Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read online

  Kate pumps a fist from her seat in the kitchen and whispers, “Go, Nana.” She is sure that Mom will make her come out from the kitchen to join in on the rounds of we’re there for yous and thank yous and hang in theres and then the uncomfortable hugs, but she doesn’t. Kate listens to the Gaudets finally leave from the relative safety of the kitchen.

  As soon as the front door is closed Mom says, “Oh, thank Christ. That was nice of them but—Jesus. How long were they here?”

  Kate laughs to herself, and it almost morphs into a crying fit. She’s actually relieved. This Mom sounds like her real mom, not the scary broken one from the last day plus. Kate doesn’t know why or how Mom has rallied, but it gives her more hope for Tommy.

  Nana says, “Too long. Let me answer the door from now on.”

  “Maybe. Let’s set up a velvet rope and I’ll give you an approved guest list.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but it sounds like Mom is serious.

  Nana says, “I can be a bouncer if you need me to. Come on. Come sit down on the couch.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve been sitting and doing nothing all day.” Mom sits on the couch anyway.

  “Do you want a drink or anything to eat?”

  “No. Actually, yeah. Just some water. And couple of ibuprofen. My head is pounding.”

  Nana comes back into the kitchen and fills Mom’s order. Nana stops in front of Kate, waves a come-with-me hand, and motions toward the living room with her head.

  Kate shrugs, shakes her head no, and doesn’t get up. She’d rather stay and listen to them talk from here in the kitchen.

  Mom and Nana fall into a quick, just-the-facts conversation about the updates, or lack of updates. The latest being the police have pulled the family cellphone records for calls and texts but have yet to find anything out of the norm.

  Kate’s stomach fills with mutant butterflies at the thought of the detective or anyone else reading the texts she sent out last night. She spent most of yesterday dropping sporadic messages to Tommy’s phone like I miss you, I hope ur ok, please come home, like her texts were a trail of breadcrumbs he could follow. Then last night, as Nana talked Mom into finally going to bed, Kate was in her brother’s room, in his bed, his blanket pulled up and over her head. Her phone phosphorescent white in the darkness, she typed, very carefully, Tommy? Hi. Did you run away? Did someone make you run away? Is it my fault? Did I do something? I’m sorry for whatever it is. And then she started crying and got so mad at herself and everything in the world and she fired off: Are you trying to be like Dad? If you really ran away from us then you’re a asshole like him and I hate you. After she hit Send she cried harder and ran back to her room. She then sent him about one thousand I’m sorrys and we miss you tommys, and she texted those messages until her thumbs ached, and Nana came in and gently took her phone away.

  Nana is in the middle of a rant about the police and how she doesn’t think they’re doing a good job, and she punctuates with “I’m sorry,” as though she’s apologizing to Mom on the police’s behalf. “But your friend, there, Detective Allison, and the rest of them, are treating this like some everyday ho-hum procedural thing when it isn’t. This isn’t an everyday thing.”

  Mom says, “She’s not my friend. I mean, we’re friendly—whatever.” Mom grunts like she’s frustrated with her own words. She adds, “She’s working hard, Mom. They’re all working hard.” In a lower voice, not quite a whisper, she says, “Is Kate still in the kitchen? Is she listening to her music?”

  Kate can’t see her mother from where she is sitting.

  Nana says, “What? Yes, I think so. Her earphones are in.”

  Kate loves that Nana calls the buds earphones. She takes them out of her ears and rolls them between her fingers.

  Mom asks, “Can she hear me?” Then she calls out “Kate? Kate!”

  Kate doesn’t answer. She hangs the buds over her shoulders, close enough to her head that she can stuff them back in her ears or pretend they fell out should either one walk into the kitchen. Kate calls up her Beautiful Noise playlist that begins with the only Sonic Youth song she likes. It’s the one with Chuck D in the middle.

  Nana says, “Do you want me to get her?”

  “No. No, I—I don’t want her to hear the rest of this.”

  “All right. Should I send her to her room?”

  “Um. No, it’s fine.” She pauses to yell Kate’s name twice more. “I don’t want her to think I’m keeping anything from her. No matter what happens, I want her to trust me.”

