by Barry Lyga
“What’s wrong?” he asked with more venom in his voice than he truly intended. “Did you miss a Portkey Portmanteau or screw up a Confoundable?”
El shook her head, and he noticed the tears at the corners of her eyes. Every joke in him died in that moment.
“Rachel. She posted another story.” El dropped her phone, screen down, in her lap and glared out the window.
Marcie was already on it from the back seat. “Girlfriend is way too thirsty,” she said, skimming the web.
“Please don’t do that,” El told her.
“‘Time Capsule Cache Still Not in Custody!’ Oh, Jesus…”
“It’s never gonna end,” El said quietly.
“‘Sources inside the sheriff’s department…’” Marcie began quoting from the story. “‘Contents of the time capsule have not been impounded or otherwise taken into custody, and so remain with their original possessor.…’”
“At least… at least she didn’t use your name,” Jorja offered.
“Doesn’t matter,” El muttered. “Everyone knows the stuff’s at my house.” She slammed her head back against the headrest.
She’s never gonna sleep again, Liam thought, and gripped the steering wheel tightly. His sense of humor and his sense of the absurd and his sense of outright idiocy all failed him—he could conjure no joke, witticism, or snark that could allay her fears, put her at ease, balm her inner wound.
“I’m not the source, if that helps,” he blurted out.
His comment was bad, his timing worse. They’d just pulled into El’s neighborhood. She thumped the side of her fist on her armrest and said, “Pull over, asshat.”
An apology was in order, but Liam was genuinely terrified that something that true and heartfelt would necessarily come with an admission of undying love. Completely without intention or forethought. It would just happen.
So he pulled over. And he let her out about three houses down from hers. Marcie hopped out, too.
“Stay until we get inside,” Marcie said darkly.
“Well, duh.”
“You don’t get the presumption of common sense anymore.” Jorja’s voice sounded so much like Dad’s in that moment that Liam almost double-checked the rearview.
He had a hundred comebacks. But Jorja was right and he deserved it, so he bit his tongue and kept watch on El and Marse by the light of his high beams until they were inside.
ELAYAH
The last time Marcie had spent the night was on Elayah’s sixteenth birthday. There’d been six girls visiting the Laird house that night, sucking up Dad’s bandwidth and devouring every scrap of food in the place. It had been amazing, and then two days later the county went on COVID-19 lockdown and Elayah had spent a couple of weeks wondering if she’d given anyone the virus at her party, or if anyone had given it to her. In the end, two girls came down with it and both pulled through fine, but the juxtaposition of the party to the lockdown and illnesses had killed any desire for sleepovers for Elayah.
She knew Marcie wouldn’t say it, but this scheme seemed to be the perfect way to get Elayah sleeping in her own room again. With Marcie nearby, she bet she could do it.
Dad seemed ill at ease with Marcie in the house, but he and Mom did that nonspeaking parental communication thing they did, and he smiled tightly and asked how her parents were as they sat down to dinner.
Marcie had no problem chatting ad infinitum with her parents, which did a good job of hiding Elayah’s own reticence. She imagined that if the situation were reversed—if she were spending the night at Marcie’s—that she would be the one blathering on and on with Kim, wallowing in small talk, and Marcie would be the sullen one at the table, trying not to glare, wondering, What did you do? What do you know?
Does the name Lisa McKenzie mean anything to you? Do you know a blond guy in his late twenties or early thirties who’s going to be limping for the foreseeable future?
After dinner she and Marcie retreated to her bedroom, which felt brighter and airier already. Marcie was a pretty good actor—she didn’t betray any nervousness or anxiety about being at the scene of the crime.
They spent some time on Insta, absorbing the usual gossip. Marcie filled Elayah in on the who, what, where, why, and when of school so that she’d be caught up when she returned after the weekend. She really appreciated it. She was tired of being “the girl who got attacked.” She was ready to be herself again. Ready to return to school and her life.
