by Barry Lyga
She nodded gravely, but she knew there would be nothing else. It had happened so fast. It had been over almost in the same instant it had begun.
“Marcus, Dinah.” He turned his attention to her parents now, telling them to leave her room as it was, not to go in there. A forensics unit would come later to fingerprint and take samples for analysis.
“Can you have someone watch the house?” Mom asked. “In case he comes back?”
Liam’s dad hesitated in his answer, then pinched the bridge of his nose as he spoke. “Sure, sure. I can have a deputy keep a lookout.”
As they ironed out the details, Elayah’s energy dropped further, sending her into that eyelid-drooping stasis that precedes sleep. She hadn’t fallen asleep while sitting up in a very long time, but it was going to happen right now, she thought. Sitting next to Liam. Holding his hand. She just wanted to curl into him, her head on his chest, and dream of absolutely nothing.
She got part of her wish, at least.
LIAM
Pop had already gone home by the time Dad was finished interrogating El, who fell asleep midsentence much to everyone’s amusement. Dad made some calls to arrange for protection for the Lairds, and Liam thought they would be headed home, but at the last minute, Mr. Laird called out Dad’s name. They huddled in a corner of the hospital corridor for a moment, Mr. Laird’s expression urgent and somehow reluctant at the same time. Dad shook his head a few times, brushing him off as politely as he could. Their brief conversation ended with a handshake and then an awkward one-armed hug that—even at a distance—felt more obligatory than earned.
“What was all that about at the end?” Liam asked as they got into the car. The sun was just edging its way into the sky off to the east. Liam should have been exhausted, but his body hummed with energy.
“He made a lot of homophobic jokes back in the day. When we were kids. I guess it’s been eating at him, and he just figured now was the time to apologize.”
Liam considered. “He didn’t know you were gay. They weren’t aimed at you.”
“No. But he feels bad. Which is his prerogative.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I reminded him that I used to tell the same damn jokes.”
1986: JAY
School meant little to Jay, which he thought both fair and somewhat retaliatory, since school didn’t seem to think much of him, cramming him into useless classes like phys ed and language arts, enslaving him to someone else’s schedule. He supposed some would have called his dislike of school ironic, given his father’s position on the board of education. But he’d known since kindergarten that he was smart—one elementary school teacher had, within earshot, called him “the smartest kid I’ve ever had in my classroom”—and so he’d come to understand that his boredom in and with school was not his fault. It was the fault of the system, which sought viciously and dispassionately to cram the square peg of him into the round hole of public education.
Brad Gimble sat a few desks over, which always managed to infuriate Jay. This was supposedly an advanced class—jock morons like Gimbo shouldn’t have been allowed in. But the school system didn’t have the money to break the advanced class off, so they were stuck with encroaching average idiots.
Gimbo, no matter his prowess on the football field, had peaked in third grade, as far as Jay was concerned. And even that had been mere luck.
Back then, they had gone on a class field trip to the Canterstown Public Library, a small brick edifice on the north side of town. From there, the Wantzler factory was just a triple jut of smokestacks rising from beyond a hill, identical triplet plumes of deep gray smoke rising and dissipating like old memories.
To the side of the library was a stale and crumbling cemetery surrounded by a precarious, half-height stone wall. Jay had been coming to the library since before he could read, and some part of him had assumed that all libraries had cemeteries attached to them. It made an eerie, juvenile sort of sense: Libraries stored old books; cemeteries stored old bodies.
In third grade, Canterstown began indoctrinating its young into the history and mythology of the town. Jay had had the story of town founders Ezekiel Canter and Jakob Wantzler already drummed into his head by that point, but one thing he hadn’t anticipated was exactly how far the school system was willing to go to make an impression on the impressionable.
After some noodling about in the library, the class reconvened just outside the gate to the cemetery. There, Miss Dell explained the final part of their trip: They would be let loose in the cemetery and tasked with finding the grave of Ezekiel Canter himself.
