If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  This article didn’t provide a ton of new information, but it jogged Roger’s memory about the place the Camaro had been abandoned. He remembered driving by with his mom a while later and seeing it rigged up to a tow truck just before the exit to the mall, which meant that wherever Andy had gone, he’d most likely gone on foot after leaving the car.

  Roger looked at the clock in the top right hand corner of his computer: 5:13 am. His wife and daughters would still be asleep for at least an hour. Without thinking, he rushed to the front hall and pulled a heavy coat off the hanger, shoving his feet into the tennis shoes he always left in the closet for working in the yard. It didn’t matter what he was wearing—no one would see him at this hour. He slipped out into the garage and hit the button to lift the door so he could pull his car out into the snowy street. He’d be at the hospital in under ten minutes.

  Daniel’s room was illuminated by a small light over the counter by the door. He lay in his bed—as always—with the white sheet and blanket pulled up to his shoulders. He hadn’t woken up again in the days since Christmas Eve.

  Roger entered the room. His winter coat made a slight swishing sound as he walked across the room and stopped next to his friend.

  “Hey, buddy.” He put a cold hand on Daniel’s forearm. His own skin was a raw red from being outside, but Daniel didn’t even flinch at his icy touch.

  “I’ve been thinking about Andy,” he whispered. Roger glanced around the room like he might wake a sleeping baby, but he knew his only hope was that Daniel could somehow hear what he was saying from whatever plane he was currently inhabiting. “Remember the night we went looking for him? Prom night?”

  Daniel was completely still. Roger looked down at him, watching his unmoving features. Of course he wasn’t going to answer any questions, this wasn’t a “Blink once for yes” type of situation. All Roger could do was talk and assume that maybe Daniel would hear him.

  “Remember how we walked and walked and never found him?” Roger paused here, knowing that Andy had been found, just too late. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot since I came here to see you, and…I don’t know.” Roger took a step back from the bed and ran both hands through his sleep-mussed red hair. He turned his back on Daniel and walked over to the window in his gray sweatpants and puffy blue jacket. He stared at the sky and out at the buildings beyond, wondering whether this whole train of thought was just one more indication that he was slowly losing his mind in middle-age. His hands were still on his head as he pondered this.

  “Anyway,” Roger went on, turning back to Daniel. His hands fell to his sides. “I remember driving by with my mom as they towed Andy’s car away. It was at that exit by the mall on Highway 22.”

  Roger watched Daniel and tried to picture him in his rain-soaked tuxedo that night, searching the streets frantically for Andy. Because Daniel looked exactly the same as he had that night, it wasn’t hard to imagine the scene.

  “If he left his car there, then he probably had to get to where they found him on foot.” Roger stopped talking when a nurse passed by the window in the hallway. He watched her as she moved behind the nurse’s station with her head bowed, totally unaware that one of her patients had a visitor outside of visiting hours. “And that night we had no clue where they’d find Andy, but I know now,” Roger said evenly. “I know where they found him.”

  The nurse used a remote to change the station on a wall-mounted television in the hallway, and Roger watched her face as she stood there, slack-jawed, watching the morning news.

  He took three steps across the room and stood next to Daniel’s bedside again. “I know where they found him, and we were really close.”

  *

  April 12, 1986

  *

  “No, dude—don’t say that.” Roger came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got this. We just need to put our heads together and think.”

  “What we need is a car,” I said, wiping at the water dripping from my nose with the back of one hand. “And we need a clue. Because otherwise we’re flying blind here.”

  Roger nodded. “Okay, so where are we going to get a car and a clue?”

  Without answering, I turned my face up to the sky and closed my eyes. Rain fell on me. I breathed in the night air. And then I knew.

  “Let’s head to the diner,” I said to Roger.

  “What diner?”

  “Joanne’s. The one on the way out of town.”

  Roger looked at me. “You want pancakes?”

  “No, I’m not hungry for pancakes. But Ellen works there, and Andy goes there all the time. I thought maybe he would go there to kill time while we were at the prom.”

