World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  Lily is still on the edge of the field, moaning and shaking.

  “Hey,” I say to her. Walking over quickly. “Hey. Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head and wipes at her mouth with the back of one sleeve. “No,” she whispers, barely moving her mouth. I step forward, closer, so I can hear. She says, “I don’t know what happened.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I remember running. Through the woods.”

  “From what?”

  “Just—that’s all I remember. Running.”

  “From who?”

  She starts to talk but she can’t talk, no words come out, her mouth hangs open and her jaw quivers.

  “From who, Lily?”

  “I don’t remember.” Her hands come up in front of her mouth. “I had to. No choice. I had to. It was just … run.” The words escape one by one from behind the barrier of her hands, each little syllable encased in its own small bubble. “Run … run … run …”

  I ask her again—from who—from what—why were you running, but she is done, she has stopped cold, stopped like a clock. Her hands come down, away from her frozen mouth, and her face is pure blank, staring forward. I peer into her eyes like narrow windows, as though if I look hard enough I can see through them and into the darkened theater of her mind, watch whatever happened to my sister unspooling inside Lily’s eyes.

  Lily’s not her name. I still don’t know her name. I have to learn her name.

  I have to learn everything.

  Attacker finds two girls in the kitchenette.

  Corners them both and slashes victim one. Assuming she’s dead, he chases the other one, victim number two, chases her out into the woods. And I can’t help it, I’m thinking of good ole Billy, back at the RV, Billy draped in his bloody apron, holding a doomed chicken by the neck.

  Meanwhile victim number one is hurt but alive and she stumbles to her feet and out of there, down the hall, trailing blood.

  Perpetrator has more success with victim number two. He catches up with her out here, in this field; he slashes her throat down to the windpipe and she dies for real. Victim number one, meanwhile, is stumbling around until she collapses in another clearing in these blood-soaked woods.

  Killer stalks back, panting, knife dripping blood, back down the hall to the kitchenette, and then—disappears.

  The basement. I have to get down to that basement.

  I turn to go back, find Cortez, get back to work, but then I stop.

  Entrances and exits, murmurs Culverson. Finish the scene.

  He’s right, except with a shock of clarity I am aware that it’s not he who is right, it’s me, I’m the one who is recalling that it’s a rookie move to clear a crime scene without giving a thought to entrances and exits. It’s him I’m hearing, but it’s really me—anytime I hear a voice telling me to do something, Detective Culverson’s mild voice, or my mom’s or my dad’s or Fenton’s or Trish McConnell’s. At a certain point you have to concede to yourself that it’s just you out here.

  I walk the perimeter of the crime scene now, slowly, in the rain. I’m looking for a broken spot in the bushes where the victim or the killer crashed in, looking for evidence of a third party, and what I find instead, lying there innocuously beside a shrub on the far end of the clearing, is a backpack with the Batman logo on it.

  I gaze wonderingly at the bag for a couple seconds, and then kick away the dirt and bend to lift it. It is instantly familiar, even comforting, the weight of it, the feel of the straps. It’s my backpack, from when I was a kid. Fourth grade, fifth grade. Obviously Nico borrowed it from me at some point, obviously she was using it out here, taking it wherever she was going, but in my grief and confusion it is a baffling and magical sight: an object has been stuffed into a time machine at the beginning of my nine-year-old summer and popped out here in the woods on the day and time I found my sister dead. I lift it gingerly to my nose, as if the bag might still smell like eraser dust, bologna sandwiches, scratch-and-sniff.

  It doesn’t. It smells like dirt and the woods. It is bulky at the top but light, bulging irregularly. I tug the zipper and out tumble bags and bags of popcorn and chips and candy: Lay’s and Cheetos and Kit Kats and granola bars.

  “I knew it,” I tell Nico. I steal a peek at the body, her body, shaking my head. “I knew it was you.”

