Come Find Me(17)

Eventually, the doorbell will ring, and the woman on the line will instruct me to open the front door. I won’t look as I follow her orders.

Joe hits the button again, and the room falls to silence.

“You know what,” Joe says, “I don’t think now’s the best time after all. Why don’t you wait for me in the hall while we finish up here, Kenny.” Which is something he called me when I was much younger. Much, much younger.

Still, I take the gift I am presented with. He gives me a few dollars, tells me to get myself something from the vending machine we saw on the way in, and to get him a soda, too. Something with caffeine, for the love of all that is holy, is what he actually says.

The door shuts behind me, and the hall feels overexposed, fluorescent-lit.

A man in uniform passes by and nods in my direction. I trail my fingers against the grooves in the wall as I make my way back to the vending machine at the entrance, near the double front doors.

I stare at the options. Paper and aluminum and chemicals. My reflection in the glass. The buzzing of the light inside. Another crack in the glass at the upper right-hand corner. I get two Cokes, and I wait outside.



* * *



—

    “So,” Joe begins, when we’re in the car, on the highway. My soda is beside his in the cup holder, and at this point I’ve forgotten which one is mine.

“He’s sort of obtuse,” I say, peeling the visitor label from my shirt. It’s got my name, a time stamp, a grainy black-and-white picture with only the top half of my face in the frame, taken at the front desk. I look like a ghost.

“Kennedy, he’s on your side.”

“I didn’t know I had a side.” I shove the crumpled label into my pocket. “If they have the nine-one-one recording, they don’t really need me to remember.”

He sighs, just faintly, and I assume that’s the end of it. Until he adds, “You’re the only witness, Kennedy.”

I don’t understand how that’s possible, standing as I was underneath a dark sky, full of a thousand stars. But that’s what they keep telling me. The night hid us from sight. The storm concealed the noise.

Joe reaches an arm across the console, but I look out the window and he picks up one of the Cokes instead. There’s a white line zigzagging across the sky, the trail of an airplane.

But I’m starting to think there’s a crack running through the whole universe and I’m the only one who sees it.



* * *



—

Lydia hasn’t texted or called by the time we arrive back at Joe’s, so I log on to the computer to see if I have any more messages about my question on the forum.

But the only thing in my inbox is a message from Visitor357. There’s also a video attachment, which I immediately open.

The camera is trained on the dial of some device pressed up against a blue wall, and I watch as the dial dives below zero, back to neutral, over and over. You can’t see what’s out of frame, and I know anything could be causing this. This guy could be causing this. Faking this. But I watch it again. And again and again. I pull up my own readout from the radio telescope on the computer screen, and I set it to run in real time. The two images are side by side; I’ve stopped breathing.

    Spike. Pause. Spike. Pause.

They line up completely.

I was wrong. There’s not something wrong with the computer program, or the satellite dish.

I lean closer to the screen, goose bumps rising across my arms.

I think: The timing is important.





Nobody remembers dinner. Nobody remembers that this investigation has already happened and an email isn’t going to change the outcome of that, either. They move as if time is still on our side, two years after the last shred of evidence led us nowhere. As if there’s still some piece of Liam left, and it’s been hidden away inside an anonymous email all along, and it’s going to slip from their grasp if they don’t all migrate over to Abby’s house at warp speed to inspect this new piece of evidence ASAP.

When Mike showed up, at three o’clock, as promised, he was quickly sent away.

“What’s happening?” he asked me, surveying the scene.

“Nothing. They’ve lost their minds.”

Mike patted my shoulder, and I knew he understood. The first months after Liam disappeared, the house was filled with Liam’s teachers, his coaches, his friends. When they dropped off, one by one, Mike pulled on the volunteers from the shelter where Liam had previously worked with him.

    The reason Mike joined the call for help was because his sister disappeared when he was a kid, never to be seen again. Not like the other volunteers who come and go, drawn to the unsolved mystery, or fueled by the guilt that it could’ve been one of their loved ones instead, or, like Dave and Clara/Sara and the rest of the college interns, needing the hours for school.

Mike has spent his whole life searching, too. Something that’s painful to think about, considering the salt-and-pepper hair covering his head, and the gray scruff of his beard. Eventually his search for the lost led him to dedicate his time to the ones he can still help.

Now, suddenly, no one cares about the phones anymore. They keep ringing downstairs, and instead of turning the lines to silent, I leave them be. I keep hoping they’ll jar my parents back to reality, pulling them back home.