“I hate the way he refers to his readers as his friends.” I was leaning back in my chair and stirring my margarita with a grape Popsicle. “It’s so patronizing.”
He held up the back cover of the book to show me the author photo. He was a mustached man with giant red-framed eyeglasses. “Dude, Dr. Harris B. Harris is your friend. He wants to help you. And me. He wants to help us.”
We kept getting calls on the landline from a blocked number. Sometimes there were as many as five or six a day. I’d answer and there’d be only a long silence as I asked who it was, what they wanted, and then finally a click as the caller hung up. The first few times I thought it was my parents trying unsuccessfully to reach me from somewhere abroad. But after a while I ditched that theory and assumed it was Pablo or Fessica or maybe even Vicki.
“Maybe it’s Jenny Moore,” Alex once said before making a ghostly moaning noise and waving his arms around. I told him it wasn’t funny, but he just laughed and rolled his eyes and told me to lighten up.
Once we got one of these calls at five in the morning. Alex was passed out next to me in bed. I deliberated not answering, but with each one came the fresh hope that after the call I’d realize something that I hadn’t before. Maybe something basic like the caller’s identity. Maybe something deeper and more cosmic.
“Who is this?” I asked the silent void. “Seriously. You’re not accomplishing anything by just calling and not saying anything. Tell me what you want.”
No sound. Not even breathing. At least there would’ve been comfort in that. I would’ve known that it was an actual human being on the other end. But now every time we got a call, I thought of Alex’s sarcastic suggestion that it was Jenny Moore. The idea of this sent a shiver down my spine.
“Jenny?” I said.
The person hung up immediately.
Alex introduced me to The Difference Between Wright and Wong, a cop show from the early eighties that they showed at three thirty a.m. on channel 321.
“This is easily one of the most underrated shows in the history of television,” he said. We were on the floor of the family room in a tangle of sheets, blankets, and pillows. I was struggling to keep my eyes open, but he was wide-awake. The opening sequence had just begun and already he was completely immersed. “I used to watch this show with my dad. He loved it. I met the actor who played Detective David Wright at the state fair when I was, like, seven. I bet I still have his autographed picture somewhere. God, what I would give to get this channel at my grandma’s place.”
The two detectives were speeding through Chinatown on a little black moped. Detective Wong was driving and Detective Wright was holding on to his waist and shooting at a black sedan that was chasing them. The horns in the chase music kept pulling me out of sleep.
“Which would you rather be?” Alex asked. “Wright or Wong?”
My eyes were barely open. “I don’t know. I’ve only seen, like, two half episodes in my entire life.”
“I think you’d be Wright. Wright is careful, levelheaded. He’s the partner that talks to the chief when shit goes wrong, like when a stakeout ends with a giant explosion and a dead hooker. Only Wright can talk him down. And Wong knows the Chinese underworld really well, sorta like I know the Cedarville underworld. So I think it fits.”
I thought about pointing out that Dingo and his gang of loser friends could hardly be referred to as the Cedarville underworld, but I fell asleep before I could.
That night I dreamt it was me and him on that moped. We were flying through a bright neon Chinatown of my mind. There were puddles in the street and I was having trouble steering the bike. It leaned in ways that defied gravity. It was all I could do to hang on. Even in my dreams there was music: cheesy horns, intense percussion, and a bass guitar humping away at a single note. “You’re such a good housewife,” Alex whispered into my ear before going back to shooting at the invisible thing following us.
Lucy and Jay came and went as they pleased. The house became our post-adolescent clubhouse. There were epic barbeques at dusk. There were marathon Ouija board sessions between the four of us in my mother’s meditation room, where we tried to conjure the ghosts of dead rock stars and poets.
One night Alex and Jay stayed up late doing God knows what while Lucy and I slept upstairs. I woke the next morning to find a long crack in the sliding glass door. Alex and Jay were eating frosted cereal in the kitchen, bags under their bloodshot eyes.
“What happened?” I exclaimed. “My parents are gonna kill me!”
“He fell,” Jay said.
“I fell,” Alex repeated. “My head did that.”
I didn’t know if believed them or not, but I quickly found myself thinking that maybe I didn’t want to know.
“This needs to be fixed,” I said.
“I already called some glass place,” Alex said. “They’ll be here between two and four. I’ll pay for it.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t expected this, but it was a pleasant surprise. It still wasn’t enough to completely smother my irritation.
I leaned against the counter and rubbed my eyes. This was not the best way to wake up. They went on eating their cereal in silence. I found myself glaring at Jay more than Alex. I felt a bit jealous of Jay, jealous that the two of them had been up all night together wreaking havoc in the house. I looked over at the refrigerator and noticed it was covered with magnetic letters. Amongst the jumbled nonsense someone had spelled Dade Kincaid is not afraid.
“Where did those come from?” I asked. “Did you go out and buy refrigerator magnets last night?”
The two of them looked dumbly at the phrase spelled out on the fridge.
“I’m not sure,” Alex said slowly. He paused for a moment. “I don’t think so, although a chunk of last night is a bit fuzzy.”
“To say the least,” Jay said.
“But I’m thinking yes,” Alex said. “We must have.”
