Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  Two detectives that I’d never seen before were positioned in our living room, exactly where Moses and Wilkerson had been a week ago, while my parents sat facing them on our sofa. One had a mustache, and was introduced to me as Garcia, and the other was a tall, gangly blond man called Becker. Before I could ask about the unexplained change in the lineup, my dad indicated the cushion between him and my mom, and said, “The police had a few more questions to ask you about January.”

  When I was seated, Becker turned his horsey countenance on me. In a mild voice, he asked, “I understand you participated in the search party out at the Walker place the other day. How’re you holding up, Flynn?” It was a meaningless question, and I offered a meaningless reply. Nodding, he started getting to the point. “We’ve read over your statement from when you spoke to our colleagues, and we’d like to talk a little more about the last time you saw your girlfriend.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “We’d like you to think some more about how she behaved that night.”

  “Um … what do you mean?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure what he meant was, this is your chance to change your story before we call bullshit—with consequences.

  Becker gave me a bland look. “Are you sure she wasn’t acting strangely in any way? Angrier or more upset than usual?”

  “Not really,” I prevaricated, thinking once again about January’s hands urgently fumbling at the waistband of my jeans. What had made her want to take that step, that night? My secret made me feel like I’d been acting unreasonably, but now that I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out why she’d been so insistent about it. “I mean, yeah, she was upset.… Like I said before, we had kind of an argument and broke up.”

  “You said it was mutual,” Detective Garcia interjected coolly, and I froze. “When the other detectives were here last week, you said the breakup was mutual. That it”—he glanced at some notes in his hand—“‘just happened.’”

  “Well … they asked if we’d had a fight, and we didn’t. We argued a little bit, but that’s all,” I said, sounding like a complete ass. My temples were immediately damp with sweat, and I knew the lie was written all over my face. Suddenly I couldn’t remember the details of all the half-truths and obfuscations I’d related to Moses and Wilkerson the week before, and why were there new detectives, anyway? “I mean, she’d been acting kind of distant for a while already and, technically speaking, breaking up was her idea, so it wasn’t, like, you know … a fight.”

  “So the breakup was her idea,” Becker repeated, making a note of it, and I nodded vigorously. “When you say she was distant, what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know … she’d ignore my texts, or she’d make excuses not to get together, or we’d make plans and she’d blow them off … that kind of stuff.”

  “And this was unusual for her?”

  “Well, I mean, yeah, I guess.” I shrugged miserably. “I just sorta figured maybe she was mad at me about something I didn’t know I’d done.”

  “That happen a lot?” Garcia asked. “She get mad at you and not say why?”

  “Sometimes.” It had been known to happen; although, truth be told, January’s episodes of icy, silent resentment had synchronized almost perfectly with the moments when I had gracelessly terminated some increasingly passionate interlude without any explanation. She’d never needed to say why she was upset, because the reason was obvious, even if I didn’t dare acknowledge it.

  “Prior to when she started ‘acting distant,’” Becker began, in a way that suggested air quotes, like he was barely humoring the notion, “you two were still pretty close, though, right? Spent a lot of time together?”

  He made it sound like a loaded question, but I couldn’t figure out where the trap was, so I just said, “Yeah, of course.”

  “There isn’t anyone else in the picture, is there?” he asked suddenly.

  I hated repeating myself, but the only thing I could think to say was, “Huh?”

  “I mean, if we ask around a bit, we’re not going to find out that maybe one of you two was seeing someone else on the side this past month or so?” His tone dripped with fake confidentiality, very come-on-you-can-tell-me, and I bristled at the question.

  “No, of course not! And what does that have to do with what’s happened to January, anyway?”

  “Just answer the questions, please,” Garcia ordered sternly, and my mouth snapped shut. Sometimes I might fancy myself a bit of a rebel, but I had no desire to piss off the cops. “I’d like to discuss the last night you saw your girlfriend again. What exactly did the two of you talk about?”

  I felt heat welling up inside of me, my mouth drying out like an old sponge. Omitting facts was one thing, but downright lying to the police felt especially wrong, a cardinal sin against an innate sense of order. Furthermore, I wasn’t even sure I was capable of inventing a convincing and benign argument out of whole cloth on the spot; but how could I possibly answer this question truthfully without turning my entire life upside down? Why were they asking about this? Licking my lips, I began uncertainly, “We … we talked about California.”

  “California?”

  “We both wanted to move to the West Coast after graduation, and so sometimes we’d tell each other stories about what it’d be like, hanging out in LA together and stuff.”

  “You went from talking about your future together to breaking up, but there was no fight?”

  “Well…” I was hoping a bunch of brilliant words would come flying out of my mouth at the end of that self-conscious ellipsis, but instead I just looked at Garcia in silence with a growing sense of desolation.

  My dad, God bless him, stepped in just then to save me. “Detective, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get to the point. What does my son’s breakup with January have to do with her clothes being found in a field behind her house?”

  Garcia and Becker looked at him, and then at me, and then at each other, and seemed to come to some unspoken agreement. The ball appeared to have been passed to Becker, because the slender detective eyed me very seriously and then asked the question that changed everything. “Flynn … were you aware that your girlfriend was pregnant?”

