I Stop Somewhere

by TE Carter

  “Good. Liz started a website, too. She’s trying to get more girls to come forward. There’s no way there were only two,” Gomes replies.

  Malik nods. “I’ve been going through these lists,” he says, holding out a folder with several printed sheets of paper. “Out of all the houses, there are four sites isolated enough. All four could fit the girls’ descriptions.”

  “Well, let’s get over there,” Gomes says.

  “Shannon and I can go, if you think you can manage everything else. Liz said info has been coming in, but … well, clearly it’s going to involve some reading.” He glances at the stack of papers.

  “These people. It would be nice if they realized they’re only making it harder on us. Do they even know they’re just helping those boys?” Gomes asks.

  Although he’s not expecting a response, Thompson replies anyway. “I’m not sure some of them are opposed to making it harder. The Brewards have a lot of supporters.”

  Gomes picks up the papers. The station is quiet, despite the swarm of reporters outside. I wonder if he even wants to leave, given that he has to walk through them to get home. “Find the house. I’ll be here filtering through the last dregs of humanity.”

  I want to help, although I can’t. But being able to ride in the car with Thompson and Malik is nice. I like thinking progress is happening. I need to know they’re getting closer.

  “What happened here?” Thompson asks as they pull up to the first house. It’s nearly fallen down. Weeds tug on the gutters and the roof has caved in. An animal scurries past the bay window on the inside.

  “I don’t think you could do much here,” Malik says. “And I’m sure the girls would’ve remembered a hole in the roof.”

  “I think you’re right. This is terrible, though.”

  In the backyard, there’s a bike. One of the wheels came off and it’s rusted, but once upon a time, someone rode it. Someone came home from school or work and there wasn’t a hole in the roof. Once upon a time.

  “This town is falling apart,” Thompson says. “How are we ever going to clean all this up?”

  “We count on people like the Brewards,” Malik replies.

  “They haven’t done a thing here.”

  “They will. That’s why people don’t want to say anything. They don’t want this house in their neighborhood.”

  “So we let the Brewards get away with murder as a thank-you,” Thompson says. She doesn’t mean it literally, but she’s right.

  As she backs out of the driveway, she looks through me while she scans the road.

  When we pull up to the second house on their list, I feel the memory tugging at me. Caleb and I came here once, early on. The furniture had all been removed and the house just needed to be cleaned. We lay in the center of an empty kitchen, cool tiles on our backs, and I stared at where the refrigerator had been. I was happy for the people who’d lived here, happy they’d been able to take it with them. It was just a thing, but you miss things when you’re forced to leave them behind.

  “This isn’t where it happened,” Thompson says once they’re inside. “Kailey mentioned a bed, and I can’t imagine the boys dragging a bed here and then bringing it somewhere else. That’s probably too much work, even for them.”

  They stand where Caleb and I fell asleep, their feet pressing down onto the memory of us. Malik flicks the light switch, which hasn’t worked in who knows how long.

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?” he asks.

  Thompson nods, but the sadness is too much on top of everything else. They do a quick scan of the place, but it’s just another house. Another ghost. Not the right one, though.

  The road toward the lake is narrow. Clumps of leaves have rotted and lie discarded in piles along the shoulder. It’s a pretty drive, except the potholes and ice heaves make it hard to focus on the way the birches and sunbeams play hide-and-seek outside the window. A chipmunk runs behind the car as we pass, diving inside a log on the other side of the road.

  These are the places that people try to remember. We come out to the lake to breathe, to justify staying here.

  I know they’re in the right place. I’ve walked along these curves before. In the snow and in the rain. At night or under the bright sun at midday. I’ve stood and listened to the chipmunks and squirrels squawking over acorns.

  Because I’ve had a lot of time to take it in now.

  It’s not far. These were my quiet escapes when it was too much in the room, but I wanted to be close enough to go back. When I was ready. When I let myself remember that it was my responsibility to be there. That I was the only one who heard them.

  As we get closer, it all makes sense for the first time. I couldn’t figure out what kept me here. Why I kept coming back. Why I’d walk in the woods but turn around and go back to that room, knowing what would happen. Knowing how much I’d have to remember.

  I thought I stayed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what else to do. But I didn’t. I realize now that I stayed because I saw myself in the other girls’ eyes. I heard myself in their cries and screams. I needed to listen. I had to experience it over and over again because I needed to give them that. I needed to make sure someone was there for them. I couldn’t let them suffer alone like I had.

  The car slows as we approach the house, and I feel all those nights coming back to me. Six months of it. I’ve watched so many girls be taken apart in there, and now, finally, someone else will know. Finally, I won’t have to carry this by myself, alone, into forever.

  There’s nothing around the house. It’s in the woods, far back from the road, the lake the only sign of people for miles. Maybe it was a summerhouse. A place like Kailey’s family had. Maybe the people who lived here and Kailey’s family knew each other—the people who came into the town but weren’t a part of it.

  This is the same lake where Dad and I went fishing. A life that was shaped, on both ends, by this place. And by the boys who declared it theirs.

  I’m not even sure if I mean the lake or my life.

