Afterward

by Jennifer Mathieu

  “Jesus,” my dad said, closing his eyes, standing by the fridge, still holding his beer.

  “Dylan, honey!” my mom yelped, running over to him.

  The rest of my spaghetti became as appealing to me as a bowl of worms. I stopped eating and made my way over to my screwed up baby brother.

  “Hey, Dill. Hey, Dill Pickle.” That’s my nickname for him. Sometimes it works.

  But not tonight. He just cried and sat in his own pee. Then he sucked on his fingers and said, “Damn, damn, piece of cake. Damn.”

  My eyes met my mom’s over Dylan’s head. Sometimes Dylan parrots back stuff he hears on television and from other people, but it never makes much sense. This piece of cake thing was new, though, something he’d only started repeating since he was taken. When I’d asked my mom early on what she thought it meant, she’d just sighed and said he probably picked up the swear word from my dad. Like anything connected to the kidnapping, she’d only wanted to ignore it.

  “Damn, damn, piece of cake!” Dylan yelled.

  My dad sighed really loud.

  “I need some air for a sec,” he said, and he headed onto the back porch with his beer. My mother acted like it was nothing. She’s always cutting Dad slack over Dylan. She says he has it harder than any of us because he always thought he would have a son he could talk about sports with and take hunting.

  After we got Dylan all cleaned up—and not without a struggle—my mom took him into her room and let him lie down on her and my dad’s bed and watch the same DVR’d episode of Jeopardy! that he watches like a hundred times a day. We all have it memorized by now.

  The categories are … Potent potables, By the numbers,19th Century France.…

  It’s a Daily Double!

  I’ll wager two thousand, Alex.

  My mom headed into the kitchen to clean up, and I thought to myself that if I were a better daughter, I would probably go and help. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And anyway, why doesn’t my dad ever help? He doesn’t even help with Dylan very much. That’s always on me more than him.

  So I just scowled to myself and shuffled into my disaster of a room, where I’ve been hiding out since, surrounded by my mess of a life.

  I love my room, but I hate it, too. I love it because it’s my escape, but I hate it because it’s where I was hanging out the morning Dylan was taken. I hate that I can’t remember exactly what I was doing when it happened, which proves to me how epically selfish I must have been that day if I couldn’t even figure out what was so important that I couldn’t watch my baby brother for five minutes while my mom took a shower. I was probably just messing around on my phone or texting Emma about how far I’d gone with Jason McGinty.

  I should have been keeping an eye on Dylan. My mom told me to. She asked me to keep an eye on him, and I didn’t.

  He got taken, and it was all my fault.

  The thought makes me sick like it always does. I go into my closet to find that teeny, tiny bag of weed I got from Jason. If I smoke with the door shut and a sock under it and blow the smoke out of the window, my parents will never know. If they even bother to check up on me.

  But one pin joint later and I don’t feel better. Only fuzzy and sweaty and my heart is beating too fast again. Maybe I should stop smoking pot.

  Dylan. Dill Pickle. Sweet little baby brother, what happened to you? What did that bastard do to you?

  Shit. I hate it when my brain goes to this place. Months later and I still can’t stop wondering.

  I get up off the floor and shut the window, then crawl up into my bed. I take a breath and close my eyes, trying to ground myself.

  I can feel a ball of tears dying to expand inside my throat, but I’ve gotten good at stopping myself from tearing up when I don’t want to.

  I’m not the best student anymore, but I’ve always been a good big sister. That’s the one thing I’ve always managed to pull off. And now I’m not that. Not even close. In fact, I’m probably the worst big sister in the entire world.

  Through our paper thin walls I can hear my mother walking Dylan to his bedroom to go to bed.

  “Damn, damn, piece of cake,” he repeats, over and over.

  Maybe it’s Jason McGinty’s weed or my own desperate, clawing attempt to try to do something to help Dylan, but I get an idea. The beginning of one, anyway. Something hazy and weird and probably screwed up.

