Good and Gone

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Maybe not permanently. But for a week or two? Not so bad.” He checks his phone. “Left up here and then a right.”

  The houses on this street seem even bigger, clad in weathered gray shingles, with circular driveways to show off all their cars. We’ve barely gone down the street when we see the line of cars and news vans. There’s a cluster of people outside one house with an iron gate and a driveway of crushed stone. Charlie pulls the car over to the side of the road.

  “I’m guessing he’s not here,” I say.

  We get out of the car anyway and walk down the street to the crowd. There’s a police officer by the gate trying to look stern. He’s got the aviator sunglasses on and a thin little moustache, which I think makes him look more silly than imposing.

  A news reporter is filming a segment. “We’re here outside of the childhood home of rock musician Adrian Wildes. Wildes disappeared yesterday, wandering away from his tour bus. He has not been heard from since.”

  She is wearing a little black skirt and a shimmering red low-cut sweater. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, no frizz at all. I hate her. I hate her and her typical mix of sex kitten and innocent, wide-eyed, wowie-isn’t-it-sad-that-this-douchebag-is-gone attitude. I mean it’s like she came from the local news anchor factory: perfect and perky and just sympathetic enough, but not, like, overly emotional—she feels your pain and she’ll be there in your moment of trouble.

  “The bus was en route to Hartford from Philadelphia, and had taken a side trip so that Wildes could photograph a river that had flooded its banks after excessive rain.” She pauses to adjust her own umbrella.

  Hannah once confessed that she would like to work on the news. Maybe as a weatherperson since she liked science. Gwen and I had stifled our giggles. “What?” Hannah asked. “It’s just so random,” Gwen told her. “But I’d bet you’d be really good at it.” And she probably would be, with her yellow hair and big eyes. If a storm was coming, she’d let you know just how bad it was going to be, and you would trust her. Trusting Hannah, though, is a mistake.

  The reporter goes on: “His family has issued a statement that they appreciate the outpouring of support and that they hope his fans’ prayers will be answered and that he will return home soon. This is Allie McMaster in Narragansett.”

  She drops her microphone to her side and the cameraman lowers the camera. “Good,” he says.

  “This story is shit,” she replies.

  My thoughts exactly. Shit story about a shitty musician who should probably just stay lost.

  “He’s probably high in some hotel room with some groupie,” she goes on.

  “You’d like to be that groupie, I’d bet, Allie,” the cameraman tells her.

  “Up yours,” she says. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from her bag and lights one, dragging deep. “You know, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a war reporter. I mean, like, really little. I saw all that shit about people embedded in Iraq, and I was like, ‘That is for me.’” I can’t stop listening to her, this woman under the shell. “So I go to journalism school—and I went to a good school—and all along I’m like, ‘Foreign correspondent, foreign correspondent.’ And my professors would smile and say, ‘But you’ve got just the right presence for an anchor. Go for it. Go for it. Admit that’s what you want. Everyone wants to be an anchor and you actually have the face for it.’ And I’d be like, ‘F you telling me what I want. Because I’m pretty I can’t do serious work?’” Her voice is at a lower register now and she gestures widely as she speaks.

  “Honestly, Allie, I didn’t mean to open this can.”

  She picks at a stray bit of tobacco on her tongue. “Well, you did, and now I’ve started, so shut it.” She sighs. “Whatever, my story’s over. Here I am. Not even an anchor, covering some crappy story that isn’t even a story. In Narragansett. I work in freaking Narragansett. Breaking news, there was graffiti on a stop sign. We interrupt this program to tell you that the tree lighting ceremony will begin at six forty-five rather than six thirty. I might as well go work for Inside Edition.”

  “You won’t be here forever, Allie,” the cameraman says.

  She sighs again. “Let’s get some color commentary.” She looks past him right at me and says, “You.”

  “Yes?” I ask.

  She puts on the fake smile and says, “How’d you like to be on TV?”

  I shake my head.

  “Come on, hon, everyone wants to be on television.”