“At least you’re thinking,” Jay said. “That’s more than I can say for myself.”
Lucy and I sat out by the pool and watched Jay and Alex roughhousing in the water. We talked about what would happen after I left for school and she went back to L.A.
“We’ll still be friends,” she told me. “Distance has nothing to do with friendship. Think about someone like Pablo who was right beside you for such a long time, but did you ever feel close to him? Distance is meaningless. No one’s that far away unless they choose to be.”
I watched Alex and Jay as they jumped on each other’s backs and tried to hold each other’s head underwater. I wondered how well I really knew him, how close we really were. Maybe my perspective was all messed up. Maybe we were really miles apart.
“Have you two talked?” Lucy asked. “You and Alex. About after the summer.”
I shook my head. “I think about it sometimes and it makes me sad.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, what are your options?”
“I don’t have any,” I said.
“There are always options, Dade.”
“Not going to college isn’t an option,” I said. “I’m not staying in Cedarville. And it’s not like he could come to school with me and sleep in my dorm room closet or something.”
“Try not to think about it,” she said.
“This is helping,” I said.
“What is?”
“My parents being gone. Having the house to ourselves.” I considered what I meant exactly before going on. “I feel like we’re in a beautiful bubble.”
“How long after they get back until you drive to Michigan?”
“Two weeks.”
“Right around when I head back to L.A.,” she said.
Alex and Jay had worn themselves out and were playing dead in the pool. Lucy let out a little laugh at the sight of it.
“That’s the sad thing about bubbles,” she said. “They burst.”
One night I dreamt that someone was in the house. I didn’t know who it was or if it was even a person. In fact
, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a person, that it was some sort of force moving through the halls. In the dream I was in bed with Alex and I could feel the thing coming up the stairs. I was afraid to speak too loudly, so I kept whispering Alex’s name in an attempt to wake him up. I nudged him and hissed his name, but he stayed fast asleep.
“It’s coming up the stairs,” I whispered to no one.
Then, in the dream, my phone rang. It was my mother. She asked if I was at home.
“I am,” I said. “Are you coming up the stairs right now? Someone’s on the stairs and I don’t know who it is.”
She said she wasn’t in the house, that she was in Europe with my father and that she was calling to tell me to get out of the house as soon as possible. Her voice was calm when she said this, so calm that it seemed like it couldn’t really be her calling.
“Why? What’s going on? What is it? Do you know what it is? Is it what’s been calling the house?”
She said it was and that I needed to climb out the window. I could feel it moving on the other side of the walls. The thing was at the top of the stairs now, almost to my door.
“What about Alex? I can’t wake him up. I can’t leave him here.”
She told me to forget about Alex and to save myself.
“But we’re the same person,” I said. I wasn’t just being dramatic. It was clear in the dream that he and I were in fact the same exact person.
My mother said that even though it felt that way that it wasn’t true. She said I had to get out of the house.
“But I can’t leave him.” I was hysterically crying at this point.
Yes, you can, she said. In fact, you have to. You really don’t have any choice.
It had its hand on the doorknob.
“But I can’t. I can’t do that.”
Do it. You have to. Go.
Chapter 18
It was a little after five in the morning. Outside my windows, the dawn was shifting the black of the night sky to a clean dark blue, Alex was sound asleep right next to me, his bare back just inches away. I reached out and put my finger to his left shoulder blade. Yes, he was real. Both him and his snoring were very real.
I got out of bed and wandered the house. The blue predawn glow coming through every window made the house feel ghostly and electric. It reminded me of the black-and-white horror movies, zombies lurching across the cornfield under some weird hybrid of day and night. The television in the refrigerator had been left on all night, muted and pouring its visuals to an inanimate audience of all the things that made up our kitchen. The cupboards, the granite countertop, the state-of-the-art faucet, the butcher’s block, the kitchen table where I sat down with my parents and told them I was gay. How did these things exist when we weren’t here? What did they do when everyone was fast asleep?
They enter our dreams, that’s what, I thought to myself as I opened the fridge. How many times had I dreamt dreams that took place in this house? In this very kitchen even? Maybe that was these things’ way of talking to me in my sleep. They were sending me benign reminders of their existence. I thought back to the dream I’d had the previous night, the one with my mother telling me to get out of the house.
I grabbed a carton of chocolate milk and drank it while leaning against the counter. The light in the house seemed to be changing a bit each second, getting brighter as the day was being born. I pushed a button on the fridge to unmute the television. The sound came on just in time for me to catch the final strains of the Cedarville Sports Club jingle (“—ville Sports Cluuuuuuuuuub . . . It just fits!”).
What came next seemed like the reason I couldn’t sleep. The reason the television had been left on. For reasons that exist far outside our realm of consciousness, for invisible reasons.
A News Channel 4 special report came on, all dramatic music and flying logos in the intro. Then anchorwoman Billie Yellowfield appeared on the screen. She’d possessed the same blond perm for as long as I could remember. As always it was frizzy and out of control, giving the whole thing the appearance of being some lost transmission from the eighties. She wore a crisp white blouse with a large red bow tied at her throat.
