I Stop Somewhere

by TE Carter

  She stands, quiet, her knuckles growing white, while my dad watches them. His eyes move between the three cops, and no one speaks for a while.

  Thompson nods her head toward the cupcake. “Is that for her?”

  My dad remains standing by the dishwasher, drinking his glass of water. “I couldn’t ignore it. I mean, I don’t think she’s coming home, but what if she does? I can’t have nothing ready, can I?”

  Nobody speaks. The room fills with the silence. It’s oppressive, especially to me, who doesn’t have a way to break it.

  “Did you need anything? Are you having any luck?” my dad finally asks.

  “Alex,” Gomes starts, but he can’t say it. Not here. Not with the cupcake looking at him. Calling him out for missing it the first time. For letting six months pass. No one moves. Everyone just stares at the cupcake. Sitting there, on a plate too big for it, in the middle of the table. Remembering.

  My dad knows before they say it. He watches as they look at one another, but not at him, each of them trying to find the words. He glances at Thompson clutching the back of the chair, at the way Malik tries to focus on the backyard through the window. At how Gomes stares down the cupcake and breathes in long, slow breaths.

  My father realizes what they can’t say and his knees buckle under him. He catches himself by hanging on to the counter. Several of the past-due notices fall to the tile. No one moves to pick them up.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  Thompson swallows. A few tears escape, and she reaches up to wipe them away quickly, steadying herself with her other hand still on the back of the chair. She looks at my dad and nods. “We found her body,” she says, but she can’t continue.

  “I’m sorry,” Gomes says. “We’ll still need you to come down to confirm it. Of course, if you can’t right now, we understand. We don’t have a lot of information yet as far as what happened, but the M.E. is coming out to do an autopsy, and we’ll be running tests.”

  “How?” my dad asks.

  “What do you mean, how?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Like I said, we’re working off limited information. We think … That is, this is all guesswork right now, but we found her in the backyard of the same home where the Brewards brought those other girls. They’d described the same house and we found it—her. In the backyard.”

  “They put her in the ground,” my dad says, and he sinks to the floor, pulling on the panda pants and crying. He tightens his hands into fists and clings to the fabric. To one of the only things he has left of me.

  My dad can’t hug me good-bye. He can’t hold me and tell me it’ll be all right or comfort me after what they did. My father can’t bring me to a doctor and tell me that we’ll get through it. He can’t even see me, not like I was. All he can do is clutch his panda bear pajama pants while he sobs on our kitchen floor, while he has to listen to words like DNA testing, sexual assault, and decomposition.

  chapter forty

  The police station feels cold. Although it’s perception, not physical awareness, everything has a chill on it. Gomes brings my dad to his office first. He’s not ready for the morgue. His daughter is in the morgue. That’s not something you just walk into.

  “I knew she wouldn’t leave,” my dad says. “I knew it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sorry is what Gomes has. Sorry doesn’t fix six months, and it doesn’t bring me home, but he can’t say nothing.

  “Why didn’t you talk to them then? What if she’d been alive still?”

  Gomes sits and opens the bottom drawer of his desk. It’s so expected. The bottle. Tucked under an old manual. We find so much comfort in the ideas of us that we don’t even notice when we become those ideas.

  “They had alibis,” he says. “We couldn’t just start digging up backyards in town.”

  My dad won’t sit. He walks to the board where the officers had written out the clues they’d had, where they’d tried for half a year to find something. The dry erase markers are faded now, but every part of our lives leaves an echo. In the new colored smears are the lines from previous notes. Possibilities that never came together.

  “Who?” my dad asks.

  “Who what?” Gomes fills a second glass.

  “Who lied? Who walked in here, told you they were somewhere else, while my daughter rotted in the ground of an empty house?” I hate seeing him heartbroken, but his anger is new to me. I don’t know which I prefer.

  “Alex, it’ll all come out. It’s going to take a while. There are a lot of questions we all have.”

  “I want to know who. I need that. You owe me that.”