  Roger shrugged and wiped rain from his upper lip with the back of one hand. “A diner. Okay. If you say so.”

  Within minutes, we’d managed to get a ride in the back of a Buick with a middle-aged couple heading towards the edge of town.

  “You two hitchhiking to a wedding?” the woman asked, turning around in her seat. Her thick red lipstick was smeared slightly on one side.

  “We’re leaving the prom,” I said without further elaboration. I pointed at an exit sign. “This one, please.”

  “Right here?” the man asked, swinging the car off the freeway and rolling to a stop at the top of the exit.

  “We just needed to get to the diner.” I pointed at Joanne’s in the distance. The windows were lit from within, and the restaurant glowed on the dark hillside.

  The woman turned around in her seat again and smiled at us. “It’s a shame you don’t have dates, two cute boys like you.”

  “Leave ‘em alone, Stella,” the man said, watching us in the rearview mirror as we climbed out. He didn’t say anything else.

  We walked the rest of the way to the diner in silence with our hands in our pockets to stay warm.

  “You see his car?” Roger asked, scanning the lot.

  “No, but it won’t be here.” I said this with confidence, like I already knew his car would be elsewhere. I had no idea where that conviction came from.

  Inside the diner, a handful of people stooped over slices of pie and cups of black coffee. One woman was spoon-feeding applesauce to a toddler who was crushing crackers in her small fists. Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at us.

  “Is Ellen here?” I asked the cook behind the counter.

  He scraped the griddle with a spatula. “Nope. It’s her night off.”

  I tapped the counter with my fingertips and felt my wet shirt sticking to my back. “Uhhh,” I said, glancing around. “Any chance you know my brother? Andy Girch?”

  The cook lifted his eyes but not his chin as he looked at me. “Yeah, I know Andy. Comes in here all the time. He was just here maybe thirty minutes ago. Had an omelette and some fried potatoes.”

  “Andy was here?” My heart started to race.

  “Yeah, sure,” the cook said, finally lifting his whole face to look at me. “He left a while ago on foot. Said his car broke down.” He went back to scraping the griddle.

  “You think he’s headed somewhere in particular?” Roger asked me, leaning one hip against the counter. His coat was drenched and his hair was soaking wet. I was sure we both looked like drowned rats in tuxedos.

  I thought about it for a second. Did I know where Andy might go? The logical answer was no. Nothing about him acting the way he had this evening was typical for him, and the thought that he’d abandon his car somewhere and show up at a diner for an omelette this late at night on foot was almost too much for me to imagine.

  But then in an instant, I knew. A light in the diner’s kitchen buzzed loudly and mingled with the sound of “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos, which blared from the speakers on the ceiling.

  “Yeah,” I said, patting the counter with the palm of my hand. “I know where he might be headed.”

  *

  December 28, 2016

  *

  “Daddy!” Hayley yelled from the swing on the playgro
und. “Can you push me higher?”

  Roger tucked Maggie’s coat under the blanket he’d wrapped her in, making sure she was secure in her stroller.

  “You could let her out, you know.” Roger’s mother was with him, spending the snowy afternoon with the girls while Angela had lunch with a college friend. “I’ll walk her around in the snow a bit.”

  Roger lifted Maggie’s small hand and tugged at her mitten to make sure it was secure. “Angela didn’t want her to get too cold. She’s been sick recently.”

  “Oh, Roger.” His mother waved a hand at him and nearly pushed him aside with her hip. “I raised children. I know what I’m doing. A little cold, fresh air won’t kill this child, right sweetheart?” Her tone changed as she bent over and unwrapped Maggie’s blanket. “In fact, in Russia, parents put their children out in the snow—even babies—everyday to make them stronger. It toughens up the immune system.”

  Somehow in his mother’s presence, Roger always turned into a kid again. He let her expertise trump his own knowledge of his children as she grandmothered them with a confident air.

  “I’ll go push Hayley,” he said, leaving his mother to unbuckle the toddler and run her through the snow so that her nose would run again and her ears would turn red and raw. Let her answer to Angela at the end of the day.

