Page 61 of Come Find Me
At first, Joe doesn’t say anything. He just gestures to his car, and we drive in silence, except we’re not heading toward his house, or mine. We’re just on a highway, signs designating east.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “You know, the first week you were at my house? I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d see you sleeping, and I just…I didn’t know what to do. I would get in the car and just drive. For hours.”
I twist in my seat. “You snuck out?”
He presses his lips together, but it’s almost a smile. “It’s not sneaking out when it’s your own house. I even left you a note on the kitchen table in case you woke up.” He cuts his eyes to me. “A courtesy you might want to take into consideration next time.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lets out a slow breath and merges onto some other road, less traveled, nothing but trees surrounding us. “Me too, Kennedy. Truth is, I didn’t know what to say to you.” He grips the wheel tighter. “I still don’t. Right now, I want to ask you what happened, but I don’t even know where to start.”
“I tried to get help,” I say to Joe again, and this time, he understands. He pulls the car over onto the shoulder, in what feels at that moment like the middle of nowhere.
He takes a deep breath, then turns to face me. His voice low, and calm. “It’s just us, Kennedy. Just me and you, for real this time. Anything you say to me, it stays right here. And we’re nowhere. Okay?”
He’s right; it feels like nowhere. I didn’t think I’d be able to find this exact spot ever again. There were no mile markers. Just road and trees and a sun dipping lower on the horizon.
I stare out the front windshield, my eyes watering from the glare.
It had been dark and raining that night, and I was waiting for the distance between the lightning and thunder to spread out so it was safe to race across the open field, to my house. And then I ran, sprinting through the storm.
“When I was coming back home,” I tell Joe, “I could see, from a distance, a light was on. In Elliot’s room. I was all the way across the field still, though.”
I heard a loudboom,and then, a little while later, a second one. The first I could explain away, as a trick of thunder, and the distance. But at the second sound, I jumped. The noise felt closer than the storm. Sharper, something that gripped my heart, turning everything still.
It was enough to keep me from going to my room, sliding open the window, and crawling inside. Some deep-buried instinct. It was like, even then, I knew.
“When I reached the house, I looked into Elliot’s room first—where the light was on. His desk chair was empty, but the light over the desk was on.” The headphones had been sitting beside his laptop, like he’d just been sitting there a moment ago. His bedroom door was open, and I could see the hallway. “Out in the hall, I could see the handprint on the wall. Red, a streak of blood below.” I shiver, and Joe closes his eyes. “And I could see Elliot, crouched down, but I didn’t know what he was doing. I hit the window with my palm.” Fast, an open slap, to get his attention. “When he stood up, he was holding a gun. He was covered in…his hands were…And he was pointing it straight at me.”
Joe doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. I want to come back from the shadow house, but I need to say it all now, or I never will.
Elliot’s eyes were dead. His face was pale. There was so much blood I thought he would’ve passed out.
I didn’t know if he could see me, in the dark. Or if it was just his own reflection in the bedroom window. I like to think he didn’t know it was me, standing on the other side. That it was just a reflex.
“I ducked down quick, and I ran. I hid in the shed.” Not yet processing. The blood, my brother with a gun. The shots I’d heard. My phone was still in my room, left behind in case my mom checked my location, and the other houses were too far away, and I knew we needed help. He was Elliot, and he was not Elliot.
I picture the headphones on his desk and wonder what he was listening to. If there was something that made him…if there was some other explanation. Because there has to be. He’s my brother, and he wouldn’t do this.
Joe grabs my hand. He doesn’t ask first, he just does it. I squeeze back.
“I tried to call for help. The Internet was hooked up. But Elliot built everything. I didn’t know how to do it. I tried. Joe, I tried.”
“I know you did,” he says, his voice barely a whisper.
“I stayed there until I heard his footsteps racing past. I could tell he was heading for the park. I counted to two hundred, just to be sure. Then I went inside.” I crawled back through my own window, got my phone off my dresser, and called 911. “I never left my room, Joe. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t see. They asked what made me leave the room when I climbed back inside, but I didn’t. Not until the police arrived. And even then, I never looked.”
The police believed I saw them on the stairs and called for help, but I didn’t. From outside Elliot’s window, I could see the handprint, out in the hall. The one we’ve now covered with fresh paint. And I could see Elliot. There was so much blood. That, I could see.
I don’t know if I could’ve saved them. If I lost my mother because of my own fear, my own inaction. I don’t know if it was too late from the start. But I didn’t leave my room until the woman on the other end of the phone told me the police were at the front door. I kept my eyes closed, my hand on the other wall, as I made my way to the front.
It will always be a shadow house, kept hidden from my memory. Full of the horrors I can only imagine.
The net is closing in, everything slipping from our grasp. I can feel it, like something coming for me. In the email, tracked to the library, where I was supposed to be. In Kennedy’s words, echoing back in the signal. Like we’re stuck in a loop. Like the circle is us.
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