The In-Between

by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

  His mom’s lips pinched together, and she nodded. “Love you, bud.”

  He nodded in return.

  Cooper rinsed his mother’s plate in the sink and watched her roll her bike from the garage, its blinking red taillight flashing as she kicked her leg up and over the saddle. She then expertly dodged the innumerable potholes in their alley on her way to the street and vanished around the turn. Cooper let his eyes drift to the yard across the alley.

  “Geez!” He startled, adrenaline flooding his senses. Yes, it was dark out, but Cooper could have sworn the swing had been empty when his mom pulled away. But now there she was. The girl. Sitting. Swinging. Staring right at him.

  Cooper reached up and pulled the cord to drop the shade over the window. He was not only a little spooked by her; he was also embarrassed. He didn’t mind everyone knowing how angry he was these days—he actually wore it with pride—but no one should know about the crying. The pain. The girl had seen too much.

  Block her out, he told himself. Block everyone out.

  3

  Cooper turned quickly to go to his room. Then came a searing pain in his leg and Jess’s surprised scream.

  It was the freezer door. Jess had opened it behind him, and he hadn’t noticed; now his shin was throbbing and Jess, who had been temporarily pinched in the freezer like it was a Venus flytrap, fell from her squatting position onto her rear.

  “What are you doing?” Cooper said, rubbing his leg.

  Jess glared up at her brother. “You did that on purpose!”

  “What are you talking about?” Cooper said. “And what are you doing in the freezer, anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jess. What’s in your hand?”

  “Nothing.” She showed one free hand before slowly pulling her other from behind her back. There was nothing in it, but a moment later a pint of ice cream rolled into view.

  “You can’t eat that! Mom already gave you your insulin.” It was like Jess wanted him to have to text Mom that she had a blood sugar of twelve million.

  “I was just going to have one bite.”

  Cooper limped a step, picked up the pint, and tossed it back in the freezer, then waved for Jess to scoot out of the way so he could shut the door. “Look. I’m supposed to make sure you’re okay when Mom’s gone. The least you could do is not actively make my job harder.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot it was all about you.”

  “All about me?” Cooper said with a laugh. “You’re kidding, right?” Nothing had been about him since Jess snagged the starring role of “sick kid.” Every choice Mom made was about Jess, about what she needed. Cooper, meanwhile, was the only person in the family who could smell the syrupy-sweet scent that came on Jess’s breath when her sugar became dangerously high. Mom joked that Cooper was as good as one of those expensive medical-service dogs that sniff out trouble before it happens.

  As good as a dog.

  He walked past his sister without helping her up.

  Normally he would head to his room to write about all of today’s events in his journal, which always seemed to help him drain his frustrations. But he was too angry. Too hot. Instead, he needed to check out, turn off, disappear.

  He headed for his mother’s desk, in the corner of the kitchen, but didn’t find what he was looking for. He reluctantly turned back to his sister. “Where’s Mom’s laptop?”

  Jess, now standing, straightened the bottom of her shirt and crossed her arms. “Don’t you have homework to do?”

  “Where’s. Mom’s. Laptop?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know. . . . It might be in my room.” As Cooper turned to head upstairs, she yelled from behind him, “Mom’s going to kill you if you get another D!”

  Cooper opened the door to Jess’s room. As always, it was pristine. The bed was crisply made (What’s the point?) with a mountain of carefully placed stuffed animals on top (How does she even sleep in all that?), and not as much as one stray sock could be seen on the floor (Show-off!). Mr. Miggins, Jess’s four-foot-tall teddy bear, sat propped up in the corner. The ridiculously oversized creature had arrived right after Jess was first diagnosed, sitting on her bed when she’d come home from the hospital. Cooper had no idea how that was supposed to help—he always thought Mr. Miggins should have arrived with a note around his neck like Paddington, saying, “I’m so bear-y sorry! You have an incurable illness I can do nothing about!” But Jess loved the thing.

