by Parker Tiden
“Oh, we just went for a little swim,” Sarah said, trying for nonchalance but not really nailing it. I giggled, still giddy.
“What did you two smoke?” Fenton asked, “Magic seaweed?”
At the campfire, I went for my bag to find some jeans, I was still shaking cold. As I pulled it open, I saw light inside. It was my phone. I pulled it out, and for the first time in hours, I checked it. I had missed five calls and six messages, all of them from my mom. The last message read “CALL PLEASE!!!” I checked the time, which was now slightly past 1 am. It had been sent an hour ago. Mom wasn’t a worrier by nature, she was rarely on my case when it came to my extra-curricular activities—I had never given her cause. I kept my grades well up, was a pretty good athlete, and my friends were polite (at strategic moments at least). Besides, it wasn’t really that late considering that this was the last party before school starts. I called her back but it went straight to voicemail. I dialed my dad, which also went unanswered.
I grabbed my bag and stepped away from the fire for a second and took in one deep breath, studied the scene and the joy on my friends’ faces as if I wanted it to be etched into my brain, and turned around.
My heart pounded as I hurried through the bushes, guided by the moonlight, to the main road. I ordered an Uber on the fly, it would be five long minutes according to the app. I sent off a quick message to Sarah—no time for goodbyes. As I reached the main road, I spotted lights streaking low across the sky from behind a hill. I prayed that it was the Uber I had ordered.
The Tesla stopped when it saw me, I jumped in and nodded to the driver. He didn’t say a word, thank God. In silence, we drove through the hills. After what felt like forever, but probably wasn’t more than 15 real minutes, the Uber rounded the corner to our street. The houses were dark, the neighbors asleep in their upper-middle-class cocoons. I could see lights up ahead, strobing lights, blue and red, lighting up my house. My phone buzzed, it was a text from Sarah, what’s wrong!!
Yellow tape stretched across the street between two cypress trees stopped us. A cop with a big black gun strapped across his chest signaled the Uber to turn around. I told the driver to stop, and I stepped out of the car. The streetlight lit the cop from above, casting his eyes in shadow.
“Step back, nothing to see here,” he said, gripping his gun.
“That’s my house,” I said anxiously, pointing to the house with all the lights on inside, and cops walking in and out, milling around outside.
“ID,” he requested, putting his gloved palm forward and motioning with his fingers.
“I don’t have ID, and I don’t need one to get to my own house!”
He pointed a flashlight in my face. “What’s your name?”
“Lily,” I said, squinting. “Lily Anderson.”
“Wait here,” he said and turned sideways as he spoke into the radio on his chest. “We’ve got the daughter here.”
“I need to get to my house,” I cried, my throat tightening. “Where’s my mom and dad?!” I went for the tape.
He blocked me and grabbed me by the shoulder. “Stand back!”
My jaw tightened and fist clenched. I yelled, “What are you gonna do? Shoot me?!” I started for the tape again, the cop looked like he was about to body slam me.
“Let her through,” a voice came from behind the wall of a cop. “It’s her house after all.” I rounded the cop and lifted the tape. “Hi, Lily,” a man in a suit, the source of the voice, came towards me. “I’m agent Maxwell, FBI.”
“Where are they?”
Gum churned in his mouth, “I’m afraid we’ve got a bit of a situation.”
The Rumbling of Jet Engines
I'd never been afraid of flying. The rumbling of jet engines, the roar of the air being pushed out of the way at 800 miles an hour, all filtered through the plastic and aluminum (or titanium or whatever planes are made of) of an airliner's body, was comforting. To sit on the cusp of the atmosphere with the promise of transformation. That rumbling, that roar, I felt it now again. Only, this time, I was on the ground, nowhere near an airliner. The sound was inside me. My blood was roaring through my brain, my soul imploding into my stomach.
What was agent Maxwell saying? I couldn't grasp. No more than twelve hours earlier, I had stood in this entryway in my father's embrace before he turned and stepped out.
