I Stop Somewhere

by TE Carter

  “Can’t you bring them both? I’m sure you can bring two shirts.”

  She threw them both to the side of the bed and picked up another one instead.

  I wish I had known more about Kate, had known why she wanted to get away. Even now, all I know is that she needed to get rid of who she was here. I don’t even know that because she told me. I only know because now I understand how time can weigh on you and how a place can turn you into someone you don’t want to remember being.

  But on that day, I didn’t understand and I wanted to ask her about Caleb.

  “Kate, did you hear me?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Caleb.” She didn’t say anything else.

  “It’s a big deal,” I told her. “I love him. I’ve never felt like this before. I kind of need to talk to you about it.”

  She stood with her back to me. “What do you want me to say? Do you want my permission to let him break your heart?”

  I was surprised, because she’d never mentioned anything about him. Nothing except to say once that she knew of him and she knew Noah. All she’d said was that she never understood what girls saw in them.

  “He’s sweet,” I said. “He tells me all the time how pretty I am.”

  She nodded, still not turning around. “You are pretty, Ellie. You don’t need Caleb Breward to say it to make it true.”

  I sat in the chair by her desk and played with her cup of pens. She went back to packing and I sat in the hot oppressive silence.

  After she closed her suitcase, she sat down on the edge of her bed and tossed me the Beatles shirt.

  “The Brewards are assholes,” Kate said. “You can do better.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  My dad explained the Bechdel test to me once when I was younger. I forget what movie we were watching, but it was one he stayed awake for and he tried to make the whole idea of female relationships in film make sense to me. It was something he’d picked up in film school. I listened because I loved hearing him remember the person he’d been, but I didn’t really get it. I didn’t have friends, and I didn’t think much about boys, so I couldn’t understand the nuances of what he was saying.

  Looking back, I realize Kate and I failed the Bechdel test. We failed at every test. Worse, we failed at opportunity. She hated Hollow Oaks. Hated everything it stood for, and she hated Noah Breward. It was something in the way she’d mentioned him before, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask why she stayed in a town she hated for an extra year, doing nothing but helping me dye my hair and borrow her clothes. I didn’t know anything because I never asked her to explain. I used Kate, even if I didn’t know it yet.

  Wisdom is a privilege of the dying and the dead alone.

  “You know what comes next,” she said. “How long have you been together? A few months? That’s not very long. If you tell him you love him, you must know what comes next. You have to know what he’s going to think you’re saying.”

  “I know. He’s gonna be a senior in a few months. I know relationships move faster for him. He’s been sweet, though. I already told him I need time, but that’s just it. I’ve been thinking about it. I know what’s next, and that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  Kate walked around her room, cleaning up signs that she’d ever lived there. It was nineteen years of her life and she was trying to erase it entirely. I watched her walk around and I waited for her advice. I waited to be told it was okay that I felt this way about Caleb. Or for her to tell me that it wasn’t. I wanted someone to tell me what I should feel, because I didn’t know if I could trust myself.

  “I love him, Kate,” I said.

  She only nodded and kept cleaning. It was hot—a midsummer day—the humidity almost as heavy as what we weren’t saying. She walked through her room, still wearing her hoodie. She always wore it, like it was some kind of armor.

  Maybe it was. Maybe Kate always felt like there was something she needed protection from. I wish I’d asked her. I wish I had asked about Hollow Oaks and Noah Breward and what kinds of things there are to hide from in a small town.

  chapter eighteen

  Their father looks like them. I’d seen him on TV and around town, but never close up. I recognize both of them in him. He has Noah’s anger, his entitlement. It sits on him, waiting to be called upon; the lines in his face show the places where it’s weaved itself into him wholly. And in his walk and his confidence I see Caleb.

  “How stupid do you have to be?” he asks. It’s directed at them both, sitting on the edge of the bed like obedient children. It’s amazing to watch them cower. To see that they have weaknesses, too.