“Good morning. I’m Billie Yellowfield, here to bring you this breaking News Channel Four special report. Police are reporting Jenny Moore, the nine-year-old Cedarville girl missing since June third, has been found safe and sound in a local supermarket, of all places. Channel four reporter Kip Bradley is on location at the eastside Food World where the young girl was found. Kip, what can you tell us about this strange turn of events?”
The screen split, and there was Kip Bradley, by far the sexiest anchor on any of the Cedarville news stations. He always had this look of muted incredulousness on his face, like he couldn’t believe he was on TV. His oil-black hair was styled in a hipster pompadour that suggested he spent his downtime in dive bars drinking cheap beer and monopolizing the jukebox with rockabilly tunes. Behind him was Food World, my Food World, its red neon sign bright and frantic. Behind him police officers were wandering back and forth. A lone potbellied civilian stood gawking at the camera a few yards back.
“Yes, Billie,” Kip said. “This is an amazing end to a situation that many people feared would end in tragedy. Police say nine-year-old Jenny Moore was found in the cereal aisle of this east Cedarville Food World. Now, the young girl was rushed to North Cedarville Hospital, but early reports coming in from people who saw Jenny said that she appeared to be fine, laughing even, and didn’t look like a girl who’d been missing for the better part of the summer.”
And then Orla the purple-haired woman from the bakery was on the screen, a microphone bearing the channel 4 logo aimed at her orange lipsticked mouth.
“Well, I just came in at four to put the bread in the oven like I always do and I saw her just sorta wandering up and down the aisle. She was opening cereal boxes, looking for the little toys they give away, and I thought it was strange that a little girl would be at a grocery store all by herself at four in the morning. So I asked her where her mom was and she just sorta looked at me. She was giving me an odd little smile and wearing a decoder ring she’d found. She was more interested in that decoder ring than telling me where she lived or who might be looking for her. After a few seconds I realized who it was, and by golly, I just about had a heart attack.”
From off-screen an unmicrophoned Kip asked, “A good heart attack or a bad one?”
Orla gave a restrained chuckle and said, “Oh, a good one.”
The live Kip returned to the screen.
“Police are still investigating this strange development in the case. Authorities have said they’ll be reviewing the store’s surveillance tapes and looking for clues about the young girl’s whereabouts. There are more questions than answers in the air this morning, but there’s something else floating around as well: an air of hope. And, yes, people have been throwing around the word miracle like you wouldn’t believe, and for once, they just might be right. Stay tuned to News Channel Four for what I’m sure will be numerous updates throughout the day. I’m Kip Bradley. Billie, back to—”
I shut it off. My body suddenly felt heavy. I dropped myself into a chair at the kitchen table and stared out at the backyard. It was getting brighter out by the minute. A few leaves dotted the surface of the pool. I thought back to the night where I thought I’d seen her. Where had she gone? I wanted to be happy that they’d found her, and I was, but it was smeared with something else, fear of the unknown, the place she’d been all summer long.
I took off the gym shorts I’d worn to bed and walked out to the pool. I put a toe in. The water was warmer that I thought it’d be. I fell in sideways and made a huge splash. It echoed throughout the quiet suburban morning that blanketed our backyard and all the others around it. No other sound to decorate it but the rapid chirping of the morning birds.
I floated on my back. Up in the sky an airplane soared overhead. Who was up there? Where were they going? The fact that they’d found Jenny safe and
sound was like trying to grasp the meaning of infinity. I wanted to know where she’d been, what had happened there, and then I wanted her to show me where that place was.
I got out and lay on one of the chaise longues. I shut my eyes but I couldn’t sleep. I hovered in a space just a few levels below full consciousness for God knows how long. The sun rose fully and warmed my skin, and somewhere a lawn mower started up. Slowly I sunk into unconsciousness. I dreamt in words, in conversations that scrolled quickly across the backs of my eyelids, conversations whose content and meaning I could never fully grasp.
When I finally woke the sun was so bright that I had to squint for a good twenty seconds and even then the world was hidden behind a hot white glow.
I’ve gone blind.
I found Alex sitting at the kitchen table. He was wearing my father’s ratty blue bathrobe and sleepily shoving a spoonful of Fruity Sugar Crisps into his mouth. He was on the phone with someone.
“I’ll ask him,” he said into the mouthpiece. His mouth was filled with cereal. The words sounded mushy. “That’s fine. . . . Well yeah. . . . I’m sure he’ll be down. . . . Oh my God, you should see him right now. He just came in from skinny-dipping in his pool. . . . I’m aware of what time it is. . . . Hey, look at what you’re doing at nine in the morning. . . . Exactly. . . . Exactly. . . . Hey Dade, Dingo says yo.”
“Tell him I said yo back.”
“Dade says yo back. And I say yo too. To both of you. . . . It’s a yoversation. . . . Yeah, I have no idea either.”
He went on talking. I made myself a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee and sat across from him. I looked groggily out into the backyard. So bright, but I couldn’t wake up. How in the heck was Alex so awake? He was laughing at something Dingo was saying. He called him a fucker. A black fuzz ran evenly over Alex’s head. His hair was growing back.