by Sara Beitia
“Please,” Olivia hisses, though there’s no one at the neighboring tables. “Keep your voice down!”
He drops his voice to just above a whisper, but doesn’t stop hammering at his point. She needs to hear it—again and again, he thinks, and again, until she gets it. “He’s looking for all of us, because the three of us are the only ones who know what he did. So we don’t have a choice—we have to find her and make sure she’s safe, and we have to do it without getting caught.”
Then they are both quiet, blending into the background of the too-bright, too-quiet fast food restaurant. Both of them are worn out, catching snatches of sleep when they can, and Albert has a lost feeling. The brightness makes him long for a nice, dark place where he might curl up in deep, dreamless sleep until everything is over.
“Eat, why don’t you?” he says roughly, gesturing at her uneaten food. He’s seventeen and barely weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, so he’s aware that trying to get all paternal and commanding with this girl he’s only known well for about a week is pretty much a joke. They’re the same age and both juniors, and though she’s kind of a runt, besides being the younger sister, it’s not like she would take orders from him; she probably wouldn’t take orders from anyone. Knowing this doesn’t stop him. Their cash flow is low and the girl needs to eat something. He feels protective of her because she’s Lily’s sister, but also because she doesn’t have anyone looking out for her, doesn’t even think she needs it. He can’t guess what’s around the next corner, or how bad it will be. Better to face whatever it will be with a little something in the stomach.
“What are you smirking about?”
Albert realizes he’s actually smiling. “I was just thinking how my manly interior dialogue sounds a lot like it’s coming from my great-grandmother Hawl.”
Olivia manages a thin smile. Albert studies her face, a pale smear under the fluorescent lights, fringed by unnaturally black hair. They’re sitting across from one another in bright yellow molded plastic benches, the kind that are attached to the table between them. They’ve ordered a burger each and taken their tray around the corner, away from the doors and the main window, and away from the homeless man digging through the trash bin near the front entrance while no employee interferes or even seems to notice, to the back of the restaurant. Their table is the nearest to the bathrooms and a bank of pay phones. Albert resists the urge to command Olivia again to eat.
“Are you about ready to go?” she says after a while. “I’m exhausted and if we don’t get moving soon, I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep right here.”
He looks pointedly at her food, which after sitting out is pretty unappetizing, but she takes the hint and has another bite. “Yes, Daddy.”
He flinches. “I prefer ‘Grandma.’” He stares off into space, letting his mind wander a little. After a bit, he says, “What are we, about halfway?”
“I’d need a map to be sure, but yeah, we’re probably halfway between home and Yellow Pine Lake. Why?”
He shrugs. “Equidistance.”
She crumples her napkin into a ball, worrying it slowly to shreds. “That’s not a word.”
“Maybe not. But I think Lily would like it. X marks the middle spot on the ley line that runs between the two significant locations of the Cult of Lily Odilon. And we’re its only followers.”
“Vestal virgins?” Olivia suggests.
They both knew they were talking nonsense, playing some word game aimed at conjuring Lily.
“Not quite,” says Albert. “Has she been talking to you about sacred geography, or was that a new thing?”
“She hasn’t, no, but Lily always has a new thing. What is it this time?”
“Sometimes, late, late at night, she would just lay things on me. You know, cosmic questions, the kind that wakes you up in a cold sweat, or keeps you from sleeping in the first place.” He pauses. “And this bit with Yellow Pine Lake, it just makes me remember something she said to me not that long ago, something about certain physical locations and the power of place, or whatever.”
“She was—” Olivia stops, consciously correcting her tense, “is, full of crap. She doesn’t believe in that new-agey garbage, in places of power or whatever. She ran because she didn’t think she had a choice, and she went to the lake because she knew you and I could find her. The rest is just wishful thinking to give it some meaning.”
“I don’t blame her.” He picks up the shredded napkin Olivia has dropped and turns it over in his fingers.