  It’s a pretty house. On the outside. It still looks like someone could live here. They did a good job fixing the broken pieces. Someone even planted daffodils. I want to think they’re beautiful, but I realize it had to have been one of them. Caleb or Noah. One of them had to go to the store, buy the flowers, and sit in the dirt, planting them. One of them had to believe that these yellow flowers deserved to live more than I did. Deserved more space in the ground than me.

  Thompson and Malik walk through the rooms. Everything is in place. It’s been transformed back into a home, and it waits for someone to love it again. Everything is as if someone will be back any day now, except for all the stuff in boxes in each room. I don’t know what happens to the stuff when the banks finally come in and take over, now that it’s all cleaned up. I wonder what happens to these parts of people.

  “They left a TV,” Malik says. “DVDs. A whole mess of their stuff.”

  “I guess they had other things to worry about,” Thompson says.

  The main floor of the house is clean, but it doesn’t fit the description the girls gave. Malik looks through the sliding glass door into the backyard, and I want to lift him up, to put him over the spot where I am, to show him that I was here.

  Thompson gets his attention instead when she opens the door to the basement.

  “Wow, there’s a lot more stuff down here.”

  Boxes fill the space in the basement. It was cold down here that night. I remember that. Concrete can’t keep out the chill in the ground that stays here, even in the summer.

  Thompson and Malik navigate the storage areas, check out the circuit breakers, press the buttons on the washer and dryer.

  “Not here, either?” Malik asks.

  Yes. Look closer. I could scream it but nobody would hear. I wish I could draw a picture, could show them the way the top box on one of the piles is crooked, because even the Brewards aren’t perfect. Look closer, I plead in my head.

  “I do
n’t know. I guess not. But something’s bugging me,” Thompson says.

  When Noah and Caleb started it, maybe here or wherever it was they started—since I don’t know how long it went on before me—they were careful about everything. They had plenty of power and could get away with more than most people. They were smart, too. They chose us with a great deal of forethought. They planned the details and setup of the location perfectly. They made sure we wouldn’t be believed.

  Thompson walks past the piles, running her hand over the tops of the boxes. She gets to the back, to that pile, and I push the box, hoping it will fall. It works in movies. But in real life, the box doesn’t do anything. My hands go through it.

  Still, something happens. I know it wasn’t me. After six months, I don’t believe in luck. It wasn’t a coincidence. She was just looking. Someone was finally looking.

  “Come here,” Thompson tells Malik. “Do you see this?”

  Caleb and Noah, over time, grew careless. It’s shown in the top box on the stack, which has started to break free from the rest. If you look closely enough, there’s a strange wooden surprise at the bottom corner. Dark wood amid cardboard and concrete.

  “Let’s move these,” Malik says, and they drag the pile of boxes away from the door.

  It was probably their son’s or daughter’s room. The people before. A hidden part of the basement. Where their kid wouldn’t have to be part of the family except when they were hungry. Happy to be separate. Keeping company with a water heater and furnace.

  When the pile is moved, the officers recognize it immediately. A small room. Hidden. A bed. Weak carpet. And they know. There’s nothing left of all the girls who’ve passed through this room. Not anymore. But they know. Because places like this create energy that can’t be washed away with new paint. All it needed was for them to come looking.

  “Call Gomes. And get my camera,” Thompson says.

  While I wait with them for Gomes to show up, I remember it. I came here willingly. That afternoon, I stood in front of my mirror, trying to get my lipstick right. It was another of my dad’s markdowns, but not orange like the others. I tried to make it work. Garish pink, but with just a little, I almost looked like the people in magazines. Like the girls I admired. As much as I could with my sepia-washed hair and skin. An old-fashioned photograph of a girl.

  I don’t want to die in a place like this. I don’t want to be forgotten, to be left here. I don’t want that kid, the one I imagined, to play soccer over my bones. I want someone to remember me. I want someone to care.

  That’s it, though. I want. I want. I want. Always. That’s no good. Who cares what a girl wants?

  chapter thirty-eight

  When I went missing, they did look for my body. After they contacted my mom, who was out of the country, and they tried to get information from people in town, they looked for me in case I was dead.

  They started searching for me by the river. It’s like an unspoken assumption that girls who disappear end up in the river, I guess. Some kind of Ophelia complex. I didn’t sing myself a lullaby and fall from a branch. It wasn’t romantic. I was torn apart and thrown in the ground, wrapped in plastic. They don’t paint pictures of girls in tarps, though, so maybe people can’t shake that idea. A girl floating peacefully to her death in a wreath of flowers. Maybe we’re all Victorian paintings or living poems.

  Now, the team is in the backyard, digging. They all knew as soon as they saw the room. I watch them as they pull up the ground. By the shed, under a large gray rock, they find bones, but they’re not mine.

  “A dog,” Malik says. “Probably the family who lived here, I would guess. They’re pretty old.”

  It makes me feel a little better that I shared the ground with someone who’d been loved.

  “Over here.” A guy digging wipes his face and someone else joins him, marking the spot where the blue tarp juts through the earth.

  That inch of plastic sends the whole team into work mode, digging and marking and photographing.

