Come Find Me

by Megan Miranda

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been pacing the short length of the shed with the phone pressed to my ear. She hasn’t answered my calls, or my texts, and she’s gone. My head fills, suddenly, with a thousand different possibilities. Lydia scatters in my mind, existing both nowhere and everywhere. Like I’m scanning the universe for her, and she’s always there, at the edge of my vision, but fades from view each time I look head-on.

  The possibilities are endless: taken; disappeared; ran away. I wonder if I should call someone, or whether I’m overreacting. I picture her simultaneously at home, at Sutton’s, in the woods, fading into a void…

  I step outside into the late-afternoon sun, ready to make my way to her house, to check on her, when I suddenly see her walking in the distance, on the other side of the fence with Marco.

  My immediate relief is replaced by aggravation that now Marco will be involved.

  They’re deep in conversation, Lydia moving her hands, gesturing to the house. To me.

  I wave, but no one seems to notice at first. Marco climbs over the fence, and Lydia ducks underneath, between rails. They slow when they’re within earshot. “Oh, look,” Lydia says, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “she’s here.” She places her hands on her hips.

  Okay, then. “I’ve been calling you.”

  She shakes her head, her high ponytail swaying, and strides across the empty space between us, Marco lagging a few paces behind. “What, so you can spook me again? No thanks, Kennedy, I’ll pass. I’m just here for my phone.” She holds out her hand, palm up.

  “Your what?”

  “My phone.” She wrinkles her nose, and it makes her look younger, more vulnerable. “I left it behind when…” She shakes her head. “Come on, I know it was you.”

  “What was me?”

  Lydia widens her eyes at Marco, clearly exasperated, as if this is his part, his line, which he’s forgotten.

  Marco clears his throat. “Kennedy,” he says, but he’s not even looking at me. Marco’s expression is far-off, like he’d give anything to be somewhere else, not having to pick sides, navigate the complexities between his best friend and his ex-girlfriend. “Look, we know you do that.” He lifts his chin toward the house. “Move things around, try to freak people out.” He cringes when he says it, still not looking at me straight-on.

  I narrow my eyes at his face, but he doesn’t notice. I mean, yes, I do those things, but I still have no idea what this has to do with this moment, and Lydia’s phone. I also had no idea they knew about it. I wonder if they’re out here more often than I realize.

  “Seriously,” Lydia begins, emboldened by Marco at her side, on her side. “There’s something wrong with you, even bef—”

  She cuts herself off.

  Before. My body language suddenly mirrors Lydia’s. Hands on hips; self-righteous anger. A sting of bitterness. “Yeah, I remember. I’ve heard you refer to me as Child of the Corn, Lydia. Even before.”

  She cringes and shakes her head, like even she realizes she’s gone a step too far. Which she has. Still, there’s something I like about it, how she doesn’t tiptoe around the things she thinks she shouldn’t say. She lowers her voice. “You just appear sometimes, from nowhere. You make no sound. It’s freaky.”

  I look to Marco, who stares at the side of Lydia’s face, like he can’t believe she’s saying this.

  She shrugs and continues. “Sometimes I would forget you were there. I’d be talking to Sutton and Marco, and then boom, there you were, standing in the corner.”

  I can feel my voice rising, the anger shaking loose. “So, basically, I freak you out because you forget I exist?”

  “Well, this is a little different. This is…” She moves her hands, searching for the word. “Intentional.”

  “Kennedy,” Marco says, like he’s suddenly the voice of reason, “we’re sorry, okay?”

  Lydia puts her hands out, as if to calm me, to rationalize. “If this is to get back at me and Sutton and Marco for hanging out on your property, I get the picture. We won’t do it again. Okay? But this is seriously messed up.”

  “I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I just got back.”

  Marco gazes at me from the corner of his eye. “You weren’t in the house?”

  “No.” I fish my visitor badge from the meeting out of my pocket, try to flatten it out so she can see my picture, my name, the time stamp. “See? I was…here.”

  Lydia stares at the crumpled paper, her jaw still set. “Well, someone was here,” she whispers, her eyes widening. Like maybe it’s a ghost, who’s eavesdropping even now. She steps back, staring at the house.

  “Oh,” I say, “the Realtors have been in and out. I saw a car before I left. I should’ve mentioned it. But I have every right to be here. I still own the house. They can’t kick us out.” Then I imagine being her, alone at the Jones House, and hearing someone else. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it,” I mumble. But I don’t get it, what she thinks I did with her phone.

  “I thought it was you.”

  “Thought what was me?”

  “The lights. They all went on. Every one of them. In the shed, in the house, like it was brighter than they should’ve been.” She shakes her head. “And then everything shut down.” She looks to the shed. “Everything.”

  Realtors, electric company, grid overload—there are a hundred possible causes. We live in an old farmhouse, after all. But she’s staring at the shed like she believes it’s haunted. I’ve lost her. “So where’s your phone?”

  She drags her eyes slowly from the shed back to me. “When everything came back online, just for a second, I swear I heard your voice through the headphones.”

  “The headphones?”

