We Are Here (39 page)

“Isn’t there
anything
you can do?”

The girl laughed, the first bitter sound Kristina had heard her utter. “Sure. I can go sit against the wall in old St. Pat’s or some unpopular park, or in one of the old tunnels where trains don’t run anymore. They say it doesn’t take long once you’ve decided to hollow out.”

Kris was shocked. “Is that what you
want
?”

“No. I want a home.”

“Good. Because if I heard you were even
considering
something like that, I’d come kick your ass.”

Lizzie smiled. “You can’t kick imaginary ass.”

“You’d be surprised what I can do. That solution sucks. It’s not happening. What’s the alternative?”

Lizzie shrugged, but not in a way that said she didn’t know the answer. She knew, all right.

“So do that instead,” Kristina said, knowing she was out on a limb and speaking of things she didn’t understand well enough. Sometimes you do that, though. Sometimes that’s what friends are for: to watch from the outside of your life, and listen, and say the thing you need to hear said.

Lizzie was still, so motionless that she looked like a painting. “Really?”

“I think it’s time for a reunion. Don’t you?”

Lizzie went back to staring out over the water toward the unknown land and buildings on the other side.

Kristina left her to it, walking off down the street to rejoin life as she knew it.

She saw Lizzie only one more time.

The first David knew about it was when he went into Roast Me. He got up at the usual hour. He made Dawn breakfast. He almost always did this, but that morning he especially wanted to get to the kitchen before her. In case he’d missed one of the blank sheets of paper. In case something else had happened there, something silent, while he lay unsleeping next to his wife. Just in case.

The kitchen was fine. Which meant everything else was fine, right? Right. Until something else happened, everything was fine.

You bet.

Dawn seemed chirpier than the night before and drove off to school in good humor. David went straight upstairs to the spare room. The contents of his boxes lay on the floor where he’d left them in the night. He decided he was done being bullied by inanimate objects and methodically destroyed the cardboard crates to force himself to do something about the items in them
right now
.

It took only half an hour, as he basically moved almost all of their contents into his study. So what had the fuss been about? Why had it taken him so long to do this?

Why was he not thinking about the paper in the kitchen the night before, and the open door?

He knew at least that he had not imagined or dreamed that incident, because the pile of paper was where he’d left it after gathering the pieces from the kitchen, on the lower shelf on the table in the front hallway. He wasn’t sure whether it would have been better to have imagined an inexplicable incident so clearly that it felt real, or for it to have actually happened, and felt rising hysteria when he tried to make the choice.

In daylight it was easier to see that the sheets of paper didn’t look like they’d been sold recently. They were dry and slightly yellowed. He knew why that was. That didn’t help him understand them any better.

He took one of his childhood books back out of the bookcase where he’d just stacked it, a bookcase that would—six months from now—hold author copies of his own work. This morning that did not feel like anything to be proud of. The book he picked was
I Sing the Body Electric
. It was a paperback, and obviously well read. He didn’t remember it, however. He knew it was his, could recall owning it, but it got cloudy after that.

He flicked through the pages, smelling old paper. Old paper in books, old paper in a pile. All he had was old paper and secondhand words.

Something caught his eye near the end of the book. It was another piece of paper, folded over, wedged between the pages. He unfolded it.

Something was written in pencil, faint and scratchy. It wasn’t David’s handwriting, even as it had been back in his early teens. It wasn’t in either of his parents’ hands either. It looked like the work of someone struggling to manipulate a physical object.

David held it up and squinted. It said:

He dropped it in the trash and left the house thinking firmly about other things.

He could tell something was off from the moment he walked into the coffeehouse. Dylan was behind the counter, failing to cope. Nobody was tutting or giving him grief, however. Dylan was nineteen and, as Talia put it, “dozy like a fucking mouse”—very much the barista B or C team, drafted in only when one of the main servers was sick. Regulars tended to feel able to give him a certain amount of goodnatured ribbing in recompense for the guaranteed inaccuracy and scaldedness of the coffees they’d receive by his hand. This afternoon everyone in line seemed subdued, and silent.

As David got closer to the counter he noticed Dylan wasn’t merely being slow. His hands were shaking. Sylvia, the owner, was back there too, turned from the room, on the phone.

“You okay?” David asked. He was reconciled to the idea that his coffee would be completely wrong.

Dylan looked at him. “Shit,” he said, after a moment. “You don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?”

“Talia’s dead.”

“She’s …
what
?”

“Yeah.” Dylan started nodding and swallowing compulsively. “They found her a couple hours ago.”

“Where?”

“By the creek. The cops came by a while back to let us know—Sylvia called me in when Talia didn’t show and wasn’t answering her phone.”

“Well, did she fall, or …”

“I don’t know, dude. That’s all they told us.”

David pushed back from the counter, unable to process this information. He’d stood
right here
and blurted out his and Dawn’s news to Talia only two days ago. How could she be … “Jesus.”

“It’s fucked up,” Dylan agreed.

David walked stiff-legged out of the coffeehouse. When he hit the cold outside he became aware his mouth was hanging open, and shut it. He should call Dawn—she’d known Talia longer, having been born and bred in Rockbridge—but he didn’t know what he could say to her. The news would arrive at the school soon enough and probably she’d call him. He wasn’t sure what he’d say then either. Quite apart from her having been a friend, he’d spent a lot of the last week buried in her novel. The idea that the mind that had created it was now gone doubled the effect. She’d taken a world with her.