Her hand went to her throat. Maybe she would wear turtlenecks for a little while.
Marcie noticed the movement. “Does it still hurt?”
“A little. The stitches are supposed to dissolve on their own. The doctor says I might have a little scar, but it shouldn’t be too bad.”
Nibbling at the cuticle on her left thumb, Marcie got around to asking, “What was it like?”
They hadn’t talked about that night. Not in any detail.
Elayah didn’t want to relive it to the degree it would take to give a fulsome answer. “It didn’t even hurt at first.” She shrugged. “Then it hurt a lot.”
“How was Liam that first night in the hospital?” Marcie grinned wickedly. The easy questions had been asked, apparently.
Elayah’s cheeks and forehead flushed with acute heat, the internal combination of well-aged passion and brand-new anger. “Can we at least try to pass the Bechdel Test tonight?” she asked. “Especially after that comment he made about my uncle?”
Marcie held her hands up, palms out in surrender. “Okay, no more Liam talk. Got it.”
With that subject off the table, they realized simultaneously that there was really only one other to discuss.
“So…,” Marcie eased into it. “Uh, do you think your uncle maybe did have something to do with it?”
Did she think it? It had been her second thought upon seeing the knife and realizing its possibilities. The worst part about that possibility was that it was probably the best-case scenario. It would mean that everyone she knew personally was innocent.
Her first thought had been that Antoine himself had been killed back in 1986. He’d never abandoned his twin, his family, leaving them to decades of heartache, mystery, and hurt—he’d been murdered.
But there were the postcards.
“It makes sense that it has something to do with him, right?” she said to Marcie. “Uncle Antoine did something back in 1986 and ran off to Mexico. It’s right there.”
“That might not be what happened,” Marcie said with a solidity and a confidence that made Elayah love her even more. “There’s De Nardo. And this other guy. Who knows?”
“I never knew him. It’s not like finding out he killed someone would wreck my relationship with him or anything.”
Marcie groped for Elayah’s hand, but she slid it away before Marcie could get there. Elayah didn’t want to be comforted any longer. She didn’t want to be coddled and protected.
Someone had come into her bedroom, her safest place, and put a knife to her throat. Something was happening around her that she could not entirely perceive, like a bad odor that starts as a whiff, then grows in intensity. Impossible to ignore and impossible to track down.
“What are you thinking?” Marcie asked gently.
“Honestly? I’m thinking about my uncle’s postcards. If it weren’t for them, I could just tell myself someone killed Antoine back then, and I wouldn’t have to think that maybe he did it.”
“Yeah.” Marcie considered. “What is in those postcards, anyway? What did he say?”
Elayah shrugged. “I’ll show you.”
Mom and Dad were still downstairs. Elayah stole into her parents’ room with the long-practiced silence of a child whose father often slept days when on night shift. She slid to the floor and shined her phone’s flashlight under their bed.
A long, flat plastic tub reflected part of the light back to her. She rolled it out just enough to lift the lid. Mementos. Mom kept swearing that someday she would assemble an album. A shadow
box. An étagère. Day after day, year after year, they remained under the bed.
The postcards—eleven of them in total—were rubber-banded together in a corner of the tub. She took them, returned the tub, and went into her bedroom.
Marcie had taken the desk chair. Once, Elayah would have flopped onto her belly on the bed to examine the postcards, but the bed still coruscated with bad energy and ill remembrances. So she unbanded the stack and spread out the postcards on the desk in front of Marcie, snapping them down image-side up as though she were a blackjack dealer.
Marcie had never seen the postcards before. She treated them with a quiet reverence that Elayah had once possessed as a child. Now, though, they were just one more old family artifact that meant nothing, certainly less important than her dad’s old track trophies.
“Do you think the police will actually get this guy?” Marcie asked.
Which guy? Elayah wondered. The guy who’d cut her? The guy they’d kidnapped? The guy who did something to someone back in 1986? There were too many people, too many possibilities.
