Good and Gone

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Smoky Walker isn’t here anymore,” I say.

  “But Smoky Walker was his mentor,” Zack says, spinning around in his seat. “Smoky Walker was who and how and what Adrian wanted to be. If this is where Smoky came when he wanted to get away from it all, then this is where Adrian would come.” He’s nodding as he speaks, or maybe that’s the car bouncing. His cheeks, ruddy most of the time, are getting brighter and brighter red, like there’s dye spreading out over his skin. “This is the best lead we’ve had.”

  “I like it when you talk about it like that,” I say. “Like we’re detectives. It almost makes this whole mess fun.”

  Charlie barely slows down as we get off the highway and onto the side road.

  “It was one of the first settlements in the United States,” Zack says, pointing at a sign as we breeze past it.

  “Any other totally not at all interesting trivia about the little hamlet?”

  “You don’t need to be snarky,” Charlie tells me.

  “I don’t? I thought that was my role here. We’ve got the depressed guy, the gay guy, and the bitch. Did I audition for the wrong part? Is this role actually for a perky girl with bouncy hair and bouncy boobs? Because I don’t have either of those, but I guess I could stuff my bra.”

  “You need to shut up,” Charlie says.

  “Oh! I got it! I’m playing the girl in the background. The one who doesn’t actually say anything, just comes along for, like, extra scenery, I guess. Just sit here and look pretty. Sure, fine.”

  “Who said you were pretty?” Charlie snaps back.

  I don’t know why Charlie and I ramp up like this, but when we do, I can’t stop. Zack breathes out slow and low. “So, how about them Red Sox?” he asks.

  His words just hang in the air, like I could reach out and pop them.

  Charlie pulls into the town. The downtown area is built around a village green with little shops and cute streetlights. “It looks like a TV town,” I mutter. “It’s not real.”

  No one answers. Charlie parks the car and we get out. Zack is on his phone, scrolling through whatever information he can find. “The restaurant Adrian worked at was closer to the ocean, but I think we should go to this bar that Smoky used to play in.”

  When we get to the address, there’s no bar. It’s been turned into a coffee shop. There’s a plaque out front that says:

  PREVIOUS SITE OF GUS’S JOINT

  SITE OF NUMEROUS PERFORMANCES BY

  LEGENDARY GUITARIST

  LEWIS “SMOKY” WALKER

  The plaque is small, and the copper is seeping green. Someone has jammed pink-gray gum on top of it.

  “Still,” Charlie says. “I mean, maybe?” I can feel the hope oozing off him. What I can’t tell is why it’s so important to him to believe that Adrian Wildes is still okay—is still alive—and that we’re going to find him.

  Zack smiles at him. “Anything is possible, right?”

  The coffee shop has a bar with stools right when you come in, but no one looks up at us. There does seem to be a little stage in the back. Maybe it’s left over from the Smoky Walker days, but I bet now it’s used mostly by the moody teens of greater Guilford to pour out their angsty feelings or their rage or whatever else they have inside them that they think someone else will care about.

  That’s what Seth was always trying to figure out—what could he say that someone else would care about? What he could say that would spike up his views. But he never thought of anything, and that’s why he only ever created that one, ranting video. He talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. How great it would be. How he’d be the next big thing on the web. How he’d be kissing Essex good-bye and not letting the door hit his ass on the way out.

  So I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on those people who actually say something.

  We’re all standing just inside the doorway, twisting our heads from side to side like this is some sort of word search and if we just look closely enough the people will suddenly clarify themselves right in front of our eyes and one of them will be Adrian Wildes.

  Zack leads the way into an area with two mismatched couches and a dinged-up coffee table. He leans right over the couple sitting on the blue leather couch and says, “Look, here he is.”

  He’s right. It’s a picture of Adrian Wildes holding a guitar. Next to him is a man who I can only assume is Smoky Walker: large and black and ecstatic looking. Both of them are bathed in a silver light that makes them glow.

  “There’s one over here, too,” Charlie says.

