LONG LOST

by Brent, Cora

  In spite of my resolve to avoid thinking about a certain gold medal asshole, my attention is captured. “What do you mean?”

  She glances over to make sure the connecting door is closed and lowers her voice. “Remember I told you the two of them met while staying at the same foster home? I didn’t tell you how awful it was. God, it was bad, Care. Almost unimaginable. They had about half a dozen boys at any one time and when there was a drug debt they couldn’t pay they would...um…rent out the kids.”

  Lana’s voice falters and she cups a hand over her mouth. I don’t need her to be explicit. I can guess what she means. I’m aware that depravity exists everywhere and still, the idea shocks me and I feel suddenly ill.

  She removes a paper napkin from the napkin holder and folds it as she collects her thoughts. “Shane was so depressed there, even suicidal at times. He’d been in the house of horrors for about three months when Jay showed up. Jay was bigger and stronger than the other kids. The first time the foster dad went after Jay he got his nose broken. So he left Jay alone after that. But meanwhile things were getting worse for Shane. They’d gotten him hooked on meth and they used it as a way to control him. Shane couldn’t take the abuse anymore. He tried to get himself clean and fight back but he didn’t stand a chance. One day his foster dad was kicking the living daylights out him when Jay intervened. Jay fought like the devil, even at age sixteen. The guy got hurt pretty bad. But the authorities were skeptical of the story Shane and Jay were telling because no one else would confirm it. As for the wife, she was just as guilty so the truth wasn’t coming from her anytime soon. And the other kids were terrified. That’s how Shane and Jay ended up in the juvenile detention center. At least the two of them got to room together the entire time. Shane says that Jay doesn’t have any family, at least none that he talks to. And Shane was left all alone in the world when his mother died. That’s why they’re so close. They are each other’s family.”

  Lana sighs after she finishes talking and I can’t speak at all for a moment.

  “Damn,” I finally whisper, rubbing my eyes to hide the tears threatening to roll out. I know nothing, nothing at all. The kind of horror Johnny suffered is alien to me.

  “Hey.” Lana is concerned and handing me her half shredded napkin to help with the tears that I can’t seem to control.

  “That’s so awful.” I blow my nose with the napkin. “I wish I’d known what he went through.”

  “Who?”

  “Um, Jay.”

  A dent appears between Lana’s flawless eyebrows. “Why?”

  I’m about to tell her. About me and Johnny and Arcana. About my family and his family. The story about my grandparents is one she already knows. It’s not something I often share because people tend to be too interested. They have questions, morbid questions.

  But even though Lana knows about my history I’m sure I’ve never mentioned Johnny’s name to her. I’m sure because I’ve never talked about him with anyone.

  And now…

  If he feels like he needs to forget he knew me and be a man named Jay Phoenix then I can’t rat him out. Not even to my best friend.

  Lana’s still watching me with worry and confusion.

  I sniff and ball up the napkin. “I don’t know, I would have been more understanding, that’s all.”

  She smiles. “He’s a little rough around the edges. But I haven’t seen you be anything but polite to him, Care, and you couldn’t have known about his past.”

  “No,” I grumble. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  Lana gives me a hug. I guess I look like I need one. Then she scampers away in her ‘Suck My Dick’ shirt to get ready for work.

  The apartment isn’t very big and eventually I run out of surfaces to clean. There’s a determined moment when I almost knock on the connecting door and then change my mind when I flash back to the encounter in the front yard.

  Jonathan Hempstead was my friend.

  Jay Phoenix doesn’t want to know me.

  I’ll find another time to talk to Shane about taking a look at his financial records.

  Instead of cash, Lana hands off her debit card before leaving for work. She orders me to use it for the entire grocery store trip, claiming that it’s payback for some old debt she owed me. I know she made it up but the gesture is nice and I can’t really afford to refuse nice gestures at the moment.