  Gomes puts the bottle back and closes the drawer. He unbuttons his collar. “I can’t do that, and you know it. I wish I could. Believe me, if I could, I’d be right there with you.”

  When my dad sits, he does it like he’s falling. A slow folding until he’s smaller and the anger slips off him, sliding onto the floor and revealing the pain underneath. “Do you have kids?” he asks.

  “I don’t. Never got married. Never really had anything but this.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Gomes slides a glass across the desk, Post-its being caught up as it moves. Like a mini tornado of forgotten ideas.

  “You don’t mean that,” Gomes says. “I know you’re hurting, but you had something good with Ellie. I know you wouldn’t give it up, even with this.”

  My dad stares at the glass. The liquid looks like oil. “It took me five years to stop resenting her.”

  “Your wife?”

  He shakes his head. “My daughter. I resented my daughter until she was almost seven years old. Can you imagine? Almost half her life. I spent half her life wishing her mom had taken her with her.”

  It doesn’t hurt to hear him say it. In fact, it brings me some comfort. I resented myself for him. The guilt of my existence, when he tried so hard, always felt so heavy on me. When he admits that he felt the same way, it fades. Because the honesty doesn’t mean he didn’t love me; it means he had to work to love me and yet he did it anyway.

  “She knew you loved her, Alex.”

  “Did she?” He starts to sob again. “Oh, damn it, Ellie.”

  Two grown men sitting in an old office, one of them crying and the other turning red from his own shame, should be the picture the media uses. People should see what goes on. What it really feels like. Because once the trial starts and everyone’s watching, both men will stand resolved and stoic. But if they could see this, if they could see what this kind of darkness does to a person, maybe they’d feel it, too. Maybe they wouldn’t make excuses anymore. Maybe they wouldn’t shrug it off, because, you know, these things happen.

  “I want to go there,” my dad says, the words coming out as he swallows, nearly making him choke.

  “Where’s that?” Gomes makes himself professional again. Clears the desk. Rebuttons his collar.

  “Where she was. Can I go there?”

  “I can probably arrange that, but are you sure?”

  “I need to see it. I need to say good-bye to her.”

  Gomes nods. “We’ll set it up tomorrow. Do you want to wait until after … for…?” He doesn’t want to identify me as a body. I don’t know why; it’s all I was to Caleb. It’s all any of us girls were.

  “No,” my dad says. “It’s fine. It’s probably best. Otherwise, I’ll just stay up all night, telling myself there was a mistake. You know, for six months, I held on to it. I thought she might still come back. I told myself every night she would come home.” He pauses. “She’s not coming home. I need to know. For sure.”

  As they walk to the morgue, my father tries to be strong. He stares straight ahead, not speaking. Pretending it doesn’t hurt. He moves his feet and he gets closer to where I am, preparing himself.

  They haven’t opened me up yet. They wanted to wait. My dad should see me as close to myself as I can be.

  I’m on a table. The tarp is below me; nobody checks to see if it’s b
ecome a part of me. If my body merged with it while I slept in the dirt.

  It’s gross. I’m me, but I’m not me. Gomes talked about winter while they were in the kitchen, talked about luck and the cold and how much the process slowed in the frozen earth. But I’m still a mass of rot. Festering on the table.

  My dad stands back, in the doorway, holding on to the frame.

  “I’m sorry,” Gomes says again. “We just need you to confirm.”

  He nods, but he doesn’t move. He stares at what I was and it sinks in. He sees it and even in the dream state he hung in as he walked down here, as he ran through impossible scenarios in his brain, telling himself it wasn’t me, that it was just another missing dead girl, he didn’t know it would be like this. He didn’t know how quickly we all fade.

  The houses don’t decay like we do. A few weeds and some animals may invade, but we’re far more fragile than wood. We’re all just waiting to break into a million pieces.

  “It’s her,” he says, and he turns and walks out. Nobody follows, because there’s nothing to say.