  I almost say, Who are you to tell me what I want? But I don’t. I look over my shoulder at Zack and Charlie. “My brother and my friend,” I say. “It was their idea—”

  “Sure, you can all be on. No problem.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant, I—”

  “Boys,” she trills. “Come on over here. I just want to do a quick little interview.”

  The guys come over, and she introduces herself. “Allie McMaster. Channel Eight News. I’m covering the Adrian Wildes disappearance and I’d love to get your opinion on it.” She draws out the word “love.” She’s wasting her time if she thinks flirting with these two will get her anywhere. Charlie’s too wrapped up in Penelope, and Zack’s, well, you know.

  She sets us up in front of the fence, me in the middle with the boys on either side. She stands next to us at a funny angle, then nods at the cameraman. “I’m here at the home of Adrian Wildes. With me are three of his biggest fans.” I grimace; she goes on. “Where were you when you heard about the disappearance of Adrian Wildes?”

  “At home,” Charlie says. “In New Hampshire.”

  She makes her eyes wide, but surprise is as hard to fake as a real smile. “You came all the way from New Hampshire?”

  The interview is full of these banalities. Favorite song. Ever seen him in concert. I imagine people watching us on television back home, even though this is a local station. We’re like semi-famous. I grin and then it occurs to me that people could see it online or something, and then I think of Seth seeing me here like some crazy fangirl.

  The reporter’s cigarette has smudged her lipstick. I know she is disgusted with us. I want to tell her: this is not me. But I am here, aren’t I?

  “And you, Lexi, where do you think Adrian is?”

  I don’t have time to think, only speak. The microphone is practically touching my lips and I can hear Charlie breathing next to me his low wheeze of a breath. “Someplace no one will find him,” I say. “I think he’s gone.”

  BEFORE

  September

  The first weekend after the pool party, Seth took me to the beach. Summer was holding on and the ocean was a cool, dark blue. The wind blew off the water and filled our noses with the salt air. “I think I’d like to live on an island someday,” I told him. “Not a terribly small island with only one house or anything like that. But like a little island town that you have to take a ferry to get to.”

  “Me, too,” he agreed. “And definitely a bigger island.”

  “When I was little I read this book about a girl who had to take care of a lighthouse. Abbie was her name. Her dad was the lighthouse keeper and he went to the mainland and then this big storm blew up and she had to save her mom and sisters. She watched over this lighthouse for weeks and kept the light burning.” Our teacher had read it to us, and then Gwen and I had read it over and over and acted it out, only in our version we were twins and we took care of the lighthouse together. We’d stand on top of the climbing structure at recess and pretend to be lighting the lamp. We’d call out to other kids to look out for the shore.

  “I think I read that, too.”

  “I loved it, but I’m definitely not interested in waiting out storms on a small island. Like, I’m not sure I’m that hardy.”

  “Small islands are creepy,” Seth said. “My family did this weird overnight, like, commune thing on Isles of Shoals. Appledore, I think. I kept sneaking off and looking at the rocks and after three days I felt like I had been shipwrecked and that no one was ever going to save me. The o
nly thing that kept me going was that I heard that Blackbeard had buried his treasure there.”

  I’d heard this story, too. Blackbeard visited the islands off our New Hampshire coast frequently, it was said. Once he was about to be captured, and so he slipped away. He left behind his wife who wandered the island saying, “He will come again.” After her death, her ghost was supposed to continue the cry. “Did you see the ghost of Blackbeard’s wife?” I asked Seth.

  But before he could answer, there was a sudden hush and then a panic. A little girl was caught in the current and couldn’t make her way back to shore. There was this whole dramatic rescue, and I found myself clinging to Seth’s hand while the lifeguard swam out with her red tube and then dragged the girl back to the beach. Another lifeguard gave the girl mouth-to-mouth while the first sat panting, her head on her knees.

  I wondered what it would be like to save someone. To have them be gone, but then to bring them back.