  “Through the audio output? I had just plugged them in, hadn’t done anything with it. Anyway, I just got the hell out in a hurry. Sorry, I feel ridiculous now.”

  But she doesn’t step any closer, and her apology feels more for her own benefit, like she’s talking herself out of something, calming her nerves.

  “Seriously,” I say, rolling my eyes. I enter the shed, move notebooks around the desk until I find her phone, facedown and silenced, in a pink-and-gold case. I pick it up, see my missed texts, my missed calls. I bring it out to her, and she mumbles her thanks, grabbing Marco by the sleeve, turning to go.

  “Wait. Lydia. The date,” I say. “Did you write it?”

  They both stop, looking back over their shoulders. “What date?” Lydia asks.

  “The numbers. On the pad of paper.”

  “Oh yes. I wrote that down right before the lights thing happened…and then…” And then she took off, spooked. “Look, that’s all I can tell you. Whatever’s running on that thing”—she points to the shed—“it originated December fourth. That’s as far as I got.”

  “December fourth. You’re sure.”

  She makes a face, like she’s insulted I’d doubt her. “I’m sure.”

  Neither of them remembers. The date is just one more in a string of numbers. The crack that runs straight through my life: 12/4, 12/4, 12/4…

  “Well,” Lydia says, waving awkwardly toward me, toward the house. She turns on her heel, and Marco gives me some self-deprecating grin that I can no longer decipher, and it’s like he’s summing up our entire relationship with this one expression. I watch them go. I’m still not sure whether she believes me, but either way, I know she won’t be coming back.

  I duck inside the shed again to escape from the heat, sitting inside with the overhead fan, the computer humming. I stare again at the numbers Lydia has written on the pad of paper, as if they will tell me something more. The date repeats in my head, over and over, until it’s all I can think. I close my eyes and see a flicker of the shadow house. Then I picture Elliot sitting in this very spot, maybe earlier in the night, fingers fly
ing over the keyboard, with his headphones on. Music blaring and him humming along—

  And then the scene splits and I see him in the shadow house instead, and I squeeze my eyes shut, until all I can really see are the spots behind my eyelids.

  Alone in the shed, I take out my phone to log on to the forum to see if Visitor357 has responded to my request for more information, to see if I can piece together some explanation that makes sense. When a new message notification from Visitor357 comes up, I sit straighter, hyperfocused.

  But he’s responded to my request for more information with two short lines. His brother has disappeared. And that signal is coming from his room. That’s it. That’s all it says.

  My heart sinks, because it’s not the right direction, but also because I understand, suddenly, why the equipment. Why he’s the ghost-hunting type.

  I swivel back and forth in the chair, the noise cutting through the empty room.

  Through the window, I watch as Marco and Lydia climb over the fence, one after the other, back to their neighborhood. I hit Reply.

  The person looking into this event for me disappeared, but it was just for a moment. But for that moment, I felt it. It was like anything was suddenly possible, almost like I was on the edge of understanding something. Of course, she came back, and it’s not the same. I guess what I’m saying is, I think I know how the universe looks to you right now. The not knowing, where everything and anything is possible. Even if it was just for a moment.

  Then I take the flash drive back to Joe’s, with all the new data, to see if the signal is still coming through.

  I don’t think this guy is going to look at this the same way. He’s looking for something else—something that isn’t there. But after his last message, I don’t have the heart to tell him.

  And I don’t have a way to explain what I’ve just started thinking. That this date means more than a random potential contact coming from somewhere in the vastness of space. That it was a signal meant for me to receive.

  Like maybe whatever I’m receiving right now is not just a message, but a warning. And it’s taken me this long to notice.

  Agent Lowell has always seemed overly interested in my story of Liam’s disappearance. It was a mistake, telling him anything when he came on board the case. But at the time, I still thought honesty could help. Unlike the others, Agent Lowell wasn’t interested in the fact that Liam was wearing a maroon shirt, or that Colby had a brown-and-white coat but a tail that was solid brown—little details I gave while others nodded along in support. It had felt like we were all on the same side, until Agent Lowell.

  Why did you start to panic, Nolan? He’d only been gone a handful of minutes.

  I told him it was a feeling; I told him about the dream. He became convinced I knew more than I was saying. I had overheard another agent, months later, saying I had given a suspicious statement. I didn’t know whether that meant I was suspicious, or that the statement itself wasn’t particularly trustworthy, but I stopped talking after that. Kept my feelings and thoughts to myself. Kept a good distance from the actual investigation.

  Now, standing eye to eye with Agent Lowell, I see he hasn’t dropped this perception of me. But I no longer feel intimidated by his gaze. I’ve been through it. Straight through. An entire investigation, your whole world ripped apart, while you stand there, begging them to do it.

  Abby says you’re close—

  What can you tell us about your brother—

  How did you feel about him?

  Offering up your belongings, and his, to try to track him down. Turning over your phones, your computers, your entire privacy, in the hopes of eventually finding him. Closing your eyes and imagining the sound of his music on the other side of the wall, the shake of a collar out in the hallway—imagining that everything would eventually lead us back to this.