Even at that young age, Jay was competitive. Deep down, he understood that the stakes in this particular race were nonexistent. Still, he wanted to be the one to find it. Because someone had to be first, and why shouldn’t that be Jay?
He started with the big monuments, zeroing in on the biggest. To his dismay, that was what everyone else had determined, too. He was one of a crowd clustered around a large plinth topped with a weeping angel, wings spread, eyes downcast. It was a little too much, and it was also the grave of REV. JEDEDIAH MOORE. Oh, and—on a smaller side plaque—HIS WIFE.
He checked the next-biggest monument, then the next and the next. Names and dates swam at him. He started to wonder: Who made sure the dates were right? It had to be the family members left behind, didn’t it? Sure, that made sense. And parents usually died first, so that meant the children would have to know the dates.
It occurred to him, in that instant, that he didn’t know in what years his parents had been born.
He stood absolutely still in the middle of the graveyard, his eyes staring yet unfocused. Kids milled around him, looking for Ezekiel’s grave, and Jay tried to remember exactly how old his mother was and what that worked out to… 1948? 1947? He would have to know. It was his job. He would have to memorize it or write it down or—
Miss Dell shouted out, “We have a winner!”
And there stood Gimbo, smirking from a patch of browning grass. When the rest of the class rushed over, they beheld not a towering monument… or even a midsize statue… or even a regular gravestone. At the edge of the smudge of grass, nearly concealed from view by weeds, lay a small stone no bigger than a picture book. The chiseled letters—worn and barely legible—spelled out EZEKIEL CANTER and then GONE TO GOD and the dates of his birth and death.
“It’s so little!” someone shouted.
Miss Dell nodded, putting a hand on Gimbo’s shoulder. “You all thought it must be the biggest one here, didn’t you? But the obvious answer isn’t always the right one. Don’t make assumptions. Just because the town is named for him doesn’t mean he had the biggest or the best grave site.”
It felt like a trick. Like a setup. And Miss Dell’s smirky little smile, the way she rested her hand on Gimbo’s shoulder, possessively, as though to say, “Brad only figured it out because I’m his teacher and I taught him,” just made it worse.
In the sudden present, Dean’s voice dragged him from his reverie. He liked Dean, but Dean was a little too goody-goody. A little too eager to answer. Better him than me, though, he thought as Dean expounded on the New Deal.
Jay didn’t care. His A in this class was already guaranteed.
But he thought about the idea Dean had approached him with, the one inspired by an earlier history class. And when they stood up into the anarchy of class change at the bell, Jay sidled up to Dean and said, “You know that time capsule idea? Let’s do it.”
THE PRESENT: LIAM
He’d not slept since being awoken at two, and Pop had suggested taking a mental health day, but Liam couldn’t imagine lingering around the house with nothing to distract him from thinking about Elayah’s night. So, fueled by an obscene quantity of Pop’s best cold brew with a triple shot of simple syrup, Liam grabbed his backpack from the back seat, beeped his car locks, and headed for the school’s side door, the closest one to the student lot.
Much to his surprise, a r
eporter buttonholed him before he made it. Liam sized him up instantly with the practiced eye of a kid whose cop dad took him to work way too often. The reporter was in his early thirties, stubbly beard, too much gut, not enough pecs. White ball cap with #1A stenciled on it in black. He wielded an iPhone like he thought it was Captain America’s shield.
“Hi there!” the guy said. “Hey, do you know Elayah Laird?”
She’s carrying my baby, Liam didn’t say.
She’s actually my twin sister, he also didn’t say.
Like, biblically? he further didn’t say.
Those were just three of the dozen retorts that blazed paths from his brain to the tip of his tongue before he managed to swallow them back down. They were twelve of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life.
“No hablo inglés,” he said instead, shrugging. It was October. There were statewide elections in a couple of weeks—shouldn’t that have been the big story?