  “Daddy, you’re here!” Hayley squealed. She held her legs out straight in front of her on the swing. Roger pushed her from behind, the swing making an arc so high that it must have felt to a five-year-old like she was about to touch the edges of the universe.

  He’d been thinking more about Daniel, of course. Visiting him in the hospital early in the morning had given him a measure of peace and had allowed him to unburden himself about Andy’s death. But it hadn’t stopped the dreams, and he’d woken again that morning feeling exhausted and as if he’d just relived prom night in his sleep.

  “This park,” his mother said, passing by Roger and Hayley as she trailed her youngest grandchild, her arms held out to catch the little girl in case she should fall. “Isn’t this park named after the older Girch boy?”

  Roger nodded, pushing his daughter absentmindedly as her swing drew near again. She yelped with delight. “They renamed it a while back, but I think everyone still calls it Lincoln Park.”

  Roger watched as his mom followed Maggie out into the soccer field, her white winter jacket blending with the newly fallen snow. Roger pushed Hayley again, but his eyes stayed on his mother. She clapped her hands and cheered happily when Maggie picked up a ball of snow and threw it.

  Life and death felt so fluid to Roger as he thought of Daniel laying in a hospital bed just a few miles from the park. The thought that somehow Daniel had been with him thirty years before and he could be with the very same Daniel now (but wait—was it the very same Daniel? He’d puzzled over this endlessly…if Daniel woke up, would he instantly recognize Roger? Or had it all been a trick of the mind?) It messed with his head sometimes. There was no way not to feel like his brain was being tied up and twisted like a pretzel as he pondered it all.

  His own mother’s very existence was somehow connected to Daniel, and that thought alone blew his mind. She bent over and picked Maggie up, kissing the little girl’s nose as she jiggled her in her arms. Hadn’t his mother been destined to be at her desk on the 87th floor of the South Tower on 9/11? And hadn’t knowing that fact fifteen years in advance given Roger time to formulate a plan to keep her away from work that day? Sure, his anonymous letter to the authorities warning of the disaster had been ignored, but maybe that day had been predestined? Maybe that event was somehow written into the fabric of time, and nothing he could have said or done would have stopped it anyway. But he could definitely book a cruise for himself and his mother that conveniently took place during that particular week, and so he had. They’d received the shocking news of the loss and devastation as they’d docked in Nassau, and Roger’s skin had gone cold and clammy when he realized everything Daniel had told him about 9/11 was true.

  Time. The mysteries of how it all folded and unfolded. It had been a recurring theme in Roger’s life since Daniel showed up on New Year’s Day 1986, and as he appreciated his mother and his two young daughters that December day, he marveled at the intricacies of it all. The what ifs and the near misses. The way it all wove together to create the life he knew.

  How it worked was a mystery to him, but Roger was okay with that. He waited for Hayley’s swing to stop and then lifted her down. She ran to catch up with her grandmother and her sister so they could go home for lunch.

  Maybe he’d visit Daniel in the hospital again, but maybe not. Maybe what he said and did now had no bearing on what went on thirty years in the past. But maybe what they’d said and done in 1986 had created long-lasting waves and ripples that ran into the future.

  Roger put his un-gloved hands into the pockets of his jeans and trudged through the snow behind his mother and daughters, leaving footprints in the powdery snow as he followed them home.

  *

  April 12, 1986

  *

  The rain was coming down sideways by the time Roger and I got back to the highway. Catching a ride would be faster, but at this point I was so intent on getting to where I knew we’d find Andy that I was willing to walk all the way there in my wet socks. The dress shoes had given me blisters that were so painful I almost couldn’t feel the pain anymore. Roger followed close on my heels.

  “Man, this is getting really unpleasant,” Roger said. A clear understatement.

  I turned and shouted over my shoulder so he could hear me over the rain and the sound of the cars rushing by. “It’s gone so far beyond unpleasant that it’s almost fun.”

  “So where are we going?”

  I knew in my gut where we needed to go, and I held up my arm, pointing one finger at a sign that was illuminated by oncoming headlights. “Hudson Dam and Falls” it read.