  While at the store I dawdle for a long time in the brilliantly lit aisles and marvel at how everyone takes the endless selection of glossy packaged foods for granted. During my summer in Arcana I’d been surprised at the small marketplace that served as the only grocery store in town. The store had been there since the forties and was run by a pair of elderly twin brothers. I doubt it’s still open. Nine years ago the town was excited about the giant chain grocery store that was being built ten miles away in neighboring Absolom. I can remember walking through the short aisles of the Arcana Market and being charmed by the idea that my mother had shopped at the same place. And then I remember being haunted by the idea that my grandparents certainly must have shopped there as well.

  When I return home there are no other vehicles parked in front of the house so the boys must have gone somewhere. I unpack all the groceries and out of gratitude to Lana I bake a batch of cinnamon rolls and leave them for her to find on the breakfast bar, prettily presented on a plate that’s been covered in clear plastic wrap.

  Once the kitchen is back in order I retreat to my room, sit cross legged on my bed and open my laptop. After a deep breath I type a pair of names and click the search icon. I know what I’ll find, although it’s been a while since I’ve considered the details. A few months ago I received a call from a journalist in New York. One of those crime shows planned to dedicate an episode to the Chapel murders. She’d already tried to get a comment from my father but he hung up on her. I did the same.

  It’s a famous story and it has everything that fascinates true crime enthusiasts.

  A small town and the brutal double murder of a beautiful young couple.

  An orphaned child and a community in shock.

  Nearly fifty years ago on a humid summer evening a young married couple left their two-year-old daughter, Suzanne, in the care of a babysitter and went out to celebrate their anniversary. She was a beauty; a former prom queen and the center of the local social scene. He was from a good family and expected to become mayor someday, just like his father. They were so very much in love and people smiled at them wherever they went.

  On this night, following a dinner at a local barbecue shack, they visited a nearby bar. A minor scuffle broke out. The furious drunken patron who was held back from throwing a punch was the boy she dated in high school. He was once the town football hero but his fortunes had fallen and everyone knew he was prone to violent behavior. Under threat of arrest, he left the bar and the happy young couple carried on with their otherwise pleasant evening.

  Sometime later, they were on their way home when the passenger side front tire of their car blew. He pulled over to the side of the road and began replacing the mangled tire with the spare. The car was still propped up on its jack when they were found by their killer.

  He was bludgeoned to death with a tire iron in front of the horrified eyes of his young wife. She was then dragged to a nearby vacant field. She was raped and strangled and left to die.

  Their names were Richard and Nancy Chapel.

  And they were my grandparents.

  And their killer?

  He died in a prison riot before he could be executed for his horrific crimes.

  His name was Billy Hempstead.

  Caris, Age 13

  No one has warned me to be quiet all the time and yet I can’t stop tiptoeing around like I’m afraid to make any noise, which makes no sense.

  After all, who would I be afraid of?

  The neighbors?

  Aunt Vay?

  Ghosts?

  Every room in the house is small and dark and I’m stay
ing in my mother’s old bedroom where the walls are covered with the most garish shade of pink wallpaper. The sense that I’ve entered a time capsule is boosted by the felt Arcana High School pennant above an oval vanity mirror. The mirror remains flanked by old magazine pages thumbtacked to the wall. There’s no closet, just a white dresser and a metal clothing rack that still hosts a few abandoned items. I don’t know why this room was never redecorated. Suzanne is certainly never returning to live here again.

  As far as I know, my mother hasn’t even set foot in her hometown since before I was born. We don’t come here, not ever. Aunt Vay always climbs in her puttering old Volkswagen every Christmas and occasionally on Easter and makes the drive to Dallas. When my mother mentions Arcana it’s with the same level of venom that a person might talk about hell. She hates this town. She has good reason. I wonder if anyone has told her yet that I’m here or if she’s just staring at a blank wall in the hospital without knowing or caring about a thing.

