Come Find Me(5)

How can I be thinking about who would pay for college when these children are missing? Priorities, Nolan.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he says, handing me a plate. “We could use your help sorting through the tip line….”

I make some excuse about studying for finals and pile a few slices onto the plate. The finals part isn’t a lie. The studying part, on the other hand, will have to wait. I need to get upstairs and transfer the data points. Plot it out on one of the park maps on my computer. See if there’s any overlap, any pattern, any failure to predict within.

    I grab a soda, and there’s a new face taped to the wall, just beside the fridge in my peripheral vision. I don’t look. Those pictures, man. They’ll gut you, or they’ll numb you, and either way, you die a little.

I have to get out of here. I’m surrounded by ghosts.





When I finally make it back, Joe’s up and in the shower. By the time he gets out, I’ve returned the bike to the garage and changed into pajamas.

I can’t believe I slept so long at the house. I woke with a start, with a feeling that someone was there, like a presence. As if the stories the other kids told in the dark, whispered low to scare one another, were real. But then the light filtered in, everything clarified—and I remembered that I was alone.



* * *



—

Joe says he has to be on campus for most of Saturday, but has to is probably an overstatement.

He does work sporadic hours, I’ll give him that. But occasionally I think he builds in some extra time, just to have an excuse to leave. I don’t even blame him.

Truthfully, we get along just fine for roommates thrown into an unforeseen living arrangement. And in practice, everything’s working out as far as the courts are concerned. But in theory, he hasn’t taken too well to suddenly being responsible for his sixteen-year-old niece. Can’t say I’ve taken too well to it, either. It’s hard to take him seriously as a voice of authority—he was always just my mom’s slightly irresponsible, much younger kid brother, who took a few years off before attending college to see the world, with a spotty attendance record when it came to family affairs—and my presence probably doesn’t help with his bachelor lifestyle.

    But on the plus side, he pretty much leaves me to my own devices. He’s adopted a random assortment of ground rules, which he came up with on a whim one night, but I mostly try to stick by them so I can fight the good fight where it counts. No drinking (not a problem), no boys (also not a problem), and no skipping school (mostly not a problem). If he ever catches me sneaking out, I can tell him that technically I haven’t broken any of his rules and hope that holds. I’m fighting him hard, though, on the house thing.

He wants to sell it. I don’t. After a lifetime of moving around campus housing with my mom, this was the first time we’d had a house in our name, and land. According to my mom, it would be a place for us all to grow roots.

It’s the only place I can feel them, still.

Technically, the house is now mine.

Technically, it’s Joe’s decision, since he’s the one who’d have to send the checks.

All these technicalities.



* * *



—

    We finally cross paths at breakfast. Lunch? I look at the clock: too close to tell. He’s got two different kinds of cereal out on the kitchen table—we shop separately but buy vaguely similar things. The one time we went grocery shopping together, the woman at the checkout gave him some seriously judgmental looks and pulled me aside to ask if I was okay. Joe’s too old to pass as my brother, too young to be my father, too unsure of how to act around me to look casual. Anyway, that store clerk’s comment? I mock-gagged and laughed it off. But Joe was mortified. Now he drops me off with cash for my own stuff while he “runs errands.” I think he just drives around for a while until I text him.

“What are you doing today?” he asks, drinking the remaining milk directly from the bowl.

“Nothing,” I say.

He nods like I’ve somehow given a satisfactory response.

“The Albertsons wanted me to tell you that you’re welcome to use their pool whenever you want—it’s the yellow corner house, you know it? They have twin girls who are about your age.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. I do know the Albertsons’ house, and I also know the Albertson twins (for the record: two years younger, not my age), and not even the stifling heat could get me into their backyard pool.

He takes his bowl to the sink, rinses it out, and puts it in the dishwasher, then pulls open the freezer. “I’ll bring back something for dinner,” he says.

“Okay.”

He’s in jeans and a gray T-shirt, apparently acceptable attire for a postgrad at the university. I don’t know what he does exactly—some sort of anthropology research, along with a bit of teaching, I think. He used to travel a lot. Yet another thing I’ve disrupted. But his presence there was one of the main reasons my mom accepted that teaching position. He’s why we’re here, in West Arbordale, Virginia, after I spent most of my life in the suburbs of DC. Same state, very different reality.

    Joe lives a little like a student, too, which is not nearly as glamorous as I’d imagined, in anticipation of college. Mostly it means ramen noodles and a lot of caffeine and a questionable laundry situation. I tried to get him to move to my house instead—more room for both of us—even suggesting we renovate, so we wouldn’t have to be reminded of the things that happened there. But he, like most people, won’t set foot in there any longer. “We can use the money from the sale to get a bigger place,” he suggested after our first couple of weeks together, when the realities of sharing a bathroom with a teenage girl, and vice versa, bordered on cringe-worthy.