He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  “I know it looks bad,” he said. “But I look better now, don’t I?”

  Rhys’s gaze was piercing, looking not just at Zachary’s healed face and his lean body, still not quite up to what the doctor had set as a target weight. Rhys looked much more deeply into Zachary’s face, seeking the truth.

  Zachary looked away, avoiding the close scrutiny. “I’m doing okay,” he promised.

  Rhys tapped some more on his phone, and turned it around again to show Zachary a gif of a cartoon character sinking underwater, his fingers held up in a three-two-one count with a bye-bye wave before disappearing below the surface. Certainly apropos of how Zachary sometimes felt.

  “Not right now. If I need to… I’ll get help. If it gets that bad, I’ll check myself in.”

  Rhys gave him one more keen look, then nodded. As he slid his phone into his pocket, he raised his eyebrows and made a kissing sound. Zachary knew it was an inquiry into Kenzie and how things were going with her, and couldn’t prevent the blush that rose to his cheeks. Rhys laughed in delight, the sound giving Zachary an unexpected rush of joy in response. He scratched his nose to hide the grin he couldn’t suppress.

  “Kenzie is good. I’ll have to bring her by to see you again one day.”

  Rhys made a louder kissing sound, both eyebrows up.

  “None of your business!” Zachary’s cheeks grew even hotter.

  Rhys mimed two hands joining, and then burping a baby on his shoulder.

  “Getting married and having a baby? That might be rushing things a bit!”

  Rhys indicated heads at descending heights.

  “Lots of babies?” Zachary laughed. “You’d better talk to Kenzie about that.” He smiled, relaxed. It was nice to think of his relationship with Kenzie and to wonder if it might someday lead to marriage and children. That was still a long way off, and he needed to sort out the issue of remaining present and not dissociating when they were together. But maybe someday…

  He hoped that Kenzie wanted children. Bridget had not. She had told him that from the beginning, but he had assumed she would change her mind. Kenzie had never offered her thoughts on the matter, and it seemed like asking her would be presuming too much. Their relationship was stable, and they were seeing each other exclusively—at least, he assumed that they both were—but he didn’t want to scare her off by getting too serious and talking about having babies together. While he badly wanted children of his own, he worried Kenzie might have doubts about his fitness as a father.

  He looked back at Rhys, who was waiting for Zachary’s attention to return. Seeing that Zachary was once again focused on him, Rhys continued the burping-a-baby mime, followed by acting out throwing up and then gingerly handling a stinky diaper.

  Zachary shrugged widely. “You have babies, you have to be prepared to deal with all of the messy stuff,” he agreed. He’d cared for and changed younger siblings. It had never bothered him. It made him feel grown up and responsible.

  Rhys gagged.

  “Then you’d better not mess around,” Zachary advised.

  Rhys crossed his arms in an X, then pushed them forward and out in a definitive no way.

  Vera called them to the dinner table.

  17

  He was more relaxed when he got home. For once, he felt like he could enjoy the evening instead of needing to crawl straight into bed. Maybe it had been thinking about the future of his relationship with Kenzie, or maybe just seeing Rhys and reminding himself that things could be a lot worse.

  He surfed his social media and TV for a while, sent an email note to Kenzie to pass on the greetings from Rhys and to thank her for being so supportive. That was one of the things that he found much easier to say in an email than face-to-face. It could be hard to get the words out when the person was right in front of him and emotions were running high. He could empathize with Rhys in that respect.

  Gradually, the night noises of the building started to bother him. It was too quiet, even with the TV left on, and each of the creaks and groans of the building or footsteps in the distance made him flinch or tense further. He decided it was time for a sleeping pill and bed so that he could shut it all out.

  He fell asleep quickly, but had restless dreams, his brain obviously processing his concerns with Heather’s case and his discussions with Rhys. He dreamed of finding Heather’s baby, not a grown man but still an infant, and trying to get Heather to take him. Heather refused, and the baby was sobbing and squirming and threw up on his shirt. Heather still wouldn’t take the baby, even to let Zachary get cleaned up, claiming that he’d gotten himself into the mess, it was up to him to get himself out.

  The baby became a toddler, crying Zachary’s name and pinching his arm. It was his baby brother Vincent, who he hadn’t seen since the day of the fire. Zachary tried to kiss his cheek and settle him down, but Vinny continued to call his name and pinch him, jab his finger into the center of Zachary’s chest and to slap him on the cheek. He couldn’t figure out what was bothering Vinny.

  Zachary’s eyes opened and he was abruptly awake. He tried to clutch at Vinny, to hold him close and not lose him to the dream, but his arms were empty and he was left puffing, out of breath, trying to reorient himself in time and space.

  “Zachary.” It wasn’t Vinny’s voice, but Kenzie’s, coming from the dark shadow beside him. He startled violently.

  “What? Kenzie?” He sat up, trying to blink her into focus. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, thank goodness.” She was sniffling.

  Zachary fumbled around until he managed to find the lamp on the bedside table and turn it on. Her eyes were shadowed, but he could see tears on her face.