“Wishful thinking,” Olivia says again. “It means nothing, it just is.”
“Add it up: Kogen, the journal, the accident, her memories, the night she left—it all comes together. Or keeping with Lily’s way of thinking, we could call it profane geometry.” Albert knows it’s crap, but he likes the way it sounds.
Olivia snorts, apparently done with the game, but he isn’t ready to give up. It’s all silliness, finding patterns because you’re looking for them, but Albert feels like he’s defending Lily, not just her quirks. “Look, you of all people should understand that sometimes people need—” But there’s an interruption and Olivia is saved from hearing the rest of his speech.
The electronic chirp of her cell phone comes from her purse and they both jump, Albert giving his knee a painful bang on the underside of the table. They stare at each other. With the second chirp, Olivia shoves her hand into her bag and pulls out the phone.
“Don’t answer it,” he says. Maybe it’s the conversation getting to him, but he’s afraid.
She glares at him. “I’m not a moron. I’m just checking to see who it is.”
“Wait, what if it’s her?”
“It’s not,” she says in a strangled voice, her eyes flickering from the screen to him and back down again. “I think it’s our friend the detective.”
“Andersen’s calling?” Albert’s tongue is thick and dry, as if it might fill his mouth and choke him. “How can you tell?”
She holds the phone out to him, but he refuses to take it, like it might burn him if he touches it. “Caller ID. Heard of it?”
“Why is he calling you?”
She switches it from ringer to vibrate and drops the phone back into her purse. “You’re their top ‘person of interest,’ and you’ve suddenly disappeared, and so have I. They must have figured that out by now.” She sighs and rubs her eyes, hard. “I’m just going to ignore it until he gives up.”
After a few more rings the phone stops buzzing, to their mutual relief. This relief doesn’t last long, though, because after about thirty seconds, the phone begins to buzz again in Olivia’s bag.
“Damn it,” she says softly, reaching in to make sure it’s Andersen again.
Albert opens his mouth to speak, but shuts it when his eyes meet a stranger’s at the table behind them. Sometime in the last few minutes, a middle-aged man, alone, had intruded upon their scene and they hadn’t noticed. Albert tries to remember what they’d said, wondering if this man has been eavesdropping. He puts his hand over Olivia’s and gestures with his chin at the new guy.
She turns to look, then leans forward and says softly, “Meet me in the ladies’ room.” Without waiting for his reply, she leaves the table and heads into the short hall that splits into two doors, women on one side, men on the other. After a moment, Albert gets up and follows. He avoids making further eye contact with the man at the other table.
The restroom is a little windowless room with two stalls, but there’s a lock on the door. Olivia turns the deadbolt and presses her back to the door like someone is out there planning to knock it down.
Albert leans against the sink. “Why are we hiding in the bathroom?”
She gives him an irritated look. “It was so quiet in there, and even with the ringer off, the buzzing on this thing is loud. I just didn’t want that guy to get suspicious, or take a good look at our faces.”
“Yeah, there’s nothing suspicious about going to the bathroom together.”
“Shut up, okay?” She
holds up her purse, which is buzzing again. “Think. What are we going to do about this?”
“Ignore it? Turn it off?”
She slaps herself on the forehead. “Turn it off! Why didn’t I just turn it off?”
Albert doesn’t know, but since in his panic he didn’t think of it either, he doesn’t say anything. “I still don’t get why he’s calling. Does he think we’re just going to give up, turn ourselves in?”
“Maybe he thinks you’re holding me captive, another victim of your bloodthirsty rampage,” Olivia says.
“That’s helpful. Really.”
“It’s reflex.” She looks sorry.
“Maybe he’s not expecting either one of us to answer. Maybe it’s something else entirely.” Albert chews his lower lip, thinking. “What do you know about tracing?”
She just looks at him.
“I mean, cell phones run through satellites, right? Can’t they do a thing—is it triangulation?”—he grasps at barely remembered ideas—“where they use your phone’s coordinates to pinpoint where you are? Can they trace our location that way?”