  Mr. Breward, or Wayne to his friends, as he says during his campaigns—insinuating that we are all, sincerely, his friends—moves with military precision. I don’t think he ever served, since it would’ve been mentioned at some point during all the years he held this town in his hands, but he could command an army.

  “I called Adrien,” he tells them. “I’m not sure I’m ready to get him involved, though. I think we can make this go away, but I need you to hold it together. Keep a low profile for a while.”

  “No one’s going to listen to her,” Noah says. “She’s like this. She’s always starting stuff. Nobody listens anymore.”

  Mr. Breward pauses and looks at his sons. “There’s another one, too. I don’t know her name. Adrien’s trying to find out. But I did dig up what I could on this Gretchen girl. You’re right; she’s got a habit of causing trouble, and that works well for you.”

  “What about the…” Caleb starts to ask, but he can’t say it. None of them can say it aloud.

  “Just clean up. Get this room fixed.” They’ve already repaired the wall and cleaned some of it, but it’s not done. And time isn’t kind when you have secrets.

  “Adrien wants us to stop by there tomorrow,” Wayne Breward continues. “He’ll probably have something.” He takes in the room, brushing his hands along the walls, the table, the bed. I can hear his footsteps on the carpet. It’s a weak carpet. A weak carpet in a room for weak girls.

  “This one’s almost ready to turn over,” he says, “and then it won’t be our problem anymore. I just would’ve preferred that you’d had more self-control. Especially after … It’s too soon. I don’t know what you were thinking. They couldn’t have been worth it. One night isn’t worth losing everything. What was it? An hour? An hour’s worth throwing your lives away?”

  They don’t respond, looking at the carpet. Their dad sighs. “Just keep yourselves out of trouble. And don’t tell your mother I was here.”

  When he’s gone, they wait. Processing. Maybe they’re trying to figure out who the other girl is, but how could they tell? There are too many. It’s hard to keep track. We all become names. Things. Colors and the clothes we wore. We aren’t human. Of all the things that make a girl, a soul doesn’t seem to be one of them. Not here.

  “Let’s get this place cleaned up,” Caleb finally says.

  The closet is never open. But now it is, and they go through the pieces they found from each of us. They save something from every girl. A collection of the hurt, a trophy case of their victories.

  I know each item so well. Perhaps the lip balm, if they’d found it first, would’ve been added to the closet.

  Hair ties, a sock, a bracelet, and earrings. Just things that each girl carried. Things they kept as some kind of reminder. I watch them go through each item. There were more girls than I remember.

  Noah lifts a bracelet, a stringy thing that was ready to fall off but hung on. Faded yellows and blues and greens. The girl who wore it was the prettiest one of all. A porcelain doll, so fragile.

  I wonder if she’s the same girl. The one who came forward. I wonder if Noah knows it when he touches the bracelet, if he remembers her at all, or if he simply yearns for whatever he’s missing when he sees it. I wonder what he finds in the little pieces he’s saved.

  I wait for me. I want to see them take me out and throw me away lik
e the rest.

  But they didn’t keep me here, because they want to pretend I never happened.

  Caleb holds the trash bag while Noah makes these girls disappear for good.

  “It’s just this garbage and we’re done.” He grabs another handful of girls.

  You’d think by now, it wouldn’t hurt. The casualness, the way they are with each item. Caleb pushes the trash down into the bag and waits for his brother to finish.

  People say you can’t fall in love in high school. That relationships you have when you’re young are meant to be stepping-stones to what real life brings, they say. But I feel the hurt of it. I thought I loved Caleb. And while he erases these girls from their history, like he erased me from everything, I feel the shards of it in my blood.

  Every last word and memory broken apart. Rushing through what’s left of me.

  It wasn’t a fantasy with him. Like the way he smiled and moved, the growing thing between us was awkward. Still, I remember the love as much as the hate. It’s a gnawing pain that I can’t forgive. I cared for him deeply. And I believed in him.

