Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  “I should probably get home,” I mumbled, surreptitiously swiping tears out of my eyes with my sleeve. It was barely 11:15, but I couldn’t face forty-five more minutes of being “friends.” “My parents have been freaking out about safety and stuff ever since January disappeared, and they’re probably waiting up for me.”

  It was a lie, and an obvious one, but Kaz didn’t challenge me on it. Instead, he blipped the locks open on the Lexus and we got inside. Just as the seat warmers started to kick in, my phone began buzzing in my pocket.

  When I saw the name and image on the display, shock took my breath away and I dropped the device at my feet as if it had burned me.

  The call was coming from January’s phone.

  TWENTY

  “DO YOU BELIEVE in ghosts?” January asked me. It was late June and we were upstairs in her room at the mansion, the windows open wide to let in air that smelled like lilacs and freshly cut grass. Her iPod was on shuffle, and I was looking up movie times on the Internet while she paged through a gossip magazine. The question seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  “No,” I said, confident it was the response of any sane individual. “I think people see what they want to see. I read this thing online once that said humans are basically programmed—on, like, an evolutionary level—to detect faces. When you encounter something random, your brain automatically scans it for a pattern it can recognize, and that’s why there are all these weirdos out there who think the Virgin Mary appeared to them on a potato chip, or whatever. It’s the same thing with ghosts.”

  January set the magazine aside and stared ruminatively up at the ceiling. After a moment, she said, “I believe in them.”

  I was sitting on the floor beside the bed, and I craned my neck around to look at her with a bemused expression. “January McConville, the future CEO of NASA, believes in the supernatural?”

  “NASA does not have a CEO, it has a government-appointed administrator,” she retorted smartly, “and it’s not as if I believe in, like, vampires and shit. Just ghosts.”

  “Same thing.”

  “They are not the same!” She sat up, giving me a serious look. “I just don’t think that you die and it’s, poof! You’re gone! Like someone flipping off a light switch. I think people leave energy behind. Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in class, taking notes, whatever, and I’ll just suddenly feel my grandma next to me. It’s not like I’m thinking about her so hard I magically convince myself that I sense her presence—I’ll be completely focused on something else and, out of nowhere, it’s like she walks up and taps me on the shoulder.” Tossing back her long straw-colored hair, she went on, “Okay, maybe I’ve never seen a ghost myself, but haven’t you ever walked into an empty room and immediately felt sad, or nervous, or like somebody was watching you, and you couldn’t figure out any reason why?”

  “Maybe,” I said. In truth, I had experienced something like that before—I just wasn’t sure I was ready to identify disembodied energy as the cause. “When they make you CEO of NASA, maybe you can dedicate the budget to holding séances and developing those proton guns they use in Ghostbusters—”

  “Shut up,” she said with a laugh, hurling a pillow at my face. “You better be nice to me, or I’ll dedicate the budget to breaking down the barrier between this world and the next, and when I die my ghost will haunt the shit out you!”

  “Just stay out of the bathroom when I’m pooping, okay?”

  “I’m not kidding, Flynn Doherty,” she said, leaning toward me across the bed with a mischievous smirk. “You’re never getting rid of me.”

  * * *

  For several heartbeats—once my heart started up again, that is—I was prepared to believe it really was January calling me. Not from beyond the grave, but maybe from somewhere in California, having faked her death after all. If anyone could’ve pulled off something like that, it was her. Her body was still missing, her clothes disposed of in a place where they would have to be found sooner or later … it could have been true.

  Only I had seen the amount of blood on her hoodie with my own eyes, had heard the police confirm that it was hers, beyond question—enough that we just don’t see how she could have survived without medical attention—and when I looked again at the display, I felt my hopes escape like a breath of air when I realized I’d made a simple error. The call wasn’t coming from January’s cell, but from her home number—the landline at the mansion. It was still unexpected, of course, but it wasn’t my ex-girlfriend, either calling me or haunting me. I answered, and the subsequent conversation I had was both short and baffling. When I hung up again, I turned to Kaz and asked, in a perturbed voice, “Can you take me to January’s? I mean, right now?”