  I go home with him, and it hurts more than dying. He sits in the dark in the kitchen, picking apart the cupcake. Pulling small pieces of it from its center, dropping them onto the table.

  “I love you,” I tell him, but he can’t hear me. Fred sleeps at his feet, knowing something is wrong but unable to express it in any other way. It’s the recognition of pain that even an animal feels.

  The cupcake turns to crumbs. My dad sits in the chair, his fingernails thick with chocolate. Fred sleeps with his face on my father’s toes. And I wait, across from them both, my hand reaching across the table, wanting.

  Sometimes I’d sit like this. When he was at work. I liked how the world faded while I sat. But now it’s just darkness and sadness and it has none of the ease of knowing you can turn on the light if it gets too uncomfortable.

  He’d gotten used to listening, waiting for sudden sounds, lying half-awake every night just in case the door opened and I snuck back in. Now, the cars passing on the street outside aren’t bringing me home. I didn’t get bored on my great adventure and decide to come back to my life. The wind outside is howling and my body is being sliced open for evidence and nobody will ever eat my cupcake.

  I hear him push the chair back. When he turns the light on, he scoops up the crumbs and throws them in the trash.

  “Happy birthday, pumpkin,” he says. “I know you hated it when I called you that, but…”

  He shrugs and takes Fred for a walk. When he comes home, I’m already lying on the couch. He sits next to me and I imagine him covering me with the blanket, telling me to feel better. Kissing me good night before he whispers a warning not to stay up too late. Instead, he turns on the TV and listens to our lives as other people tell them.

  “There is talk that new charges are being filed against Wayne Breward’s sons, Noah and Caleb. Although the sexual assault cases will still be handled individually, we are told the investigation has led the police to a gruesome discovery. The body of Ellie Frias, who’s been missing since November, was found behind a house where police believe she died. Limited information is available, but it’s expected that, in the days to come, everyone in Hollow Oaks will be asked to remember the weekend of November 12. Cassie Haddom is live with what we know.”

  “Thanks, Maria.” Cassie stands in front of the Brewards’ house. The lights are all off, but their lawn has been commandeered by the media. They won’t have any privacy tonight. “The police have recently arrested Caleb and Noah Breward on charges of sexual assault, but now, we’re hearing talk that there will be additional charges due to the discovery of Ellie Frias’s body in a backyard in Hollow Oaks. We don’t know the details, but we do know that Caleb and Ellie had a prior relationship. When she went missing, he was cleared of any involvement. Right now, we are trying to find out what’s changed.”

  “Do the police seem to feel there is a danger to the general public?” Maria asks.

  “Not at this time. Sources say that while they can’t go into detail, they are confident there is no credible risk to anyone else. We are also told that the Brewards, through their attorney, are cooperating.”

  “Thank you, Cassie,” Maria says, and Cassie fades from the television. “In other news, the town of St. Agatha has recently undergone a restructuring in the permit process for new businesses.”

  My dad changes the channel. He settles on a Western. Something old with John Wayne I know he’s seen before. I could never tell these movies apart, but I remember this one because of the girl. There weren’t a lot of girls in Westerns.

  I curl up against him as he dozes off, while the girl plots her revenge. My head rests on his arm and I tell myself he can sense me, that he knows I’m here when he wraps his arm around where I would be. I pretend he’s not just hugging himself to stay warm.

  I pretend it’s a normal night.

  I pretend I’m really sixteen.

  I suppose I should feel grateful. In retrospect, I was happy. Well, I wasn’t happy exactly, but I did have a happy life. I had my father. Fred. Three days in New York City. Summers and winters and the times in between. I had stories and hope in my life and, for a moment, I even felt what it was like to fall in love with someone. Sure, it was a lie and it wasn’t real love and it was the wrong person, but I suppose that’s just part of living, too.

