Last Girl Ghosted(44)

“She did.”

“And where was she?”

“I told you last night. She’d checked herself into rehab, a posh place out west. But that was for six weeks and her father knew she was there. This is very different.”

“Addicts disappear,” I say. “That’s a common behavior pattern.”

“And you know this because...”

“Because everybody knows this.”

He clears his throat. There’s a lot of background noise. It sounds like he’s driving, too. “Not because you’re used to giving people advice?”

Shit.

“Don’t worry, Dear Birdie. Your secret is safe with me.”

An electric wave of alarm. He just outed me as Dear Birdie. They don’t call private investigators dicks for nothing.

I summon my grown-up voice. “You know what, Detective Kirk. Back off.”

“Wait—”

I end the call, hands shaking. He’s the first one to dig through my layers and find the truth. It seems to have taken him approximately twenty-four hours. Of course, as a PI he has access to resources that the average person doesn’t. But still. I press my foot to the gas, adrenaline pumping. I feel naked, exposed, and a little angry. When the phone rings again, I don’t answer it.

The city falls away, disappearing from my rearview mirror, as do all the selves I am when I’m there.



twenty


Then


“Come here, little bird.”

My father’s voice was just a croak, emitting from the dark of their bedroom. I paused in the hallway outside his door. The echoes of the fight he and my mother had the night before still seemed to bounce off the walls.

“It’s okay. Come say good morning to your old man.”

I moved to the doorway and stood there. The room smelled faintly, not unpleasantly, of sleep and cigarettes.

“Closer.”

I walked into the room over the creaking hardwood floor and stood beside the bed. The blinds were pulled, but sunlight streamed in from the edges, casting the room in a buttery yellow. He was shirtless, thickly muscled, tattoos on his arms. His sandy hair was a wild tousle.

He reached for his pack of cigarettes, then looked at me and put it back. “I shouldn’t smoke.”

“It’s bad for you,” I ventured.

A rare smile. “You’re right.”

He rubbed at the crown of his head. “Where’s your mom?”

“She’s working.”

She worked in town, just to bring some money in, at the local grocery. Every time I saw her leave in the rattling pickup, I worried that she wouldn’t come back. But she always did, smuggling contraband to us, things from our life before—Cheetos and Snickers bars, Oreos, and Goldfish crackers.

He nodded, a frown wrinkling his brow. His face had so many shadows, could pull into so many different masks. Gentle, tired like he was now. Dark and angry as he had been last night when he and my mother fought. Peaceful when he played the guitar. Blank, hollow like he was just before his rages.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, eager to keep him as he was.

“A little,” he said with a shrug. “Can you cook?”

“I can make oatmeal. Would you like some?”

He nodded. “That would be nice, little bird. Then we’ll go out. I want to show you something.”

After breakfast, we walked through the woods, down a winding path that was barely there, cleared by Jay and my father. I had to nearly jog to keep up with him. As we walked, my father delivered one of his sermons.

“When the global financial collapse ends society as we know it, and the sky turns red with flames, people like us will be the survivors. The world will belong to us.”

“When? When will the world end?”

I wondered about my school, my teachers, the friends we’d left behind. What would happen to them when the world ended? And how could the world end? It didn’t seem possible—the air, the earth, the sky, the birds—all of it here long before us.

“It’s already ended. Humanity just hasn’t gotten the memo.”

“What’s a memo?”

Another chuckle. “Never mind. Here we are.”

We had come to stand before a squat cinder block building with a large metal door. It was jarring to come across it in a place of nature, all hard angles among the curve of trees, the swish of the wind, and drop of leaves.

“What is this place?” I asked, putting my hand on the cold metal door.

“It’s something my father built,” he said. “It’s a bunker. A safe house.”

He took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. We stepped inside and climbed down a narrow flight of concrete steps with the outside light guiding our way. At the bottom, he unlocked another door.

He walked inside and turned on a battery-powered lantern that hung from a hook on the wall.

I followed him, my heart thumping, throat dry. There were two cots, a table with four chairs, a tattered plaid couch, piles of books and games, and what looked like endless rows of shelves stretching into the dark. The air was moldy and dank.

“Who lives here?”

“No one,” he said. “Right now, we just use it to store the things we’ll need later.”