  It wasn’t long before the news crews showed up, and soon everyone was an expert. There were people jumping up to be interviewed who hadn’t even been there. “It was so scary,” they gushed to the camera. “My heart was beating a mile a minute.” People walking by in the background jumped up and down and waved, calling on their cell phones to the people back home.

  “So stupid,” Seth said.

  “So stupid,” I agreed.

  “They should actually do something to get recognized themselves, not jump in on someone else’s story.”

  “Right,” I said. “Totally.”

  “I almost drowned once, you know.”

  I turned to him, eyes wide, imagining his skin pale, his eyes with dark circles, the way the girl’s were. I tried to imagine his mother, never without her heels and hoop earrings, running to his side and folding his wet body into her arms. “You did?”

  “It was up at Lake Winnipesaukee when I was like nine. We went out on my dad’s friend’s speedboat and I went tubing and the thing flipped over but I was, like, stuck to it and no one noticed right away. They thought I was messing with them. So then they stopped the boat and they had to fish me out.”

  I could feel the water pounding against my face, my ears, my body bouncing behind the speed boat, the whole world black. My heart ricocheted and I ached as if I’d actually lost him. “What did it feel like?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno.” He threw his arm over my shoulders, bare except for my skinny bathing suit straps. “Kind of crazy. I was totally dizzy when they pulled me out and my nose felt like someone had driven a turbo jet up one nostril and out the other. You should have seen the snot rockets.”

  “Gross,” I said, and pushed him away.

  NOW

  In the car again. It’s Zack’s turn to drive. I’m not sure how they’ve worked out the schedule, or if it’s just an unspoken thing. The one thing that’s clear is that I get the stinky, stuffy back seat. Always.

  We’re driving on Route 1, still in Rhode Island, which seems impossible given that it’s barely even a speck of a state. The road veers up to and away from the ocean so that sometimes there’s just trees and then all of a sudden this big, blue-gray swath of seawater so vast it seems it has no end.

  I don’t really know what the plan is and the guys aren’t talking. Charlie is mad about the way I acted with the reporter, what I said about Adrian being gone, and maybe Zack is, too. I can feel the anger coming off my brother in waves. When we were little and he’d get like this I knew to steer clear, but where can I go when we are trapped in this tiny little car?

  Burlington is in the total opposite direction, so I know that’s not our destination. If we keep going this way, we could be headed toward New York City. Suddenly that idea seems more frightening than exciting. How will I keep track of Charlie in a city that big? Anyway, the sun is already setting and New York must be hours away.

  I contemplate the likelihood that Seth will actually see the news story. I guess it’s possible that the story could get picked up nationally, but, then, it’s not much of a story. I wipe away the fog on the window. There’s nothing to see outside anyway. Just gray highway. Everyone always makes road trips sound like these super-glamorous funfests: top down convertibles, driving along the coast. But this is nothing like that. The car is small and rumbles funnily and it smells awful. Underneath the fast food and the menthol cough drops, it smells like wet dog.

  Zack turns on the radio and someone is playing the guitar. It isn’t until Adrian Wildes starts singing that I recognize the song. It’s an acoustic version of my absolute least favorite song of his: “Lexi.” It isn’t just because the girl in the song has the same name as me—which does suck, by the way. Ever since it came out, when I tell people my name, they say “Oh, like the song?” But worse than that is the girl is so pathetic. She’s all sad and damaged, and that seems to be the reason he loves her.

  I reach between the two front seats and snap the radio off with such force that Zack says, “Hey now, watch the knob. That is one fine piece of car stereo equipment and I wouldn’t want you to break it.”

  “It’s a crappy song.”

  Charlie sighs or groans or otherwise registers his complete disgust with me through a heaving noise.

  “It is,” I say. “One of a long line.”

  “You don’t like Adrian Wildes anymore,” Charlie says. “We get it. Seth totally ruined him for you.”

  “Actually, now I’m talking about a whole genre of songs. The Damaged Girl song. She’s so crazy, sexy, sad, and lovely, and he just can’t help but love her.”