  As the idea swims through my skull, I hear loud noises between my mother and Dylan as she tries to settle him down for bed. I feel the weight of the idea sink on me along with the painful awareness that I’m the only one in my family who seems to want to face the fact that something awful happened to Dylan. From down the hall I hear another one of Dylan’s shrieks. I close my eyes and try to wish away whatever demons keep coming for my sweet baby brother.

  ETHAN—146 DAYS AFTERWARD

  Since I’ve been back, I’ve mostly only been around my parents, the therapists, and my mom’s parents who came to visit me right after I got back. The only person I’ve seen a lot who is around my age is Jesse. We’ve hung out like six or seven times in the past few months, and each time he’s stayed a little bit longer than the last, and this has made me happy. I guess he’s the one friend from before who decided all the television news cameras and the interview with Carlotta King and the weirdness in general weren’t going to keep him from spending time with me. He didn’t just come over right away, though. His mom called my mom first. I know because about a week after I came back, I overheard my mother on the phone in her bedroom with her door almost all the way shut. She didn’t know it, but I’d seen the name Lisa Taylor on the caller ID, and I knew it was Jesse’s mom calling our house. My parents never let me answer the house phone in case it’s a reporter who has managed to get our number, and that’s fine by me. I don’t want to answer it.

  I’d stood outside my parents’ bedroom door that morning after my mom picked up the phone. And I’d listened in on what she was telling Jesse’s mother.

  “I think it would be good for Jesse and Ethan to see each other. My gut is telling me it would be good for his healing process. But let me call Ethan’s therapist and get back to you on specifics, all right?”

  I acted like I didn’t know anything, and then a few days later my mom asked me if I would like to see Jesse. I wasn’t sure what to say. Part of me wanted to see him. Just to be around someone my own age again. The last time I’d been around any other teenagers was with Bennie and Narciso. After Marty finally let me outside, I ran into them when I was taking out the garbage, and I guess you could say we became friends. We played video games, mostly. Sometimes we skateboarded around the apartment complex or smoked a little weed or walked over to Taco Bell. Bennie and Narciso were one of the few not-so-messed up things in the most messed up part of my life.

  Part of me was scared to see Jesse. That it would just be really weird, and neither one of us would know what to say. But I knew it would make my parents happy to see me being normal, having a friend. I thought it might make me feel happy, too. So I said, Yes. Jesse can come over. And a few days later, he did.

  He looked so different. He was almost a foot taller than me, and the Afro that used to jump out a good few inches from his skull was cut super short. He looked like he’d been lifting weights or working out or something. Basically, he looked like he could beat up my dad.

  “Hey, man,” he said when my mom and I opened the front door. He gave me a big, toothy smile, and for a second he was eleven-year-old Jesse again.

  “Hey, man,” I said back. And after a couple of awkward seconds he reached out to me and I reached out to him and we gave each other a hug. Quick and one-armed and with a pat on the back. I used to give hugs like that to Bennie and Narciso.

  That first time he visited, Jesse and I mostly played video games while my mom came in to check on us every five seconds. She even made us those Totino’s Pizza Rolls like she did when we were in fifth grade, and after we ate them, he told me he had to get going.
/>
  “I work at that frozen yogurt place next to the Tom Thumb,” he told me. “Got my license last week, and I’m saving up for a used car.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, still trying to put together the idea that Jesse Taylor is old enough to drive a car. It was like he was some grown-up, and I was a kid. Then it hit me that I was old enough to drive a car, too, and for a second something came over me so strong and so heavy I’d wished he had never come over at all and that I could go upstairs and hide or scream in my room.

  But mostly it was okay to have him over, and he showed up every couple weeks to play video games. Then today, like two weeks after my sixteenth birthday, he shows up with some Mountain Dew, our favorite soda. Or at least it was when we were kids.

  “Happy late birthday,” he says to me, holding up the six-pack.

  “Hey,” I say, and I smile as big a smile as Jesse’s.

