by Lisa Unger
But Emily. Why is true friendship so often invisible? The person who is always there, the one who answers when we call, who comes when we need her. Why do we so often take that quiet presence for granted? I turn to look at her, but she’s staring straight ahead. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time.
One of her poems rings back to me:
Show me your crooked teeth
The nose you were born with
The birthmark you had removed
Your childhood scars
I want to see all your beautiful ugly
Shed the mask you wear for everyone else and
Show me
When she turns to face me, she wears an odd smile. Something in me shivers. I am naked beneath that gaze. I tighten my fingers around hers. Her smile widens.
As we arrive in town, it’s clear that we’re not “in the flow.” Not at all. This is a fool’s errand. Every business is closed and shuttered for the night. We pull into the gravel lot of the Happy Cow and sit in my parents’ car. Suddenly it feels as if all the urgency has drained from our venture.
We climb out of the car and walk around—because what else? Our feet crunch on the ground; we wrap our arms around our middles against the cold. I walk over to the storefront window, cup my hands around my eyes, and peer inside. The counter, the stack of cups. A chalkboard lists the day’s fresh flavors in cheerful lettering and bright colors.
Like every place now, there are cameras mounted over the door, behind the counter. They’re just basic home cameras like most people install to watch their front door, their dog, their child. We have put ourselves under constant surveillance. Never a moment when we are not watching ourselves and each other. And yet here we are, chasing those images, searching for the real Anisa, who is as elusive as a ghost.
“This was stupid,” Emily says.
She wears a peasant skirt and lace-up boots, a kind of fuzzy, wrappy coat. She’s let her hair go wild around her shoulders. There’s a look—they all share it. Claire. Anisa. Emily. A kind of manifest disbelief that the world falls so short of the fairy tale they were sold.
“It was worth a try,” I say, my voice sounding false and tight. Dr. Black suggests optimism. He says it’s a choice. I’m trying, Dr. Black. I really am.
“I watch too many crime shows,” she says. Her laugh disappears into the night. “I thought we’d found a clue. That we could solve the case of our missing friend.”
More words of Emily’s whisper back:
The case is cold
Your secrets hold
We’ll all grow old
Just wondering
I move closer to her. I don’t dare touch her. But I’m surprised at how badly I want to. Am I wrong? The way she’s standing, body leaning toward me, eyes on mine—does she feel it too?
“There’s only one place still open,” I say. “Pop’s, the twenty-four-hour diner.”
My voice breaks the spell.
“I’m starving,” she says, looking suddenly spent, depleted.
“Me too.” I am. I don’t remember the last time I ate. I’m thinner than I ever have been in adulthood. Gaunt, my mother says. I’ve always been one of those too-skinny guys, not that interested in food. I gained with Anisa. We were constantly eating.
The diner is a bit out of town, closer to the house. I haven’t been there in a while, but we used to go all the time before Claire died, and a few times since. Big juicy burgers on floppy white buns, crispy fries, pillowy, creamy shakes. And a peanut butter pie that is my mother’s all-time favorite. I always grab her a slice when I’m up here checking on the house. She eats it with equal parts joy, sadness, and guilt.
This meal
Tastes like regret
Salty and stale.
I eat it anyway
Grateful for any nourishment at all.
Pop is there, as I knew he would be. He must be ninety years old. His son and daughter run the place now, but he’s always there, greeting customers. He sits in the same booth by the door, a newspaper always open in front of him. Late at night, it’s just him, a single waitress, and whatever shift worker they have in the kitchen.
“Will,” he says brightly. “Long time no see.”
He always says that, no matter how long it’s been since I saw him last. I really cannot believe he remembers my name. Or maybe he just calls everyone Will.
“How you doing, Pop?”
“Never better, son,” he answers. Every time. “How’s that lovely family of yours?”
“All good,” I say.
“Don’t forget to bring a piece of pie to your mom for me.”
He’s wrinkled and nearly bald, except for some neat white wisps. His thick hands shake. He’s dressed neatly in a buttoned-up plaid shirt, pressed khakis, and old-man brown shoes.
This is the same conversation I have with him every single time. He is as senile as they get, on some kind of loop that will not reset. I don’t feel bad for him. I envy him. There are so many things I’d like to forget.
We order. Emily shows the waitress a picture of Anisa. But the girl just gives her a blank stare, a dismissive shrug. She doesn’t ask a single question about who Anisa is or why we might be looking for her. She just sticks our order ticket through the window to the kitchen, then immediately goes back to whatever she was doing on her smartphone.
We get the same meal I used to get with Claire when we were kids—cheeseburgers, fries, chocolate milkshake to share. In spite of our dark errand, our failure, the food is good. We talk and talk—not about Anisa but about Emily’s poetry, how she applied for a writers’ retreat and might go if she gets in, leaving her job. We talk about my novel and where I’m stuck. She agrees to read it. It’s easy. Our friendship, even after everything, and with Anisa gone, is still intact. I take Dr. Black’s advice and choose to be happy about that, at least.
I pick up the tab on the credit card my mother gave me that my father doesn’t know I have. She pays the bill from an account that my father doesn’t track. He’ll rail at year-end when he balances the books, but he won’t stop her. Softening blows. Coming in for the rescue.