  SIXTEEN

  FOR A MOMENT, the room lost focus and my ears filled with feedback, the couch swaying like a catamaran as I tried to make sense of what I’d just been told. My parents were staring at me, white-faced, and I was staring at Becker. Finally, I laughed, a little wildly. “No she wasn’t!”

  He continued to stare at me, his face serious, his mouth clamped into a taut little line. Uncompromising, he asked again, “Did you know?”

  “Know what? Of course I didn’t know! There was nothing to know!” I turned to my parents for support, but they were looking at me like they’d never seen me before. The sweat at my temples started to roll. Did they not believe me? “She was a virgin!”

  “We’re very careful,” Garcia explained smugly, as though he rather enjoyed my escalating agitation. “We have to be. As soon as we realized it was blood we were dealing with, we had it analyzed and compared against a DNA sample taken from January’s bedroom, crossing our Ts and making sure the facts were the facts. The specimens matched, Flynn; there’s no question about it. Your girlfriend lost a ton of blood, and somebody tried to wipe it all up with her sweatshirt.” His eyes bored into me like an oil drill. “And I mean it was a lot of blood. Enough that we just don’t see how she could have survived without medical attention—which we know she didn’t get, at least not at any licensed emergency room in this part of the state. That’s why we’re here. We’re from Homicide. This is officially no longer a missing persons case, Flynn.”

  Homicide—official now. Everybody knows she’s not just missing anymore. But I couldn’t even process that part, couldn’t find any spare room in the mosh pit of crazy thoughts squirming and crashing about in my head. Pregnant? They were wrong!

  “Confirming that it was January’s blood and that
she’s most likely dead wasn’t all we learned when we had the samples tested, though.” Becker took over seamlessly, their interplay a well-choreographed routine. “The analysis also showed the presence of hCG—human chorionic gonadotropin—a hormone excreted during pregnancy. It surprised us, too, but it’s one hundred percent accurate: Your girlfriend was pregnant.”

  “She was a virgin!” I insisted, instantly aware of how unhinged I sounded. I knew from TV that sometimes cops lied to suspects to get a confession—your partner’s in the next room right now, spilling his guts out—but I could see no reason they would lie about this. No reason to fabricate the detection of “human chorionic gonadotropin” in January’s blood. I could practically feel all the color drain out of my face, and the room slid and throbbed around me. When I spoke again, my voice sounded tinny and small. “I don’t … there has to be … I don’t understand.”

  “Is that what the two of you fought about?” Becker asked gently. My mother wouldn’t look at me anymore, her hand over her mouth, but my father continued to stare. “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “She wasn’t,” I maintained irrationally. Then, “We never even had sex!”

  “Flynn,” my dad began in a strangled voice, “we’re not going to be upset—”

  “There’s nothing to be upset about! We didn’t have sex!”

  “Maybe you tried to talk her out of having it, but you couldn’t,” Garcia suggested next, almost cajoling. “We understand January was pretty headstrong. Maybe she told you she was having the baby, and she expected you to step up to the plate.”

  “That’s a lot to have hanging over your head,” Becker chimed in sympathetically. “Being a father at fifteen? No one would blame you for being angry—even a little desperate. You’d have to tell your parents, her parents … and her stepfather isn’t the kind of guy—”

  “No,” I gasped, my eyes huge. “No! That’s all wrong!”

  “It could be someone else’s,” my mother finally managed to suggest, but her tone was so dubious it both enraged me and broke my heart at the same time. Coupled with that, the austere, skeptical looks on the detectives’ faces felt like a kick directly to my solar plexus.

  “None of this makes any fucking sense!” I exclaimed manically. “I’m telling you the truth—we didn’t have sex. She was still a virgin, she said so!”

  Garcia moved closer, interest piqued. “When did she say that, Flynn?”

  “Friday!” My entire body felt raw and hot, and I was answering the questions without thinking about where they were going, the need to clear my name suddenly urgent. “The night we broke up. She said she wanted me to be her … you know, her first.”

  “And afterward, you realized she had been lying to you?”

  “What? No! There was no afterward! I’m telling you that we didn’t do it!” I was emphatic, everything coming out with exclamation points. “She wanted to, and I wouldn’t, and she got mad, and then … and then she said it was over.”

  “She broke up with you because you wouldn’t sleep with her.” Garcia seemed disappointed in me for thinking he might be stupid enough to buy such an absurd story.

  “She wanted to have sex and you didn’t?” Becker asked, sounding even less credulous than his partner, if that were possible.

  “Yes! We—we’d agreed to wait, and then she didn’t want to wait, and I told her I still wanted to wait.…” My voice petered out pathetically. I felt like I had floodlights pouring into my eyes, and my chest was constricted, the air too thick and hot to breathe.

  They stared at me. Just stared. I thought I was going to lose my mind, my body burning all over, my parents rigid on either side of me, and these two cops sizing me up for an orange jumpsuit while I tried not to speak the words that were crawling up my throat like stomach acid. Becker shifted. “Son, we know you claim you have an alibi for the night she disappeared, but you need to be honest with us—”

  “I’m gay!”