My mom was at the kitchen table when I walked in. Her face was blank, her stare empty. It wasn't until a few days later that the picture of what happened that night became clear to me. It went something like this. At approximately 10 pm, there’s a loud knock on our front door. I’m at the party on the beach. Mom, alone at home, opens the door. A dozen FBI agents stand on the doorstep with a federal search warrant. Mom is powerless to stop them, so they proceed to forcefully, and recklessly, search the entire house. Mom frantically calls and texts my dad, whom she thinks is at work, but the calls go to voicemail and the texts are unanswered.
At around 11 pm, word comes through cop radio that a car has been found idling outside the offices of Westcap EnviroTech. An unidentified male is in the driver’s seat, seemingly asleep or unconscious. The car doors are locked. When the cops smash the window, they discover that the male is, in fact, pulseless—dead. At 12.30 am, the body is conditionally identified as a 43-year-old male by the name of Sam Anderson, beloved husband, and devoted father of one. The cops don’t take any chances and immediately deem our house a secondary crime scene, even before they know the cause of death. The last of the cops don’t leave the house until 7 am.
When they finally left, my mom was still at the kitchen table, walled off by grief or anger, or a mixture of both. The house looked like it had been bombed. I was in a daze. I couldn't stay in the kitchen with a mom incapable of providing or receiving comfort, so I ventured out into the house and ended up in my dad's study.
Dad's computer, fixed-line phone, and all his papers were gone. Books and other debris lay strewn across the floor. I bent down and picked up a framed picture of an eight-year-old me and dad smiling, holding up my third-place medal from my first club sailing competition. The frame's glass was shattered, as was my dad's favorite tea mug—a monstrosity I’d made in second grade. My room was barely in better shape.
Those first few weeks after his death were hued in darkness, and revealed themselves, afterwards, only in a few blurred vignettes. People had come to the house, but I didn't come down to see them. My cell rang and beeped and alerted. I threw it against the wall and it exploded into pieces.
The darkness was compounded by the developing investigation. The FBI agent, Maxwell, the same agent that had first met me outside the house, came over at least half a dozen times over the next few weeks. I had to sit down for an interrogation. Maxwell churned his gum and asked about my dad.
It became clear pretty fast that the feds weren’t interested in how he died. For them, it was an open and shut case of suicide. What they wanted to know was what he had done before he died.
Had I noticed anything unusual in the months, weeks, days, or hours before his death? No.
Had he been acting differently lately? No.
Had he met people outside his usual orbit? Not that I know of.
Had he given anything to me recently? No, I lied reflexively.
The investigation and the delayed death certificate meant that the funeral didn't take place until several weeks after he died. My mom kept the funeral to close family only. At the funeral, I couldn't cry.
Someone in the FBI was leaking like a White House staffer. The local newspapers and TV stations framed my dad as an embezzler, a white-collar criminal, who when the law was closing in on him, took the easy way out. The final police report didn't, in the end, deviate much from the media report. The official version went something like this:
Mr. Anderson gets word of the ongoing raid on his house.
Mr. Anderson fires off an email to his wife, with a simple message—I’m sorry.
Mr. Anderson leaves the office and
heads for the parking lot.
Mr. Anderson gets in his car and locks the doors.
Mr. Anderson downs a handful of assorted pills with a bottle of Macallan whisky.
Mr. Anderson passes out.
Mr. Anderson dies.
All this might be plausible to someone who didn't know Mr. Anderson. I knew Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson was my dad.
"Let me see here," the lady on the other end of the line said. "Says here that the report is sealed."
"What do you mean, sealed?"
"You're right, Miss Anderson. Ordinarily, next-of-kin can access the autopsy report. But this particular report has been sealed by order of the federal district judge. There isn't much I can do for you at this juncture. May I suggest you contact your lawyer.”
