The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  “Oh my God, Ellie, you’re here, you’re safe,” she said, her voice ragged. “I was so worried you were there with the rest of them.” I could smell cigarette smoke on her, thick and pungent, and that was enough to tell me how worried she must have been, since she’d quit three years ago. She must have hidden a pack somewhere secret, in preparation for some horrible event she couldn’t foresee but knew would come one day. That was how my mom thought. Always the planner.

  I hugged her back and kissed her wet cheek, saying, “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m safe.”

  My mom isn’t usually the crying sort, and to see her like that cracked my eyes open a little, allowing some of my own tears to surface. The floodgates wouldn’t open until a few moments later, though, after I’d assured her that I was a real, live person and able to get out of the car on my own to stand in front of her. The floodgates didn’t open until she started to calm down, and I asked what she’d meant when she’d said the rest of them.

  Mom looked shocked by that, and for a long moment afterward, she searched my face, as if trying to find something.

  Eventually, she said, “Your father. I have to let him know you’re okay.”

  Mom took hold of my hand then and pulled me behind her onto the porch and into the house, as if I were a five-year-old she refused to lose in a crowded mall, leaving the car door open behind us. She wasn’t thinking straight. Or, actually, she was thinking with extreme focus. And because of that, ordinary things like leaving car doors open, the alarm dinging behind us, were outside of her concern.

  In the kitchen, she took our old landline phone and started punching in numbers, then turned to look at me over her shoulder to say, “I’m so glad we kept this phone. Cell service isn’t working.” A few rings later, her face lit up and she said, “Yes, Gus, this is Patty Frame.” Gus manned the emergency lines at the power company my dad worked for. “Can you get in touch with Dan for me? I mean, right now? Tell him I have her. Tell him Ellie’s here with me. She’s safe, Gus. She’s home now.”

  While they were talking, I heard the sound of a basketball smacking against a floor or a wall, and looked out our kitchen window toward the Barlows’ house next door, where their son, Timothy, stood on their back deck, dribbling his basketball as if nothing very big in the world had changed around him. He was fifteen, a sophomore at my school. So he’s safe, too, I thought, and I was glad for him and his family that he’d stayed home from school for some reason.

  “Thank you,” Mom said again as she wrapped up her call with Gus. Then she hung up the phone and turned to me, sighing with relief, her whole body seeming to sag a little, like she was deflating. “Gus will be able to get your dad on the radio,” she said. “Your father is an absolute wreck. Where were you, Ellie?” she asked. “Why weren’t you at school?”

  This was a question I’d started to think about, but just barely. The clock on that thought had started at the lighthouse, when I’d begun to realize that what I had seen might be even worse than I could imagine. And then Mom had said—

  “What did you mean when you said you worried I was with ‘the rest of them’?” I asked again.

  “Ellie, honey,” Mom said slowly, looking just past my head in the direction of downtown, “it’s about your school.”

  I stood there, blinking, feeling my lips begin to tremble as she continued to talk.

  “Something happened there during the storm. Some kind of…explosion. There are reports that half of downtown was destroyed. Your father is there right now. He went to look for you, to find out more.” She paused for a moment then, and I thought again about what I’d seen from the lighthouse earlier. The flash of bright light in the distance, coming from the direction of downtown.

  I blinked some more, lifting my face to meet her red-rimmed eyes, after which I immediately broke down sobbing. I couldn’t look at my mom and not do that. We looked alike, people always said, and I could see it. We had the same high cheekbones, the same ash-blond hair, the same blue eyes. So, sometimes, when I looked at her, I imagined I was looking into a mirror, only the person on the other side of the silver didn’t know exactly how I was feeling. It was me but not me at the same time.

  Mom pulled me to her and rocked me slowly while I tried to tell her through my tears what had happened. It was hard to put into words, though. “A fight,” I said, forcing my tongue and lips to shape the words. “A stupid fight,” I told her, wiping my cheeks and eyes as I began to explain how I’d left school that morning and gone to the lighthouse. Began to explain how I’d seen it all happen from there, or at least what happened to the downtown. Began to explain how I’d seen something that looked like the top half of a silo fly at the school, and then the flash of bright light, the aftershocks that followed. I’d almost forgotten all of it after I’d hit my head on the stone floor, only to come to later, hoping that it had all been a nightmare.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “A gas tanker.” She said the words soft, whisper-thin, in my ear as she held me, rocking us back and forth together in the kitchen. “I think it was a gas tanker you saw hit the school. I’m not sure. The news on the scanner is so scattered.”

  I couldn’t hold any of it in my mind. Everything she said was like sand falling through the sieve of my fingers. And the thing I wanted to know most, the question still lodged inside me, I couldn’t ask. Because if I did, I might not be able to handle the answer.

