As Pierre and I worked on one of the other walls out in the woods—a wall he’d kicked around while he wasn’t himself, so we had at least some idea of what it was supposed to look like—I got a feeling of someone watching us. I didn’t turn to look. It wasn’t a bad feeling. It wasn’t the things from over the wall. I wonder perhaps if it might have been people who’d tended these walls before, way back in the day.
I know that doesn’t make much sense. It was probably just imagination. A lot of things are.
That afternoon I ran into Dan, the principal, and exchanged a few words. I get the sense he’ll be keeping an eye out for Alaina. After he left I noticed that though there was a faded painted sign on the side wall of the market on the corner, the name wasn’t Vaneski. It was Adams.
And though there were a line of decorative tiles along the front of the coffee shop, there were no J&K initials on them.
When Ken and I arrived at the Tap late that first afternoon, Kristy’s rental was no longer on the street. I asked Val if she knew where she was. She said Kristy dropped the key off an hour earlier and said goodbye.
Bryan Hixon was sitting at the end of the bar with some food and a beer. He nodded at me. That was it. After I left, I glanced back and saw him back in conversation with Val. I have since done some research on the Knack. There’s nothing whatsoever about them on the internet, which implies they know how to do their job. Quietly. I think Alaina will be offered the guidance she needs. All she has to do is take it. But then, she’s a teenager.
The teacher, Gina, was in a booth in the back with the guy I’d seen her with before. She was talking, and he was listening. At the end they laughed together, then stopped. She looked hesitant in the silence, as if unsure it was okay for things to be okay. He reached out and put his hand on hers, and she smiled.
After a while I tried calling Kristy. She didn’t pick up. I left a message.
She didn’t call back.
Mid-evening I was outside smoking a cigarette. Three women turned the corner up by the grocery store and walked down the street toward me, talking, laughing quietly, trailing a cloud of smoke. At least, at first I thought they were women. Then I realized it was the Hardaker girls and Alaina Hixon. Nadja quickly slipped something in her pocket.
“Oh,” she said, as they got closer. “It’s only you.”
“Who did you think?”
“I thought you were my dad.”
“On his behalf I’ll tell you that getting into vaping is a bad idea.”
Maddy stared at me. “Dude, you are literally smoking. Right now. In real life.”
“Do as we say, not as we do.”
They did their simultaneous eye roll number and walked on. Alaina stayed behind a moment. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Helping fixing the walls. And the mess I made.”
“Sounds like you’ll be spending the rest of your life doing something similar for other people. We’re good. But in exchange, tell your friends from me that adulting isn’t as much fun as everybody says.”
“That’s like a rich guy telling a poor guy that money isn’t everything.”
“It’s really not. As you’ll find out. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get where I am, is all I’m saying.”
“Take life one day at a time, right?”
“I don’t know a better way of tackling it.”
As we were packing our stuff into the car next morning, the motel owner drove into the lot. He parked up and got out.
“Good visit with your sister?”
“Nope,” he said. “She’s a pain in the ass. Always has been. So—did I miss much?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” Ken said. “This is a very boring little town.”
“And that’s just the way we like it,” the guy said. “Don’t forget you owe me an extra five hundred bucks.”
A few days after I got back to Santa Monica, Kristy emailed.
She was in Lavenda, her hometown. She had spent three days trying to get the police to listen to her, without success, about a man who’d lived by himself a few doors down from Helen’s family in the 1990s. A neighbor she’d only seen a few times, from a distance. He died in 2004. His former house had changed hands twice since.
The new owners were a nice young couple with a new baby, and Kristy didn’t even ask them if they’d be open to the idea of digging up their yard. She knew it was unlikely Helen would be there anyway. There are a lot of woods around Lavenda.
There was a photo attached to the email. It was an archive clipping from the local newspaper. An obituary. It showed a guy in his late sixties, with dark hair, a gaunt face, and bags under his eyes. A face that Kristy had stored in the back of her mind, somehow knowing without knowing. Or guessing, at least. How? I have no idea. I doubt she does either. Maybe he looked at them a beat too long one afternoon, or at Helen, and Kristy’s mind stored that away, far back in the shadows of her mind.
She might even be completely wrong.
After I’d read the email I tried calling. Again, she didn’t pick up or respond to the message I left. The next day it occurred to me to check whether she was still in Lavenda. I hoped she’d decided to leave it be. If not, I hoped I might be able to convince her to move on.
I booted up Find Your Friends. I didn’t even get a LOCATION UNKNOWN.
She’d unfriended me.
The next night the four of us met up in Venice Beach to eat and try to figure out what to do next on The Anomaly Files. We agreed there was nothing to say about Birchlake or the walls. Nothing that people needed to hear, anyway, or would understand or believe. It had already occurred to me, when I saw Val and Bryan Hixon in the bar, that they were the only adults who knew something had taken place. For all the rest it was just a dark, rainy night, when everyone stayed indoors and perhaps felt anxious or sad, but then felt fine the next day.
Pierre still had the remnants of two black eyes and the cut on his forehead from where his face had been smacked into the underside of the hatch in Olsen’s. “Can the next show at least not involve the threat of physical violence?” he asked. “Because it always seems to be me who gets hurt.”
“Pierre, you tried to set fire to us,” Ken said.
“I was possessed.”
“Well, next time, be more careful.”
After the other two had left I told Ken what had happened with Kristy, including the fact that I had no idea of her whereabouts or any way of finding out.
“She’ll be back,” he said. “Or she won’t.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Sorry, mate—that’s all I’ve got. Seems like the person you used to know isn’t there anymore. Not in your head and especially not in hers. You told her she gets to choose which world she wants to live in now. You were right. That’s going to take a while to play out.”
“I see. Any further advice?”
“Yes. Buy me more beer.”
He was right. If a story finishes, you can’t simply pick it up and start again. You can’t reread it, because you know how it ends, and that it does end. You can’t simply start adding fresh new pages, either. Getting back together is a sequel. What went before is going to be relevant, but any further story has to function on its own merits. Even I, celebrated emotional klutz though I may be, understand this.
So I guess I’ll wait and see what happens next.
A couple nights ago I got a call from Molly. She asked me to meet her on Santa Monica pier in the early evening.
I wandered over and we walked together to the very end. She stood there for a while, looking out over the ocean, and then she said something to it.
“No,” she said. “I belong to me.”
Then she turned away. “Do I need to know what that’s about?” I asked.
“Nope. Just wanted a witness. With a witness you know something’s really happened.”
“Well, sometimes,” I said.
She laughed, and asked if I wanted to go find a drink. I said yes. As
we walked back up the pier I was pretty sure I heard, from a distance, a song I recognized.
I didn’t mention it.
Acknowledgments
With many thanks to my agents, Jonny Geller and Jennifer Joel, my thoughtful (and patient) editor, Wes Miller, and everybody at Grand Central and Bonnier for all their hard work and enthusiasm.
Thank you also to those who supported and encouraged me in various ways through the process, including: Paula and Nate, Stephen Jones and Jim Haley, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Neil Gaiman, and my father. And with no thanks to our cats, Stark, Maybe, and Ginge, because honestly, you were no help at all.
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About the Author
Michael Rutger is an acclaimed short story writer whose work has been optioned by major Hollywood studios. He lives in California with his wife, son, and two cats.
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