Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

Our combined momentum threw us sideways, Kaz’s feet clearing the fracture in the floor only an instant before it turned into a gaping hole, and we crash-landed on a pile of dirty straw. Despite the padding, the impact was so great that it shook the entire barn, weathered timbers shifting and groaning under us until I was positive the place was about to collapse. But the shuddering slowed and finally stopped, the rafters creaking, until at last the only movement in the loft was the airy swirl of dust kicked up by the violent disturbance and the painful banging of my heart rebounding off my rib cage.

  Kaz was on top of me, breathing hard, his gold-and-olive face gray with fright. “Holy shit, dude.” He let out a shaky exhalation, his mouth so close I could smell coffee and spearmint gum on his breath. “I think you just saved my life!”

  “I think you just broke my ribs,” I joked weakly in return, my head whirling a little with the air I’d lost when he’d flattened my lungs.

  “I can’t believe you dove at me like fucking Batman!” He giggled a little bit, nerves escaping through laughter. “It was kind of badass, actually.”

  “That’s me. The high school badass.”

  I’d meant it as another joke, but once I’d said it, the moment seemed to shift. Kaz’s expression had transitioned from shock to relief to an emotion I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and he was staring at me, his hazel eyes dark and intense. Something in his face softened perceptibly, and his eyelashes fluttered with a strange caution. “Flynn…”

  He moved closer, hesitated … and then he kissed me.

  The pressure was almost unbearably gentle at first, his lips soft and warm against mine, and an electrical storm erupted in my stomach as conflicting emotions rolled like thunder from my scalp to my toes. Then Kaz’s bottom lip maneuvered my mouth open, his fingers tightening on the collar of my jacket; I felt heat and hunger, my head zooming like a carousel, and when his tongue touched mine, all the blood in my body made an immediate, mad rush to a certain point between my legs, like a horde of Black Friday shoppers at the opening bell.

  Just like that I was fully aroused, zero to steel rebar in nothing flat, and a crazy jolt of destabilizing panic swept over me in the same instant. Our bodies pressed together the way they were, there was no chance that Kaz couldn’t feel my physical response, and as electricity jabbed at every nerve ending in my skin, I jolted back. Fear, primal and absolute, jammed my lungs up into my throat. “Stop!”

  Once again, Kaz looked utterly confused. “I—I don’t g—”

  “Stop! Get off me!” I shoved him to the side and scrambled to my feet, my heart slamming against my ribs again, and I struggled in vain to disguise my erection with the bottom edge of my jacket as I backed away from him.

  “I—I’m sorry, man,” Kaz stammered in a thin voice, looking startled and abashed. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “Why did you do that?” I demanded crazily, pointing at him for no reason.

  “I don’t know. I just … the way you were looking at me, I—”

  “I’m not gay!”

  I don’t know why I said it. It came out of my mouth before I could think about it. I could have admitted the truth then and there and at least allowed myself to have enjoyed that moment—and with one hand fumbling to hide the evidence of my lie, I don’t know who I thought I was kidding—but I couldn’t do it. It was easier to deny it, to put it off. Forever.

  “I’m. Not. Gay!”

  “I’m sorry,” Kaz repeated in a small, flummoxed voice. “I shouldn’t have—It was stupid. I just thought…”

  He trailed off, staring up at me helplessly from the dusty pallet on the floor, and I stared back, breathing hard. I was trying to think of what I should do next, to figure out what it meant that Kaz had kissed me, when we heard the screams.

  High-pitched and wordless, they echoed against the downy blanket of the sky, an unmistakable distress signal that cut the tension in the loft like the blow of an ax. In an instant I was scrambling down the ladder with Kaz behind me, and when I burst from the barn I realized that the cries were coming from the adjacent meadow, where January liked to gaze at the stars.

  My lungs and limbs stinging with alarm, I shoved through the thicket of trees that separated the barn from the former pasture; at the top of the rise in the middle of the vast field, with dark birds swooping portentously overhead, I could see a cluster of people. One of them was an African-American woman—Tiana’s mother—and she was sobbing against the shoulder of the Dumas drama coach, Cedric Hoffman, her choked howl carrying across the empty space.