  The things I miss aren’t the things I would’ve expected to miss. I remember a night, not so long ago, but that feels so far away now. A night when I remembered gum. When I missed it and its simplicity. I miss biting down into a new piece, miss feeling the sharp newness of it. I miss complaining that it’s raining, miss how my shoes and socks would get wet and my shirt would stick to my back. I miss waking up for school and wishing I was dreaming, wishing that the alarm hadn’t gone off yet.

  I don’t miss the big things we think are important; I miss the things that filled all the other minutes of the time I was here.

  I don’t want to know this. I don’t want this knowledge. Not as the clock ticks down what’s left of my sixteenth birthday. Not as my body is opened up somewhere. Opened again to see where they’ve already opened me.

  I just want to be a girl. All the parts of me that made me real. Maybe a lot of things make a girl, but I think being alive is the one I miss the most.

  chapter forty-one

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Thompson leads, and Malik and Gomes come up behind my dad. They’re in front of the door to the house. Waiting. They know what’s inside. Know he’ll never be able to shake the image of it. They know he’ll wake in the middle of the night sometimes and see that carpet, the furnace, the cobwebs in the corners by the room where I died.

  “I am.” He’s not, but he needs this. He needs to make it real.

  They don’t spend time taking it all in, don’t notice how the kitchen wallpaper is already starting to peel again. Some places just don’t want to be fixed.

  Instead, they bring him down to the basement. All the boxes are moved now. A pile on the other side of the concrete square. The door to the room is wide-open.

  “Can I…” He pauses, looks around the basement. It’s so normal. Average. It could be anyone’s house. I could have been anyone. This could happen anywhere.

  “I’d like a moment,” he says. “By myself. I won’t touch anything.”

  They nod and my dad walks into the room. There’s the small table, the lamp, and the bed. Nothing else to look at it. Nothing but the parts of the room that make it a room. Carpet. Closet. Beige walls.

  I wish they’d painted it another color. Wish they’d prettied the place at least.

  My dad reaches his hand out but he doesn’t touch the bed. There are police markers on the few items of furniture. It’s a crime scene. It should have been someone’s room, and now it’s something they’ll show on CNN. Something strangers will look at and try to imagine what they did. Why they did.

  “We still aren’t sure what happened,”
Gomes says from behind my dad. His voice echoes in the basement. “We’re waiting on some tests and we haven’t been able to confirm anything. But we think it’s likely it happened here.”

  “This was the last thing she saw, wasn’t it?” my dad asks.

  “I really am sorry,” Gomes tells him.

  My father waits, breathing in the musty basement. Seeing the carpet and walls. Trying not to look at the bed. I don’t know if he’d be happier knowing I never made it that far.

  “It’s too quiet,” he says finally, and he rejoins the officers. Malik closes the door behind them as Gomes leads my dad back upstairs. Thompson waits until they’re all gone before turning out the light.

  I wonder about her daughter. How old is she? We never would’ve met if I’d lived, but I still try to picture it. I could’ve been her babysitter. There doesn’t need to be a Heaven; I can fill endless time with the could-haves and what-ifs.

  Outside, it’s torn up. The backyard is all holes. The spot where I was is one of many, although it’s easy to notice now with the square of yellow tape around it. It’s more of a memorial than Caleb gave me.

  I don’t know why my dad wants to see it. It’s a hole, and now he’ll know exactly where I was. For all that time. Did he drive by here? Does he remember fishing with me on this same lake? Will he be able to pass this way anymore, knowing my body was waiting for him? Knowing how much time passed while I longed to be found?

  “They deserve to die,” he says. It’s a fact. There’s no anger in his voice. No subjective, emotional response. He says it and the police agree and everyone knows it’s fact. It’s truth because that’s what a person deserves after what they did. They deserve to be wrapped in blue plastic, to have a tarp stick to the backs of their legs where the jeans ripped. They deserve to wait and remember and relive it over and over while someone does it to other girls. They deserve every last minute of what I’ve experienced. But I don’t want them here. I don’t want to share this space with them. Their lives are a blessing. It means I’m safe.