  He grabbed the Mac laptop from where it was sitting on Jess’s bedside table and crossed the small hallway to his own room, plopping down cross-legged on his bed. He opened the computer and started to close the windows Jess had left open. But before he clicked one red circle, he froze.

  It was the Messages app, open to a conversation, though “conversation” was a generous way to put it—only the blue message bubbles on the right were filled in. The most recent read:

  Hi, Dad! It’s Jess. School started here last month. Fifth grade is supposed to be harder than fourth, but so far, it’s been okay. How are you?

  Before that:

  Hi, Dad! It’s Jess. Summer’s almost over, but it’s still so hot. How’s San Diego?

  Cooper scrolled up. And up. He saw message after message. Not once had their dad responded. It was as if Jess was texting the wrong person, but Cooper knew the number was right. Dad, apparently, just couldn’t be bothered.

  “Oh, Jess,” he muttered. How many messages had his sister sent into the void? How long would she continue to hope on the hopeless?

  He checked his doorway. If she’d walked in, he’d probably have yelled at her or mocked her for being so dumb. But here, alone, he only had sympathy for her. Heartbreak, even.

  Cooper too had tried to have contact with his dad when he’d first moved away, writing actual paper letters—short, awkward scrawled notes on stationery his mother had bought him—filled with the same sort of nonsense as Jess’s messages. It was the sort of junk you wrote when all you really wanted to ask was “Why?” a hundred times over. His dad hadn’t responded a single time. Thankfully, Cooper’s mother had never asked about the rest of the stationery, because it had long since been reduced to a pile of ash in the backyard.

  He strangled the urge to type some rather pointed words to his father right now. The window was open. Instead, Cooper quit the Messages app and whispered once more, “Block him out, Jess.”

  Cooper intended to watch YouTube, but when he pulled up the internet browser, it was already open to a page with an old black-and-white newspaper article. In the middle was a photo of twisted metal and rubble so deformed that Cooper couldn’t even guess at its original shape. Intrigued, he scrolled up to find out what it was, but had to watch the twirling rainbow beach ball for a full minute instead, as the computer, which was almost as old as Jess, refreshed. The article was from a British newspaper called The Daily News and was dated October 14, 1928. The words of the banner headline read:

  RAILWAY DISASTER IN CHARFIELD! SIXTEEN DEAD

  “Wanna play Spit?”

  Jess was standing at the door, holding a deck of cards, clearly already over what had happened downstairs. She hated being alone as much as Cooper hated having company.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what are you going to do, then?”

  “Why were you reading about a railway disaster?”

  He knew his question was an invitation, but he wanted to know. Sure enough, Jess hurried over to his bed and leaped up, landing on her knees. “Can you believe that was a train?” She reached over and scrolled back down to the photos. “That bent metal there, that used to be tracks, and those two curved things were parts of the train wheels. I’m glad all the smoke in the picture makes it hard to see the dead bodies.”

  “Dead bod— Why is Ms. Chelsea having you read this?” Jess’s new teacher did things a little differently—including having her students call her by her first name, which Cooper found weird—but researching such a gruesome accident seemed a little bit much
for fifth grade.

  “It’s just Chelsea, no Ms. And she isn’t.”

  “Then why were you reading this?”

  “Because it’s a great mystery!” Jess said in a British accent.

  “Okay . . .”

  “I’m serious. Read it!”

  “If I do, will you leave?”

  “Yes!” She smiled at him.

  He scrolled back to the top. He had to admit, if only to himself, that her excitement was a little contagious.

  Early yesterday morning, an overnight train headed for Bristol and bearing fifty people passed a red warning light unheeded. It appears the young engineer never saw the caution light through the thick fog, as all accounts indicate the train never slowed; attempts to brake and avoid the freight train on the tracks at Charfield station ahead of him came too late. In an instant, the train became a tangled knot of steel, splintered wood, and flames.