She knew Liam’s dad. She’d grown up around him, spent a lot of time with him as a kid, before all the parents sort of drifted apart. Even though he was a cop, she liked him.
But she also knew that the Canterstown Sheriff’s Department wasn’t exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. Or even the FBI. There was a chance this crime—these crimes, she amended, touching her stitches briefly—would never be solved.
She went cold at the thought. Marcie noticed the shiver.
“It’s going to be okay,” she promised Elayah.
Elayah eyed the bed. Just an ordinary bed. It looked more like a torture rack to her.
“I know it will be,” she lied to her best friend.
They turned to the postcards. The first one was blank-faced, a generic airmail postcard that—the theory went—Antoine had purchased in the US before crossing the border.
The rest of the postcards were from sites in Mexico City and a place called Temoaya. They called up Temoaya on Google Maps—it was about two hours outside Mexico City. Google Earth showed them what it looked like. Did Antoine still live there? Was Antoine even alive?
Marcie said little. She seemed to understand intuitively that this was fraught and tenuous territory.
Elayah flipped over the first postcard. Uncle Antoine’s printing was sloppy, almost juvenile. Her image of him was always of a teenager, even though she knew he was Dad’s exact same age.
Mom, Pops, Marcus—
I’m sorry, but I can’t explain this right now. Maybe later. I’ll try. I’ve gone away. I have to do this. Please don’t try to find me. I love you all, but I can’t be home right now.
Love, Antoine
She’d read it before, of course, filching the pack of cards from her parents’ room, poring over each and every one. It had been a while, though. And it had always felt like reading excerpts from an old Victorian novel, from back when a novel was really nothing more than a fictional biography. Her ninth-grade English teacher, Ms. Burke, had explained the origin of the novel this way: “These weren’t considered fiction the way we think of it today. The very first novels were biographies; they just happened to be biographies of people who had never existed.”
She flipped over the last card, this one postmarked from Temoaya in September of 1987, almost a year after Antoine disappeared.
Mom, Pops, Marcus—
My Spanish has improved a lot since coming here. I think in it now. Don’t use my English much—it’s a little weird writing this to you!
I’m working in a bar (they call them “las cantinas” here), doing odd jobs, sometimes tending bar. I only speak English when there are tourists in town, but that’s not often. Everyone treats me well here. I have a little apartment to myself and it’s nice.
I’m doing well. I hope all of you are well, too. Once I’m fully moved in, I’ll send my address.
Love, Antoine
That was the last they’d heard of him.
Emotions surrounding Uncle Antoine—his disappearance, his vacancy, his mere existence—resisted easy quantification for Elayah. She had a sense that she was supposed to feel an emptiness, an Antoine-shaped hole in her life, the way her dad clearly and harshly missed half of himself. But she’d never known him. Never seen him other than photographs and a single, grainy home video shot by her grandparents with a janky, old 8mm camera in 1976. And in truth, one little kid looked like another, especially when they were identical twins.
Still, he was gone and he was blood, and she felt something, even if it was only perplexity and an almost frangible sense of abstract loss.
“Wow,” Marcie breathed. “This is…” She trailed off and said nothing else.
“I think there was something in the yearbook about him, too.” Elayah sneaked back into her parents’ room and snagged her mom’s senior yearbook. In her room, she and Marcie flipped through it until they found a section in the back labeled Gone, But Not Forgotten.
The first page was an In Memoriam for a kid named Bradley Simon Gimble, who had apparently died in a car accident. Sad, but irrelevant to them.
They turned the page and there he was: Uncle Antoine. Eternally young, in black and white. Because apparently color printing was too difficult for the eighties?
Antoine Louis Laird. ’Toine. Black Lightning.
Antoine’s disappearance shocked the Canterstown community. He had planned to attend Howard University after graduation. We all miss him, none more so than his twin brother, Marcus. Wherever you break the tape, Antoine, your hometown crowd is still cheering for you.
“That’s nice,” Marcie said. “I wonder who wrote it.”