  There’s a heaviness to the air inside this house. It’s probably my imagination but it bothers me anyway. Taking a deep breath is like trying to breathe through a layer of honey. I swear it feels like I’ve been here for half a year even though it was only ten days ago that my father dropped me off a few minutes before midnight and refused Aunt Vay’s offer to stay over and get some rest. The drive home to Dallas was long and he needed to get back. Aunt Vay played with the strands of my hair and told him not to worry, that she would take excellent care of me just like she’d always taken excellent care of Suzanne after her parents were killed. My dad was barely listening but he crouched down and opened his arms, inviting me in for a hug as if I were still five years old and I ran to him, happy to be his little girl only for a moment.

  Daddy, don’t leave me here.

  I couldn’t say that to him. He had too much to worry about already. In my mind, twelve-almost-thirteen was plenty old enough to stay home by myself while he spent his time at work or at the hospital with Mom. If there were other relatives to choose from I’m sure he would have sent me to them instead but there was only Aunt Vay in Arcana.

  I promised him I would cause Aunt Vay no trouble and he rose to his feet, kissed the top of my head, called me ‘sunshine’, which was actually my mother’s nickname for me, and then offered Aunt Vay an awkward hug. His hair, already grey at the temples, had begun changing from black to white months ago, right after the baby died. Thinking of him as old was painful.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him and allowed Aunt Vay to drape an arm around my shoulders because she cared about me and meant well even if she had a hardboiled, sour kind of personality.

  For the first few days I crept around the house and tried to imagine my mother growing up here. I thought if I could somehow sense a kinship with the teenage Suzanne who’d once lounged in the pink room, staring at the ceiling and daydreaming about the future, then I’d feel closer to her. I would understand why she was afraid to go outside sometimes or why she would occasionally burst into tears at the dinner table for no apparent reason and run to her bedroom in despair while my father pretended everything was fine, asking me about my day and then preparing a meal tray to bring to his wife.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that the house offered few options in the way of entertainment. There was no working television and no reliable internet service. Aunt Vay saw no reason to fix either of these situations. She pointed me to her pressed wood bookcase of tattered paperbacks and I spent a vaguely pleasant two days scanning the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Aunt Vay was involved with a lot of local committees and she was gone more than she was home, which was fine with me because she hovered. Plus, sooner or later Gary, the rubber-faced ‘boyfriend’ she’d been attached to for thirty years and yet had no intention of marrying, would find his way over here from down the street. There was something about the flat expression in his eyes that troubled me. And then there was the way he called me ‘girlie’ and giggled like a hyena at things that weren’t even funny.

  My mother grew up here so there are plenty of pictures of her around, although most of the ones I’ve found where she was smiling were taken before she hit her teens. The most prominent photo is an eight by ten studio photo framed in dark wood and it hangs in the living room.

  The photo has faded with time, the colors all diminished to a brownish orange. Nancy holds my mother in her lap while Richard stands beside her with one hand protectively on her shoulder. I’d like to know if they chose those poses or if the unseen photographer posed them that way. My mother wears a frilly white dress that she’s also wearing in her photos of her second birthday.

  I’d seen this picture before, although not at my house in Dallas. I’d seen it on the internet when morbid curiosity drove me to search for some details about something terrible that happened and was almost never talked about at home. Sometimes I’d tell someone, a friend at school, or a kid I met on line at the water slide park. Now and then I just need to say it out loud for some reason. Then as soon as I do I always regret it.

  “Your grandparents were killed? Like murdered kind of killed?”

  And then they want to talk to me all about it because they think it’s interesting. I don’t want to be interesting in that way.

  On my birthday Aunt Vay noticed that I was getting mopey and bored. She gave me some money and told me to take her old bicycle out of the garage and pedal it the three blocks to the strip of low brick buildings that comprised downtown Arcana.

  And that’s when I ran into the only stroke of luck that’s happened to me in months. I met Johnny.

  The boys my age tend to be thoughtless jerks that say disgusting things and laugh about sex and farting. Johnny is different. When I’m around him I feel like I can be me because even if I blurt out something stupid he won’t mind.