  But they’re just pictures: the real person is nowhere to be found. I think for a minute that maybe they are all hiding him: the barista and the customers. Maybe they saw us coming and Adrian dove behind the counter and they are all just waiting for us to leave so he can come back out and go back to his sulking escape from reality. But there is no tension in the air. Just the smell of coffee and innocuous music.

  “Can I help you?” the barista finally asks. His hair is clipped close to his head and he has gauges in his ears and a tattoo that creeps around his neck. I kind of want to stick my finger through the gauge hole and tug just to see what it would feel like. Actually, I wish he would take the ring out so I could feel the inside of his ear.

  “We’re just looking,” Charlie says.

  “Did Smoky Walker really play here?” Zack asks.

  The barista shrugs. “That’s what the plaque says. That’s not really my jam, though.” He picks up a cloth and starts wiping off the espresso machine.

  “What about Adrian Wildes?” I ask.

  The barista actually scoffs. “Sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, it’s not me who’s interested. My dipshit brother here is on a quest. He’s like Don Quixote tilting at pop stars.”

  The barista only shakes his head, which makes me think he’s not a very good alt-rock-hipster if he doesn’t know who Don Quixote is.

  “We just thought he might be here since his idol was Smoky Walker,” Charlie explains.

  “Smoky Walker is dead,” the barista says. “So he wouldn’t have anyone to see.” He speaks slowly, like there is something wrong with my brother. And even though I’m the one who just called my brother a dipshit, this still makes me angry.

  “Yeah, thanks for the update,” I say.

  “If you’re not going to order something, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “We don’t want any of your shitty, overpriced coffee,” I tell him. I pivot to go, and thankfully, Charlie and Zack are right behind me. I don’t know what I would have done if I had stormed out of there and they had stayed behind.

  “He could have at least been half-assed helpful, don’t you think?” I say.

  Zack turns to Charlie. He puts his hand on his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s drive out to the ocean, okay? We can find that restaurant.”

  Charlie’s face is dark again, like a micro-storm has blown in off the ocean and settled right there over his high forehead, dropping rain and hail and gusting wind across him. That’s the way he is now, I think, either a lake so still you aren’t sure it’s real or an ocean all churned up during hurricane season, and I’m not sure which is scarier.

  “Hey.” A voice comes from behind us. There’s a white teenaged guy striding toward us. He’s wearing a beanie and his hair curls up underneath it at the back. Hockey hair. There’s a girl, lanky and pale and a little greasy looking, and a few steps behind. “Hey,” he says again. “You really looking for Adrian Wildes?”

  I square my body. I don’t need some hockey guy and his greasy girlfriend coming out here to tell us we’re being pathetic and that Adrian Wildes is gone, gone, gone. But the boy is smiling and he says, “He did come by here a few months ago. Before his tour.”

  “Really?” Charlie asks, stepping toward them.

  The girl twists her hair around her fingers. The boy’s shadow cuts straight across her face.

  “Yeah,” the guy says. He tugs on his beanie. The hair curling out from
under it is blond, but his eyebrows are thick and dark. “We were down by the water. We saw him skipping stones.”

  “You don’t really expect us to believe that, do you?” I ask.

  “Lexi,” Charlie says, but the guy just looks confused.

  “A lot of people do it,” he says.

  “We’ve got really smooth stones on our beaches,” the girl adds.

  I want to tell her that all beaches have smooth stones. It’s because of the ocean, all the rough edges get smoothed away by tossing and turning around. It’s like sea glass. It’s like what happened to Charlie with Penelope.

  Charlie says, “Show us.”

  “Charlie, he’s not there now. We should get back on the road.”

  But Charlie is laser focused again. We are going to the beach to see where Adrian Wildes may or may not have stood. And that’s that.

  We all cram back into Miss Ruka. Of course the couple is in the back with me. The boy sits behind the driver’s seat and the girl is half on his lap and half on the middle seat. I remember cramming into Seth’s friend Torrance’s car. Gwen sat up front with Hannah, the two of them belted in together. Four of us sat in the back and I had to sit on Seth’s lap. “There’s no seat belt for me,” I said. “Don’t worry, Lex,” he replied. “You’ve got me.” That was when we still all hung out together. Before it was just Seth and me, me and Seth.