  She took the full contents of that vending machine is what it seems like, even the crappy little items that no one ever wants, the Necco wafers and mints and thin packs of Wrigley’s. I can picture her snaking her thin arms up the inside of the machine, again and again, fashioning a coat hanger into a hook to make sure she got it all. The old trick. You’re welcome, fatties!

  Buried beneath all the candy and chips is the rest of Nico’s belongings. Shorts and shirts. A couple of handguns, a box of bullets secured with a scrap of Scotch tape. A pair of walkie-talkies—not just one, the pair. Underpants and bras. Animal Farm. A rain jacket, wrapped up tightly and secured with a rubber band. A red plastic flashlight, which I flick on and off. The bottom of the ancient Batman backpack is lined with layers and layers of duct tape to keep it from opening up and everything falling out.

  I wipe tears from my eyes with the back of my hand.

  She was on her way out.

  The rest of this ridiculous club had at long last given up their foundational ridiculous idea, accepted with only a week left that this rogue military scientist was dead or still in jail or otherwise a no-show. Godot wasn’t coming after all.

  But not Nico. Not my stiff-spined little sister. She wouldn’t accept the obvious.

  The situation is what it is, said Astronaut, and she said, I disagree.

  Even when the rest of them were ready to go to the backup plan, to slip underground and seal themselves in and cover their ears, my headstrong incorrigible younger sister was slipping out with a backpack full of junk food, bound for a military facility four hundred miles away, to track the infamous Hans-Michael Parry like Sasquatch, pin him and bring him to heel.

  She was off to save the world all by her goddamn self, if that’s what she had to do.

  I let myself laugh, just the tiniest bit, but not for long, because her plan didn’t work, because someone didn’t want her to go. Someone followed her out, her and Lily, and cut their throats and left them to die.

  As I shrug the Batman backpack onto my shoulder I find one last piece of evidence, just beside her body, poking up out of the mud. A slim stick of molded black plastic, curved at one end and jagged at the other as if snapped off.

  It’s the stem of a pair of sunglasses. I tug it out of the mud. I hold it for a long time in my palm and then I tuck it carefully in my pocket. The rain trickles down my face.

  I don’t know anything yet, not really, I still have almost everything to learn about what happened to Nico.

  But this, this piece of plastic, I know what this means.

  * * *

  “Acceptance of loss is not a destination—it’s a journey.”

  This was explained to me by a specially trained grief counselor, how recovering from the unexpected death of a loved one “is not a discrete event that happens at a specific moment in time,” but rather a “process” that unfolds over all the slow years of a lifetime. I met with parades of such counselors in my teenage years, variously competent representatives of the healing community: bereavement experts, therapists, child psychologists. My grandfather would bring me and sit with open impatience in the waiting room, working the crossword, an American Spirit behind his ear waiting to be lit. His skepticism casting a distinct pall over all efforts to make me well.

  “One must have time to heal,” these experts were always announcing. My parents were dead; both of them. A part of me had been gouged out. “Healing will happen, in time.”

  There’s no time, now, obviously. I won’t heal. That won’t happen.

  I gather Nico up into my arms and hug her tight to walk her through the woods, back to the station. “
Okay,” I say gently to Lily, to the girl, whatever her name is. “Okay, come on now.”

  “So it’s a group home.”

  “Yes. No. Well—group home makes it sound like it’s for criminals or drug addicts,” I say. “This is for policemen.”

  Abigail is skeptical. She chews it over for a minute, her eyes darting where they peek out over her allergy mask. She still isn’t entirely convinced, but she seems to have backed off the idea of me putting a bullet in her head. I think we’re done with that.

  “What if they all hate me?”

  “No one is going to hate you.”

  I evaluate the statement as I say it. Some of them will hate her. Officer Carstairs will hate her because she’s not a cop; Officer Melwyn will hate her because she comes from me, and I’ve been nagging him about leaving the porch lantern on all night. Officer Katz will like her because she’s young and good-looking. Most will not hate her, but they will be wary of her because she’s an outsider, and because she’s self-evidently crazy—but most people are crazy at this point, one way or another.

