He nods at me. “Okay, you’re doing good,” he says, even though I’m not. He moves his finger down the page, to the next question. Truthfully, this is already going better than expected. He’s not going to force an answer from me where no answer can be found. His pointer finger stops at the next line. “?‘How did you enter the house?’?”
Easy question. “My bedroom window.” The house was originally a ranch, before the second-floor loft addition. All our bedrooms were on the main level, accessible through the windows with a few strategically placed steps—either via the deck railing, or a bench pulled below.
As if anticipating this answer, he moves to the next one. “?‘Was the window already open?’?”
“The window was how I left it,” I say, my eyes feeling wide and dry, like I’m in a trance. “Mostly closed, so the cold air wouldn’t come through. But cracked open so I could get my fingers underneath and push it up when I got back home.”
I’m there, suddenly, kneeling on the back railing, my fingers drenched from the rain, slipping on the glass, trying to wedge it open—
“?‘What made you…’?” He pauses, the line between his eyes deepening, his brows furrowed. “?‘What made you leave your room after you got back home?’?”
I shoot my head up, my eyes meeting his. “I don’t understand the question,” I whisper.
He shifts in his seat, clearly uncomfortable, not wanting to take this trip down memory lane any more than I do. “I think it means, I think they’re trying to understand…you got home after sneaking out, sometime around one-ten or one-fifteen in the morning. So you climbed through the window and you were in your room, and you kept the door closed, right? So no one would know you were gone?” He cringes. “So, they want to know, uh, what made you leave the room after you got back.”
I don’t answer. I’m frozen.
“Was the door already open, Kennedy? Did you see something? Were there lights on?”
And then I’m back outside the window again, peering into the shadow house; it’s raining, and my fingers shake from the cold.
“Kennedy.” His warm hand is on my arm, and I flinch. Joe looks down at my hands—I didn’t realize they were shaking now, too. Joe puts the paper down, the air suddenly charged, and he tips his head just slightly to the side. “What happened that night? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
I close my eyes, shake my head. “I hid,” I say.
“I know.”
“I tried to call for help.”
“You did, Kennedy. You did. They have the nine-one-one call. We all heard it. You did everything you could.”
Our voices are so low, and his eyes are my mother’s and the shadow house is here. It’s right here, so close, like suddenly there’s just the thinnest film between us and the blurry other side, and there’s a tear, the plastic pulling apart, so I can see—
His phone rings, jarring us both. The moment is broken. The shadow house is gone, Joe is Joe, and I am just me.
He doesn’t move to answer, doesn’t move at all. “It’s okay,” I say. “You should get it.” I stand from the kitchen table, the blood rushing from my head, the room tilting momentarily.
“Kennedy,” he says, reaching an arm for me.
But I’m already halfway to my room. I’m behind the door, my back pressed up against it, trying to slow my heartbeat.
I hear him answering the call, moving farther away, until the sound of his voice disappears.
I’m alone, and I’m safe again.
The house at the address Kennedy sent me is a sharp contrast to the Jones House. I should probably stop calling it, capital letter, implied italics, the Jones House. But that’s how it was introduced to me, like something haunted, a landmark from which ghosts and stories originate in equal measure. It’s not that large but looks larger rising up out of the center of a huge field. And it’s distinctive, with a wide porch and wooden steps and this feeling it’s missing a pack of farm animals or something.
In contrast, this house I’ve just pulled the car up to is a small ranch, set in a row of near-identical ranches, mere feet apart from one another. They differ from one another only in the color, or the presence or absence of a fence. But really it just looks like someone stuck a row of Monopoly houses down and called it a day.
The address is displayed on the mailbox, sticker numbers pasted on. At one time I’m guessing the siding on the house was blue, but it’s faded to a worn gray, lighter in some sections than others. And no one seems to give two craps about the yard.
She hasn’t answered my texts.
I’m here.
Outside your house.
Still outside your house.