  Locals heard the cacophony of the crash up to six miles away and saw the ensuing inferno climb forty feet into the air. At current count, twenty-three people are injured and sixteen have died. The families of fifteen of the victims have claimed their lost, but one soul remains unidentified.

  Firemen found the body of a well-dressed boy, thought to be twelve or thirteen years old, curled under a seat in the blackened shell of a third-class cabin. The only clue to his identity is an insignia on his clothing, but an immediate search turned up no clue to its origin. Police are asking for the public’s help in identifying this child.

  “Well, there you go,” Cooper said. “I read it. Bye.”

  “But you haven’t read everything!” She reached across him again and clicked on a series of other open tabs.

  Lost Little Child

  The Unsolved Mystery of the 1928 Crash

  The Haunting Puzzle of Charfield

  “Huh.” Cooper tried to sound bored.

  “One more?” Jess asked with a grin.

  He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either, so she linked to another article, one that had been posted only a year ago, and read from the middle of the text. “No parent or guardian ever emerged to claim their son, and despite high-profile efforts made in the decades since, the child has never been identified. Ninety-two years later, his name remains a mystery, lost to time.” Beside the text was a color photograph of a tall stone monument in the shape of a cross, set before a short ivy-covered wall. Jess reached over and pointed to the wide, square pedestal and its weathered and worn words.

  In Memory of Those Who Lost Their Lives

  A list of names lay beneath these words, only snippets of which were legible.

  “Look at the bottom,” Jess said.

  One Unknown

  How is that possible? Cooper wondered. Someone had to have bought the boy’s ticket, put him on the train. The original article said he’d been well-dressed, so someone took care of him. Even if he’d been a runaway or a stowaway, someone should have eventually arrived to explain who he was. How could all this time pass without an answer?

  “So.” Jess grinned at him. “Want to help me solve it?”

  “Solve it?”

  “Yeah!”

  Cooper closed the laptop. “Did you not read the articles, Jess? People have been trying to figure this out for almost a century. What makes you think you could do any better?”

  “The insignia.”

  “What insignia?”

  Jess sighed dramatically. “Did you not just read the articles? The one on his clothes, that the people in 1928 couldn’t identify!”

  “What about it?”

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  Cooper laughed. “Sure you have.”

  “I have! And so have you. Don’t you recognize it?”

  Cooper shook his head slowly. “I don’t even know what it looks like.”

  Jess sighed again. “Go back! It’s in the first article.”

  Cooper slowly opened the laptop and navigated back. Next to the photos of the wreck was a rough pencil sketch made by some long-dead newspaper artist. It appeared incomplete, only the top half of an image. The caption below read, “Any persons with knowledge of this crest should contact police immediately.”

  “They couldn’t draw the bottom half because it was burned in the fire,” Jess said. “But you recognize the top, right?”

  There was something familiar about it—the head of a rising bird with two sword tips crossing behind it. But he couldn’t place it. He looked at Jess and shrugged, but immediately regretted it when she let out a giggle for knowing something he didn’t.

  “That girl!” Jess said. “Across the alley. Her jacket has this same symbol.”

  Her answer made Cooper sit back and pause. He tried to recall the details of the girl’s crest, checking his memory against Jess’s claim. He had to admit they might be a little similar—at least half similar—but he also didn’t see what it amounted to. “So?”

  “So, all we have to do is ask the girl where she got the jacket, find the connection to that kid from 1928, and we’ll have solved a nearly hundred-year-old mystery!”

  “I doubt it’s that simple, Jess.”

  His sister’s eyes were wide with excitement. “We’ll be famous. Everyone will want to interview us, ask us how we figured it out. They’ll probably fly us to England to accept an award or something. Don’t you remember how Dad always wanted to take us to England?”

  Ah. So that was what this was all about. Cooper closed the laptop again and laced his fingers together.

  “For one,” he said, “I doubt the symbols are actually the same. And two, even if they are, and you, miraculously, are the first person to finally solve the mystery of the dead kid, it isn’t going to make Dad coming running back to us.”