  My thoughts splintered as I stumbled up the slope, abject fear making an icy slush of my bloodstream, certainty and denial kicking in simultaneously. I told myself, No, no it isn’t, it can’t be, no, but I knew. With every fiber of my being, I knew they had found her—that the search for January was over.

  My eyes blurred and acid scorched the back of my throat as I reached Mrs. Hughes and looked down. I was so dazed with dread that at first I could make no sense of what I was seeing; it looked like nothing but a heap of old clothes—someone’s trash, discarded where it didn’t belong. When things at last swam into focus, the world beating around me in time with my heart, I was still blinking in total confusion. Laid out at my feet was a heap of clothes, and nothing more.

  I spent another minute trying to conjure them into a body, trying to make the discovery fit my horrible expectations, before I finally understood exactly what I was seeing. The red canvas shoes, the dark jeans, the gray sweatshirt … they weren’t just any clothes; they were January’s. It was the same outfit described on the flier—the one she was last seen wearing—and then I recognized the familiar rip in the knee of the pants and the inky stain near the left elbow of the hoodie from a misadvised home attempt at dip-dyeing her hair. The clothes were hers without a doubt … but something was wrong with them. So wrong that I instantly understood Mrs. Hughes’s breathless horror, and the frantic murmurs of the crowd of volunteers who had been drawn by her exclamations.

  Trailing from the hoodie’s cuffs and wrapped around the ankles of the jeans were long strips of silver tape; a dense, red-brown stain, so dark it was almost black, covered the front of the heathery sweatshirt. Starting at the neck, the strain stretched all the way to the bottom edge, and from one side almost clear to the other, stiffening the worn fabric to the consistency of cardboard. It was a grisly sight that made my head spin as my pulse thudded in my temples, some primal part of me already aware of what I was looking at a split second before my brain put the pieces together.

  It was blood.

  TEN

  THE NEXT COUPLE of hours passed as if in a fog, time seeming to slip in both directions simultaneously. One minute, people were moving around me so quickly that I could barely see their faces; the next, things were so agonizingly slow that I was able to count every lash on Mrs. Hughes’s right eye as she gripped my hands and prayed out loud through gasping sobs.

  Reporters appeared on the scene with the swiftness of jackals, and everyone present was pumped dry of information by journalists wielding tape recorders and cameras. I stared at the trees, at the grass, at the ravens that zigzagged through the sky, my brain churning but refusing to process what I’d seen. With dulled ears, I listened as Cedric Hoffman gave an interview to a helmet-haired woman from a local news station, explaining how his group of volunteers had happened to make the discovery.

  “She was such a lovely girl,” he was saying in his distant, ruminative manner, “such a creative, thoughtful, and intelligent girl. She was interested in astronomy, you know, and she used to tell me of the meadow where she liked to watch the stars, and I thought … well, I suppose that’s what made me suggest we look there.”

  My feet went cold and then numb, but I couldn’t move. I had a short conversation with my parents, telling them that I wasn’t ready to leave yet, that I needed to stay, even though I wanted to be as far from there as possible. I just couldn’t bring myself to walk away. It felt almost as if we
had found January after all—and I could see decisions being made in the expressions of those around me, a closing of doors as the significance of the bloodstained clothing was interpreted.

  I was watching hope dissolve in real time.

  I felt it leaving me as well, and struggled to hold on, but how could I possibly explain what I’d seen, except by acknowledging the obvious? It was blood—and such a soul-shocking amount of it. I didn’t know how much you could lose and still survive, but I did know that if January had made it to a hospital, it would have been in the news. Therefore, I knew that someone had to have taken her clothes from her and dumped them in the middle of that field. But who? And why? And where was she?

  At last, January’s clothes were surrounded by investigators while a growing cohort of uniformed officers pushed back the media and the congregated onlookers. People who hadn’t even taken part in the search had appeared in the field seemingly from nowhere, watching the proceedings with the ghoulish curiosity of spectators who rubberneck at auto accidents. The helmet-haired reporter stepped into the empty space directly to my right, the odor of face powder and mousse suddenly filling my nostrils, and she began doing a stand-up for her nightly broadcast in a jarring, “newsy” voice.

