Come Find Me(22)

    Now, standing eye to eye with Agent Lowell, I see he hasn’t dropped this perception of me. But I no longer feel intimidated by his gaze. I’ve been through it. Straight through. An entire investigation, your whole world ripped apart, while you stand there, begging them to do it.

Abby says you’re close—

What can you tell us about your brother—

How did you feel about him?

Offering up your belongings, and his, to try to track him down. Turning over your phones, your computers, your entire privacy, in the hopes of eventually finding him. Closing your eyes and imagining the sound of his music on the other side of the wall, the shake of a collar out in the hallway—imagining that everything would eventually lead us back to this.

“I’m going out,” I tell Agent Lowell now, knowing better than to get involved once more. “If my parents are looking for me, tell them I’m not interested in wasting time with this.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You think this—an email claiming to know what happened—is a waste of time? Why would that be, Nolan?”

Because the only explanation for what happened to my brother is that he was taken by something we can’t understand. That something pulled him, against his will. Some crack in reality, and my brother slipped through.

When Liam first disappeared, the number one theory, in the absence of any sign of foul play, was that he had run away. There were several points in favor of this theory. He volunteered at a shelter that was rumored to be frequented by teen runaways—he would know what to do, how to do it. It’s one thing to take a person, the police said. It’s another to take a person and a dog. Same goes for accidental injury or death—both Liam and the dog? A tougher thing to explain, though my dad insisted that Colby wouldn’t have left Liam’s side if he’d been hurt.

    My parents asked Mike if he agreed with the runaway theory—he said that at first he didn’t think Liam was the type, but what he had learned was that there wasn’t really a type.

So everyone agreed: Liam and the dog both disappearing was a sign.

This gave my parents a shred of hope, even though it was a ridiculous idea. Liam Chandler, running away.

He had the girlfriend. The social status. The college scouts. The future. And all the searching through his life turned up nothing—no reason, no explanation.

I could’ve told them that from the start. Actually, I did tell them that. I’d spent the previous year hearing Abby in his bedroom through the wall, watching his friends taking over the house, staring down the shelves of his trophies and awards.

Liam Chandler running away? No. Not possible. There was the dream, the feeling, and then he was gone. Never to be heard from again.

But there were sightings. Two hundred and nine the first week (a kid hitchhiking in Florida; another filling up a gas tank in Ohio with a dog in the backseat; one buying a lottery ticket in Maryland), followed by 330 the second week. Calls from people who meant well, and those who didn’t. No leads panned out. Nothing real, anyway. The sightings picked up, spread across the country like his image was contagious, then shrank back in, slowly but surely collapsing on themselves. Like he was fading, just as we were reaching for him.

    I saw him once myself, over a year later, when the investigation had slid to a halt. This past winter. I’d had the flu, and he appeared to me in the middle of a fever dream. I had been half-sleeping—that type of semiconscious state when you’re sick, where you dream, but you’re always right there, on the cusp of waking. I was curled up on the couch, blanket tucked around me, medicine on the table, half-dreaming of his voice, speaking to me. Then I opened my eyes and he was right there. Standing across the living room, in the same clothes he wore the day he disappeared: jeans, long-sleeved maroon shirt, mud-streaked blue sneakers with dirty laces.

Liam, I said, we’ve been looking for you.

It was my father who found me, standing in the middle of the room, in the middle of the night, talking to empty space. Who put a hand on my forehead and dosed me with Motrin and said, Let’s not tell your mother about this.

But even as my father spoke, shaking me gently, washcloth on the back of my neck, Liam still stood in the corner, in front of the fireplace. His mouth moved, but no sound came out, like there was some boundary he was desperate to breach.

“Listen,” I tell Agent Lowell, “knock yourself out. We used to get hundreds of emails a day. Why does one matter now?”

    “Because, Nolan, the email included an encrypted attachment. Turns out, it’s a picture.”

My shoulders tense, and from the quirk of his lips, it seems he enjoyed springing this little piece of information on me. “A picture of what?”

“A picture of Liam. Your brother.”

“From when?”

“Well,” he says, taking a deep breath. “That’s what we’re about to find out.”

I take a step back, so close to being pulled back in; a trap, a lure. A carrot on a stick, until we’re back where we started. “Abby has a thousand pictures of Liam, sir. My guess, you’re not gonna have to look all that hard.”

“You think this is Abby’s work, Nolan? That she faked an email to herself? Abby has always cooperated with the investigation.” As if implying that I have not. “She seems pretty shook up to me,” he adds.