  Jess sat back heavily on her heels and glared at her brother. “That’s not what I was saying.”

  “It’s what you were thinking, though.”

  “You don’t know what I’m thinking,” she said, but the way she blinked and turned away said otherwise.

  “It won’t matter, Jess. He doesn’t care.”

  The lower lids of his sister’s eyes reddened as she looked back at him and spoke very slowly. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I’m just telling the truth.”

  “You’re so mean! You are terrible and cold and . . . mean!”

  “You already said mean.”

  Jess pushed off his bed and started to walk away.

  “The sooner you stop caring about him,” Cooper said after her, “the sooner it’ll stop hurting.”

  She spun, eyes like slits. “So I can be like you? You don’t care about anyone! You’re like a robot.”

  “Yeah, well, at least you don’t hear me whining about my feelings.”

  “That’s because you have no feelings!”

  “Maybe when Dad shows up to take you to England, he can explain it to you.”

  “Dad, Dad, Dad! You blame everything on him.”

  “Yeah, well, he ruined our lives, so . . .”

  “At least Dad only hurt me once. You do it every day.”

  “Only once, huh?” Cooper laughed. “What about all those unanswered text messages?”

  Jess froze, eyes glistening. Cooper couldn’t tell if she was more upset that he’d looked at her messages or that he was cruelly shoving them in her face. Then she howled in outrage.

  “You’re just like him! You can’t deal, so you’ve quit on me and Mom.”

  Cooper flung the laptop onto his bed and shot up. “No! Don’t you ever compare me to him!” He felt his fingernails digging painfully into his palms. “GET OUT!”

  Slowly, the corners of Jess’s mouth turned up, and she crossed her arms. “The sooner you stop caring, the sooner it’ll stop hurting,” she mocked before turning and walking out.

  Cooper slammed the door behind her and paced a few times before throwing a book against the wall. It didn’t matter how mean he was. He could be mean to his sister all day every day, and it would never come c
lose to what his father had done.

  Cooper and his dad were not the same. He took a deep breath and tried to wipe his mind clear.

  Forget what Jess said.

  Forget about his dad’s new baby.

  Pack it all away.

  Do something else.

  He sat down, opened the computer again, and turned reality off.

  4

  “Yo!” Zack said as Cooper plopped onto the vinyl bus seat beside him.

  “Hey,” Cooper said. He sank slowly as air sighed out of the seams of the cushion, bringing with it a musty, old-foam odor.

  “Man,” Zack said, “I stayed up waaaay too late last night. Tyler and I finally found a good group and finished that raid in Destiny.”

  Cooper didn’t even know what raid his friend was talking about—it had been months since he’d last logged on to the video game Zack and his older brother were apparently still playing. When Zack held his hand up for a congratulatory high five, though, Cooper weakly complied.

  They had been best friends since before Cooper could remember, and even if they hadn’t really hung out in a long time, they still knew things about each other that no one else did. Cooper kept Zack’s secret that he still hid a Beanie Baby kitten in his pillowcase. Zack was the one who, one morning at sleepaway camp, had only needed one glance at Cooper’s terrified face to “playfully” dump his entire water bottle on Cooper and his sheets. Cooper still had no clue how Zack knew he’d wet the bed, but Zack’s quick thinking had saved him from everyone seeing that his cot was soaked. They’d never talked about it. They didn’t have to. They had each other’s backs.

  Or at least they used to.

  Cooper and Zack had also never talked about the chasm that now lay between them. It had grown so gradually. Zack knew Cooper’s dad wasn’t around anymore, of course. Cooper had told Zack that he didn’t want to talk about it, but when it was all Cooper could think about, that meant not talking to Zack about anything at all. Now it seemed too late. Cooper was sure that, even if he tried, Zack could never truly understand him anymore. Zack’s life was too . . . easy. He didn’t have to deal with any of the garbage Cooper did. His parents were the sort of people who kissed in public and still giggled at each other’s lame jokes.