Jess sat on her bed and stared at the paper, crushing it in her grip. Of course she knew it was from him, but she didn’t understand. She ran her finger over those two cryptic words: I can’t. If he couldn’t, then why was he giving her an address? Was he asking her to meet him, or wasn’t he? Can’t what? See her anymore? Figure out what to do? She recalled her last words, her bold admonition on the last night she’d seen him: Forget me. She gasped as she understood.
Her mother pulled into the driveway then, and Jess jumped up from the bed in a panic. She ripped the key from the paper, balled up the note, and threw it in the wastebasket under a tissue and string of floss, then pulled it out and shoved it in the drawer with her father’s cards. Her mom called out, “I’m home, J-bird. I picked up dinner. Come eat—I’m starving!” Jess stuffed the key in her pocket, pulled the crumpled paper from the drawer, wrote the address down in her notebook, and tore the paper to bits. Later, she would sneak the town map from the car’s glove box, but now she hurried out to meet her mother. That skipping sensation again: a stone across the lake, her ripples bending outward.
At midnight, Jess again opened the front door and slipped outside. Again, she ran on long legs, loping down Roadrunner Lane toward town, a silver key loose in her jeans pocket. A cracked eggshell moon, three-quarters round, lit her way. The desert around her rustled. Nocturnal, like her. In the distance she saw what she thought was another person, but she didn’t try to hide, just turned the corner and kept running. Catching speed, she leaped across the low dips and then lunged upward, her thighs burning.
The address was a house on a secluded dead-end street not far from her own. A car sat parked at the end of the street, but not one she recognized. She squinted at a sign in the yard: For Sale. No porch light, no car in the driveway, no movement in the drape-drawn windows. She stood on the curb and scanned the house, unsure what to do next. The only light was at a neighbor’s house several yards up the street.
She walked up to the front door. Still uncertain, she slid the key in the lock and turned it just as the door opened.
“Quickly,” he said. He moved to let her in, and she stepped over the threshold.
Inside, her nostrils flared at the warm air, stagnant with lemon cleaner and cigarette smoke. The back window’s curtains, partly drawn, let in a shaft of moonlight, and she could see that the entryway opened into a large carpeted living room. Not a stick of furniture. No trace of who once lived here. He knelt in the center of the living room, where he’d spread a blanket, and turned on a small propane camping lantern. Its fabric bulbs glowed white.
“Come in,” he said, gesturing toward the blanket.
She hovered near the blanket and then sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her back against the wall. She hadn’t yet looked him in the face. “Whose house is this?”
“A client’s,” he said. He wore loose Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes without socks, a windbreaker left unzipped. “It’s been on the market a while. Listed too high, though they won’t listen to me.” He spoke faster than usual and fiddled with his jacket zipper. Instead of sitting, he began to pace along the edge of the blanket.
She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, watching his feet move back and forth on the carpet.
“It’s—safe,” he said. “They moved out of town. No one will come.”
“I see,” she said. The words sounded dramatic, suggesting she understood the subtext, which was the farthest thing from the truth. She saw nothing. She couldn’t see beyond her own hands. She couldn’t see his face. And she did not feel in any way safe as the musty air pressed down on her, as the silence stretched.
He said, “I wasn’t sure you would show up.”
“I wasn’t sure I should.”
“I know. This is strange.” He rubbed his hand over his hair. He began to walk the whole square of the blanket, stepping along its sides as if it were a maze. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “In private.”
“What about?”
“Jess,” he said. He stopped pacing and knelt on the blanket, facing her. He gazed at her across the lantern, his face in shadow.
“We’re supposed to forget it. Go back to normal,” she said. That was the word she’d repeated to herself in the last three weeks, as she trudged through the orchard in the heat, the ground slick and muddy from monsoon rain, as she huddled on the couch next to her mother watching Masterpiece Mystery, as she curled in her bed with a book open, unread, as she started her senior year, walking the halls with her best friend but unable to meet her eyes.
He crawled toward her in the corner. She could see his face now, the shadow of stubble, the knuckle in his nose, a divot in his left eyebrow she hadn’t noticed before.
He said, “I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel like I’m losing my mind. Trying to figure it out. To explain it away. I keep going round and round. All the reasons it’s wrong, all the reasons I’m a terrible person for even thinking about it.”
She nodded. If she understood anything, it was spinning thoughts and feeling terrible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept through the night. She wanted to punch a hole in her skull to release the pressure.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “It’s still wrong.” He moved closer. He kneeled in front of her, his face lit from below, mottled with shadow. The knot in his throat moved up and down. “I don’t understand what’s happening. Is this a midlife crisis? Is this what everyone talks about?”
“I don’t know,” Jess said.
“No.” He laughed a little. “Neither do I. I guess I wanted to see you face to face. To try to make some sense out of it.”
She stared at him through the lantern’s glow. “Here I am.”
“There you are. God. I look at you, and—” He took an unsteady breath and tapped his chest. “This is what I’m worried about. This thing here.” He thumped his sternum. “This is what I’m afraid to name.”
She thought of Dani tracing her back in the tent in Mexico, the last word on their last night, the word she could not name either. Her toes curled inside her sneakers, and her jaw locked with the force of sensation in her.
He held up a shaking hand. “Actually I’m terrified.” He dropped his hand. “What do you think about this? What are you thinking?”
That was the thing: for the first time in weeks, she wasn’t. Her mind was an exquisite blank. All she had was her flushed body, a toe-curling heat. She wanted to touch him, to have him touch her too. She unfolded herself and rose to her knees, thinking, yes, yes, unfold, unfold.
She leaned in, reaching for his face—the face that had been at the fringe of her consciousness all day and night, the face that materialized behind her eyes at the orchard, in the grocery store, in the shower, in her school desk, on her pillow, his knuckled-nosed, dark-eyed face above her, beneath her, between her hands.
The doorbell rang.
Jess fell backward and scrambled to her feet. Adam jumped up too. He put a finger to his lips, miming quiet.
“Who is it?” he called out.
“Detective Alvarez,” the booming voice said. “Sycamore Police. We had a call.”