  “A short while ago, the search for fifteen-year-old January Beth McConville took a dark turn in the field you see behind me. Scarcely a mile from the home she shared with her mother and stepfather, U.S. senatorial candidate Jonathan Walker, a pile of girl’s clothes—soaked in blood—was found by members of a volunteer search party. The Ann Arbor Police Department has offered no official comment as yet, but multiple eyewitnesses have confirmed that the clothing discovered here matches the description of the outfit McConville was wearing the day she vanished. Speculation regarding the fate of the missing teenager has become understandably grim, and many of those I have spoken to today already fear the worst; but in the absence of a body, the question still remains: What happened to January McConville?”

  I tuned her out, my eyes on the people gathered around my ex-girlfriend’s clothes. The items were photographed and then collected by gloved technicians and tucked safely into plastic bags before the tedious enterprise of searching the meadow for trace evidence could begin. Finally, the earth released my feet and allowed me to stumble out of the meadow and back across the long, endless fields that spread between there and civilization.

  She was dead. The thought hit me hard, bouncing inside my skull like a piece of shrapnel. I resisted it—but I couldn’t exactly refute it, either. What other explanation could there be? Could I really continue to believe that January was just trying to frighten her parents? This was no petty prank, and no matter how much she resented the circumstances of her life, I could think of no reason she would resort to something this extreme, to staging something so horrific. Running away was one thing, but faking a murder? January was impulsive, but not irresponsible; and though it was true she could be vengeful, she had never been cruel the way she’d have to be to scare her friends and family like that. There would be legal consequences if and when she was found—possibly academic ones as well—and I simply couldn’t see January risking her whole future like that just to teach Jonathan and Tammy a lesson.

  I blinked in surprise when the back side of the Walker mansion abruptly reared up in front of me, as if having burst through the earth right in my path, French doors reflecting the bleak white sky and my bleak white face. I hadn’t realized I had walked so far until that very moment, despite the fact that I had climbed the rear patio and was standing beside the vast, kidney-shaped pool.

  Feeling shaky and exhausted, completely unsettled by what I’d seen and what I was thinking, I sank into one of the Walkers’ custom-made Adirondack chairs and stared into the dry basin of the pool, emptied for the season. It was painted a pallid turquoise, and a handful of dirt and dead leaves had already gathered at the bottom of the gaping socket. There was supposed to be a tarp over it, I knew; Mr. Walker considered this sort of untidiness to be trashy and “low class.” I wondered who had forgotten to take care of it.

  The Jacuzzi, nestled into the pool’s bend with its padded cover firmly in place, would remain operational all year long, I presumed. I’d spent a lot of time out here over the previous summer and early fall, and I could still easily picture January submerged across from me in the hot tub like she’d been one night in August, when we were lamenting the end of summer. The water had surged around us as the sky bruised and blackened with night, and she had tossed her head back over the lip of the tub so she could watch the stars blink to life overhead.

  “I wish we could fucking move to California already,” she’d said in a tone more wistful sorrow than complaint.

  I looked around at the fancy deck furniture, the lanterns glowing in the gazebo, and the crescent moon reflecting brightly on the still surface of the pool. Music pumped from hidden speakers, and two sweating glasses next to the hot tub contained rum and Coke—heavy on the rum—that January had fixed from her stepdad’s virtually bottomless and unguarded supply of liquor. There were always guests over at the mansion for cocktails, from political strategists to donors to politicians whose endorsements Jonathan was courting, and we’d discovered pretty quickly that unless we were caught red-handed, no one could tell if we had helped ourselves.

  Add to all that the fact that the Walkers had a personal chef for their numerous parties, a fleet of sports cars begging to be driven by a newly licensed teenager, and enormous television screens in almost every single room in the house, and it was hard to comprehend January’s wish—no matter how many times she expressed it. Cocking a dubious brow, I asked her, “Do you really think that being a broke-ass college student in LA will be better than this?”