  “What’s this about?”

  Everyone is quiet for a few beats. The tinny screech of guitars and a steady drumbeat pulse out of Kate’s earbud speakers. Mom starts talking. She tells Nana she saw something in her bedroom late last night. She says there was a shadow or something between her chair and end table, like a ghost, but it was a dark shape, something made of more dark. Mom stops talking, and Kate turns that odd phrase around in her head, inspecting it for imperfections, like a jeweler, but finding none. It makes perfect sense to Kate. What else would a ghost be made of but more dark? Kate quickly calls up the tweets about the dark shape running through yards and looking into windows, and she wants to say something to Mom, show her what other people are saying about dark shapes, but she also doesn’t want to be caught eavesdropping.

  Nana says, “Okay, wait. What are you saying?”

  Mom then says that what she saw was Tommy, all huddled up, and then at the very end, something was wrong with his face, and she knows that means Tommy is dead and that he’s never coming back home. She says it so plainly, Kate almost drops her phone. It doesn’t sound like Mom at all, but a narrator to one of those boring documentaries she watches sometimes.

  Nana clucks her tongue, and although she doesn’t raise the volume of her voice, she uses an argument-in-a-restaurant tone that’s downright poisonous. Kate sinks deeper into the hard, wooden chair, having never heard Nana sound this cold and angry; it’s terrifying. Nana asks how she could even think of saying such a thing about Tommy, and she says that Mom has to be stronger than this, that she thought she raised a tougher daughter, one that wouldn’t give up so easily.

  Kate says “Stop it,” out loud to Nana, but she says it too weakly to be heard. Nana should let Mom talk. Mom needs to talk, no matter what it is she says.

  Mom says she isn’t giving up and won’t ever give up, but she saw what she saw. She says, “I saw him, Mom. I saw Tommy. It was him. It wasn’t—it wasn’t anything else and I wasn’t dreaming and it wasn’t a breakdown or a hallucination and I wasn’t seeing things. I saw Tommy. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life, Mom. Tommy was there in my room last night.”

  Nana says, “What we’re going through, what you’re going through, it’s impossible, Elizabeth. It is. But you didn’t see Tommy. You—”

  “Mom. He was there. It wasn’t just seeing him. I—I smelled him. His smell was there. I swear to God I could smell him, too.”

  And that’s too much for Kate. She stands up, loudly knocking the kitchen chair back into the wall. She stuffs her earbuds back in, as deep as they can go so that the drone of Ministry’s “N.W.O.” jackhammers inside her head. She walks out of the kitchen and into the living room on the way to her bedroom. The living room really isn’t on the way. Kate feels Mom and Nana call out to her, their words bouncing off her back. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t end up going to her bedroom, either. She goes into Tommy’s room.

  His bed is made, which is just wrong. It makes Tommy’s room look like a hotel room or a movie set. Mom must’ve come in and made it this morning before Kate got up. Tommy’s bed is never made. It isn’t that Tommy is a total slob; far from it. His room is always more clean and tidy than Kate’s disaster area. Tommy never dumps his clothes (clean or dirty) on the floor. All of his books and comics are neatly stacked in the big bookcase along the wall and in the smaller one built into his bed frame. His desk is clear of clutter. His pens, pencils, and markers sit like floral arrangements in plastic
cups of various colors, the color scheme hinting to some design and reason. Even his posters (Iron Man, the Avengers, a Minecraft Creeper, and a life-sized wall decal of the Legend of Zelda hero Link) are positioned in an orderly fashion; one on each wall, each hung from the same height. So Tommy isn’t opposed to keeping his room neat; he only thought that making his bed was unnecessary. As he once eloquently explained to Kate and an annoyed Mom, making the bed was purely cosmetic. What was the point if no one was going into his room to see his bed anyway, and if he was going to turn down and sleep in the same blanket and sheets again? Kate agrees in principle, and she’s adopted a more extreme version of Tommy’s philosophy with her own room.