  “You’ll do just fine,” I tell her. “There will be space for you, because I’m leaving. The Night Bird will work out the details.”

  “The Night Bird?”

  “She’s great. You’ll see.”

  At last Abigail gets up and flaps open a giant black Hefty garbage bag and starts throwing things inside, clothes and guns and books and hairbrush and bedroll. She unclips her various armaments, leaving only the calf-sheath pistol and packing everything else in a rolling suitcase.

  While she’s packing I flip through the forty- or fifty-page document that Abigail handed me along with the map to Rotary, Ohio, which came out of a false-bottom suitcase and is marked TOP SECRET with a red stamp, just like in the movies. My eyes skim dense paragraphs, bristling with impenetrable details and the Greek letters of complex equations: optimal orbital distance, relationship of impact velocity (km/s) to kinetic-energy release (GJ), relationship of energy yield (kt) to mass velocity and initial density, target center versus mass-motion center.

  Second to last page: CONCLUSIONS. Last page: PROTOCOL. I can’t make sense of any of it.

  On the blank back page of the TOP SECRET document I jot down the timeline I’ve managed to get out of Abigail, structuring the narrative. In mid-July, Jordan tells Abigail that Hans-Michael Parry, a.k.a. Resolution, has been located in Gary, Indiana; he tells her that soon the various “teams” will be gathering in Ohio, at the police station in a small town called Rotary. But then, sometime after July 21—after Jordan has put Nico on that helicopter, her and one other girl flying off from Butler Field at UNH—he tells Abigail they’ve got new instructions. Jordan and Abigail are to stay put in Concord because their designation has been changed to “backup team.”

  And then, abruptly on the morning of August 13, Jordan disappears. No signs of foul play, but neither does he leave a note or any new instructions. He’s just “gone,” Abigail says, whether to Rotary or off on some new adventure she has no idea.

  He’s just gone, and she’s been sitting here alone since then, staring into the corners, feeling the Earth’s rotation in her inner ear and choking on cosmic dust.

  Now she seems more clear-eyed, calmer, as if simply having somewhere definite to go has allowed her to walk steady in her uneven world. She walks to the door of the store and doesn’t look back.

  On the way out, on the top shelf of a dresser, is a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. I’ve seen them before—the same ugly pair Jordan was wearing the first time I met him, at UNH.

  I lift them, turn them idly between my fingers. “Jordan forgot his sunglasses,” I say.

  “Those things?” says Abigail, and snorts. “Are you kidding me? He’s got a million of those fucking things.”

  1.

  “I made coffee. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? It’s not gourmet or anything, but it’s coffee. It’s something.”

  “No, thank you.” The girl looks up, looks at me quickly, a frightened bird, and then quickly down again. “Do you have tea?”

  “Oh, shoot,” I say, “no. I’m so sorry. Just coffee.”

  Lily doesn’t say anything else. She’s sitting on the edge of the thin mattress in the holding cell, staring at her hands folded in her lap. The politeness and patience I am showing her, the composed and even casual demeanor, is all artifice, a strategy designed to achieve a goal. The feeling I have inside is of having been exploded—like all of the things that for so long have defined me, all of my habits and memories and idiosyncrasies, everything that I have built up around whatever core there is of me, all of it has turned out to be plaster, and now it has been blown up and I am watching the powder drift in the atmosphere and settle slowly on the ground. The question now is whether there is or ever was anything underneath all of that, or was I always papier-mâché, a dragon head in a parade, all exterior adornment and nothing inside. I think there is something that remains, a hard warm stone like you find glowing on the ground after a fire. But I’m not sure. I don’t know.

  I am leaning against the back wall of the holding room, on the good-guy side of the bars, sipping from my thermos with exaggerated calm. From down the hall, in the garage, there is an occasional rattling blast of sound, Cortez grinding away at that concrete wedge with a diesel-fuel jackhammer. My sister’s body is in the dispatch room, wrapped in a wrinkled blue tarp.