  The words burst out of me like they were spring-loaded, and I’m not certain, but I think my soul left my body for a moment. It was like I was looking down at myself, damp and stricken at the center of that ridiculous tableau, everyone blinking at me with saucered eyes. The room was dead silent, and it was far too late to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and my entire life had just changed—completely, totally, irrevocably, and so fast it wasn’t fair, I still needed more time—and then more words poured out like a river of barf, because I couldn’t stop them anymore. “She wanted to have sex, and I said no, and I guess she’d figured out the reason why I never wanted to … do anything with her, because she tried to make me admit that I … that I don’t like girls, and I got mad, and we started fighting, and she said … she told me I needed to ‘admit the truth,’ because she was done. And then she stormed out, and it was the last time I ever saw her. It was the last time.”

  I couldn’t look at my parents, and I couldn’t look at the detectives, so I stared at the coffee table. A hiccup jerked at my esophagus and I tasted bile, but I bit down against the impulse to vomit. I was struggling to breathe, waiting for my mom to start crying or something, but the room was so quiet it was like I’d been struck deaf. Finally, after an interminable length of time, Becker cleared his throat. “So, it’s safe to say she was pretty upset that night.”

  I actually laughed. “Yeah. Yes. It’s safe to say that she was upset.”

  “I don’t understand,” my dad said, his voice steady but unnatural, and I still couldn’t look at him. “If she was pregnant, it obviously wasn’t Flynn’s—and you yourself just pointed out he has an alibi—so what’s the point of all these questions? What difference does it make?”

  “Kind of convenient, you suddenly realizing you don’t like girls anymore, right after finding out a piece of news like this,” Becker remarked, almost casually, and I gave him a poisonous glare in response. Did anything about the situation actually seem “convenient” to him? Tossing a look at his notes, he continued, “And about that alibi … you say you were doing homework the night January disappeared. Can anyone else confirm that?”

  “He watched TV before dinner, right in this room, and then sat at that table and worked on his history paper until he went to bed,” my mother reported, her tone as cold and stiff as a corpse. The question didn’t make any sense to me; did they really think I could have hopped on my bike, gone off to kill January, and then dumped her clothes in a field behind her own house before cycling back home? It was insane. The whole thing was completely insane.

  “And you’re sure that we’re not going to find out about a secret girlfriend—or boyfriend—when we ask around about this?” Garcia pressed. “Someone who might have gotten jealous?”

  My heart tripped and fell over. When we ask around about this. Naturally, they couldn’t just take my word for it, and soon—the next day? The day after?—they would start talking to my friends. Micah, Ti, Mason, the guys on the track team … one by one, they’d all get asked if I might have been cheating on January. If I might really be gay. My stomach dropped like an anchor as I pictured it, all their faces flashing through my mind in high speed as they reacted to the question. I couldn’t speak, my tongue felt like it was coasted in paste, so I just shook my head in response.

  “We understand that the field where her clothes were found had some particular significance to her,” Becker noted, directing the comment to me.

  “She watched the stars there.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Do you think that’s where she was … Do you think … it happened in the same place?” my father asked, still struggling with the unnamable act, as if saying it out loud might upset someone. As if the night could possibly become more upsetting.

  The detectives ignored him, scribbling down some notes, and then Becker inquired, “Flynn, if you weren’t the father, then do you have any idea who was? Any guesses as to who else your girlfriend might have been seeing on the side?”

  “No,” I replied rigidly. �
�I really don’t know.”

  It was the truth, but it was also somewhat misleading. I didn’t know, but I was starting to have a suspicion, and it was one that made the taste of bile flood the back of my throat once again. It was sick and twisted and wrong, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Anson sneering at me in January’s bedroom, a lacy G-string in his hands. Your girlfriend was a dirty fucking whore who tried to Lolita my dad.

  It was bullshit. It had to be. January would never ever have had sex with Jonathan Walker—ever. Like I’d said to myself the day Anson made the preposterous allegation, it was nothing but a perverse fantasy, invented by the most fantastic pervert of all time. January loathed her pompous martinet of a stepfather and, until that night in the barn, had agreed with me that sex was a Big Deal and shouldn’t be rushed. Beyond all of that, there was simply no way I could picture her trying to seduce her mom’s husband. It was as insane as everything else that was happening.

  And yet. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of ice cream with maple syrup and potato chips, of January complaining about sexual objectification while gesticulating provocatively with a banana. The details were too real to be wholly false.

  And what if, somewhere at the bottom of it all, there was a grain of truth in Anson’s claims? It’s finally the right time, and I want … I want you to be the first. What if January had known she was pregnant that night in the barn, and the reason she’d been so desperate to sleep with me was because she was hoping to convince me that the baby was mine? If, somehow, she really had been carrying her perfect, politically ambitious, image-obsessed stepdad’s baby, the man couldn’t possibly afford to let anyone find out. Jonathan Walker would have had an excellent motive for wanting her to disappear—and that desolate field behind the mansion would have been a really convenient place to dump the evidence.