  “Yes,” she’d answered simply, eyes still on the heavens.

  And then, as if to illustrate her point, the doors to the house burst open and a tall, imposing figure stalked out onto the patio. Glowering beneath a shock of stiff, dark hair, his broad face shiny and flushed with pique, it was Jonathan’s campaign manager, Eddie Sward. The sleeves of his purple button-down shirt were rolled above his elbows, and his hands were clenched into fists. Without preamble, he barked, “Will you turn off that fucking music?”

  “Hello to you, too, Eddie,” January replied languidly, still looking up at the sky. She didn’t move, and I felt tension coil in my gut. Flouting authority wasn’t exactly my strong suit, and the man was practically vibrating with anger. “Want to join us?”

  “Turn off the music!” he repeated, baring his teeth as cords sprang into view along the length of his neck. He thrust a finger in the direction of what Tammy called the “grand room,” a wood-paneled den with a fireplace and cushy furniture that looked out over the rear of the property, where Jonathan had decided to conduct the bulk of his campaign-related business. “I can barely hear myself think in there with all this damned racket!”

  “We were here first,” January reminded him petulantly, and the man’s eyes darkened. “You can always move your little meeting into the basement or whatever.”

  “Do you have any idea what we’re trying to accomplish in there?” Eddie was practically spitting. “How critical things are at this stage? How important this actually is?”

  “If this meeting is such a big deal,” January returned slowly, “then maybe you should have set it up in the basement.”

  Eddie stared at her for a long moment, the darkness rolling in his eyes like storm clouds, his expression one of disbelief. Then, stomping closer, he grabbed for our things. “Where the hell is the remote?”

  “Get your hands off my stuff!” January protested sharply, standing up in the tub. Her heated skin was pink around the white straps of her bikini, and she lunged for the pair of shorts Eddie was rifling through.

  “Why don’t you chill out for a second,” I suggested to the man in a tone more bold than I felt, rising to my girlfriend’s defense.

  “You stay out of this, you little pothead punk—you’r
e nothing but a bad influence,” Eddie snapped. The minute he’d learned about my parents’ marijuana activism, he’d declared me a “political liability,” and begun treating me like a case of campaign herpes. Giving my towel a violent shake, he ejected from its folds the remote control that operated the hidden speakers, and the device clattered across the patio. Snatching it up, the man silenced the music immediately.

  “Fine,” January snapped, her voice a little shaky, “you got what you wanted. Now leave us alone!”

  But Eddie had discovered our glasses of rum and Coke, and as he sniffed them, his eyebrows nearly blew into the stratosphere. “Is this … are you drinking?”

  Not waiting for a response, he hurled the contents of both glasses out over the railing and into the darkness, and January shouted, “Hey! You can’t do that!”

  Eddie spun back around, trembling all over, and jabbed a finger into my girlfriend’s face. “You listen to me, you ungrateful little bitch! This is exactly the kind of dumb-shit teenage fuckery that we cannot tolerate. You get caught drinking underage and it’s your father who takes the heat! You could cost him this election!”

  “He is not my father,” January corrected him coldly, “and I don’t really give a shit if he gets elected.”

  Through his teeth, Eddie seethed, “If you were my kid, I’d belt the sass out of your smart little mouth.”

  “Hey!” I jolted forward, putting myself between him and January. “Don’t you threaten her!”

  He ignored me completely. Still speaking to January, he snarled over my shoulder, “Someone needs to teach you a little manners and respect!”

  “Manners and respect?” January laughed, the sound bright and unpleasant. “You came out here to bully and curse out a couple of teenagers, and you want to talk about manners and respect?”

  There was a moment of charged silence, during which it looked as if Eddie might either blast off into orbit or burst into flames, and then he marched past us, toward the doors to the morning room, pocketing the remote. “Someone needs to do something about you—put you somewhere you can’t fuck things up anymore! If you can’t behave with even an ounce of class, you need to get out of the way.”