“I want to talk to you,” someone said.

It was George Lofland. His face was red and he wasn’t wearing a jacket, despite the chill.

“What abou—”

Then George was right in his face. His breath smelled of stale alcohol. He shoved a hand into David’s chest, knocking him backward.

“Hey,” David said. “What’s the—”

“What’s the
problem
? Have you heard about Talia?”

“Dylan just told me. But—”

“Someone killed her.” George had stopped trying to push David back down the sidewalk and was standing hands on hips. When he was in front of you like that you realized he was kind of a big guy.

“What? What makes you even
say
that?”

“I’ve just been up to her place,” he said. “The cops are there. One of them is Bedloe’s son. I’ve known him since he was a kid.”

“Are
they
saying somebody killed her?”

“No. But they didn’t know her like I did. Talia was never going to kill herself, and even if she
did
, she’d have left instructions about her cats. And plenty of food. Which she did not. I just fed them myself.”

“But no one’s
saying
she killed herself, are they? Surely it was an accident.”

“An accident she got herself dressed up for, in fancy clothes?”

David was uncomfortably aware that someone would be able to tell that a confrontation was going on from right across the street. “What are you talking about?”

“The Bedloe kid told me how she was found. At the bottom of the creek, neck broken. Wearing a dress smarter than anything else they found in the trailer, something that didn’t even fit. That make any sense to you?”

It didn’t, but nothing about Talia’s death had made sense. He could tell Lofland was one step from taking a swing at him, however, so he tried to speak calmly.

“So … what do you think happened?”

“I don’t
know
what happened, David. What I
do
know is she called me on the phone yesterday afternoon, asking questions about that guy I picked up in my car. A guy who disappeared into thin air—just like the guy you were talking with in Kendricks.”

“I … was there by myself. I told you that.”

“I know that’s what you
said
, but it was bullshit. I know I saw a guy sitting opposite you, and then he wasn’t there. Talia kept me on the line for twenty minutes trying to get me to remember things about the guy I picked up. Now, why do you think she would do that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Me neither. Then that same night she gets dolled up and goes out to meet someone and …” He swallowed. “And she doesn’t come back.”

David tried to get these pieces to fit together and couldn’t. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

“I can see that. But I’ll tell
you
this. If I find your ‘friend’ had anything to do with what happened to her, anything
at all
, I’m going to come find you. Understand?”

David realized that George meant what he said and that there lurked years of pent-up anger and frustration in the man that would help him carry the job through. Denying anything—everything—wasn’t going to help.

He nodded. George stormed away.

David had no desire to go home. Home—the house he owned with Dawn, where they kept their stuff—did not feel like a place he needed to be. If anywhere, he felt he needed to go back to his hometown—something he’d never felt since leaving it years before. He didn’t understand why. There was nothing for him there. No closure to be had. Nothing that could be said or done. No parents.

No friends.

He knew this was the reality of Talia’s death sinking in. Where you live is not your world. What you own isn’t either. The people you know …
that’s
the world you live in, and that’s why living a life is like building a house on an emotional fault line. Places persist, but every living thing is going to die.

Die, or leave you.

He recalled an acquaintance who went on a contract to a country eight hours’ time difference away; the guy said living that far out of sync with everyone he knew felt like being a ghost. Maybe that’s all being a ghost
is
—finding yourself out of step with everything and everyone you knew. David had never been sociable (total loner geek—thanks, Dad), so the few people he cared about loomed large. Talia had been one, even though they’d never gone for a drink, eaten together, even visited each other’s houses. Losing her was bad enough. That someone might think he was somehow
involved
or implicated … was terrible.

And how
could
he be? He thought back to the last conversation they’d had, outside Roast Me. She’d been talking very strangely, yes. He’d blown straight past the concern he should probably have felt for her state of mind because of the part where she reprised the story of George and the hitchhiker. Was there something he’d missed, something he could have talked her down from, a difference he could have made?

He tried to remember. There’d been something about how people when they died might not actually have gone, or something … Christ.

She’d got it into her head that the guy George picked up on the forest road was a ghost.

Not just any ghost, either. Talia had believed in signs and portents. It was all over her novel—there was even a mawkish and credibility stretching moment where one of her key characters, the slim and plucky heroine, was given fresh strength to continue life’s struggle after seeing a shooting star. Yes, this was fiction, but what people write reflects what they believe—fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life. She’d latched on to George’s hitchhiker story right from the start, telling David about it the same day in the coffee shop. It had spoken to her, and maybe something
else
had then happened that had given her some bizarre cause to add two and two together to make seventy-five …

The person George picked up
must
have been Maj, as he’d already realized. But how did that explain what had happened? There was no evidence Maj was in town now, or had been last night. What motive would he have for hassling other people, never mind setting up a situation in which one of them might
die
?

Except …
someone
had been in David’s house, hadn’t they? That was evidence of
someone
being on his case in however inexplicable a manner, even if it wasn’t Maj.

And if Maj or these others were unable to get anywhere with David, what might be the obvious next step?

Lean on his friends.

Isn’t that what the crazy or vindictive
did
in these circumstances—bring pressure on their victim in any way they can, threatening him from the outside? Talia wasn’t in a position to force David to do anything, though—and Maj had already made contact with David. Why would he resort to doing things secondhand?