  What I’ve liked the most about hanging out with Jesse is that we haven’t really had to talk to each other. A few times I’ve asked him how tenth grade is and what some of the friends we’d had in common are up to, and he’s asked me about starting online school and having a tutor, but mostly we just get swallowed up by the enormous couch in the family room and play video games. We’ve hung out enough that my mom has stopped hovering around us and standing in the kitchen like she’s making lunch when she’s obviously trying to overhear whatever we’re saying. Because basically we’re not saying anything to each other except for talking about the game we’re playing. We just zone out. I like it.

  I’m good at the video games. It’s maybe the one thing I did with Marty that I didn’t hate. And it’s all I did, some days. While he was at work and after he let me out of the closet, I was able to move around inside the apartment. I played game after game like I was willing myself to disappear inside one of them.

  Once I got home, I wondered if I would want to still play, but it turned out I did. And I was still good at the games, too. Like today, after Jesse and I drink two Mountain Dews each, I end up kicking his ass at Halo.

  “Give up?” I ask, smirking at Jesse.

  Jesse rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Let’s take a break.”

  I go to the kitchen to get us each another soda, but when I get back Jesse seems different. More serious. He’s just looking at the wall behind the television and not saying anything.

  “What’s up?” I ask. He’s never done this before. Just sitting there staring at the wall.

  “Man, I’ve wanted to tell you something,” he starts. “I wanted to say it to you those first few times I came over. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  There’s a big empty space. A huge silence. My heart starts beating a little faster.

  “What?”

  Jesse takes a big breath and bends forward, putting his head into his hands so I can’t see his face. Then to his feet he says, “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” I ask him, but I can feel my throat go dry.

  He sits back up and looks at me, and then away like he can’t. Then he says, “I wish I’d never asked you to come over that day.”

  I don’t want it to happen, but Jesse’s words pull me back to that hot Sunday in May. No homework since school was almost out. The pool not open just yet. Nothing to do.

  “Mom, can I bike over to Jesse’s? Please?”

  Gravel road. Sun beating down on me. I’m five minutes from Jesse’s place.

  “Get on the floor. This is a gun on your neck.”

  Numb and sweating. Sure what was happening was a dream.

  “Sorry, buddy. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Realizing it wasn’t a dream. Realizing it was real life. My life.

  “Don’t cry. I don’t like crying.”

  An empty pack of Marlboro Lights on the floorboard. Gum wrappers. Streaks of mud.

  I shake my head, like I can shake out the thoughts. I blink a couple of times. My heart is racing really hard now, and I cough a few times to keep the nausea back.

  Jesse takes a big breath and still doesn’t look at me. But he says again, “The number of times I fucking hated myself for calling you up and asking you to come over to my house. Dude, you can’t even know.”

  I don’t know what to say. I think if I say anything I could puke. I run my thumbs up and down my knuckles, over and over again.

  “I just…,” Jesse tries again, shifting in the uncomfortable silence. “I mean … shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have even brought this up.”

  I want him to leave right now, and this makes me feel like an asshole. In the same way I feel like an asshole when my mom hugs me, and I desperately want her to let me go. In the same way I feel like an asshole when my dad delivers one of his little pep talks about how great I’m doing, and I want to go in my room and shut the door and sleep until he goes away.

  How come I’m an asshole to people who care about me?

  There’s more silence, and I still wish he would go away, but finally I manage a soft, “Don’t worry about it, man.” But I can’t look at him when I say it.

  “Yeah?” I hear Jesse answer, and when I do glance over at him he’s finally looking at me, trying to make eye contact. His body relaxes a little. It must be nice to feel so much better about something so easily.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Seriously, man. I don’t think about it like that. Really.”

  And in a way this is true. For all the years I was with Marty, my mind blocked out that day in May. But since I’ve come back—since I’ve been in the same bedroom and the same kitchen and the same town as before—I have thought about Jesse asking me over all those years before. About him calling our house phone from his new cell phone and me being jealous that he could call me from his own number. Being pissed for a second that his parents got him his own phone and my parents told me I needed to wait until I turned twelve to get one.