“¿Conoces Elayah Laird?” the reporter replied in immediate and excellent Spanish.
Liam stared. “No hablo español,” he blurted in a panic, and ran for the door. The reporter gave chase, then stopped at the walkway as he realized Liam would make it inside before he could catch up.
“Curses, foiled again!” Liam shouted over his shoulder, and then disappeared into the school.
For third period, Liam had study hall, which was hilarious because he never ever studied. But it was an opportunity to head to the media center. Where it had all started.
El had been working on a project for the yearbook, a retrospective page. It was supposed to be a simple one-pager, a look back at the first year or two of the yearbook. One of those “Look how far we’ve come!” sort of things that got geeks so excited.
In typical El fashion, she’d gone overboard. She’d spent hours in the media center, paging through the old yearbooks, noting local dynasties, print upgrades, the procession of time. What began as a page in the yearbook morphed into an online multimedia project for the school website. Because of course it did.
And then she stumbled upon the list of the time capsule’s contents. And then she’d talked to her dad. And then Liam had talked to his dad, who’d laughed with foggy reminiscence and said, “My God, that thing is buried and gone, Liam!”
“What if we could find it and dig it up?” he remembered her saying to all of them, clustered around a pizza in her living room. Marcie had sort of shrugged and Jorja had nodded thoughtfully, and the idea would have died right there. Should have died right there because Liam thought it was sort of pointless, but also it was El’s idea, and also also, his dad thought it was useless, so of course Liam was now all for it. And he bubbled up with enthusiasm, which got Jorja nodding thoughtfully again, but this time with more energy, and Marcie clucked her tongue like she did when she had an idea.…
And then someone slit El’s throat in her own bed in the dead of night. So, yeah, good job there, Liam.
The media center was quiet, empty except for Mr. Hindon behind the circulation desk, tapping at his keyboard. He looked up when Liam entered, looked back down at the keyboard, then startled and did a double take.
“Liam! Have you seen Elayah? How is she?”
Mr. Hindon was ticcing like crazy, his eyes aflutter, his nose working like a bunny on crack. When he got excited or stressed—every kid in school knew this—his Tourette symptoms really kicked into high gear. “She brought me that inventory, and I told her about your dad and her dad and the others.…” He grimaced. “I feel like it’s my fault.”
Makes two of us. “Pretty sure it’s the guy with the knife’s fault,” Liam said with an airy insouciance he did not truly feel. “You got a minute?”
Mr. Hindon’s eyes narrowed. “I have several. Do you?”
Liam flashed his hall pass. “Study hall. Do you remember anything else about the time capsule? Like, was there anyone else involved?”
Dad had said it was just the five of them, but thirty-five years was a long time. There could have been another participant.
He remembered the expression on Marcie’s face when he’d made his ill-considered joke (most of them were ill-considered, honestly) about one of their parents having wielded the knife. She’d been shocked, dismayed, disbelieving all at once. He didn’t want it to be true. His dad, both of Marcie’s parents, Jorja’s dad, El’s dad… and El’s missing uncle. Six of them had conceived of the time capsule, put things inside. Five buried it. As far as he knew, no one else had been involved.
But anything was possible, right?
Please, he thought, let someone else be involved.
With a sigh, Mr. Hindon came around the desk and dropped into a chair. He motioned for Liam to sit, too, so Liam perched one hip on a table.
“I wasn’t directly involved, you understand? They came to me with some questions about archiving.” Mr. Hindon shook his head, a small smile on his lips. “I can’t remember which of them, whether it was your dad or one of the others. They wanted to bury a time capsule, and they came to me and asked about how to do it.”
“And?” Liam licked his lips. Someone had to know something.
A shrug. “I helped them figure out where to buy one. I think…” He leaned back, staring at the ceiling for a moment. “It was a long time ago… but back then, I probably put in for an interlibrary loan. Got a catalog with time capsules in it for them. I think I tried to explain some best practices for preservation and selection.…”
“But it was a long time ago,” Liam supplied as Mr. Hindon drifted off.