  “So why don’t we start by getting your name straight,” I say. “It’s not Lily, that much I know.” I laugh a little, and it sounds hollow, so I stop.

  The girl watches her hands. The jackhammer sounds again, growling from down the hall. So far the interrogation is going poorly.

  “I wish that I could leave you alone,” I say, “I really do.” I talk slow, as slow as I can force myself to talk. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “I have?” She looks up, genuinely asking, and then her finger runs along her throat, where she has allowed me to reapply the bandage. “I guess I have.”

  Mental pictures in strobe-light flash: Two girls, crazy with fear. Tan sandals slipping on leaves. Heavy footsteps crashing through the woods behind them. Nico, facedown, blood flooding from her neck. I blink, clear my throat. Talk very, very slowly. “Your mind is processing trauma. It’s hard. The thing is, though, we’re in a tough spot, so to speak, just in terms of time.”

  She nods some more, her small head nervously bobbling up and down, her hands twitching in her lap. “Actually,” she says softly. “Can I—you said, about time …” She peeks up at me, and then down. “How much longer?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Sure.” She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She doesn’t know. “It’s Monday morning, October 1,” I tell her. “There are two more days.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She licks her dry lips nervously, pushes one stray lock of black hair behind one small ear, a simple gesture redolent of who she is, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, a kid who got lost in something terrible and strange.

  “So I’m really …” I smile one more time, try to make the smile look human. “I’m really wanting to figure out what happened.”

  “But I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember. It’s all like this—I don’t know.” Glances up at me, scared, touches the thick gauze on her neck. “It’s all black.”

  “Not everything, though, right?”

  She shakes her head, barely, a tiny motion.

  “Not your whole life?”

  “No,” she manages, glancing up. “Not my whole life.”

  “Okay, then. So we’ll start with what you do remember, okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispers.

  It’s not okay. It’s really not. What I want to do and what I would do if it would work is lift her and shake her by the feet until the facts come flying out like coins from her pockets. But this is how the process works. It works slowly. It’s impossible to tell at this point what
portion of her not remembering stems from literal amnesia, what portion from the atavistic fear of reliving whatever horrors she has encountered. The necessary tactic in either case is bound to be patience, small steady movement through the fog, toward the truth. You build trust: Here are the things we both know. Here are the things we are going to talk about. You coach. You coax. It can be hours. Days.

  I slip through the bars onto her side of the room and place my coffee cup carefully on the floor and take a knee like I’m going to propose.

  “You had this bracelet in your pocket, with the charms,” I say. “The lilies. So that’s why we called you Lily.” She lifts it hesitantly from my hand and then presses it in her palm, folds her fingers around it tightly.

  “My parents gave it to me.”

  “A-ha.”

  “When I was little.”

  “Gotcha. Nice. But, so—what is your name?”

  She says something, in the back of her throat, too soft for me to hear.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Tapestry.”

  “Tapestry?”

  She nods. Sniffs a little, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. I feel a dim glow of knowledge in the darkness between us, the first teardrop bulb glowing on in a string of Christmas lights.

  “And is Tapestry a nickname?” I say. “A code name?”

  “Yeah.” She looks up and gives a watery smile. “Both, sort of. We all have them.”

  “A-ha.”

  They all have them. Tapestry. Tick. Astronaut. Does Jordan have one of these nickname/code names, I wonder? Does Abigail? Tapestry’s black eye, I notice, is at the bare beginnings of the healing process, fading from dark purple to a soft bruised pink. She is—what? Nineteen? Twenty maybe. She’s like a hummingbird, this girl. She sort of reminds me of a hummingbird.

  “Did Astronaut assign you the code names? Astronaut is—”

  The end of the question is “the leader, right?” but before I can get there she inhales sharply and her eyelids drop shut like window blinds.

  “Whoa,” I say, standing up. I take a half step forward. “Hello?”