Why all the secrecy? It was just all too convenient. Why would you want to hide the autopsy report of someone who has killed themselves?
This was the latest in a long string of setbacks. What enraged me more than anything was that my mom was buying the whole thing, the official version, hook, line, and sinker. I said we needed to hire a private investigator to help us, but she said we didn't have the money. I said, “Well, sell the house.” She said no.
One of the sucky things about dying while under federal investigation is that you never get your day in court—not a court in this dimension anyway. The cloud of suspicion around you lingers on into eternity. I knew that what they were accusing him of was ridiculously wrong. With no outlet, my hate festered.
Speaking of hate, agent Maxwell had insinuated himself into our lives. Those first few weeks, he kept on showing up at the house with care packages, or pizzas, telling us that he was on our side, trying to dig up any information, any piece of the puzzle that could help us get to the truth. He had roped in my mom, exploiting her inherent vulnerability to peddle his lies.
One afternoon, the last time he visited the house, as the investigation was wrapping up, I came down from my room to find him sitting with my mother at the kitchen island. It looked so horrifyingly mundane. I tried to turn back to my room, but I'd been spotted.
"Hey, kiddo, how you holding up?" Maxwell said, still chewing that gum of his.
I walked over to the kitchen counter without offering an answer. I turned my back to them as I filled the electric kettle.
"Lily, we've got some tea already made over here,” my mom said.
I pulled out my favorite mug from the cupboard. I wasn't a fan of teabags, they were for amateurs, but they could be useful when you're in a hurry.
They realized pretty quickly that they weren't going to get a word from me, so they continued as if I weren't there. "We've established that he stole the money," he paused as he sipped from his tea. "But we can't find it, and as long as the money is missing, the judge won't let up." He sighed as though he really cared, "They will take everything you own." If I turned around and saw his hand touching my mom’s, I would jam the meat cleaver between his eyes. The cleaver stood in its stand, mere inches away from me.
"We have nothing,” my mom pleaded. “There is no money."
"Oh, I believe you, but it's the federal judge you need to convince."
"Is there anything you can do?"
I poured boiling water into the mug and grabbed milk from the fridge. I still had my back turned to them, but I was pretty sure that he was shaking his head in false pity just about now. I poured the milk into the tea, before it had finished infusing, and was out of there. That would turn out to be the last time I saw Maxwell, for a while.
First day of sophomore year came and went. First week of sophomore year came and went. I hardly left my bedroom, going days without talking to anyone. For now, the system was leaving me alone, any school district representative or truancy officer knocking on my bedroom door were probably weeks away. Considering all the commotion the case had created, the school must have been relieved that I stayed away.
My mom had her own issues, dealing with feelings of loss and betrayal, or whatever she was dealing with. If my mom was on psychotropic drugs before this all went down, she must have doubled or tripled her dose. If she had been a distant mother before, she was in her own orbit now—an orbit around another star, in another corner of the Milky Way.
A few weeks after his death, I opened the fridge and thought I saw something move. It became increasingly clear that my mom's hands-off approach to homemaking and child-rearing wasn't really working out, and that I would have to pick up the slack at home. The feds had frozen my dad's assets, but by some miracle, someone over there wasn't doing their job because the credit card on FreshDirect was still alive and ticking. I could go online and order whatever we needed, which wasn't much, with the added bonus of not having to step outside the house.
Electricity and water were still on, but I could see the pile of bills on the hall table growing day by day. I knew the days in this house, our house, were numbered.
One night, I sat in front of the mirror in my room. In my face I saw him, his eyes in mine. My foundations, lipsticks, eyeliners, cotton swabs, eyeshadows, rouges, perfumes, tweezers, hairbrushes, and myriads of creams, all lay spread out as I had left them on the night of the last party, the night he died. I grabbed the wastebasket off the floor with one hand, and with the other, I wiped the table clean of it all, the flotsam of my life as it had been.