  When I eventually pulled away, my mom kept hold of my forearms, like I might disappear at any moment in a puff of smoke, like I was no more than a ghost that had wandered back to see her one last time before exiting the world forever, and she was going to do whatever she could to keep me here on earth with her. And right then, feeling the weight of her, was when I found the strength—or maybe the stupidity—to ask what I wanted to know.

  “What about—” I said.

  I stopped then, looked down at my shoulder, biting my bottom lip, unable to finish the question after all.

  “Noah?” Mom finished for me.

  I turned back to her, still biting my lip, and nodded.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said, frowning, shaking her head. “I haven’t heard anything. I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”

  * * *

  My dad came home half an hour later. It would have been sooner, but he had to navigate the blocked roads as well, making what should have been a ten-minute drive three times longer. Mom was in the kitchen, trying to call people from the landline, hoping to reach anyone, hoping to find out something, but each call went unanswered. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, trying to make my phone browser tell me something beyond the fact that there wasn’t any service, when Dad came through the front door. I looked up from my phone and, without saying anything, he walked over to the couch with his arms held out, motioning for me to come hug him.

  I stood to let him pull me into his chest, where his arms tightened around my shoulders. He was wearing an Ohio Edison polo shirt and khakis as if he were at work, which he would have been if he hadn’t gone off in search of me. The company had let him go down to the school to find out what he could. Now here he was, his big arms holding me, him kissing the top of my head like I was still a little girl.

  “Where were you, Ellie?” he said after he was finally assured I was real. His eyes were glassy from holding back tears. “Why weren’t you at school with everyone else?”

  There it was. Not the same words my mom used, but close. Everyone else. Why? Why wasn’t I there like I was supposed to be? Each time they asked, I couldn’t help but feel guilty, like I’d done something wrong. I’d cut classes. I’d run off because I was jealous of my boyfriend being nice to a lonely, awkward girl who just needed a friend.

  “The lighthouse,” Mom answered for me, after she saw my lips squirming to form words.

  “What were you doing there?” Dad asked, wi
ncing in disbelief.

  Mom met his eyes and shook her head in that not right now way, though, and said we should probably just wait to talk about all of that later.

  Dad took her cue and danced away from the subject, kissing the top of my head once more instead. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of that matters. Whatever the reason, I’m glad for it. I’m glad you weren’t at school today, sweetheart. The place is an absolute disaster.”

  I choked up then, put my hand to my mouth, trying to hold in a sob. So the vague things Mom had heard on the scanner and the flash of light I’d seen from the lighthouse really did mean the downtown—and the school—had been destroyed.

  “Dan,” Mom said.

  But I didn’t hold his saying that against him. Mom had already gone through all of this with me, so she understood where the landmines I wanted to avoid were planted. Coming over to take me out of his arms and into hers, she sat me back on the couch beside her and ran her fingers through my hair, saying, “Shh, baby. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

  * * *

  But everything wasn’t okay. Not even close. In the evening hours, after my dad left us to go back to work, numbers began to trickle in. They screeched across the scanner my mom held to her chest like a baby while we sat next to each other on the couch, fidgeting, clasping our sweaty hands together every now and then, listening to the news of things I didn’t quite want to understand. News of life and death. How many of us were gone. How many of us were missing. How many were injured, but still with us. We listened to the squelching scanner for what seemed like unending hours, taking breaks to boil water after an alert over the scanner advised it, and the numbers of the dead just kept growing.

  Twenty-three confirmed in the first twenty-four hours, though no names were announced. Those wouldn’t come until days later, after families were notified, identities confirmed. And there were more tornadoes than they originally thought, not just the three I’d seen overtake downtown. Twisters had touched down in other places, too, burning trails of destruction through large parts of the tricounty area. During the second day after the outbreak, when the electricity was restored, we watched footage of the wreckage on the TV in our living room: streets where all of the houses had been obliterated beneath the gales, twisted lampposts, a roller rink that was now a hole in the ground, a cemetery where headstones and statues had been sucked out of the earth and spit back again, some landing more than a mile away, the wings of stone angels shattered. And no matter what reporters said throughout the footage, no matter how many survivors were interviewed, declaring their survival to be a miracle, I couldn’t help but think, What about Noah? What about my friends? Where are they? Where is their miracle?

  Because if I could have known that any one of them was still alive, I might have been able to breathe easier. If just one of them could have returned the texts I’d tried to send after I got home safely, I might have given belief in miracles a shot.

  Instead, my phone remained silent, a dead thing I kept looking at, hoping it would suddenly spring to life.

  And instead of relief, the numbers of the dead just kept rising.

  Day two after the outbreak: sixty-five. Plus confirmation of the gas tanker having been the source of the school explosion.

  Day three after the outbreak: ninety.

  I kept thinking of how there were only two thousand people in all of Newfoundland.