  “I … sure, why? Who was that?”

  “It was Jonathan Walker.” I was still rattled at hearing the man’s voice in my ear, and perplexed by what he’d said. “He practically begged me to come over there. He told me it was an emergency.”

  “And you believe him?” Kaz oozed doubt from every pore, even as he redirected the Lexus in the direction of Superior Charter Township. “Flynn, just a little while ago, you said you thought he had raped and killed his stepdaughter!”

  “And what was my excuse supposed to be for refusing to go? ‘Sorry, but I’m pretty sure you raped and killed your stepdaughter?’” I was still clinging to my phone, half hoping for January to call for real this time and clear the matter up. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but he sounded pretty sincere.”

  “I’m not leaving you there alone,” Kaz said decisively, his hands tightening on the wheel. “I’m coming in with you.”

  I didn’t fight him on it. I didn’t want to go there alone. Maybe I should have said no to Mr. Walker in the first place, but he’d sounded urgent, almost panicked. Flynn? Listen, I … could you please come out to the house? Right away. Please. It’s … it’s Mrs. Walker, she’s … honestly, it’s kind of an emergency. Please come? He’d offered no details, hadn’t explained what kind of an emergency Tammy might be having that I could help with, but I wasn’t sure how to say no.

  The interior of the Lexus was silent on the drive out to where the Walkers lived, the residual tension of the embarrassing almost-kiss mingling with a sense of foreboding about where we were headed and what we might find when we got there. Eventually, though, we were turning onto the drive leading to the mansion, headlights sweeping across another small shrine to January that had sprung up since Tuesday. Candles, flowers, stuffed animals, and other mementos had been piled under a prominent photograph of my ex-girlfriend smiling into the darkness.

  At the end of the twisting lane, we pulled to a stop in the mansion’s forecourt, stepped from the car, and started for the front porch. The door opened before we even reached the top of the steps, and Jonathan Walker appeared, backlit by the blazing glory of the crystal chandelier that floated in the foyer.

  “Flynn! Thank you for coming.” The man’s voice was thin and anxious, and from behind him, out of the depths of the enormous manse, I heard alarming sounds: animalistic wails and sobs punctuated by the noise of shattering dishes. As we stepped into the glow of the porch lamps, Mr. Walker seemed to notice Kaz for the first time. “I’m sorry … I believe we’ve met, but I can’t remember your name.”

  “Kaz Bashiri, sir. I worked with January at Old Mother Hubbard’s, and I was here on Tuesday for the … um, the search.” He shifted his weight uneasily and seemed to have trouble looking Mr. Walker in the eye.

  “Of course,” the man returned with a nod, though he still appeared distracted, radiating an aura of jittery carelessness. “Thank you for taking part. I … I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but I would appreciate it if you would wait out here. This is … it’s a private matter.”

  Kaz looked to me, and I gave him a short nod before Mr. Walker ushered me quickly into the foyer, slamming the door shut on Kaz’s worried, watchful gaze. While I wasn’t anxious to go inside without backup, I didn’t believe that the man wished to
do me harm; he couldn’t possibly know what I suspected. Besides, he would have to have assumed someone would bring me, and would therefore be waiting to take me home. Not the slick move of a criminal plotting his next kill.

  “What’s going on?” I asked with trepidation as he herded me along. “Is it … Why did you ask me to come over?”

  “You were so good with her the other day,” he answered indirectly, guiding me past the rounded staircases and toward the kitchen, from whence the dramatic and destructive sounds emanated. When we passed through the doors into the once immaculate and exquisitely appointed space, my mouth dropped open and I gazed in a state of horrified fascination at the source of the emergency.

  Tammy Walker was down on her hands and knees, sobbing and babbling incomprehensibly, her hair disheveled and her silk robe in disarray. It hadn’t been dishes I’d heard breaking from the front door, but stone; in one hand she gripped a claw hammer, and was bringing it down over and over against the expensive marble that paved the kitchen floor. The creamy tiles were cracked and smashed, gaping holes revealing the glue where Tammy had torn up large fragments and flung them aside.

