Come Find Me(39)

“Go, fast,” I say, and he listens.

The humid air funnels in, and it’s hard to hear him when we’re moving fast. “Sorry,” he calls, “the air conditioner didn’t kick in this morning. It’s like that sometimes.”

I don’t complain. I like it, really. Reminds you how fast you’re moving, the air pushing back against you, tears in the corners of your eyes.



* * *



—

The car slows when we pass the sign for Freedom Battleground State Park. “The turnoff for my house is easy to miss,” I say in warning.

“I know,” he says. “Sorry, not to be creepy. But I’ve been taking readings around the park, and I saw your house from the distance. I knew what happened, and I…well, I don’t know what I thought. That maybe I’d sense something? But when my device started picking up the Event, I could only think about the one thing I did differently. So I came back.”

    “I see,” I say, though of course, I already knew he had been there. It was my handprints that had plastered his car’s back window, after all—I’d assumed he was the Realtor then. I’m guessing he knows by now that it was me. He passes the turnoff, and I laugh. “Seriously, Nolan, you just missed it anyway.”

He mumbles to himself. “You guys need a sign.”

“Keeps the spectators away,” I joke. Except I’m not. After the killings, people did one of two things: They either avoided our house to an extreme, not even looking as they drove past. Like Joe, going ten miles out of the way so we could pretend the road didn’t even exist. Or they were sucked in like it was a magnet. The horror of it all; like they could taste it in the air. Like they could look at the house, peer in the windows, and see evil as an observer, from a safe distance.

Nolan drums his fingers on the steering wheel, over and over. “I have something to tell you,” he says.

“Shoot.”

“I was going through my credit card statement from last year, because I had this feeling about something that happened. Last winter, when I was sick, I saw my brother, talking to me.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. Even to myself I sound disbelieving.

“Right, so, that’s when I decided to buy all this equipment.”

    “Okay.” I don’t know what else to say. It seems Nolan believes in ghosts. I don’t.

He sighs heavily. “Anyway, I bought the equipment December fourth.”

“Wait. What?” I twist in my seat, staring at the side of his face. My eyes scan his expression for a tell, for a giveaway. “For real, Nolan?”

He nods, his fingers tight on the steering wheel. “I saw my brother in a dream. Well, I was awake. I was sick. You know, a fever dream? Where you’re not sure whether you’re awake or not? I saw my brother, and I thought he was asking me to help him.” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t really make out what he was saying.”

I can hear my heart beating inside my head. “December fourth, you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. I just double-checked with the receipt.”

This program originated December fourth. Nolan bought the equipment December fourth. That split in my life, through the entire universe.

“Lydia said she heard something,” I say. “When the power rebooted at my house. Something when the audio was hooked up to Elliot’s computer.”

She said she thought she heard me, but I don’t mention that part. She must’ve been mistaken. Imagining me there, and trying to make sense of things.

He slows the car on the drive in, the wheels unsettled over the grooves in the packed dirt and gravel. He brakes suddenly, idling the car before the clearing, the house just visible between the trees. “Someone’s here,” he says.

    I have to crane my neck to see, but then I do. At least two people—a man and a woman, from what I can make out—and two separate cars. It seems like someone is pacing, taking measurements. “Ugh, no,” I say.

“Do you know them?”

My hands are clenched so tightly that my fingernails dig into my palm. “Not exactly. Someone put an offer on the house. Well, on the land.” I turn to Nolan. “They want to tear it down. All of it.”

Nolan shakes his head fast. “They can’t,” he says, and it feels so good, so necessary, to have someone on my side, finally. It feels like something else is possible. “Should I say something?” he asks, putting the car in park.

“Like what?”

“Like, get the hell off your property?”

I feel a smile forming, unexpectedly. Then I press my lips together, looking away. “No, if Joe finds out I was here, he’ll flip. Can we head to your place instead? So I can see where the signal was coming from?”

But he stares out the windshield, mouth a straight line. “Depends,” he says, drumming his fingers again.

“On what?”

“On how stealthy you are.”



* * *



—

When we pull up to what must be Nolan’s house, he’s staring suspiciously at the front of the house. “That’s odd.”

“What’s odd?” The house looks so not-odd I worry we’re on the set of some television show. Everything seems fake. The perfectly lined-up yards and shrubs, the fronts of the houses all differing just slightly, but there’s an underlying uniformity to everything. My mom loved houses with character. Which is why we were in an old house in the middle of farmland, with a shed that had once been an old stable. History is important, she always said, and then we lived within it so we wouldn’t forget it.