On the way out, I use the restroom. When I emerge, Emily is sitting with Pop.
“Have you seen this girl?” I hear her say as I come up beside him. I didn’t even think to ask him. It would be like asking an old transistor radio.
But Pop just stares blankly at the phone, then up at Emily.
“Is that the girl who died so long ago?”
Emily shakes her head. “No,” she says quickly. “Her name is Anisa.”
His eyes are filling, though.
“Such a tragedy,” he says.
She looks stricken, horrified that she’s upset the old man. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
The waitress comes over and hands me my take-out pie.
“I’ve got my peanut butter pie, Pop,” I say brightly, hoping to cheer him up. He turns to look at me, and Emily slips quickly from the booth, glad for the escape.
He seems to forget Emily and the picture.
“Don’t tell your mother that I’ve always had a crush on her.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
“Good night,” Emily says.
We move away, the bell ringing as we exit. Emily is far ahead of me, out in the night. She doesn’t hear him say before the door closes: “They say the brother did it. There was always something off about that boy.”
I pretend I didn’t hear it, don’t let it upset me the way it used to. There were endless rumors then—a beautiful young girl dies by accident, and no one wants to accept that. No one wants to accept the randomness of it all. Believe me, I get it.
In the car, we sit. There’s an energy between us, a tingle.
“We don’t need to drive all the way back,” I say.
The long trip is not an enticing prospect with a belly full of cheeseburger and milkshake. “We can stay at the house. I promised my parents I’d stop by and check on it anyway.”
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I figure she’ll say no. Even though it’s Friday night and she doesn’t have to work tomorrow and probably her only plans are to write all weekend. She’s very still, staring at the picture of Anisa glowing on the screen. She clicks the side of the phone, and it goes dark. She leans closer, blinks. I wait for her to come back with a list of excuses.
“Okay,” she says. “That sounds good.”
It’s a bit of a drive, the road hypnotic and winding. No streetlamps. The exact opposite of city living. The layers fall away—light, noise, clutter—leaving a hush, a peaceful silence. I turn at the tilted red mailbox and stop to retrieve the pile of junk that inevitably collects in it.
“I forgot how isolated this place is,” she says. “Total middle of nowhere.”
I don’t say anything. Is she nervous, questioning her decision to come out here with someone who has proven himself to be unstable?
“You should come out here more,” she goes on. “You could really focus on your writing up here.”
“That’s what my mom says.”
“You could really, you know, get quiet,” she says, wistful. “That’s what I always think when I look at Anisa’s posts. I’m so jealous—not of Parker, not of her success or happiness. Just that she’s found the space she needs to—I don’t know—be.”
“Hey,” I say, eager to give her something. “Anytime you want to come up here, you can.”
“Really?”
“Are you kidding? It’s empty most of the time. My parents would love it.”
Silence. This time when her words echo, I recite them out loud to her:
Why are they so afraid of you?
Boredom, why don’t they seek your hidden magic?
To sit and think.
To be.
All gone the way of the 8-track.
A silly, outdated thing.
“You memorized one of my poems?” she says, her hand at her chest, her smile wide.
“They’re very memorable. You really have a gift, if I haven’t told you before. I have, haven’t I?”
She blushes, looks down shyly. “Thank you.”
The house comes into view, small and dark. The sight of it never fails to fill me with this odd mingling of nostalgia and revulsion. There’s this feeling of thinking I’ve spotted a long-lost friend, only to realize with despair that it’s a stranger, someone not very nice at all.
Emily draws in a breath. “It’s beautiful here.”
It’s really not. Maybe it was once, when I was young and we were happy, but the house is in disrepair, the grounds neglected. Just on first glance, a shutter tilts, the porch sags. I know that doves roost in the gutter, clogging it. My parents always make it sound grand. Our place in the country. Designed by someone, built by someone else. Names no one knows but still nod about knowingly anyway. A mystery writer lived there, died there, wrote something in between—a book no one’s ever read.
Stories, stories, stories—reality narrated, packaged, disseminated. Why can’t anything just be what it is?
We climb out of the car and stand in the stillness. There’s rustling in the leaves, the call of a great horned owl. It’s a moonless, starless night.
“It’s so”—she stops, the poet searching for the perfect word—“apart.”
Yes. We could be on the moon.
I tried to give her this. Anisa. What she seems to have found with Parker. But what I offered, she didn’t want. I touch the scar on my arm, snaking a finger up the cuff.
“Hey, Will?” Emily is standing on the porch. “Is someone else here?”
She’s wearing that Piglet frown.
“No,” I say. “Why?”
“I hear music.”
“No.”
She points. “And there’s a light on inside.”
This house is haunted, I want to tell her but don’t.
I feel that rise of anger.
It’s haunted by the ghosts of all my parents’ expectations, their grief. By the perfect Claire, who was everywhere and everything—the shining light, the will-o’-the-wisp that you chase and never catch. And then, after she was gone, her presence only grew. She was made perfect in life by her untimely death. And all the lost possibilities ballooned. Your sister was a talented writer; I can only imagine what she would have done. A great beauty. A sterling intellect. An angel of kindness. Who might she have been—if only?
