“His clothes, the details?” he asks, and then I understand my role. I’m confirming the clothes he wore, the dog, the way he’s looking over his shoulder. His dark blond hair is a little longer than it usually was, because he was due for a haircut, so it sort of falls over his forehead from the weight of it, instead of staying up and to the side, like he styles it. Styled it.
The jeans, the long-sleeved maroon shirt, the blue sneakers. All of it is Liam, all of it the details we gave over and over about that day; remembering, pulling things from his closet so we were sure. These details are now ingrained in our memory.
But, I see, there are some things we had forgotten, that I only remember now, by looking at him: the way his left arm bends slightly, held at his hip, from an old injury that never healed right. A broken bone brought to the doctor too late, already starting to ossify around the crack on its own. And a cut against the underside of his jawbone, from shaving. I’d forgotten that, completely, until they show me the photo of his face, zoomed in.
I remembered hearing him hiss in the bathroom that morning, the razor dropping, clattering against the sink. A bead of blood on the porcelain, left behind.
Why did I never mention that, in the days that followed? It’s like that detail completely slipped my mind—like I was too focused, instead, on the feeling in the dream, the knowledge that, somehow, his disappearance was inevitable.
“It’s him. It’s that day,” I say. More definitive now. There’s no best estimation here. It’s him. In that moment. The small, chaotic details leading to only that day, and no other day.
My mother whispers, “Oh my God.” The room has otherwise gone silent.
“Thank you, Nolan,” Agent Lowell says, a hand on my shoulder.
“What does this mean?” my dad asks. I’d leave, but the hand is still heavy on my shoulder, as if holding me in place.
“There’s a time stamp in the image file. The date and time lead us to believe it was taken around four in the afternoon the day of his disappearance,” Agent Lowell responds. “Though we know these things can be fudged with.”
Nothing is definite. Still, it was taken that day.
“Do any of you recognize the location?” he asks.
I don’t. None of us do. It’s just trees, and Colby’s tail, and my brother. “Couldn’t this still be the park?” I ask.
“That would be highly unlikely,” he responds after a pause. “This is almost four hours after he disappeared, and we had plenty of officers patrolling the park. It seems unlikely he would’ve been there all along without giving himself away. Especially with the dog.”
Everything changes. I slip from his grasp, from the table, from that room. Their voices rise, and I continue up the steps, trying to make sense of things.
I feel sick. My brother, in a photo with Colby, at 4 p.m. He’d disappeared around noon—12:10, we decided, the best estimate after going through everything, over and over again, with the police. From the sun in the sky, to the temperature of the food, to the witnesses who saw us entering the park, and the cameras on the road before the entrance. We didn’t have a clock to consult, until my dad went back to the car for his phone, to eventually call the police. It was a rule that we left our phones behind on family outings. It was a rule that we never followed again.
Inside Liam’s empty room, I pace, trying to think.
I remember that night my brother appeared to me, across the living room, a boundary he could not breach. Help us. Please, he said.
When was that?
I stop moving, the room charged. The hair stands up on the back of my neck, because the date…the when…it was when I was sick, with the flu. I remember, I was sick when the news came through about some double murder nearby. I remember, because I was on the couch that day, my computer setup in my lap, the noise of the morning news on in the background—but I had been focused on something else.
I bought this equipment the morning after my brother appeared to me, asking for help. I bought this equipment while the news anchor reported the details about some terrible crime. I remember thinking: At least they know what happened; at least they know.
The phone rang then, because school was canceled—a suspect on the loose—but it didn’t matter anyway because I was sick.
Am I making it up? Putting the pieces together because I want them to connect? The memories blending together in my mind?
I have to be sure before I tell Kennedy.
Back in my room, I log on to my computer and pull up my credit card history, scanning back month by month until I find it. The order for the EMF meter, the Geiger counter, and more. I trace my finger to the date listed beside the purchase: 12/4.
December fourth. My God, I was right. I bought this equipment December fourth.
It has to mean something.
I go to text Kennedy, but I already have a message from her. It must’ve come through while we were all sitting around the table, staring at the image of Nolan.
We’re running out of time, she says.
I can feel it, too. The men in my house, the case reopened. My brother, the sound of his imagined voice whispering in my ear: Help us. Please.
We have plans to skip school. Well, I’m pseudo-skipping school. I showed up for first period, because Joe doesn’t get out of the house until after the bus rumbles by, shaking the thin windows.
I don’t have any finals until next week, and apparently neither does Nolan. Besides, what do finals really matter when there’s something else out there?
He said he’d pick me up out front at 9:30. Which is why I’m standing outside on the concrete pavement with the sun beating down at 9:28, squinting against the summer sun. A teacher walks by behind the glass doors. He looks at me with a face of concern, and I wave. I wave because I don’t want him to think I shouldn’t be doing this. People leave all the time, for appointments. I just don’t want him to see someone definitely not Joe picking me up in the circular drop-off zone.
I look back once into the front office windows to make sure no one is reporting this, and thankfully no one seems to be paying attention. Except for a face at the corner of the window: it’s Marco, standing at the front desk, looking back. And of course, of course, it’s him.
Marco pulled a disappearing act last winter, in the weeks following the crime. When he finally did show up to see me, he pretended he hadn’t gone AWOL, pretended that everything was fine and he was the supportive boyfriend, though by then there was a hard and impenetrable wall between us.
And now finally he’s paying attention, exactly when I don’t want him here. I look away, pretending not to notice.
At 9:29, Nolan’s car stutters into the lot. It’s hard not to notice. It’s not exactly quiet, and it’s not exactly clean. I’m practically bouncing on my toes by the time he makes his way through the lot to the entrance, meeting him halfway so as not to draw any more attention.
“Go, fast,” I say, and he listens.
The humid air funnels in, and it’s hard to hear him when we’re moving fast. “Sorry,” he calls, “the air conditioner didn’t kick in this morning. It’s like that sometimes.”
I don’t complain. I like it, really. Reminds you how fast you’re moving, the air pushing back against you, tears in the corners of your eyes.
* * *
—
The car slows when we pass the sign for Freedom Battleground State Park. “The turnoff for my house is easy to miss,” I say in warning.
“I know,” he says. “Sorry, not to be creepy. But I’ve been taking readings around the park, and I saw your house from the distance. I knew what happened, and I…well, I don’t know what I thought. That maybe I’d sense something? But when my device started picking up the Event, I could only think about the one thing I did differently. So I came back.”
“I see,” I say, though of course, I already knew he had been there. It was my handprints that had plastered his car’s back window, after all—I’d assumed he was the Realtor then. I’m guessing he knows by now that it was me. He passes the turnoff, and I laugh. “Seriously, Nolan, you just missed it anyway.”
He mumbles to himself. “You guys need a sign.”
“Keeps the spectators away,” I joke. Except I’m not. After the killings, people did one of two things: They either avoided our house to an extreme, not even looking as they drove past. Like Joe, going ten miles out of the way so we could pretend the road didn’t even exist. Or they were sucked in like it was a magnet. The horror of it all; like they could taste it in the air. Like they could look at the house, peer in the windows, and see evil as an observer, from a safe distance.
Nolan drums his fingers on the steering wheel, over and over. “I have something to tell you,” he says.
“Shoot.”
“I was going through my credit card statement from last year, because I had this feeling about something that happened. Last winter, when I was sick, I saw my brother, talking to me.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Even to myself I sound disbelieving.
“Right, so, that’s when I decided to buy all this equipment.”
“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say. It seems Nolan believes in ghosts. I don’t.