  They lead us out of town and it occurs to me that this could all be some elaborate setup. Like we could get all the way out of town and then they’d pull out a gun. No, probably not a gun. A knife. I look at the lanky girl. She’s wearing an oversized army jacket that probably belongs to the boy. The sleeves are so long her hands don’t peek out. There’s lot of room to hide a knife.

  “My name is Jacob,” the boy says. “This is Caroline.”

  “You live in this town?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” the boy says. “It’s okay. Kind of bougie, you know, but it’s not so bad.”

  “The ocean is pretty,” the girl says.

  “We live by the ocean, too,” I say.

  “Cool,” Jacob says. I see him squeeze Caroline’s leg. It looks like he’s squeezing pretty hard and I wonder if she likes it. If it’s reassuring to her. Or if it feels like something else entirely.

  “We’re not right on the ocean,” Zack says. “Technically our town is on a bay.”

  “We’re on the bay that leads to the ocean,” I tell them. “So practically the same thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jacob says.

  “Did you talk to him?” Charlie asks.

  “Adrian Wildes? Nah. He was way in his own world. Also, we were, um, a little—we had our own thing going on.” He pinches his forefinger and thumb together and holds them up to his lips. “It was super windy that day and we were having trouble getting things going, you know.”

  I check Caroline’s eyes. They don’t look red rimmed or anything now, so being high wouldn’t explain her near-comatose state. “You can sit down in the middle if you want,” I tell her.

  She gives a half shrug and then curls her body more into his and away from mine. And it’s not like I want to be wedged into the back seat with her, but it’s also not like I am gross and germ infested or anything. Sitting on him is just unnecessary.

  “We’re good like this,” Jacob says. “Right, baby?”

  Baby?

  “So, Caroline,” I ask. “Read any good books lately?”

  “What?” she asks.

  “Lexi,” Charlie says with a warning tone from the front seat.

  “I’m just making small talk,” I say.

  “The road’s gonna kind of split and curve up here. Follow the curve.”

  “Got it,” Zack says.

  “So, have you?” I ask.

  She does that half shrug again. “We’re reading Pride and Prejudice in English class. I guess I like it.”

  “Really?” Jacob asks. “I always felt like that was just something they included so there could be a book by a woman. I didn’t even finish it.”

  He’s older than her, I realize. “I liked it,” I say. “I thought it was really clever and even though it’s old a lot of the stuff she talks about, it matters today—like keeping up appearances and the social roles and all that stuff.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Plus all the back and forth with Darcy and Elizabeth, and with her sister and that awful guy—”

  “Wickham,” Zack says. “What a tool.”

  “Right.” Caroline giggles.

  “Up here,” Jacob says. “We were just past those sand dunes.”

  Zack pulls the car off to the side of the road. It’s a blank stretch of beach in front of us, but off to the left is a strip of shingled cottages. You’d think none of us have ever gotten out of a car the way we trip over one another. Zack gets out first and flips the driver’s seat forward. Charlie holds still and looks at the ocean. So Caroline has to lean back toward me to let Jacob get out, and when she does her elbow goes into my side, which doesn’t hurt, but she apologizes like she slit my throat. Finally they get out—him pulling her by both hands—and Charlie still hasn’t moved, so I climb out the driver’s side, too, right into a wall of cool ocean air. My nose starts running and I tug my little hoodie closer around me.

  “You coming, Charlie?” I ask.

  He clicks off his seat belt and gets out of the car. He has on a waffle-weave shirt, but that’s it. He shivers a little, but doesn’t look for anything to keep him warm, doesn’t even put his hands in his pockets.