But that’s not the whole truth.
The truth is that my sister was mean. She tortured me—teasing, getting me in trouble for things I didn’t do. She slept around—there were any number of townie boys who might have done her in. She was a city cat, and they were her country mice. And you know what? She wasn’t that good looking. She developed early. She had a great body for a kid. A dangerously hot body. She evoked emotions she wasn’t prepared to handle.
No, no. It wasn’t me. Come on.
There were whispers, of course. Rumors abounded—that it was me, my father, a boy in town who everyone thought had violent tendencies. But the police ruled it an accident. A cramp, maybe. Or she got her foot tangled in some weeds. The only evidence that someone else might have been on the bank of the lake that night were some scattered boot prints, much larger than my size, even larger than my father’s. But that piece of evidence never led them anywhere, didn’t link back to any of her known friends in town.
No, I didn’t kill my sister. I was just a kid. And I loved her. And just like everyone else, I thought she was perfect. Because even though she pinched me hard under the table to make me yell, pulled the arm off my favorite bear, and told me that there really were monsters in my closet—she also lay on my bed when I had bad dreams, patiently helped me with my homework, and taught me how to do my hair so that I didn’t go through life looking like a “total dork.” It was only later, after my suicide attempt, my hours with Dr. Black, that I started to see the truth behind all the dream-weaving my parents did. She was just a girl who died too soon.
“Will?” says Emily, snapping me back. “Do you hear it?”
Yes, actually. Something tinny on the air. I come to stand beside her. There is a slight glow. As if there is a light burning somewhere in the house.
“There’s a cleaning crew that comes. Maybe they left a light on?”
“Or someone knows this place is empty? And they’re squatting?”
We stand a moment.
“Let’s go,” Emily says. “We can call the police and have them come check it out.”
But I’m already moving around back, jogging.
It’s her. Must be. It all makes sense now.
“Will!”
Emily’s voice is a whisper-yell in the dark, but I keep going—around the side of the house, past the trash cans.
My heart swells.
She’s here! All this time, she’s been hiding here. All of it—her life with Parker, the tiny house, Parker himself. It’s all a fiction. Such a clever girl.
I imagine coming around to the porch. I’ll see her, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop. She’ll be wearing one of those long-sleeve V-neck T-shirts she favors, her hair up. The infinity necklace will lie prettily against her collarbone. She’ll be shocked to see us. Amazed that Emily and I figured it out. Then she’ll be angry. Then relieved. Because it takes so much energy to live a lie. She fooled everyone, except the people who know and love her best.
It will be easy to back out of it, to save face. So easy. All we have to do is create another fiction. She and Parker broke up; he was a controlling jerk. But she’s still living the simple life, in a reasonably sized house in the country. Lessons learned.
But when I come around back, all the lights in the house are dark. It’s the porch light that burns. It’s on a timer—set to turn on at 9:00 p.m. and go off at 5:00 a.m. The music—it’s carrying from someplace across the lake, which happens. Hope leaves me, a lantern floating into the sky.
Emily knocks into me from behind.
“Are you crazy?” she wants to know. �
�What if there had been a break-in? Some meth head living in your house?”
I have to laugh a little—at her, at myself.
“What if it had been one of the Fiercer Animals?” I suggest.
She stares a moment, that worried face freezing in place, finally dissolving into an eye roll and an embarrassed smile. Then she smacks me hard on the arm.
“Jerk.”
“Ow,” I say, laughing, rubbing at the spot. She’s a lot stronger than she looks.
The house is a total throwback. There is no wireless. On the rare occasions I come up here, I use my phone as a hot spot to get online. But even that’s wonky because cell service is spotty. There’s a television, an ancient box of a thing, connected to a VCR, no cable. But there’s a vast library of modern classics—Scarface, The Godfather, the Star Wars trilogy, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club. And books—books in every room, on every shelf and surface—all genres, from Stephen King to Jane Austen.
It smells a little. The musty scent of old, little-used places.
There’s a transistor radio in the kitchen. It picks up AM and FM stations. And yes, of course, there is a landline with an answering machine. The nineties came here and stayed.
We keep the place stocked—in case. There are good bottles of red and white in the pantry, canned goods—soups, beans, spaghetti and ravioli, nuts, chips in tubes. When I do come up, I normally stay the night, feast on junk food, go home sick.
“This place is amazing,” Emily says, walking around, running a careful finger across surfaces, objects. “Time has stopped.”
We make a perfunctory attempt to get online, to look through Anisa’s feed for more clues, to come up with next steps, but we can’t get her page to load. Finally, exhausted, we just give up.
I open a bottle of wine. Build a fire. We make popcorn on the stove. I find The Matrix and pop it in the VCR. Rewind. Wait and listen to it whir. Time settles when there’s nothing to do but wait. Our phones, Emily’s laptop, are all useless and lie dark in the other room. She puts her notebook and a slim pen on the coffee table, in case inspiration strikes, I guess.
We curl up on the couch. The lights are out, the room lit only by the screen. The popcorn is buttery and salty.