  The diaphanous, Martha Stewart–y window treatments had been pulled down, copper pots pounded against the floor until they were bent and twisted, and a silverware drawer yanked out and emptied over the center island, its rectangular socket gaping in the otherwise impeccable white facade of the below-counter cabinetry.

  Mr. Walker rushed forward, grabbing Tammy’s wrist before she could bring the hammer down again. His wife began to shriek like a madwoman as he struggled to wrest the tool from her grasp. “Let it go, Tammy, let it go—let it go!”

  He jerked the hammer free at last and tossed it to the side. As Tammy began to flail in his arms, striking his chest with wild, ineffectual blows, he directed her—without warning—to me. The handoff was seamless, however; as Tammy fell against me, her frenzied rage segued immediately into paroxysms of hysterical grief. Clutching me in a fiercely tight embrace, she wept into my ear, tears wetting my neck as her fingers dug into the flesh of my back.

  “She’s gone,” January’s mother gasped, almost uncomprehendingly, her voice thin and ragged. “She’s really, really gone.…”

  “I’m sorry.” It was a stupid thing to say, but the first thing that came to mind.

  “She hated those tiles,” the woman choked out in a defensive, almost childish tone that was also tinged with regret. “She said they were … pretentious. She hated this kitchen, Flynn. She hated this house, this gilded cage.”

  “I know.”

  The sobbing started again, and she seemed to melt against me, sagging gradually as though her life force was depleting bit by bit with every tear. She cried for a long time, shaking and sniffling, her hair clinging damply to my face, until she was able to form words again. “I thought this was going to be the happy ending. I thought this was going to be our reward! I wanted her to have everything, the most wonderful life, and this was supposed to be it. How could it turn out this way?”

  “I don’t know.” The robe had slipped off her shoulder now, and I was terrified that if I looked down, I would see mom boobs.

  “He never tried,” she said with sudden contempt. “Even when he was around, he never tried! He looked at her like she might detonate at any second—how was she supposed to feel?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about.

  “She was always so angry, Flynn, always so hurtful, so ‘me against the world’! Why?” The question came out so despondent and confused it nearly broke my heart, and as Tammy’s grip weakened, I moved her around the center island to one of the tall stools at the counter that faced the morning room. She slumped onto it, a husk of a woman, her face haggard and swollen with anguish, and pulled her robe together with trembling fingers. “Why did she always want to hurt me?”

  “I … I don’t think…” I trailed off, unsure how to approach this question, how to manage Tammy’s combined grief and narcissism with any kind of finesse.

  Then, bluntly, the woman asked, “Was it yours? The … baby?”

  “N-no.”

  She studied me, as if trying to read my face, to see if I was lying, and then rasped in the same desolate tone, “I don’t understand how life turns out like this.”

  I had nothing to say to that, and therefore just nodded my agreement. I didn’t understand, either. Completely worn out, January’s mother hunched over the counter and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking gently and silently. A shoe scraped against the ruined floor behind me, and I turned to see Mr. Walker standing by the edge of the counter, half consumed by the shadows that filled the central hall. I wondered how much of our exchange he had heard. Nothing particularly private or sensitive had come up, and yet I felt a thrill of unease, thinking that he’d been eavesdropping.

  With a blank face, the man beckoned, turned, and then disappeared from sight without waiting to see if I would follow. Clearly, the ambitious state senator was used to giving orders and having them followed without question.

  Tammy had tuned me out, and for the moment it looked like she was finished with her kitchen demolition project, so I heeded Mr. Walker’s summons. He was waiting for me in the grand room, pouring scotch into two cut-glass tumblers that sat on his desk. One serving he knocked back immediately; the other he thrust into my hands. I looked at it with wide eyes, wondering if he was seriously expecting me to have a drink with him, and then he finished swallowing and spoke. “Give that to Mrs. Walker. She needs a drink—and she’ll take it, if it’s from you.”