  Perhaps the worst dangers in our lives are the ones we invite in.

  Noah dumps the rest of the items into the bag before doing another sweep of the closet. It’s just a closet now. Empty except for the dresser the people before left behind. He pulls it away from the wall, checks underneath, making sure the remnants of what they’ve done are all removed.

  He nods and Caleb closes the bag, tying it shut, holding it over his shoulder. The same way he’d slung my bag over his shoulder on that first day by the river. A sadistic Santa Claus.

  I don’t know where I’ll go when they’re gone. The walls are freshly painted, the room just another room in another house. The last record of what happened here sits in the bag Caleb’s holding.

  Neither of them moves. Noah keeps looking into the dark closet, seeing something that’s not there. I wonder if he’s mourning this place. Mourning that it’s over.

  “Are you worried?” Caleb asks.

  “Not really. They’re not going to believe her.”

  “But what about … the flyers. If she tells the right person. We didn’t move her. All they have to do is walk out back and—”

  “Don’t say it. Don’t say her name,” Noah says. “She doesn’t exist. We’ve been over this. This is about Gretchen and the other one, whoever it is. They’re trying to distract us, trying to get us to say the wrong thing. They’ve already asked about her. We’ve been through it. We’re clear, so stop bringing it up.”

  Looking at them now, they don’t look like monsters. Noah’s perfectly trimmed nails and hands, when they’re not pulsing with the violence he has within him, make him look gentle. Soft in places. His hair, his clothes, everything about his posture is on target with whatever makes him seem safe.

  And Caleb, with his awkward confidence and constant smile. Charming. Sweet.

  They look like a sitcom.

  “Say it,” I whisper.

  Noah shuts the closet and they’re done here.

  They turn out the light. Caleb pulls the door closed, the trash bag hitting the frame as he leaves me alone with the bed and the closet and the carpet and the always-and-forever brown walls.

  “Say my fucking name!” I scream after them.

  Being dead is agonizing. But at least when everyone ignores you, it doesn’t sting the same way it did while you were alive.

  chapter nineteen

  Dad and I were never religious. I went to Sunday school and Saint Elizabeth’s, but it was mostly for show. We both had too much else happening in our lives. We were too busy to worry about what God was up to all the time.

  Besides, it was hard to get answers about God that made sense. I asked the priests and nuns at school, and when we went to Mass on Sundays, I would try to piece together the stories. There was the Gospel and the Old Testament and the way the priests tried to make it relevant to what was happening in the world.

  But the stories were told out of order. Just bits and pieces of someone’s life, and we were told He was the only one who really knew. How could I understand these disjointed parts when I didn’t understand my own scattered stories?

  I didn’t know my mom’s parents. She was part of my dad’s life, then I came, and she was only a story, too. The grandparents I knew died when I was eight. She went first—cancer—and my grandfather followed close behind. I always hoped someday someone would love me that much. That someone would follow me into death, because living wasn’t worth it without me.

  It seems silly. I was so afraid of being alone in death. As if the real pain isn’t on the people left behind.

  Now I know it wasn’t a romantic gesture on my grandfather’s part. He wasn’t desperate to keep my grandmother company; he just couldn’t bear how quickly her space in the world closed up and left nothing in its place. They’re not the same thing. Not at all.

  “Where do we go when we die?” I asked Father O’Connell one Sunday. I used to fall asleep dreaming that my mom had meant to come back, that she’d turned around after leaving but she’d died trying to return to me. It didn’t explain the cards, but I was young and I could still live in two realities. The one that was and the one I wanted it to be.

  “If we’re good, we go to Heaven and get to be with Jesus,” he told me.

  “Why Jesus? I don’t know Him.”

  “Because Jesus loves you and wants you with Him,” he explained.