  Caroline follows Jacob, a couple steps behind. I see her watching him, watching the way his body moves, and I wonder how long they’ve been together. Is this still new? Is that why she’s disappearing into him? And it’s not like this should be a hard question for me to answer. I mean, I mastered the art of disappearing into a guy, didn’t I? Still, I can’t look away and I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. Is this what we looked like to other people? Is this what I looked like? The girl behind the boy? The silent girl? The girl afraid to have an opinion of her own?

  Charlie stands at the top of the dune, looking out over the water. I’m not sure what this is supposed to tell us about Adrian Wildes. He was here a couple of months ago. So what?

  “So, you guys have any grass or anything?” Jacob asks. Caroline looks hopeful. Stoned or looking to be stoned all the time. At least she has an excuse for her behavior.

  “Nope, totally clean,” Zack says.

  “That’s cool,” Jacob tells him. Caroline chews her lower lip.

  “You think he was staying in one of these houses?” Charlie asks.

  “Yeah, rumor is it’s that one,” Jacob says, pointing to a white house with heavy green shutters over the windows, all tucked up for winter. “Someone saw a light, but I don’t know.”

  Charlie heads for the house, and so I follow with Zack right behind. Jacob and Caroline hang back. “Did you lock the car?” I whisper to Zack.

  “What? No, why?”

  I glance over my shoulder.

  “Oh, come on, Lexi, they’re just a couple of stoners.”

  Charlie climbs the steps of the house, his feet clomping on the ice that covers the wooden stairs. I grip the handrail tightly so my feet don’t slip out from underneath me. There’s a big wraparound porch and I can just picture some old rocking chairs out here, maybe Adrian sitting in one and playing his guitar while Alana Greengrass reads in another chair beside him.

  The door is locked, of course, but Charlie pulls on it gently at first and then roughly.

  “No go,” I say. “Too bad, so sad, let’s get going.”

  He doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. He’s gotten very good at both of those things. He walks down the length of the porch, testing each of the plywood shutters. He goes around the corner of the porch. I look over at Zack. “So, what, we’re breaking and entering now?”

  “None of the windows are going to open,” Zack says. “Just let him walk around a little and then we’ll go.”

/>   I lift my hood up over my ears. When we left New Hampshire it wasn’t too cold, but now the temperature seems to be dropping. My dad would be able to tell me exactly why, with a lengthy explanation about jet streams and cold fronts and on and on. I wish I had thought to bring my winter jacket.

  “Back here!” Charlie calls.

  I take a step toward Charlie’s voice, and slip on a patch of glare ice. Zack catches me by the arm, his grip sure and firm. So I keep holding on to him as we walk around the porch. It must be nice to be so solid, to know that you are usually the biggest guy in the room. That has to feel safe.

  Charlie stands by a window, holding up the plywood. “This one just lifted right up,” he says. “Check the window.”

  “We can’t break into this house, Charlie,” I tell him. “We don’t even know if it’s Adrian Wildes’s house, and that wouldn’t excuse it even if it were.”

  “He might be in there,” Charlie says.

  The house is dark. Nothing stirs. “If he’s in there, he’s probably—”

  “He could be sleeping or hurt,” Charlie says. “It’s like a wellness check that police do.”

  “Except for the part about us not being police officers.”

  He sighs and turns to Zack. “Just hold this shutter up for me.” Zack, the traitor, takes the plywood from Charlie’s hands. Charlie bends over and tugs on the window. It opens smooth and easy and Charlie steps up and over the sill and into the house.

  “You going?” Zack asks.

  “Are you?”

  I’ve followed my brother this far, and I figure I can keep using the my-brother’s-keeper defense. My parents might come bail me out for that. Maybe. I think about texting them. Breaking into a house now. NBD.

  “This is not a good choice,” I tell him. When we were little, and we did something wrong, our parents would say, “Was that a good choice or a bad choice?” Any time they asked the question, you knew the answer was “bad choice.” But I step over the sill. I’m not as tall as Charlie so I have to straddle it for a moment before my right foot touches down on the floor inside the house. Zack climbs in behind me, letting the shutter down gently.

  “My first felony,” I say. “How about you?”