Page 88 of Come Find Me
There’s a knock at the front door, but I didn’t hear a car pull in. It’s officially summer break for me, but Joe still has to be on campus, and Nolan was meeting with the detectives on his brother’s case, going through the latest developments.
I peer through the living room window first, but I can only see a sliver of a body, fidgeting back and forth on the front porch. When I open the door, Marco seems surprised to see me standing there. He’s half turned away already, though he was the one who just knocked on the door, so.
“Hey,” he says, “I saw your bike.” He points to the side of the house.
I open the door wider, and though he hesitates, he eventually steps across the threshold, looking around.
“The For Sale sign is gone,” he says. “Does that mean you’re coming back?”
“We’re not sure yet,” I say. But it’s possible. We’re all in one big holding pattern, waiting to see what happens with Elliot; waiting to decide where we’ll all be comfortable living, if he comes home soon, like the lawyer believes will happen.
But if he comes back, and he steps inside this house, I want him to see beyond the shadow house, to what else might be possible.
Marco looks around once more, running his hand through his hair, in the way I once used to love. “Lydia told me what you guys are doing tomorrow.”
I nod, putting my hand on my hip, not sure whether I should be on the defensive.
I don’t know what he’s doing here, only that he’s here.
“Will you be there, too?” I ask.
He looks at me then before putting a hand on the doorframe. “Probably. I mean, I’m usually there anyway.”
I smile then, and he grins back, and he’s both the Marco I met last summer and the Marco who’s been changed by all that came after, just like the rest of us.
“Guess I’ll be seeing you, then,” I say.
Sometimes, when I first wake up in the morning, I close my eyes and try to go back. To find the crack in the universe, where time is malleable and I can change things.
I wish he had talked to me.
I would beg him:Tell me. I’m right here.
My parents say I have to accept that we may never know for sure. To be okay with the things we know but cannot prove.
Which is ironic, since no one seems interested in the thingsIknow but cannot prove. No, it’s all too much for them. Something they try to explain away as a series of coincidences orchestrated by two kids looking for something, and falling for each other.
Never mind that we both found it.
They’d rather brush it all aside, the things we’ve told them. There are too many leaps for our families to accept.
We cannot explain why I received Kennedy’s words that night, in the form of my brother speaking the same words.Help us. Please.Her message, coming through.
Well, Ican.It’s just not something my parents, or the police, are interested in hearing.
Nothing is provable.
So they would rather explain our connection by location, through a circle of friends who overlapped. They would rather explain my feeling about Liam disappearing as subconscious intuition, instead of premonition. And it’s the same with everything that followed. The static I kept hearing, like a warning of what would happen that day. The baseball field, calling to me. Kennedy with my bat.
They want to chalk it all up to coincidence, and fever dreams. Pieces we want to connect; a pattern we want to believe in.
But sometimes, late at night, I play that video I took—the one of the signal coming from Liam’s room. And when it stops, I can still feel it. The memory of a pulse that I can sense in the palm of my hand. Like it was his, holding on. Counting down. Calling after me,Come on, Nolan—
My phone lights up with a new message:Are you ready?
On my way,I reply, shutting down my laptop. I think I’ve got it all together now, the things I want to say.
Sometimes I’m not sure what brought us together, or why. Whether it was for Elliot, or for her; whether it was for my brother, or for me.