  I liked Jesus just fine. I felt sad when I looked at him during Mass, hanging on his cross. They told us we should be happy about it, that He died for us, but it didn’t look like something I wanted to be happy about. I thought it was selfish to find joy in His pain just because it made things better for me. I didn’t know Jesus well enough, and I certainly wasn’t open to dying for Him.

  He used to watch us during lunch at Saint Elizabeth’s. I’d peer over to the side and He’d be there. I felt ashamed, sitting at the lunch table and being upset they’d run out of french fries when poor Jesus was suffering next to me. But when the kids would make fun of me or knock my tray onto the floor, I’d look at Jesus. I’d ask Him for help. No matter how much I asked, though, no matter how much I hurt for His suffering, He never seemed to be there when I needed Him.

  “I don’t want to be with Jesus. I want to be with my dad,” I told Father O’Connell. They put a lot of stake in Jesus and what He wanted, but I just wanted my dad. I could count on my father. Jesus’s track record was a bit spotty for me.

  “God is all of our father.”

  “No, my father is my father,” I argued. “What happens to him if I’m in Heaven with Jesus?”

  I didn’t want to die and be separated from my dad. I didn’t want God to think I was bad, and I didn’t know how to be good. I tried to be good. But I failed, and I don’t know the rules anymore. I don’t know where we go when we die. I don’t know if Heaven still waits for the good people, or if Hell exists, or if there’s a lot of nothing. I only know what happened to me and I know what follows a series of mistakes. There was nothing in the Bible or in sermons that prepared me. There was never a list of what made good girls. And when you discover you’re not a good girl, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. There’s no kind of reconciliation for that.

  chapter twenty

  I don’t have to stay here. Maybe I’m weak, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I stay because it feels apropos. This room ended up being the most important part of my life. I guess it only makes sense that it’d be the most important part of my death.

  Sometimes I do leave. I never go far, though. I walk out to where the trees are, where I can be among the quiet things I didn’t notice enough when I was alive. They remind me how there’s still so much good. I go there when it’s too much. When I can’t see the good anymore. When I can’t feel it or I can’t remember, I go to the trees and I listen. I hear the birds sing and I wait for the sunlight to play games in between the branches. I remember how my feet alw
ays made the same sounds when I’d walk down a path covered in dry leaves. That crunching sound that announces to the world it’s fall.

  I can go other places. I just don’t.

  Right after it happened, there was one time I did. I was scared and my first thought, once I understood what was happening, was to go home. I thought maybe I could go to sleep and wake up and it would all be a mistake. There’s no sleep in death, though. It’s just time passing along the endless loop of itself.

  On that one night, I went home and found my father crying.

  He sat at the kitchen table, our laptop on, and my picture—the same one from the yearbook that Gretchen used on the flyers—filled the screen. I was memorialized by that one school photo, a thing I had to do, and I’ll forever be that girl now.

  The kitchen was dark. The only light came from the computer, and my father was washed in it, in the tints of my picture glowing on the screen.

  I watched him cry. It took a while, me sitting there with my dad’s pain surrounding me and helpless to do anything about it. He stared and clicked on the laptop and then stared some more. Eventually, when it seemed like he was out of tears, he got up and went to bed.

  My dad had so many dreams. Ideas of how the world should be. How it could be. When he was able to stay awake, he talked about them. He told me about the films he’d wanted to make, the ideas he had of what he could still make. But agents and film producers weren’t rushing to Hollow Oaks for stories about people like us. He told me the ideas he’d had, and then they died between us.

  I want to believe he still held on to those dreams. Even though they were on pause. Sometimes I thought I saw them in the back of his smile. But that night, after he saw the things people had written about me online, I watched as something in him snapped.

  I couldn’t go home again after that. I didn’t want to watch him unravel. I didn’t want to believe that there was nothing left for him, either.

  I’m sure it was hard for him when I disappeared. I’m sure he worried nobody really cared. These things happen and they’re in the news and they’re part of everyone’s lives, but not really. They’re someone else’s problem. You still try to care when you remember to, but eventually, something else comes along.