, leaving me no room to get around.

  “Delia, what do you remember about that day in the woods? Do you have any information that could help Layla Gerrard?”

  “You can’t use my name,” I say. “I was a minor then, and I’m still a minor now.”

  She smiles, and the effect is of a predator honing in on prey. “Delia, darling, you know that the internet is a wild, chaotic place, right? You’re absolutely right that I can’t use your name in my broadcasts, but I can’t help it if someone takes it on themselves to drop your name into the comments or quote tweets it out along with one of my videos. Privacy is dead, sweetheart. You’re far too interesting to stay hidden.”

  “You’re an awful person,” I say. “Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

  “I’m just doing my job,” she says, taking a half step toward me. “I’m giving people the news, and like it or not, you’re part of the news. Come on, Delia. Let me interview you. We’ll blur your face. We’ll even alter your voice.”

  The thought that my voice could be altered and sent out into the world terrifies me. What if the effect is similar enough that someone connects me to the Seeker? My lower jaw starts to shake uncontrollably. I’m blank. I want to get away from here, but I don’t have the will to push her out of the way.

  The noise comes out of nowhere. A long bellow that seems composed of three sounds at once, a low guttural moan, an insistent holler, and a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek. Quinlee reaches up and yanks her earpiece out, a horrified grimace on her face, her microphone dropping to the ground next to her. She scrambles to her knees to pick it up, and I notice the camerawoman glance past me and then hurrying to get out of the way.

  The noise continues, and as awful as it is, I’m so grateful for it that I don’t mind if it keeps going all day. I turn around and realize what I’ve been hearing. A distinctive blue and silver Nova is crawling down the street toward me, and Sarah Cash is behind the wheel with a determined grimace on her face, pressing insistently on the horn. She stops next to me and opens her window.

  “You coming or what?” she yells over the sound of the horn.

  She doesn’t need to ask me twice. I hurry around the car and slide into the passenger seat.

  As Quinlee hurries toward the car, her camera operator close behind, Sarah presses down on the horn again.

  “Duck down,” she says. “Don’t give them anything they can use.”

  I take her advice, crouching forward and putting my head in my hands. She presses on the gas, and we lurch forward. As we pass the news van, she gives another quick blare of the horn, and then we’re around the corner and off.

  “You’re cool,” she says. “We’re out of the minefield.”

  I sit up, intending to respond, but the words don’t come to me, and it’s only now that I realize that I’m trembling. She glances over at me and shakes her head.

  “What an asshole,” she says. “As if it wasn’t crystal clear that you didn’t want to talk to her. Not that it makes a whole lot of difference to the leeches. You want a smoke or something?”

  I manage to shake my head. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. I’m glad that Sarah doesn’t say anything while I collect myself. When I open my eyes again, she’s cruising along Main Street, one hand thrown casually over the steering wheel, the other at her head, fingers running through her hair.

  “I didn’t realize you smoked,” I say.

  “I don’t,” she says. “It just seemed like the right thing to ask.”

  I laugh, surprised that I’m finding anything funny right now. “Thanks,” I say. “Seriously. I should have been able to just walk around her, but I froze.”

  “Well, at least she didn’t get anything she can use,” she says. She presses on the horn twice quickly, releasing two blasts of noise. “They don’t make car horns obnoxious like they used to. So where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Let’s just drive,” she says, “and see where we end up.”

  I’m relieved that Sarah doesn’t ask me about what happened, as we drive out of town. Instead, she hands me her phone and tells me to pick out whatever I want to listen to, and as I skim through her music, happy for the distraction, she talks to me. It’s not like she’s trying to fill up an awkward silence; instead, she’s easy, smooth, and comfortable to talk to, as if there’s nothing weird about what just happened. As if having a sensationalistic news reporter show up on your doorstep is something that happens to all of us every few months or so.

  About ten miles out of town, she slows and pulls off at a rest stop, a gas station with a diner built into the side.

  “Come on,” she says. “My treat.”

  We navigate around the slushy puddles that have collected against the parking lot curb. My boots are frosted with white already from the buildup of salt.

  Inside, the diner is warm and comforting, almost empty. Old country music is playing on the stereo, and we slide into a booth that’s up against a wide window that catches the cold winter sun and turns it into a warm greenhouse of a space. When the waitress, an elderly woman who strolls over to the table in her own damn time, offers menus, Sarah looks at me.

  “You hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  She smiles at the waitress but holds out her hand to refuse the menus.

  “Just a couple of coffees, please.”

  The waitress walks away without comment. A moment later, she walks back with a pot of coffee and reaches in to flip our mugs right-side up. With a practiced flourish, she reaches in with the pot and fills us each up, then walks away without a word.

  “Delightful,” says Sarah, holding the mug to her face and inhaling deeply. “Garbage coffee is my favorite.”