Olivia pulls the phone out of her bag, turning it off mid-buzz and dropping it on the counter by the sink. “I don’t know! Is that real? Can they really do that?”
“I think they can.” He doesn’t actually know for sure, but he’s afraid, a sensation he’s getting used to.
“Does it even have to be on, or connected, for them to do that? What if they already did?”
They stare at the phone as if it had suddenly grown fangs.
Then Albert says, “We should get rid of it.”
“Agreed.”
“Where?”
Olivia points to the trash bin next to the door, overflowing with paper towels. “Why not there?”
After they make sure the ringer is off, they wrap the little device in paper towels until it’s an unidentifiable ball of paper refuse, then Albert takes off his coat, pushes up his sleeve and reaches into the can of he-prefers-not-to-know-what and buries the balled up phone in the middle of all that trash.
“Well, thanks, Lil. I sank pretty much all of my cash into that stupid phone,” Olivia says when Albert is done burying it. “That model cost me twenty bucks extra, and it has an MP3 player …” She shrugs, but her eyes sweep the trash can regretfully as she does. “So we should probably jet.”
Grossed out by digging in the garbage, Albert washes his hands and up his arm with hot water and a ton of soap, trying to do it fast. “I’ll get you the money for a new one. Let’s go.”
Just then the door thumps and there are several insistent raps on it, more like pounding than knocking. Albert accidentally splashes water all over the counter and Olivia lets out a little scream. “What the hell is going on in there?” a gravelly female voice demands from the other side. “Open the damn door!”
Olivia struggles to undo the latch, and the door flies open and into her the second the catch comes undone. The form of a woman—not old, but definitely a lot older than her teenage coworkers behind the counter—fills the doorway. She glares from one to the other with narrowed, darting eyes.
“I’m sorry,” says Olivia. “We were just …” But she doesn’t know how to finish the sentence she’s begun.
The woman saves her the trouble. “Out,” she commands. She points at Albert. “You too, Romeo. I know what you little freaks do in here.”
“No, you’ve got it wrong,” says Albert. Olivia kicks him to keep him from going on.
“Save it!” says the woman. “Just get out of here before I call your parents. Bet they’d love to know what you’ve been up to in a public restroom. This is a family restaurant!” At this point, everyone in the place—which is just the man at the table, the homeless man still digging in the trash, an old couple seated near the front, and the two people behind the counter—is looking at them as the woman leads them to the front exit.
In the parking lot, Albert zips up his coat as he walks. “Come on. She’s watching us.” He points at the bright front window. In fact, the faces inside are all turned to Olivia and himself.
“I wish we had a car.” She gestures up as they begin to walk. “Look at how clear the sky is. It’s going to be cold tonight.”
Whether they’re rested or not, cold or not, frightened or not, it’s time to move, and quickly. The idea that Olivia’s cell phone might be tattling on them is unsettling, and they both want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the thing. So leaving the bright glow of the restaurant’s neon sign, they head back into the night, following the dim line of the black highway. They each keep their own thoughts to themselves, letting out only faint puffs of breath in the cold, the roadside scrub crunching under their shoes.
She was really gone.
Even after awaking alone in the house and seeing the empty garage for himself, Albert couldn’t believe that Lily would just take off without saying anything to him. He spent the next couple of hours searching her neighborhood on foot. He tried to go unnoticed as he spiraled farther and farther from her house down the sidewalks and alleyways, not sure what he was looking for except some sign of Lily. The darkness had turned dim gray, which meant dawn wasn’t far off. When he found no trace of Lily or her car, he went back to the house—her house—and back to her room. He kicked off his shoes and sat on her bed, pulling the blankets up around his shoulders. He wasn’t sure what to do next, and he couldn’t shake the nightmare feeling that he was moving through dense fog in a dream scenario that made no sense.