“It was. I’m sorry I don’t remember more.”
Liam chewed on that for a moment.
“Is there anyone you can think of who might know more?” Liam asked.
“Most of the faculty back then were older. They’re either retired or no longer with us.” He tapped a pin he wore on his chest: CHISHOLM FOR STATE SENATE. The county superintendent of schools was running for the General Assembly. “He taught here back then, but I doubt we could get in touch with him now.”
“Are you allowed to wear that to school?” Liam asked.
“Oh. I didn’t even think about it.” He removed the pin and tucked it into his pocket. “I was canvassing before work. Thanks for reminding me. Anyway, I could put together a list of the others who are still around, but…”
“But what?” Liam asked into the hesitation.
“But, well, Liam… you should really be talking to your parents. Yours. Marcie’s. Jorja’s. Elayah’s. They were the ones who did it, after all.”
ELAYAH
Mom sat in what appeared to be the more comfortable of the hospital room’s two chairs, tapping away at her phone. Dad was nowhere to be seen. Elayah came awake slowly and reached for the cup of water by her bed.
“Your father had to go into work. I took the day off.”
Elayah nodded as though she understood. Took a sip. She knew her mom really couldn’t afford a day off.
While she slept, the analgesic gel had worn off. The outside of her throat itched and burned. It felt threadbare, as though something as simple as a hard swallow would rip it right open.
“I’m okay.” Her voice surprised her—it was low and husky, almost sexy. “You can go to work.”
Mom laughed hollowly. “Not a chance, baby girl. Some fool comes into my home and threatens my daughter. You think I’m letting you out of my sight? Besides, the doctors say at least a day, maybe more, depending.”
Elayah fumbled for her phone. Someone had brought it for her and plugged it in on the nightstand. Her notifications were blowing up, a steady stream of round rects popping up like soap bubbles on the lock screen.
Twitter.
Insta.
And email notifications from the Loco. She’d signed up for them the previous night, thinking there might be something interesting that would pop overnight. Not knowing that she’d conjured herself into a horror movie, not a documentary.
Fiddling with the phone, she tried to scroll Insta,
but her mentions were clogged. She caught a word here and there—knife, wow, murder, parents—just enough to know that everyone who knew her wanted to talk about nothing more than what had been reported in the paper and what had happened afterward.
Yesterday, all she’d wanted to do was talk to people about the knife. Now she didn’t even want to think about it.
Mom sat stirring a paper cup of coffee, staring out the window. She had a magnificent view of the parking lot and a big air conditioner condenser on the nearby roof.
“Did you put anything in the time capsule, Mom?” Elayah had been so focused on the knife and then on getting the picture to her dad that she’d never considered what Mom might have preserved.
With a wistful little smile, Mom shook her head. “Honey, I don’t expect you to understand, but… your dad and I weren’t that close back then.”
“You were his girlfriend! You went to homecoming with him.”
“I know. But we weren’t in love, baby. Not yet. That happened later, after…” She drifted off into that territory of fog and mist that occluded her uncle Antoine and his life in Mexico. “We liked each other. We dated. I know people don’t really date anymore. You just…” She mimed swiping right on an invisible phone, and Elayah suppressed a giggle at the thought of her mom on Tinder.
“We went out on Saturdays. We went to dances together. But your dad was always running. Always training. He was so dedicated and devoted. And he had his friends.”
“Like Liam’s dad,” Elayah supplied.
“All those white boys.” Mom shook her head, tsking. “Can’t really blame him. There weren’t a lot of Black kids in this town back then. You had to get along with the white kids, especially if you wanted to compete.”
Elayah pondered this. She attended the same high school her mom had, but the place was easily 40 percent students of color, with more than half of those being Black. Hearing about the old days was like visiting Mars.