“I don’t know.” Elayah flipped back through the pages until she found her dad’s photo in the senior section. There he was with that greasy hair, otherwise identical to Antoine.
Marcus Louis Laird. Marco. Black Lightning. University of Houston–bound! Lewis and Baptiste!
“That’s weird,” Elayah muttered.
“What?”
“My dad didn’t go to University of Houston. He went to Howard.”
“Like Antoine planned to.”
“Yeah…”
Elayah stared at the page, her brow furrowing. Something… something tickled the back of her brain. Puzzle pieces wanted to slip into place, if only she would let them.
Her dad talked about Howard a lot. He talked about Houston when he mentioned his childhood track heroes, but never talked about wanting to go there.
Marcie watched her, clearly wanting to ask a question, but just as clearly respecting Elayah’s need to process on her own. Instead, she turned to the postcards and skimmed through the ones they’d skipped over. Meanwhile, Elayah stared at the picture of her father, the smile, the hair, the almost-familiar squint of the eyes.
She wondered how her life might have been different had Uncle Antoine never run off to Mexico. If she’d grown up with him in her life. A duplicate Dad. She wished that had been the case. How different would the world be?
Or at least her little piece of it.
“Hey,” Marcie said. Quietly. To herself.
“What?” Elayah asked.
“I…” Marcie hedged. “I’m not sure, but…”
She pulled out her phone and tapped into Photos, where she pulled up a picture of the note they’d found in the time capsule. Then she laid her phone next to Antoine’s first postcard.
Elayah leaned over, peering from the phone to the postcard and back. And then she saw it.
Both began with the words I’m sorry. And to her admittedly untutored eye, they looked the same.
Gnawing at her lower lip, Elayah skipped back and forth between the two. Were they? Were they the same?
She had a sudden inspiration and took a picture of the postcard’s text. Then she opened that picture and the note in a photo-editing app, placing them each on separate layers. Manipulated the images until they were the same size. Then she overlaid one on the other.
Oh, God.
Without a word, she held out her phone to Marcie, who leaned in to scrutinize it. She spent more time than was necessary to realize the obvious.
“They’re the same. I mean… there’s little tiny differences, but it’s different paper, probably different pens, but they look the same. They overlap almost perfectly.”
Precisely what Elayah had thought. She appreciated that Marcie had taken more time than was necessary, pretending it was a tough call. But facts were facts. It was as obvious as the air she breathed.
“Uncle Antoine wrote the note. He’s the one who killed someone.”
“Who?” When Marcie spoke, Elayah realized that at some point they’d both begun whispering. “Why?”
“I don’t know.…” She glanced at the yearbook again. Her dad’s picture. Black Lightning. Lewis and Baptiste. University of Houston.
Duplicate Dad.
She’d thought it moments ago, and for some reason, now it echoed, coming back like a bad sequel no one wanted.
Duplicate Dad.
Something nibbled around the edges of her thoughts.
Houston and Howard. Howard and Houston. Black Lightning. Houston and Howard. Howard and Houston.
And then a new voice in her head: Anyway, that’s how your dad and I got close. Love close.
Mom.
Love close.
Oh.
It was beginning to make sense. She resisted it, but it clamored in her head, singing out its truth.
Oh, God!
Elayah’s guts, already tangled and taut, loosened and pulsed. Without a word to Marcie, she leapt up and ran to the bathroom down the hall, fell to her knees at the toilet, and threw up with an abandon she hadn’t experienced since she was a kid. It felt like it took forever to void her stomach, and even when it was empty, her throat continued to constrict, dry heaves, the painful cut pulsing with heat.
The mystery wasn’t really a mystery at all. It was a puzzle, a puzzle with only two pieces: who killed and who died.
And Marcie was there behind her, rubbing her back, her shoulders. Elayah slumped against the cool porcelain of the toilet and spat bile into the bowl. Marcie tore off some toilet paper and held it out to her.