  I take a sip. It’s superhot and bitter, not nearly as good as the coffee they serve at Fresh Brews, or the stuff my parents make for that matter. But Sarah is obviously enjoying hers so much that I can’t help but smile.

  She puts her mug back down on the table and cups her hands around it, warming them.

  “So. You going to tell me what happened to you?” she asks, staring across the table at me.

  I drop my head, wondering how to even begin with a question as loaded as that. I half expect her to laugh, to apologize for her phrasing, tell me she didn’t mean to say it that way, but when I look up across the table at her, she’s still looking at me intently, and I realize that she meant the question exactly the way she asked it.

  “Do you remember when you asked me about the girl who went missing ten years ago?” I begin.

  She nods, clearly curious about where I’m going with this.

  “Sibby was my best friend,” I say. “I was there when she went missing.”

  I have to stop for a moment to think about how to begin because I realize that I’ve never had to explain this to anyone. Everyone in this town, everyone in my whole life, has always known what happened to me.

  Sarah stares at me, waiting for me to continue. I take a breath, and then for the first time in ten years, I tell my story.

  19.

  TEN YEARS
EARLIER

  This far into the forest, things are quiet and still. The wind moves lightly along the tops of the trees, so that the canopy high above them rustles lightly, but distant enough that the noise only serves to make it feel calmer and quieter in the treehouse.

  The fort, as Dee had suspected, isn’t as much fun with just the two of them. For a while, they sit up in the treehouse, which is really just a platform and two walls. When everyone else is here, they can play games like Capture the Castle and Space Station, but that isn’t possible with just Dee and Sibby, and so they end up just sitting there.

  “Maybe we should just go back and play at my house,” says Dee.

  “No!” says Sibby, panicked at the thought of leaving. “We can play something here!”

  “Like what?” asks Dee, skeptical.

  Sibby thinks about it for a minute. “Hide-and-seek!” she says.

  “We can’t play hide and seek with just two of us,” says Dee. “That won’t work.”

  “Sure it will!” insists Sibby. “One of us will stay up here and count to a hundred, and the other one will hide.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” says Dee. “You need a bunch of people for hide-and-seek.”

  “Not this kind,” says Sibby. “Just trust me. You count first, and I’ll go hide. Once you find me, we’ll switch.”

  Dee thinks that sounds kind of stupid, but she knows better than to argue with Sibby when she’s decided on something like this. It’s a waste of energy.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Great,” says Sibby. She gets up and goes to the edge of the platform and begins to climb down the ladder. “Don’t start counting until I’m on the ground,” she says before her head disappears over the edge.

  “I won’t,” says Dee.

  A moment later, she hears a light thud as Sibby jumps from the bottom of the ladder and hits the ground. “Okay!” she yells. “Start counting!”

  Dee hears Sibby run away, giggling, her feet crunching on dead leaves. Even though she’s backed up against one of the walls and can’t see over the edge, Dee puts her face in her hands anyway, because it would feel like cheating not to.

  One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.

  The footsteps become fainter, and then slow down, as Sibby begins to move more deliberately. Dee wonders if Sibby is trying to fake her out.

  Seventy-four. Seventy-three. Seventy-two.

  There’s no noise at all now, just the rustling of the trees high above. Dee feels a chill as a small gust of breeze rushes through the trees and into the treehouse. She knows Sibby is out there, hiding behind one of the big old maples or underneath the boughs of a spruce, but she isn’t comfortable here by herself. She begins to speed up her counting.

  Fifty-oneFiftyForty-NineForty-eight…

  Another noise breaks through her concentration, and Dee stops counting abruptly. Footsteps have picked up again, crunching quickly through the underlayer, heavy and determined. Not close, exactly, but loud. Much louder than Sibby’s footsteps. And more of them?

  Then another sound. A yelp, a short, surprised scream, like a dog that’s had its paw stepped on accidentally. But it’s not a dog. It’s Sibby.

  Dee thinks she hears voices, muffled, and she wonders if maybe Sibby’s parents have come to get her.

  Nothing about this feels right, and Dee stands, scared, and moves to the edge of the platform. She crouches and shifts around so she can push her way over the edge and catch the ladder. She scurries down the rungs of wood that have been nailed to the tree and hops to the ground.

  The noises have stopped, but they don’t feel gone. They feel paused. Is Sibby watching her from somewhere, playing a joke?

  “Sibby?” Dee calls out tentatively. No response. Dee takes a few steps away from the treehouse, moving in the direction that she’s pretty sure Sibby ran in. “Sibby?” she calls again.

  Dee walks faster, her heart pounding in her chest. She thinks she’ll be furious if Sibby is playing a joke. But even as she thinks it, she knows it isn’t a joke. There’s nothing funny about this.

  Dee stops as the sound of footsteps picks up again. They’re moving toward her, branches snapping and the light between the thick stand of trees shifting and her heart pounding and then, like a monster from a horror movie, a figure steps out and stands in front of her about twenty feet away.