  “Kenzie!” He hugged her, trying to comfort her, even though he didn’t know what was wrong. She must have had bad news, and she’d needed someone to talk to, so she came to him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She wiped her tears on his t-shirt, giving a shuddering sob as she tried to stop and talk to him. She swore. “I thought you’d done something. I got your email and it scared me, and when I tried to call you, there was no answer. Then you wouldn’t wake up… I was afraid…”

  “What?” He squeezed her and then pulled back so that he could see her face. “How did my email scare you? I just wanted to send you a note…”

  She wiped her face again. He hoped she wasn’t planning to blow her nose on his shirt too. “It sounded like a goodbye. I thought… you’d decided…”

  He shook his head. “No!” Zachary was baffled. He grabbed his phone and pulled it off of the charge cord to look at the email he had sent Kenzie, which he could immediately see that she had written several replies to in a row. Without stopping to read them, he opened the original message. His eyes raced over the lines, and he stopped, lowering the phone to look at her.

  “I was just being nice!”

  “‘Thanks for being such a good friend and supporting me all this time’?” Kenzie returned, “That doesn’t sound like ‘thanks and so long’ to you? You scared the hell out of me!”

  Zachary allowed a chuckle. “I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate you.” He swallowed, trying to keep the lump in his throat from turning into tears. He had a feeling she wouldn’t let him wipe his tears on her shirt. “It wasn’t goodbye. I just… it’s hard to say out loud, so I thought…”

  “Sheesh, Zach.” She snuffled, the mucus thick in her throat. “If you’re going to say something like that in an email, you’d better at least answer your phone.”

  He looked at the call log, embarrassed. “I was just asleep. This new one doesn’t vibrate very loudly, I didn’t hear it.”

  She leaned with her face against his chest, cuddled up, her body relaxing. He liked the way it felt to hold her close and comfort her. Like when he used to comfort Tyrrell or one of the other littles.

  He stroked Kenzie’s hair, thinking back to before he had awakened. “I was having a dream. About Vinny.”

  “Vinny?” She
didn’t look up at him and her voice was muffled against his body.

  “One of my little brothers. Younger than T. I was dreaming about him right before I woke up.”

  “Yeah? A good dream or a bad one?”

  “Good.” He held her, rocking slightly. “Except for when he started pinching me.”

  Kenzie laughed. “Sorry about that. You were hard to wake up. I was worried that you had overdosed, I didn’t know whether to keep trying to wake you up or to call for an ambulance.”

  “I didn’t overdose. I took one pill. I just didn’t want to wake up from that dream.”

  “Okay.”

  He shifted so that they could both lie down together, pulling her legs up onto the bed and spooning against her. Kenzie sighed, warm and soft in his arms. He kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry for scaring you. I never meant to do that.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not like you said ‘this is the end’ or ‘if you’re reading this I must be dead.’ It just hit me the wrong way, with the trouble you’ve been having lately… when you said ‘thank you for always supporting me,’ I just immediately thought it was goodbye. It’s not your fault.”

  “Still. I’m sorry. Next time I’ll say ‘thank you and I’m not going to kill myself.’”

  “Yeah, that would be better,” she agreed, her body shaking slightly with a silent laugh.

  Zachary fell back asleep holding her.

  In the morning, he was awake early, like he used to be, and didn’t know what to do with himself. He wasn’t sure whether he should try to get more sleep, because he’d been sleeping so much recently, or whether he should get up and attack his day, assuming that he was finished sleeping and ready for the day.

  What would it be like to have a body that only slept when he needed to sleep and woke up when he’d had enough sleep, instead of trying to analyze it and force his body into some kind of reasonable facsimile of a circadian rhythm? He tossed and turned for a while, but then decided he didn’t want to keep Kenzie awake and got out of bed.

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” Kenzie murmured.

  “It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”

  There was no response. She was probably already fast asleep again. Zachary went to his computer and checked his email, again feeling guilty as he deleted Kenzie’s increasingly frantic replies to his email. He never would have guessed in a million years that she would misinterpret his intent and panic over something like that. Communication and relationships were complex systems. Miss one signal, and it could throw everything off the rails.

  He was glad that Kenzie had just come over and had not panicked and called the police or stayed awake all night worrying about him. And he was glad she had been able to get to sleep after she had found out that he was okay. They would both laugh about it again when she got up. It was a work day, so she wouldn’t be in bed too late. But it was still too early for decent people to be out of bed.

  He checked social networks and his business emails, routing and sorting what had come in overnight.

  There was an email from Heather telling him to call her.

  If he hadn’t gone to sleep so early, he would have been able to connect with her the night before, and wouldn’t have to wait for an answer. But he couldn’t call her back so early in the morning and would have to wait until the sun was up and the birds were chirping before calling to see if she had changed her mind about finding the baby.

  18

  Eventually, he heard Kenzie stirring. When she got up to use the bathroom, he put the coffee on and checked the cupboards and fridge to see if he had any breakfast foods that might appeal to her. There were some bagels in the freezer, so he took a couple of them out and put them in the toaster oven. She had a quick shower, and then was out, had changed into a spare set of clothes that she kept at his apartment, and joined him in the kitchen.