  “The falls?” Roger stopped walking behind me; I could feel the distance grow between us as I kept trudging ahead.

  “Yeah,” I shouted back at him, turning around. “He’s headed to the falls.”

  “But how do you know?” Roger looked bewildered. “Out of all the places he could be tonight, why would he leave his car somewhere else, eat an omelette, and then walk to Hudson Falls? It’s crazy.”

  It was crazy. And feeling the nugget of certainty in the pit of my stomach was crazy. How had I known to head to the diner? What made me so sure we weren’t simply wasting our time on a dangerous and fruitless errand here?

  I looked at Roger in the pouring rain for a long minute. “That’s where he is.”

  We stood there a beat longer, staring each other down. But just when it seemed like Roger might turn back and hitch a ride in the other direction, he started walking again, determination and resignation on his face.

  “Let’s keep walking,” he said. And so we did.

  Fifteen minutes later, we got to the entrance. There were no cars in the lot, and no one crazy enough to be up on the bridge in the dark tonight. I couldn’t see a single person wandering the dirt paths around the dam, and the floodlights that lit up the rushing water revealed nothing but dark trees, rain, and a dangerous drop from the top of the falls into the water.

  Roger wrapped his arms across his midsection and tried to fight off a shiver. His lips were turning a bluish color. “You think he’s here?”

  I scanned the horizon. The raging water rushed downwards. The bridge’s colorful graffiti was visible under the floodlights, and I searched for the path that led to it. “I think he’s headed up there.” I pointed at the bridge. “We need to follow him.”

  Roger inhaled deeply. I sensed that he’d rather do pretty much anything but climb a muddy incline in dress shoes, chasing someone who may or may not even be here. But to his credit, he nodded and put one hand on my shoulder. “Lead the way,” he said. We’d come this far, and we’d see it through. I knew Roger was with me to the end.

  The continuous ra
in had left the dirty path slippery like chocolate syrup. We slid around in the mud, trying to get our footing as we walked through the trees.

  “Andy?” I called out. I knew he’d never hear me over the falls and the pounding rain, but I had to try. “Andy?” I yelled again. Nothing.

  As we made our way through the trees, the branches sheltered the path a bit more and Roger and I were able to cover ground faster. We emerged from the trees at the end of the bridge and I stopped and looked around.

  “Do you see him?” Roger asked. He sounded breathless behind me. “Is he here?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. The giant floodlight shone directly into my eyes as I searched the bridge for signs of Andy. “He has to be here somewhere,” I whispered to myself. The certainty of this knowledge stilled me. I felt like a hunter seeking its prey as I scanned the area. It was almost like I could smell him and track his scent.

  With a hesitant step, I walked out of the trees and stepped onto the slick metal of the bridge. The sole of my shiny dress shoe slipped an inch or two and I reached out a hand to grab something. The rain was getting in my eyes and I blinked a few times and steadied myself.

  “Be careful!” Roger shouted.

  I nodded my head slightly without turning around. Two more tentative steps put me onto the metal bridge. I paused and looked at the end of the structure. I saw something, but I wasn’t sure what it was. “Andy?” I said in the steadiest voice I could muster, sure that by yelling I’d lose my balance and fall over the side. The dark figure at the end of the bridge didn’t move. I kept taking steps as slowly and carefully as a tightrope walker.

  The floodlight was on a timer and it moved in a slow arc through the darkness, leaving a portion of the falls and the bridge in shadow as it shifted position. I moved and the light dragged slowly towards the end of the bridge. I stopped and waited. Sure enough, the light cast a glow over an unmoving figure. It was Andy. It had to be. He was standing still and staring at the falls below, not moving an inch.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled at him. My words were swallowed by the falls. I wanted him to hear me. I was convinced that the sound of my voice would shake him out of whatever spell he was under. “Andrew Girch!” I screamed, risking the sensation of losing my balance on the bridge again. But I didn’t slip. My body stayed firmly in place, my fists balled up at my sides as I tried to make him hear me. “What are you trying to do here?”