A Lily in the Light(9)

Detective Ferrera leaned against the wall while they waited for the elevator, hands on his hips like a superhero. Esme half expected he’d rip his button-down shirt and flash a Superman S underneath.

“Who’s older?” Detective Ferrera asked as the door opened. It should have been obvious. Madeline was taller. She wore glasses that made her look like a real grown-up, but Madeline was scrunched into the corner of the elevator, arms folded across her chest. She didn’t look older. She just looked scared.

“She is,” Esme said. “She’s fifteen, and I’m eleven.”

“And your brother? How old is he?” The elevator dinged at the fourth floor.

“Seventeen,” Madeline mumbled.

Where was Nick? Esme hadn’t seen him since they’d passed each other in the hallway. She didn’t even know what time it was. The elevator dipped into place. Lily always said, “Whoa!” when it did. It must have felt like a bigger drop than it actually was under her little feet. The doors slid open.

“Lead the way.” Detective Ferrera moved aside even though he knew where they were going. Esme didn’t argue. She led the way to their apartment and pushed the door open. Another officer, a woman, was already inside, sitting at the table with a briefcase and the phone from her parents’ bedroom. The phone was upside down, and the officer was unscrewing the bottom with a screwdriver. The cord dangled over the edge of the table. The receiver rested on the rug.

Esme fought the urge to put it back in place. “Why is she doing that?”

The woman looked up briefly, then away, and no one answered. There was a thin layer of dust on everything now. The woman at the table was wearing bright-blue bags over her shoes. Lily’s blanket cave was gone now, folded neatly into a stack of pillows and blankets, erased. Esme’s house was a mirror version of its real self, the rabbit hole version. Her hand lingered on the doorframe, painted gray steel like it had always been. What would happen to her if she passed through?

“Sit.” He gestured toward the couch. Why would he offer them a place to sit in their own house? His gray suit and shiny tie looked out of place on the recliner chair, where her father should have been in his pajamas, slippers poking out from under one of the fleece blankets, instead of a gun in a holster on Detective Ferrera’s waist.

Outside, he’d had a plan and had known what to do to find Lily, but after Mrs. Rodriquez, Esme wasn’t sure. He reminded her of the dogs on the corner behind the double fence, with eyes dark as marbles and tails that never wagged, the kind that looked like any other brindle pit bull until someone walked by on the sidewalk. Then they stopped moving, eyes fixed, holding one foot up still as wood until they snapped awake and sprinted, jumping and snarling, spit spraying through the chain-link fence. “They’ll rip you apart,” her father had told her once, crossing to the other side of the street. A tuft of fur had blown past Esme’s sneaker. Both dogs had been sleeping, spread out on the concrete where the sun was the warmest, but they’d been watching her anyway, even with closed eyes. The wind had been a traitor, carrying her scent to them in their sleep. Detective Ferrera wouldn’t be the best person to find Lily if he was like those dogs.

Esme sensed that he had to talk to them but wasn’t expecting to learn very much, like he was talking to cardboard cutouts instead of real people.

“So you were both in there when your sister went missing?” He pointed to their bedroom door behind them. It was open, but the lights were off. Lily’s crayon drawing of the three of them eating birthday cake with pink candles was taped to the outside from Madeline’s birthday last month. The edges curled.

“I was in there,” Esme said. “She was in the shower. Then I went to the kitchen to make dinner.”

“There’d been some kind of disagreement with your sister?”

They nodded. Esme swallowed. Madeline’s hand found hers. They hadn’t held hands since Esme was old enough to cross the street by herself. Madeline’s fingers were thin and cold. Esme squeezed them, wishing she was still young enough to trust that Madeline could look left and right and guide her home safely.

“And you didn’t hear anything after that? You didn’t hear the door open, didn’t hear the doorbell?”

Esme opened her mouth to speak but exhaled instead. She cleared her throat. “I was cooking, and the TV was on. My dad put it on for her.”

“So your mother was at church, your father was out here with Lily, and where was your brother?”

“In his room,” Madeline said. She looked at Esme, eyebrows narrowed in question. Had he been? Across the living room, Nick’s bedroom door was open. It spilled light onto the closet and into their parents’ bedroom, but Esme couldn’t see inside.

“Or our parents’ room, but he wasn’t out here,” Esme said, remembering him yelling to shut up.

“OK.” He nodded slowly, and Esme could almost see him thinking. She shifted her weight and tightened her hand around Madeline’s.

“Tell me about your brother’s relationship with Lily.”

Something in the room shifted. She looked at Madeline, but Madeline glared at Detective Ferrera like she did when the high school kids drove around the block in borrowed cars, slowing down, then flying over speed bumps, windows down, laughing while kids scurried out of the street.

“It’s fine, I guess. He’s not around much,” Madeline said. “He’s seventeen and out with his friends a lot.”