I decide this is almost as creepy as telling her I’m texting her from inside her house. So eventually I get out of the car and ring the bell.
There’s a flurry of footsteps from the other side, and a man opens the door. I see Kennedy racing behind him; the look on her face one of oh crap. The man is about my height, with Kennedy’s coloring—dark hair, sort of messy—but his eyes are blue to her brown. He’s looking me over in a way that makes me uncomfortable, like he’s assessing me for danger. And Kennedy looks between us like she wishes one of us weren’t standing in this doorway, and I’m not sure which of us that is.
“Um,” I say, looking at my phone, “I thought…” Because I can’t figure out who this guy is, and whether I should pretend I have the wrong address.
“No, sorry, my fault,” she says, elbowing the guy aside so he’s no longer taking up the entire doorway. “I told you I had plans,” she says to him, looking at the side of his face.
But he hasn’t taken his eyes off me. “What kind of plans?” he asks.
“The studying kind,” I say, on instinct, which is my go-to answer to my parents, and from the look of relief on Kennedy’s face, it seems like the right answer in this situation, too.
“Joe, this is my friend. Nolan,” she says, smiling, like she’s only just remembered my real name. “Nolan, my uncle, Joe.”
Joe nods, but he doesn’t extend his hand. Instead, he looks at Kennedy with one eyebrow raised. “I know, I know,” she says, fake-smiling, “two friends in less than twenty-four hours, must be some sort of record, right?”
“Kennedy…,” he warns.
But she sidesteps. “What? Is this because he’s a guy? I know you said no boys, I know. But I didn’t think that was an across-the-board rule. Not that I couldn’t study with someone who happened to have a Y chromosome. I thought you just meant, like, no boys in your house? As in, italics, no boys.”
I’m trying not to smile, watching this exchange. Her whole face changes when she talks to him, and she moves her hands to accentuate her points.
Her uncle—it feels weird thinking that, since he can’t be that much older than us—has turned almost scarlet by now. She stares up at him, and he stares back, and it’s like watching the most passive-aggressive game of chicken in history.
When Joe doesn’t answer, she puts a hand out in my direction, in the universal stop signal. “Nolan, to be safe, please keep both feet on the other side of the doorway.”
Joe cracks the slightest smile then, and he opens the door wider. “Take your phone,” he says as she disappears down the hall, presumably to get her things.
When she’s gone, his expression turns serious again. “Nolan what?” he says, like he’s planning to run a background check on me.
“Chandler,” I say. “Sir.”
He almost laughs.
She breezes back out again, just as quick. “Bye, Joe,” she says.
“And answer it if I call you, please.”
“I will!” she calls over her shoulder.
“The library closes at eight!” he yells as she’s getting into the car. “I expect you back here at quarter after!”
She slides into the passenger seat of my car and closes the door like it’s her own, and she’s smiling so wide at something Joe said, but I don’t even get it. She gives him the thumbs-up as he watches us drive away.
She rubs her hands together and looks at the clock on the dashboard and says, “We’d better hurry. We don’t have much time.”
I’m going about five miles per hour, inching down the street. “Um, I know you said no questions, but it would help if I knew where to turn.”
“Ha, yeah, that would help. Sorry.” She holds up her phone and turns up the volume, and it starts directing me. Right on Wilson. Left on Stenton. Merge onto highway. In twenty miles, take the exit.
“Twenty miles,” I say. No wonder she mentioned the time. I have a thousand questions I want to ask. Namely: Where are we going? What are we doing? Who are you? But I’ve grown comfortable in the unknown. Everything takes time. And so will this.
* * *
—
On the way, she grills me on the Event. That’s what she’s started calling it. “Did you pick up anything related to the Event in the park last night?” she asks.
How to explain that I wasn’t out there testing things with machinery. I was out there trying to listen for my brother. “Eh, I think your friends kind of ruined the setting.”
“Those aren’t my friends,” she says.
“You just follow them?”