I stared at myself again, my chestnut hair hung limp and greasy from days of neglect. The hair too, once a source of pride and self-definition, now seemed unnecessary and stupid. I rescued a pair of scissors out of the wastebasket and let them wander across my scalp, felling tuft after tuft until there were no more tufts to fell. The darkness under my eyes was now my most striking feature.
Nick
The first three weeks of my sophomore year at high school had come and gone without me setting my foot there. I didn't want to deal with the false pity in people's eyes. My mom told me that Sarah, Carl, and Fenton, and others, including teachers, dropped by the house. I refused to see them. In a moment of weakness, I opened up Snapchat on my Mac; messages and missed calls flooded the screen—most of them from Sarah. Most of them were from the first two weeks, and then they dropped off to a trickle.
You could say that I was feeling sorry for myself, maybe, but I just didn't see the point of it all. I spent most of my time staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, haunted by his death and by a feeling I couldn't shake… a feeling that something was seriously not kosher.
I knew that Nick Stranton lived in the house next to ours and had done so for years. Nick was my neighbor, but our circles had never really intersected. I saw his room from my window, through the tree, a California buckeye that separated our houses. There probably wasn’t more than 20 feet between us, in this what used to be a working-class neighborhood.
In those still muggy September nights, when sleep no longer came, I would often see the blue light of a screen flicker in his room through my open window. One night, as I sat on my window ledge breathing in the still air, trying to catch a glimpse of the crescent moon, Nick's silhouette appeared suddenly in his window. I threw myself down on the floor of my room, not wanting him to think that I was spying, and, more to the point, not wanting him to strike up a conversation or something. I valued my isolation. Then I heard him say, "We should celebrate," through the tree.
I stayed down, hoping he hadn't seen me and that he was talking to someone else.
"Hey, Lily, want to celebrate?"
God, why can't he stop? I lifted my head slowly and, still on my knees, peered out into the night, and to my dismay, saw that he was staring right at me. I stood up and attempted casual, "Damn, can't find my contact... what were you saying?"
"I just got in my ten thousandth headshot, thought it might be worth celebrating."
I wasn't following his geek-speak. "You did what?"
"I play a lot of computer games, you know, and it's fun when you notice that you're getting better."
"I'm sorry, Nick, but really, I don't know what th
e hell you're talking about."
Nick hesitated for a second, "I know these weeks have been tough... I can't imagine..."
"No, you can't," I said as I started to slide my window shut.
"You're missed at school, you know. People are even asking me about you as if I know you. Nice haircut, by the way." Nick was backlit and several feet away, but from what I could remember, he looked like boys do nowadays. Through the foliage, I could glimpse carelessly tussled brownish hair, not dissimilar to mine in color, or at least what mine had been before I lopped it all off. It was hard to get a grasp of his face. His voice was kind, though.
“It's late. You too need to catch some sleep," I shut the window and drew the curtains.
The next night, I let the window stay shut with the curtain drawn, even though I hated not getting the air and a chance to see the moon, but I didn't want to risk having another conversation with another human being, let alone Nick. A while later, as I lay wallowing in my bed, staring at the proverbial ceiling, I heard a tap on my window. I sat up, then another tap, then a few seconds later, a third. Jesus, what the hell does that guy want now? I got up, pulled the curtain, and slid open the window, ready to rip into him.
"Listen Ni—" Something hit me square between the eyes.
"Oops"
I looked up and saw Nick standing in his window holding what could only be a nerf gun. In a split-second act of self-preservation, I picked up whatever happened to be closest to me and whipped it out the window and through the tree branches.
Nick yelled, "Whaaa! Are you nuts? Your countermeasure is hardly proportionate." He ducked down and re-emerged with an object in his right hand. At first, I couldn't make out what it was, but then I saw it. It was my snow globe—the snow globe with a moon in it that my dad had given me the day he died. I could lie for hours staring into the globe as the moon appeared to float in the glass with the stars whirling around it like the mother of all star-falls.