  Why wouldn’t she take it from you? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t find the courage to do so aloud. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She will,” he said tiredly, pouring more scotch into his tumbler, “eventually.” He took a sip, closed his eyes, and exhaled. “This has all been … exceedingly difficult for her, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’m afraid she hasn’t been herself since January disappeared. Her outburst on Tuesday was just the tip of the iceberg.”

  It was both an apology and a rebuke of his wife, and I squirmed uncomfortably. “I think she’s calmed down now.”

  “She’ll start up again.” He rubbed his mouth ruefully. His hand looked raw and chapped from repeated washings, and I wondered if he was a germophobe. “The election is Tuesday. What am I going to do with her?”

  The question was both crass and rhetorical and, once again, I found myself disappointed to see Mr. Walker’s selfish priorities cast in such sharp relief. I didn’t have the balls to call him on it, though—especially in light of what he might well have done to the last teenager that pissed him off. “Maybe she needs some help? Like, professional help, I mean.”

  “That reminds me,” Mr. Walker said suddenly. Putting down his glass, he reached into his pocket and withdrew an orange plastic vial. Popping off the cap, he turned it over into the palm of his hand and a cascade of blue capsules tumbled out. “She’d better take some of these, too.”

  “What are they?”

  “Sedatives,” he replied. He noticed my reaction and, with a faint smile, added, “I know, I know, you shouldn’t mix pills and alcohol. Believe me, though, Mrs. Walker can handle a lot more than this. She’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

  “What if she won’t take them?”

  “Good point.” With obviously practiced skill, he broke two capsules open and emptied their contents into the whiskey I held in my hands. “Swirl that around a bit—she won’t even notice.”

  I did as I was told, my stomach feeling unsettled and queasy, and then carried the concoction back into the kitchen. Stiffly, aware that I was being watched, I slid the drink in front of January’s mother. She looked up at me with a feeble smile.

  “Thank you, Flynn.” She downed the whiskey in two gulps, then closed her hand over mine on the counter and expelled a breath that rattled like an old car with a busted muffler. “You’re a sweet boy. January was lucky to have met you.”
>
  “I…” I blushed, feeling miserably unable to accept the compliment.

  “The truth is,” she admitted, letting out another sigh, “I wish it had been yours.” There was absolutely nothing to say to this, so I sat stock-still and allowed her to continue. “I was young when I had January. Too young. Everyone told me it was a big mistake, to have a baby at seventeen, but I thought I knew everything. Kids always think they know everything. Sure, I understood that childcare was challenging—I had younger siblings, I’d been a babysitter—but I never had any doubt that I could hack it as a mom. I’d always landed on my feet before, why would this be any different?” She was staring at the black windows of the morning room, our faces reflected in the overlaid glass. Tammy’s voice was already starting to get soft around the edges. “I didn’t use to believe in having regrets, but maybe I should have listened. Maybe I was selfish.”

  “Don’t say that,” I offered weakly. “January loved you. She said you weren’t just her mom, you were her friend, too, you know?”

  Tammy sobbed a little, then squeezed my hand. “Such a sweet boy.”

  Her eyes were dreamy and unfocused, her movements becoming lethargic, and Mr. Walker seemed to take this as his cue to reenter the scene. “Come along, Tammy, let’s get you to bed.”

  “Flynn is a sweet boy,” she told him faintly as he pulled her up from the barstool and put his arm around her waist. “A good boy.”

  “Of course,” Jonathan responded, his tone perfunctory and meaningless, and the smell of bullshit seemed to have an adverse effect on his wife.

  Pushing out of his grasp with an unsteady stumble, she snapped, “You don’t care. You only care about yourself, about your election.”

  “Tammy—”

  “You want everything to be perfect, and even then it’s still not good enough!” Her words ran together like watercolors. “The more I try to do what you want, the less shits you give. My unhappiness is an ‘inconvenience’! My contributions are unappreciated! Look, sweetheart,” she announced, with a sadistic cackle, “I fixed the kitchen for you!”