  And still no texts were coming. Cell phone towers were down, and what capacity had been restored was still too congested. Too many people trying to use it all at once. Trying to call loved ones they knew outside of the area, to reassure them that they were fine. People trying to call into the area, to check on loved ones after they’d heard about the outbreak on the national news. And all the while, the texts I tried to send out all hovered at the top of my phone screen, uncompleted, suspended like that for what seemed like would be forever.

  I told Mom I wanted to go down to the school, to see it for myself, to help look for people, even. “I can’t stand just sitting here, doing nothing.”

  She wouldn’t let me, though. “People have been told to stay home,” she said. “It’s too dangerous for anyone other than emergency crews to be out, Ellie.”

  And then, out of nowhere, late into the fourth night after the outbreak, after Mom and Dad had gone to bed, my phone vibrated back to life on my nightstand. I almost screamed, but what came out was something more like the hiss of a boiling teakettle. I stared at the phone for a minute, not believing it had done anything, and then when it vibrated again, I picked it up cautiously, turned it over, and began to read the messages that were finally coming through.

  Messages from friends at school. Messages from people asking if I knew about all sorts of people who were still missing. People asking if I knew anything about Noah. (I didn’t, and I hadn’t been able to reach his parents when the cell connections were lost.) People asking if I knew anything about Becca. If I’d heard any word on Adrienne. If I’d heard anything about Rose.

  Nothing. I knew nothing. And it was all I could do when I returned the well-intentioned, sometimes frantic texts of other survivors, hoping to trade information.

  No, I said, I haven’t heard from any of them. And I can’t reach their parents. Do you know anything?

  To which I received answers that were the sorts of things I didn’t want to know.

  Things like:

  Oh. I thought you’d know. I was in the choir room when it happened. Other side of the school. We were safe there.

  Or:

  I thought for sure you’d know if anyone did. A bunch of us have been wondering.

  And this, the absolute worst of them:

  Everyone assumed you were with them. That’s why everyone’s asking, Ellie.

  To which I tried to respond, Noah and I had a fight that morning.

  In the end, though, I couldn’t. I deleted those words, didn’t respond to that last one at all. Decided I couldn’t let anyone know that was why I wasn’t there with them. The others. My best friends and my boyfriend. Instead, I looked up from the glowing screen of my phone into the dark of my room, where I’d tried to go to sleep hours ago, only to fail. I sat there with my knees pulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped around them, and tried not to think or feel anything about the messages that had started to find me in the middle of the night.

  I knew what all of this meant, on some level. I just couldn’t let myself accept it in the moment.

  Later, though, I wouldn’t be able to ignore what the messages meant collectively. I wouldn’t be able to ignore the fact that, out of all of the texts I received, including the five my frantic mother had sent during the outbreak itself, none of them had come from Noah, Becca, Adrienne, or Rose. None were from the rest of them. The people I wasn’t with on the afternoon of the outbreak.

  * * *

  In the days that followed, the names of the dead eventually began to circulate. Through phone calls and text messages and news report upon updated news report. Through Facebook and Twitter and any other kind of platform. The list of the dead was long, and it was ever growing. Already I’d seen the names of two of my teachers, Ms. Carlson, who taught Spanish, and Mr. Emory, who taught world history. Ms. Carlson was only twenty-five—less than ten years older than me. Fresh out of college. A fiancé waiting to marry her next year. And Mr. Emory had just become a grandparent for the first time recently. He had a gazillion pictures of his grandchild, a baby boy his son and daughter-in-law had named Zachary, after him. They scrolled across his laptop screen whenever the computer fell asleep.

  There were others from school, and I knew them all, even if I wasn’t necessarily close to all of them. A janitor. A school secretary. A teacher’s aide, Mrs. Melvin, who volunteered as a calculus tutor. And classmates, too. Seniors and juniors. Most had been in the wing of the school the tanker had s
truck, leveling it like a bomb that had been dropped from the sky. All people I’d known since I was a child, my entire life.

  With each addition to the list of the dead, a piece of something inside me seemed to wither and die, like a flower on a frost-stricken vine.

  And still I waited, not calling Noah’s parents, not calling the parents of any of my friends. Because as the hours and the days passed, I was afraid to find out what had happened to them. I was desperately trying not to accept what was most likely the truth.

  But a person can only hide from the truth for so long, especially when everyone around her is trying to uncover it. And so it was on the sixth day after the outbreak that I saw their names on a website that had been set up to report on the status of people who were still unaccounted for. I’d been refreshing the page every hour, hoping that Noah and my friends would remain on the list of the missing. It was better if they were still missing, I thought. Because if they were still missing, they weren’t dead and gone.

  When I pulled up the web page on the sixth day, though, that’s when I had to give up any hope I’d been clinging to. That’s when I saw their names:

  Noah Cady.

  Rebecca Hendrix.

  Adrienne Long.

  Rose Sano.