  “I’m not sure that qualifies as a genre,” Charlie says. “More like a trope.”

  “Whatever, dropout. It’s like those movies, too. These girls are so messed up and the guys act like it’s the best thing ever. If your life is in a rut, she shakes it up. If you’re depressed, she’ll snap you out of it.”

  Zack glances at me in the rearview mirror, but keeps silent.

  “The thing of it is, if an actual girl—not a song girl, but an actual girl—has actual problems, and she talks about them, the actual guy flips out. It’s like, ‘Oh, this is getting a little heavy,’ and he’s gone.”

  “Ah,” Charlie says.

  “What?” I demand.

  “We’re not talking about song girls. We’re talking about you and Seth. Again.”

  “Screw you,” I tell him.

  “What are those problems you have?” Charlie asks. I can’t see his face, but I’m sure he’s sneering. “What’s the litany of troubles that ails you? Aside from Seth, I mean, because it would seem that he wasn’t a problem until you started talking about all those other woes that plague you.”

  “Screw you,” I say again. I look out the window at the skinny pines that seem to stretch out for miles. Charlie is the king of sorrows, I guess. No one else could possibly have troubles, not compared to him. But he doesn’t know my problems. He doesn’t know problems period. So Penelope dumped him. Big whoop. It’s nothing compared to what Seth—what happened between me and Seth.

  “It’s a hero thing,” Zack says.

  “What?” Charlie asks.

  “The songs—those girls. You think you can save her. You want to save her. And in a song you can.”

  “So you’re saying it’s a big fairy tale for everyone?” I ask. “The crazy girls and the loser guys get to live out this alternate reality?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Though maybe not in such a negative way.”

  I tap my finger on top of the lock for the door. “Either way, I still think it’s stupid.”

  “Of course you do,” Charlie says.

  When Seth and I first broke up, I used to check my phone all the time. It was gross, really. I disgusted myself and everyone around me. Not that there was anyone around. Gwen was gone. And Hannah, of course. Charlie was still at college then. Seth’s friends went with him. So I only had myself to disgust, but I disgusted myself plenty.

  And now it’s like a habit. I remember that I have a phone—that it exi
sts at all—and I have to check it. So when I see the man in the car next to us holding his phone in one hand and trying to steer with his elbow since he has a soda in the other, I think of my phone. I mean, first I think, What a douche, but then I think of my phone.

  I’m trying to break the habit, so I don’t take the phone out right away. Instead I count one, two, three in my head, trying to get all the way to seventeen. I count to seventeen seventeen times.

  I’m up to my thirteenth time when Zack says, “Aw crap,” and then starts shifting over to the right lane. He takes the next exit all the while muttering, “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.”

  “What?” I finally ask.

  “Oil can, oil can,” he says, and I guess he’s trying to sound like the Tin Man, but he really sounds like a robot in a sci-fi movie with bad special effects.

  Once we are off the exit, he pulls into the parking lot of an office building.

  Every single person coming in or out of that building is holding a phone.

  Zack gets out of the car, pops the hood, and heads around to the trunk. “Miss Ruka leaks oil. We’ve gone a long way without giving her a top off.”

  “Move it, Charlie,” I tell him.

  “Why?”

  “So I can get out.”

  “Why?” he asks again.

  “To stretch my legs. To make a break for it. To rob this building full of office peons. What do you care?”

  “I care because it inconveniences me.”

  I roll my eyes and don’t say anything, but instead crawl in between the front seats and out through the driver-side door. Then I flip Charlie the bird.

  A woman is standing in a little courtyard pacing while she talks on her phone, which is about the last straw for me. I pull out my phone and notice two things: I am at 25 percent battery and I have seven new voicemail messages, all of them from my mom.

  “Calling the parentals,” I announce.

  Charlie doesn’t respond.

  “I don’t understand.” Mom’s voice wavers up and down and I know she is trying to control it. She is trying to sound like the professor she is, perhaps trying to get one of her lazy-ass students to clarify a point. “You went to search for who?”