  Kate turns off her music and listens for footsteps coming down the hall. There are none. She can’t even hear Mom and Nana talking anymore. It’s dark in Tommy’s room. She doesn’t turn on a light. Instead, she pulls up the blinds on the two windows on either side of his bed and inwardly braces at the thought of finding someone (a dark shape, the dark shape, Tommy?) staring back through the glass. There’s no one there. His windows are east-facing and look out into the green, rectangular backyard. It’s sunny out, but the sun has already begun its descent on the other side of the house.

  Tommy’s desk is a sturdy hunk of lacquered wood that is probably older than their house. Mom picked it up at a yard sale a few years ago, and it took the three of them to lug it past the front door and then drag it (with towels underneath the desk legs) into Tommy’s room. Tommy refers to his desk as Stonehenge, and it’s as clean and kept as it was on the day they brought it into the house. It has none of the graffiti or gouge marks that splotch Kate’s tiny, elementary-school-reject desk.

  Kate sits at his desk, willing herself to not dwell on what Mom said about believing Tommy was dead and the shadow image of Tommy’s ghost and how it oddly dovetailed with what kids were saying online. Of course not not-thinking about something like that is impossible, and she imagines his ghost all scrunched up below her, reaching out for her feet. She takes multiple quick looks under the desk and around the room, trying but not hoping to see Tommy.

  The desk chair is hard molded plastic and is cold on the backs of her thighs. Adrift on the vast expanse of the desktop is his laptop. It’s closed and unplugged. Stickers of cartoon characters are all over it, and the mostly ironic characters (like SpongeBob and Finn, Jake, and Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time) have mustaches and other black Sharpie alterations. There is one little square of duct tape in the middle, covering up the laptop’s brand symbol, with a Tommy sketch: a puffy monster-cloud with angry eyebrows and a big, open mouth with two sharp fangs ready to devour a small flock of panicked birds. The sketch isn’t very detailed and the birds aren’t really more than rounded off Vs, yet the scene is clear and vivid, and funny as hell. Kate smirks at it, like it’s too clever for its own good. She can hear Mom saying to Tommy, No one likes a wise ass, in a way that clearly means the opposite.

  Kate opens the laptop and turns it on, but the log-in screen is password protected. She gives up guessing at the password after four tries, even though she thinks she’s close. She doesn’t want to guess wrong again and have the computer locked up. She closes the laptop and again looks at the monster-cloud sketch, which looks a bit more sinister with repeated viewings.

  On the floor and adjacent to the desk is a milk crate neatly filled with his many sketchbooks and notebooks. Tommy has been doodling and drawing ever since he could hold a crayon, and he’s always been amazing at it. Tommy’s attitude toward his talent oscillates between bouts of painful modesty and cocky showmanship. Kate pulls out a sketchbook from the middle. It’s green and is filled with drawings of Minecraft characters, maps of houses and areas he’s created, and brief scripts for his YouTube videos where he’s describing the game play and his designs.

  She takes out another notebook, one with a yellow cover. This one has outlines of giant waves braking over and around a jagged rock formation. A drenched boy about to be swept away clings to the rocks. His long bangs cover one eye, and the other looks up at Kate, pleading with her for help. Inside the cover, on the first page, in heartbreakingly small, careful script is the sentence “School is like drowning.”

  Kate, unlike her brother, has always got along with her elementary school teachers, and getting top grades has been easy. But the prospect of going to the middle school has left Kate utterly terrified. She thinks she can handle the workload; it’s more the stories she’s heard about what goes on in the lunchroom and hallways and bathrooms that has her anxiety level red-lining. Stories about girls getting their bra straps snapped or girls goosed in the hallways, and this year she heard there were some seventh-grade boys caught taking up-skirt pictures and sharing them online, and then there’s all the stuff about the older girls beating up the sixth-grade girls in the bathrooms and making them do gross stuff. Nothing like that happens at the elementary school, and she doesn’t understand what happened to everyone to make them so mean and awful. Her and Sam have been talking about nothing else this summer and doing their best to dismiss the stories as not true, as the older kids trying to scare them. But she doesn’t know for sure, and there’s no way she can go to middle school without Tommy being there. She’s counting on him to look out for her.