  “Caris? Are you going to town again?” Aunt Vay now asks me from the living room sofa where she’s curled up with a People magazine and drinking a cup of black coffee.

  The living room is my least favorite part of the house. Somehow it always smells like overcooked pasta and the furniture is hideously patterned with green and yellow flowers. Worst of all, there’s a sense of being suspended in time as a young, happy family smiles from the wall with no idea what the future will do to them.

  “Is that okay?” I ask while tying my hair back in a sloppy ponytail. I’m supposed to meet Johnny at the Arcana Market in an hour. I can’t wait to get out of this house.

  Aunt Vay glances up from her magazine and gives me a wistful smile. I know it’s because I look like my mother. People comment on this regularly, although I think they’re being kind. My mother’s far prettier than I’ll ever be. I’m just a watered down version of her.

  “Just be home before six,” Aunt Vay warns. She reaches over to dig a fork into the plate of chocolate cake sitting on the polished end table. “And you’ll be with your new friends, right?”

  “Right,” I confirm and feel a minor stab of guilt. Aunt Vay has old fashioned ideas about young girls and young boys spending too much time alone together. I had to tell her I’d found a group of kids to hang out with. If she thought I was with Johnny and only Johnny every day then she might stop letting me out of the house.

  Aunt Vay asks if I’ll pick up a box of macaroni and cheese from the Arcana Market on the way home. That will be dinner tonight. She withdraws a ten dollar bill from a leather change purse sitting beside the plate of cake.

  “Oh, I spoke to your father this morning. Your mother has made some progress.”

  Her voice is so hopeful it’s easy to hear the love behind the words. Aunt Vay is my grandfather’s younger sister. After the horrifying murders of Nancy and Richard, she dropped out of college to raise the little girl who had been left behind. She moved into the house her brother had purchased as a hopeful young newlywed and became the only parent little Suzanne would ever remember.

  “Yeah, he told me that too.” The ache in my heart that has kept me company for mont
hs resurfaces as I remember the tired sound of my father’s words as he tried to sound positive about the fact that my mother’s mind is so confused that she needs round the clock hospital care in order to be safe from herself. There’s really no happy way to spin that reality and Eben Newsom, the hateful boy who lives across the street from our house in Dallas, taunted me the day before I left for Arcana.

  “My mom says your mother’s a fucking lunatic, Caris. She says it’s a good thing your dad locked her up before she killed someone.”

  Instead of firing an insult back at Eben, like the fact that he’s not one to talk because his own father was arrested for drunk driving last year, I picked up a river rock from my mother’s garden and hurled it with all my might. It bounced in the middle of the street and landed a good ten feet away from Eben, who howled with laughter at my pathetic retaliation.

  Thinking of Eben makes me appreciate my luck in finding Johnny. I’m sure that Johnny would never say such ugly things to anyone. He talks about stars and meteor craters and laughs when I tell one of my stupid jokes. Plus it’s nice to make a friend who knows nothing about my family’s sad times. Even friends like Megan and Ashley, who I’ve known since first grade, didn’t know what to say to me about my mother. Johnny has a way of letting me know that he cares without making me feel like crap. With Johnny, everything becomes fun and adventurous and the summer doesn’t seem so depressing now that I can look forward to hanging out with him.

  “Caris.” Aunt Vay is scrutinizing me with an air of worry. “She will get better.”

  “I know.” I try to smile but the corners of my mouth are stuck.

  Aunt Vay simply nods and for a second directs her gaze to the hanging photo of her lost brother. She had no other siblings and her own mother died a year before Richard was killed. Their father was inconsolable over his son’s murder and died of a stroke a few months after the killings. There were a few scattered cousins but none were close by. The Chapel family had once been very important in Arcana and now I’m struck by a thought. Aunt Vay is the last of them. The last of the Chapels. What a lonely sounding fate.