  When one of them lifts the tarp, my foot falls loose. I’m still wearing my sneakers.

  I don’t want to see myself. I don’t want to know what becomes of a girl.

  I go to the front of the house and wait. The night settles overhead, but the lights from their lamps and cars don’t let it through. The house is awash in white. It’s quiet, except for the sound of digging. Except for the fear present when they take me out of the earth.

  Thompson comes around the house, dialing a number on her phone. She’s crying.

  “Mom? Can I talk to Rana?” She sits on the front steps, her feet kicking at the daffodils. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. It’s a nervous habit to avoid thinking about what they found. She tries to keep her voice steady while the tears fall. “No, probably not,” she says. “Do you mind keeping her there tonight? It’s going to be late.” She pauses while her mother responds. “Yeah, it’s bad. Can you put Rana on? I don’t have much time.”

  While she waits for the phone to be passed along to Rana, she looks up at the sky. Her hands are shaking and the phone slips, tumbling to the steps below her. She picks it up, her breath ragged.

  But then suddenly, she’s fine. The tears are quelled, her hands grow steady, and she focuses on the phone, holding it tight against her ear.

  “Hi, honey,” she says. “How’s Grandma’s? Are you doing anything fun?”

  It shouldn’t surprise me. She’s young, but not that young. Plenty of people her age have kids. But I get it now. Why she’s been so focused on me. On the other girls. It’s the fear that’s born with your child. The realization that you can’t protect them, even if you make it your career.

  Thompson smiles at hearing her daughter’s voice. “I’m still at work, but I’ll be home tomorrow night, okay?” Her daughter speaks and Thompson waits, running her free hand along the bush beside the stairs. Noise drifts over the roof from the backyard. “I’m sure Grandma would love to bake cookies,” she says. “Well, you can ask her. I don’t know if she has gummy bears, but why don’t you see?”

  The tears return and she bites her lip to avoid letting her voice shake. “Okay, Rana, I have to get back to work now, okay? But I’ll see you tomorrow.… Yes, I’m very excited about your gummy princess cookies.… Give Grandma kisses for me, okay?”

  She sits on the front steps of the house after she hangs up and gives in to the crying. Her tears soak the knees of her pants and she bends over, folding herself up. She tries wiping her knees dry, but the spots spread downward. Dark spots growing while she tries not to hurt.

  On the other side of the bushes, a team of officers brings my body over to a van. The lights go down in the backyard, but Thompson doesn’t move. She doesn’t stop crying.

  “How’s Rana?” Malik asks as he comes around the house.

  “She’s alive,” she says, tucking her phone into her pocket. “I can’t imagine what Alex Frias is going to feel. I can’t…”

  “Are you okay?”

  As the rest of the cops leave, there’s no light anymore. This is one of the few places in town where the pollution from the store doesn’t spread. I look up and the stars fill the darkness here. I wish I’d been able to see them when they put me in the ground.

  “No,” Thompson says. “I don’t think I’ll ever be okay, Tariq. I kept hoping, you know? I kept thinking maybe we’d find her. That maybe it was all just coincidence and we’d find her and she’d be fine. We took so long. I just can’t forgive myself.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Anyone but those boys.”

  “What if we’d been able to save her?” she asks.

  Shaking his head, he holds his hand out to help her up. They walk to the car in silence and I follow. I want to know where they’re going. I want to know what comes next. I’ve waited so long to be found, but now, I don’t know what this means for me.

  Inside the car, Malik looks at Thompson. He changed spots with her and he’s driving now.
She sits with her face pressed against the window, shaking.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asks.

  “It’s my job,” she says. “I have to be.”

  chapter thirty-nine

  The Christmas lights are still tangled in the gutters. He never took them down, but I don’t know if he lit them this year. I don’t think he would’ve. He probably forgot they’re even there.

  “I’ll do most of the talking,” Gomes says, but it’s not authoritative. He’s not trying to lead the conversation; he’s taking the brunt of it because Thompson and Malik are having a hard enough time walking to the front door. “He may be angry. He has every right to be angry. Hell, I’m angry.”

  My dad comes to the door wearing his panda bear pajama pants. I bought them for him a few years ago for Christmas. They were supposed to be funny. His T-shirt is wrinkled and there’s a hole in the armpit. He looks like he was half-asleep.

  “Come in,” he says, and he opens the screen door to let them into the house. They follow him past the dark living room, down the hall, into the kitchen. The overhead light is on and there’s one cupcake on the table, sitting in the middle of a plate that’s too big for one cupcake.

  “Do you want something to drink?” my dad asks. They don’t respond. He gets a glass out of the dishwasher and fills it with water.

  “Alex, do you have a minute?” Gomes asks.

  “I’m off today. It was … It is Ellie’s birthday. She’s sixteen.”

  The days after dying all feel like one long stretch of time. Not much different than the days when you’re alive, but time doesn’t work the same way. The sun goes up and down, but it’s all one day. I didn’t realize it was my birthday.

  Thompson puts her hands on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Her expression doesn’t change. Her posture doesn’t change. But her hands grip the wood of the chair, as she tries not to feel what she does. As she tries to hold it together because, like she told Malik, she has to.