  “I’m going out,” I tell Agent Lowell now, knowing better than to get involved once more. “If my parents are looking for me, tell them I’m not interested in wasting time with this.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You think this—an email claiming to know what happened—is a waste of time? Why would that be, Nolan?”

  Because the only explanation for what happened to my brother is that he was taken by something we can’t understand. That something pulled him, against his will. Some crack in reality, and my brother slipped through.

  When Liam first disappeared, the number one theory, in the absence of any sign of foul play, was that he had run away. There were several points in favor of this theory. He volunteered at a shelter that was rumored to be frequented by teen runaways—he would know what to do, how to do it. It’s one thing to take a person, the police said. It’s another to take a person and a dog. Same goes for accidental injury or death—both Liam and the dog? A tougher thing to explain, though my dad insisted that Colby wouldn’t have left Liam’s side if he’d been hurt.

  My parents asked Mike if he agreed with the runaway theory—he said that at first he didn’t think Liam was the type, but what he had learned was that there wasn’t really a type.

  So everyone agreed: Liam and the dog both disappearing was a sign.

  This gave my parents a shred of hope, even though it was a ridiculous idea. Liam Chandler, running away.

  He had the girlfriend. The social status. The college scouts. The future. And all the searching through his life turned up nothing—no reason, no explanation.

  I could’ve told them that from the start. Actually, I did tell them that. I’d spent the previous year hearing Abby in his bedroom through the wall, watching his friends taking over the house, staring down the shelves of his trophies and awards.

  Liam Chandler running away? No. Not possible. There was the dream, the feeling, and then he was gone. Never to be heard from again.

  But there were sightings. Two hundred and nine the first week (a kid hitchhiking in Florida; another filling up a gas tank in Ohio with a dog in the backseat; one buying a lottery ticket in Maryland), followed by 330 the second week. Calls from people who meant well, and those who didn’t. No leads panned out. Nothing real, anyway. The sightings picked up, spread across the country like his image was contagious, then shrank back in, slowly but surely collapsing on themselves. Like he was fading, just as we were reaching for him.

  I saw him once myself, over a year later, when the investigation had slid to a halt. This past winter. I’d had the flu, and he appeared to me in the middle of a fever dream. I had been half-sleeping—that type of semiconscious state when you’re sick, where you dream, but you’re always right there, on the cusp of waking. I was curled up on the couch, blanket tucked around me, medicine on the table, half-dreaming of his voice, speaking to me. Then I opened my eyes and he was right there. Standing across the living room, in the same clothes he wore the day he disappeared: jeans, long-sleeved maroon shirt, mud-streaked blue sneakers with dirty laces.

  Liam, I said, we’ve been looking for you.

  It was my father who found me, standing in the middle of the room, in the middle of the night, talking to empty space. Who put a hand on my forehead and dosed me with Motrin and said, Let’s not tell your mother about this.

  But even as my father spoke, shaking me gently, washcloth on the back of my neck, Liam still stood in the corner, in front of the fireplace. His mouth moved, but no sound came out, like there was some boundary he was desperate to breach.

  “Listen,” I tell Agent Lowell, “knock yourself out. We used to get hundreds of emails a day. Why does one matter now?”

  “Because, Nolan, the email included an encrypted attachment. Turns out, it’s a picture.”

  My shoulders tense, and from the quirk of his lips, it seems he enjoyed springing this little piece of information on me. “A picture of what?”

  “A picture of Liam. Your brother.”

  “From when?”

 
“Well,” he says, taking a deep breath. “That’s what we’re about to find out.”

  I take a step back, so close to being pulled back in; a trap, a lure. A carrot on a stick, until we’re back where we started. “Abby has a thousand pictures of Liam, sir. My guess, you’re not gonna have to look all that hard.”

  “You think this is Abby’s work, Nolan? That she faked an email to herself? Abby has always cooperated with the investigation.” As if implying that I have not. “She seems pretty shook up to me,” he adds.

  But that was the thing about Abby. Everything shook her. It was just in her expression. Like she was always a step behind, surprised by where she found herself. The last time I’d seen it, she was in the car with me—the moment she realized what she was doing. Like I’d been the one to start it, instead of the other way around.

  “Yes, I think this is her doing,” I say, but my words have less force, less conviction. And I no longer feel I can leave the house; I feel like there’s something holding me, against my will. I go upstairs to my room, leaving the agent to whatever he’s doing downstairs. The answers aren’t going to come like this, this simply. With a picture of my brother in an anonymous email, after all this time. Not to Abby.

  No.

  The truth was sent to me. Something has been trying to reach me, and now it’s finally pushing through.

  * * *

  —

  I never told my father the other part of the fever dream. The words I could just barely make out, Liam’s lips moving too fast to make out the rest. Help us. Please.

  I bought this equipment the very next morning.

  The first thing I notice when I upload the new data is that the signal is no longer there. I mean, it was, but eventually the signal went dead, around the time Lydia mentioned the power going out. It’s not there after the reboot. I change views, change parameters, hit a thousand different random numbers searching for something more. But all that remains is the expected background noise of the vastness of space, exactly where it’s supposed to be—a whole lot of nothing, in an endless expanse of nothingness.