  “Sorry about busting in on you last night.”

  “No, it’s okay. If something had happened, then I would want you to be able to get in.” He paused, thinking about what he had just said. What he meant was if some accident befell him. He would want to know that Kenzie was able to get in. But he would not want her coming to the apartment and discovering his body if he intentionally overdosed. It wasn’t something he had ever thought about before, and it made him stop buttering the bagels to consider it for a moment. “If something happened to me, I mean,” he said. “Not if I…”

  “If you intentionally overdosed. Or did something else. That’s probably something you should think about, Zachary, because I’m the one who is going to have to deal with it if you do something like that.”

  Zachary shook his head and resumed buttering the bagels. “I’m not going to do anything. I’m not suicidal right now. You don’t need to worry about it.”

  “I always worry about it. Just because you’re feeling good right now, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to have a setback next week. I’m always watching you for signs. Hoping that you’d tell me if you started to feel worse. Worrying because you won’t talk about what happened with Archuro. And even when you’re acting cheerful, I worry that it’s that last little energy boost people get when they’ve made the decision to kill themselves.”

  “I’ve never understood that,” Zachary confessed. “I never had that.”

  She took the bagel that he had buttered and put it on a plate, and then the plate on the table. She got a jar of jam out of the fridge. “Have you ever actually…” she stopped, mouth closing, unable to go on. She looked at the bagel he was buttering, then looked at his face. “Of course you have. I’ve seen the scars on your arms. You’re telling me that when you made that decision, you didn’t get a mood elevation?”

  “Nope. I’ve heard that it can be one of the red flags. If you know someone who is depressed and they have an abrupt mood change for the better, that it might actually be an indicator that they are going to make an attempt. But I never had that. I felt kind of ripped off about that.”

  “That you didn’t feel better?”

  “Yeah. They say you’ll feel better after you make that choice, so that’s what you think. But for me, it never happened.”

  “Huh. Then maybe I can stop worrying when your mood picks up.”

  He nodded his agreement. He’d never realized before that she worried when he started to feel better. She must feel like she was on tenterhooks all the time. He sat down at the table with her and the second bagel. He watched her eat hers, not really hungry. She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He took a small bite of the bagel.

  “So, what are your plans for the day?” Kenzie asked.

  Zachary looked at his watch. “After you go, I’m going to give Heather a call. She emailed me last night to call her back, but I figured it was too early to call her yet. I don’t want to wake her up.”

  “You’re probably right. She should be up any time now. Though she doesn’t work, so who knows what kind of a schedule she keeps.”

  “Do you know what she’s calling about? Did she say if she thought of something? Remembered a name or another clue?”

  “No. Probably not. I want her to have changed her mind about tracing the baby, because I think that’s the one thing that could really help. But she really didn’t want to the other night. I don’t know if that’s just because she was afraid and it was too sudden…”

  Kenzie nodded and sipped her coffee. “Let me know how it goes. I’m interested in if she’ll go for it. I don’t know of any cases where they’ve done that kind of DNA matching for a criminal case.”

  Zachary leaned toward her. “They have, actually. I’ve been doing a bunch of research so that I’ll be ready if she decides to go ahead, and there are a number of cases where a DNA search has pulled up familial matches, and they’ve been able to use it as a starting point to identify suspects and build a case. They still need a direct DNA match eventually, but it’s a lot easier if you just have one or two suspects to follow around and retrieve their used coffee cups or cigarett
e butts to make a match. Then once you know you’ve got the guy, you can start building a case.”

  “They’ve used familial matches?”

  “Sure,” Zachary nodded vigorously. “They do a search on CODIS and find out that they’ve got the guy’s brother in prison. Or there have even been cases where they have used GENEmatch, a public database, to find several relatives of the perp, and then have used genealogical research to find out the relationships between those people to find out who is related to all of them.”

  Kenzie pursed her lips, thinking about it. “That’s pretty smart.”

  “Yeah. The technology is really amazing.”

  “I knew DNA profiling was maturing, but I really had no idea we were to that point.”

  When Kenzie headed off to work, Zachary sat down with his computer notes in front of him and dialed Heather’s number. He was worried that he would wake her up or that there would be no answer, but in a few rings, she picked up.

  “Hi, Zachary.”

  “I got your email. You wanted to talk about something?”

  “I just wanted to thank you for all of your work on this case. I’m sorry that there wasn’t enough evidence to lead anywhere…”

  Zachary immediately heard Kenzie’s ‘thank you and goodbye,’ and understood why she had been so worried about his email. It did sound like a terminal statement.

  “You’re welcome. I’m not done, though. I can still canvass the neighborhood, try to make contact with the policeman who initially investigated it, maybe even call your old foster parents to see if they have any insight—”

  “No.”

  “No?” Zachary echoed back, even though he had understood her statement perfectly.

  “No. You can’t contact the Astors. I don’t want you to talk to them.”

  “They might have a recollection of other assaults that could be related, there might have been certain men they were suspicious of, but there was never any evidence to go on so it didn’t make it to the police file… they might not have said anything to you because they didn’t want to upset you.”