  What if I had missed his phone call?

  What if I had gone outside to shoot hoops and my mom had gone into the bathroom at just that moment and neither of us had heard the phone ring?

  What if I had decided it was too hot to bike over? That I wanted to stay home instead?

  Maybe I’d be in tenth grade at Dove Lake High instead of sitting at home with a tutor doing school online, completely screwed up and sleeping with the lights on.

  Maybe.

  Jesse is fiddling with his controller now, and I wonder if he wants to play some more. But I don’t feel like playing. I just want to be by myself. Or better, disappear. Then my mom walks in and starts asking us if we want a snack.

  “Actually Mrs. Jorgenson, I got to get going,” Jesse says, standing up.

  “All right,” my mom answers, and she’s reading my face, trying to make sure I’m okay. She’s constantly checking in with me. Every millisecond of every second, she’s scanning my eyes and my nose and my mouth to make sure I’m not about to lose it or something. Sometimes I feel like a science experiment.

  I try to hold it together, nodding. My mom and I walk Jesse to the door.

  “I’ll try to stop by next week,” he says.

  “Cool,” I say. But I think he might never come over again, and this makes me relieved and depressed at the exact same time.

  “Cool,” Jesse says, and he makes his way over to his mom’s Camry and drives off, giving me a little wave as he pulls out. No guy hug this time.

  “Did you have fun?” my mom asks after I shut the front door, her eyebrows popping up.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say. I might as well tell her what I know she wants to hear.

  “What do you think you want for dinner?” she asks me, her eyebrows still up like two umbrellas.

  “Anything’s good. Maybe mac and cheese.” I just need to get out of here. I need to breathe a little.

  “Okay, mac and cheese it is,” she says, smiling.

  She heads back toward the kitchen but I say, “I’m going out to the garage. To practice.”

  “Oh, that’s great
, Ethan,” my mom says, and yeah, when she looks back at me, she tears up. Again.

  Outside, I take a deep inhale as I watch the garage door roll back like I’m the winner on some game show and here is my prize. A Ludwig in deep blue. I gaze at my drums and slide onto the stool, taking the smooth sticks into my hands. And I start playing, wailing away until I’m sure my arms are about to fly off. Until my mind is nothing but machine gun beats.

  CAROLINE—148 DAYS AFTERWARD

  Because it’s Dove Lake. Because it’s only a couple of thousand people who call this place home. Because Emma and I even drove past it a few times in the days after Ethan and Dylan were found to gawk at the news trucks hanging around. (Emma wanted to do it because it was something exciting that was happening in a place where nothing exciting ever did, but to me, it just felt creepy.) But because of all of these reasons, I know exactly where to find the house where Ethan Jorgenson lives. It’s one of those big, beautiful homes with a wraparound front porch and a landscaped garden and a giant backyard that gently nestles up against Dove Lake Creek. It’s an older neighborhood, but most of the homes only look old on the outside and are probably totally new and Pottery Barnish on the inside—not that I’ve ever been inside any of them. The people who live here are mostly people with money who came here to get away from city life. Some of them don’t even live here year-round. They just come and spend the weekends and long breaks.

  Must be nice.

  As I bike down Ethan’s street, I catch glimpses of the cute Halloween decorations in the gardens and yards of these big fancy houses. Clusters of pumpkins by front doors and gauzy fake spiders’ webs pulled over bushes and hedges. Emma and I would always trick-or-treat in this neighborhood when we were little because the people who lived here gave out the best candy—whole Snickers (not just the mini size), Ring Pops, and jumbo-sized bags of M&Ms. Dr. Jorgenson didn’t give out candy on account of being a dentist, but he and Mrs.Jorgenson would answer the door and give out glow-in-the-dark spider stickers and temporary tattoos of ghosts and witches.