It would’ve been nice, he thought, if this were just a very realistic nightmare, something he could wake up from. People didn’t usually disappear like that—there one minute, gone the next. He kept coming back to his certainty that Lily would not have left him alone in her house, now a trespasser instead of a guest, confused as to what had happened and feeling like he was at the edge of some disaster. He wanted to lie down and fall asleep again, so he could wake up with everything back in place and the nightmare over, but his heart wouldn’t stop thumping. He was too aware of the seconds and minutes slipping by until he would have no choice but to do something.
Then Albert had another thought. He hadn’t yet tried the simplest thing—getting an explanation from the girl who was causing all this anxiety in the first place. Feeling hopeful for the first time since he’d awakened in the empty house, he shrugged off the blankets and left Lily’s room to find the phone. He remembered seeing one in the kitchen and he sprinted through the house to reach it. Probably just a misunderstanding, he told himself, relief already pouring in as he dialed Lily’s cell. He was sure now, already starting to feel stupid for panicking, anticipating her voice on the other end of the line. She’d gone out for doughnuts or for some other slightly crazy whim; she was probably already on her way back and when she saw him she would be unable to understand his distress and probably laugh at him for being so worried over nothing. Her unpredictability, the way she gave in to her impulses, was part of what drew him to her—there was nothing boring about her.
Does it take several hours to buy doughnuts? asked a voice in the back of his head, but Albert stubbornly shut it down.
The phone rang several times and then went to voice mail. Albert hung up without leaving a message. Just as he disconnected, he thought he heard a sound from somewhere in the empty house. Curious, he dialed Lily’s cell phone again, slowly making his way back to her room as it rang and rang without answer. It was still ringing when he got to Lily’s room, and by then he had the brr-click of the phone ringing in one ear, and the faint tinny tinkling of an electronic ringtone in the other.
Albert hung up, then dialed Lily’s number a third time, dropping the handset on the bed and letting it ring. Listening hard, he moved around her room, tracking the sound of the familiar electronic ring until he found Lily’s bag on the floor in the corner. Her cell phone rang from inside it.
He picked up her bag and dropped it on the bed, then hung up the telephone. The house was still
and silent again. Feeling guilty, he dumped out the bag’s contents. A bunch of Lily’s junk rattled out and settled into the folds of the blankets. What Albert saw was what he figured were the usual things found in a girl’s bag, but the sight of her phone and her little pink fuzzy wallet made his heart pound for some reason. After a moment of just looking, he picked up Lily’s wallet and opened it. Inside was her driver’s license and six dollars.
“Why would she leave without her phone or her purse?” Albert asked aloud of the room. As if the strong sense of her presence, among all her things, might be enough to force an answer.
If this had been a hypothetical situation, a what-if and what-would-you-do kind of thing, Albert would have said that of course she wouldn’t leave without any of the basics like her license and money. But she was gone, her car was gone, and everything else, including her boyfriend, was still here. So the fact was, no matter how improbable: she had left. And he was completely in the dark as to why.
Now Albert finally noticed that the sun had fully risen and it was actually surprisingly high in the sky. It was morning, early for a Saturday but very late for him, since he still needed to get back home and into his room without being seen by his parents.
So he had a decision to make.
Sitting there with Lily’s empty bag and its contents, junk that had taken on extra weight, in his lap, Albert decided that sneaking home, and soon, was the only reasonable thing he could do at the moment. If he could just get into his house and into his own bed until at least noon, perhaps things would work themselves out without him while he slept off a bad night.
He pushed away the little voice in his head that was now shouting Find her! Tell someone! Something’s wrong! Something’s bad! She’s gone! He really wanted Lily to just be cutting loose because her mother, stepfather, and sister were out of town and she had a bit of temporary freedom.
And you know that’s all it is, he thought, slamming the door on the worry-voice that had been tormenting him.
If he told someone … and who would he tell? What would he say? If he raised some alarm about her, it would only get Lily into trouble when she showed up again, with no clue about the way she’d made them worry.