  Kate flips quickly past “School is like drowning.” The subjects of the notebook’s early pages are scattershot and seemingly unrelated: a giant, intricately detailed foot in the middle of a busy intersection; a cartoonish bear that’s simultaneously cuddly and menacing wearing a wristwatch; a jagged cliff that has a sad-faced boulder sitting on top; open fields and rivers as viewed from up in the clouds, the view framed between two hands, a broken string looped between the right hand’s finger and thumb.

  She skips ahead and toward the middle of the book is a page full of cartoonish naked people, their eyes bulging and tongues wagging as they point and leer at each other. From there are pages and pages of huge breasts and asses, giant erect penises and scrotums, and dark triangular patches of hair, and all manner and derivation of frenzied coupling. Kate’s face fills with blood and heat. She shuts the notebook and quickly throws it at the milk crate. She misses and it whooshes and claps against the floor. She looks around the room, wishing that Tommy would walk in and catch her, and yell at her, and she’d make fun of the pervy pictures and threaten to tell Mom. She waits, her breathing so heavy, but he doesn’t walk into his room. She picks up the notebook and looks at the naked pictures again, quickly, before filing the yellow notebook in its Tommy-designated place.

  Kate leaves his desk and walks over to his bureau. Even though she wants to, going through his drawers feels like she’d really be crossing a line that can’t be uncrossed. And given the pictures in his notebook, she’s a little afraid of what she might find, though she can’t say what it is exactly she’s afraid of finding. The top of his bureau is fair game, though, as it’s all out in the open. One corner is stacked with baseball hats, in the middle is an assortment of superhero figurines and mini-Minecraft axes and swords, and there’s a circular metal tin that once held holiday tea bags that’s a catch-all for pocket-sized stuff; movie stubs he’s saved (who knows why), key chains he’s never used, a compass with the needle stuck in one place, loose change, small bills. She sifts through the tin and finds a plastic sandwich bag. Inside the sealed bag are two coins.

  Tommy went through a coin collecting phase. One summer Mom had inexplicably given both of them a shoebox full of old coins their father had collected. The two of them reverently picked through the box and made a ledger detailing coin types together. Kate lost interest soon after the initial, found-buried-treasure rush. Tommy kept it going and added to the collection on his own, but Kate could’ve sworn he’d stopped collecting a few years ago, certainly before he went to middle school.

  Kate opens the bag and slides the coins out onto her palm. One is a penny that’s old (1956) but isn’t a wheat back. What makes the penny remarkable is a large crack in Lincoln’s hea
d that runs horizontally; starting above his eyebrow and going clean through the back of his head. Or maybe it’s a matter of perspective and the crack starts in the back of his head and runs through to the front, and it’s a weird penny version of the Lincoln getting shot in the head (Kate learned about his assassination in third grade). She runs her thumb over the crack and doesn’t feel any raised edges.

  The second coin is the size of a nickel, and its tails side features Jefferson’s stately Monticello. There’s no Thomas Jefferson profile on the heads side of the coin. Instead, there’s a blank profile, a silhouette of a face: no features, everything perfectly smoothed over except the profile’s outline. Hovering above this profile is a single eye, like the one on the back of a dollar bill. Kate digs through Tommy’s tin for a regular nickel and compares the two. “In God We Trust” and “Liberty” and the year the nickel was pressed is gone, wiped away. The profile of the man on the coin is different from Jefferson as well; it’s not just Jefferson’s face with the details removed. It’s someone else’s silhouetted profile. The sharp nose and chin has been replaced with rounder versions and his long ponytail swapped out for a short, tight haircut. It’s definitely a profile of someone more modern. She imagines Tommy using the coin as a joke and trying to convince people that the new nickel features Justin Timberlake or someone equally random. Kate thinks she should know to whom this mysterious profile belongs. Whoever it is, the floating eye above makes it weird and creepy, and she doesn’t like looking at the coin or holding it.

  Mom calls out Kate’s name. Kate doesn’t want to yell back from inside her brother’s room. Mom hasn’t come out and said she shouldn’t be in here but the made bed might as well be a KEEP OUT sign.