  It’s a man. Or at least Dee thinks it’s a man. It’s hard to tell for sure because whoever it is, is wearing a ski mask, a black wool cap that pulls down under the chin, with holes for the eyes and mouth. She registers a bulky gray jacket and jeans, but that’s all she has time to take in because the figure suddenly lunges at her, and Dee screams and ducks out of the way as he reaches for her, and then she runs.

  She knows he’ll catch her. She knows it even as she picks up her speed, moving as fast as her legs will carry her, branches scratching her face and yanking her hat off her head. She focuses on her boots, imagines them carrying her away from those people, out of the woods, up her front steps, and through her front door. She imagines them taking her all the way home.

  She does not think of Sibby. Everything is happening so quickly that all she has time to think is must get away and so she tries to do that, to get away, until all of a sudden she pushes into a small clearing that she recognizes right away, because even though she feels like she’s been running forever, she knows that this clearing is actually really close to the treehouse, which means she’s been running in circles, and then she turns around and everything else except Sibby leaves her mind.

  Because Sibby is in front of her, just a few feet away, and her eyes are wide and pleading when she sees Dee, but her mouth is covered with duct tape, and there’s another figure in a ski mask, big and tall and holding Sibby, who has been tied around the arms so that she can’t move.

  Dee stands, frozen for a long moment, and then the blood rushes back into her head and she begins to scream at the top of her lungs, and then a hand clamps over her mouth from behind.

  Everything happens very quickly after that. Dee allows herself to go slack, the fight gone out of her, and duct tape goes over her mouth too, and the man holding Sibby digs into a duffel bag on the ground and pulls out some rope that he tosses to the man holding Dee. The next thing Dee knows, she’s being taken to a tree and pushed down to sit on the ground with her back to it, and then she’s being tied to the trunk.

  The two figures in the ski masks don’t say anything to each other, but they appear to be communicating with their eyes. Once Dee is tied tight to the tree, the man stands and walks over to where Sibby and the other man are standing.

  Then the taller man is picking up Sibby and tossing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and although Sibby wriggles and tries to get away, she’s so much smaller than the man, and he’s so much stronger, that she gives up almost immediately.

  The other man, the one who tied up Dee, picks up the duffel bag and slings it onto his back like a backpack.

  The man holding Sibby turns and begins to walk, and Sibby catches Dee’s eyes, and for a moment that seems burned in time, they stare at each other, and then she’s being carried into the forest, away from the treehouse, away from the path back to the neighborhood, away from Dee.

  There’s a pause, and then the other man takes a step to follow, but he stops. He turns back to look at Dee, seems to hesitate.

  The other man stops and turns back halfway.

  “We’ve only got one chance at this. Now hurry up,” he says.

  The man looking at me just shakes his head, then turns to follow, and they disappear into the forest.

  Dee listens to the sounds of them leaving, getting more distant with every second, until she can’t hear them at all.

  Until she’s alone.

  20.

  I go quiet. That’s the story. That’s what happened as far as I remember it. I expect Sarah to start in with an interrogation, a thousand questions about what happened next, how hard searchers l
ooked. How much I was able to help them out.

  Instead, she just looks at me with what must be sympathy. Her calm response would be almost unsettling, if I didn’t appreciate it so much.

  “So,” I say, because I need the silence broken, “it’s pretty messed up, hey?”

  She nods her head slowly. “How long were you there?”

  “Almost three hours,” I tell her. “It was getting dark, and when we hadn’t come back home, Sibby’s dad came into the woods looking for us. He found me, but by that time she was long gone.”

  “It must have been terrifying,” Sarah says quietly.

  “Afterward, it was,” I say. “But while it was happening I…I know this sounds weird, but I wasn’t really even scared. I mean, I must have been, but I don’t remember feeling that way. Part of it was probably shock. Part of it was just…I don’t know, the concept of being stolen or hurt by strangers never crossed my mind. Not even for a moment. We’d been playing that game, and I was in that headspace, and I don’t know…” I trail off.

  “It was like it became part of the game,” she finishes.

  I nod. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “And now everyone’s looking for you to relive it all,” she says. “The reporters. The police.”

  “Everyone,” I say. “They want me to tell them something that will help, and the truth is, I don’t have anything to tell them. Usually, I don’t care what people think of me. When people like Brianna Jax-Covington decide to stick their noses in where they don’t belong, I don’t have time for that,” I say. “You think I’m stuck-up? Fuck you, I don’t care.”

  Across the table, Sarah pulls her head back slightly and smiles at me, as if trying to figure me out.

  “You think I’m surly? Fuck you, I don’t care. You think I’m unpleasant? That I don’t smile enough? That my best friend is a waste-of-space pothead? Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you. I don’t fucking care.”