Page 37 of Come Find Me
I stop chewing. Wondering if they told Joe I’ve been messing around with the house. That I’m spooking the prospective buyers.
“There’s an offer,” he says.
“What?” I say around a bite. Not possible. No one would want to live there. “Who wants to live in that house?Youdon’t even want to live in that house, Joe, and itbelongsto us.”
He shakes his head. “From what I understand, they want to take it back to its roots.” He spreads his hands out, as if this is something that should clarify everything. It doesn’t.
“What does that mean,take it back to its roots?”
“Turn it back into a working farm. I guess.”
“And how does one do that, exactly?”
He takes a deep breath. “They just want the land, Kennedy.”
The acreage, stretching from the road to the fence to Freedom Battleground State Park. It’s what drew my mother to it in the first place. That, and the fact that we’d never had land before, growing up closer to a city. She said it would be good for us, the space, the air. The house, quirky and charming, was full of history, which she loved. But she’d given me and Elliot control over the paint, the furniture, deciding what each room would be used for. That first summer, we painted it ourselves, steamed the carpets, hung the porch swing, dug the garden. Before the start of the school year, Will showed up with flowers—the kind ready to plant—and helped us transfer them to the side yard himself, the knees of his khaki pants covered in soil afterward. It was the first time we met him, the first time he’d asked Mom to dinner. It worked; they left us there to finish the garden ourselves.
“And what will happen to the rest of it?”
He doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. They intend to level it. Take it all down. “No,” I say.
“Kennedy.”
“Joe. No. It’s my house. I say no.” We hadn’t built it from the ground up, but it felt like we had brought it to life. I picture Elliot with white paint on his knuckles, dirt under his nails, his eyes unfocused, his cheeks flushed red from the sun. So different from the Elliot I was used to seeing. I think maybe that’s what Mom meant, when she said it was good for us. In the middle of that summer, it did really feel like a house could change us.
“It’s not that simple—”
“Except it is.” It’s mine—in my name, but in Joe’s trust.
He raises his eyes to mine, and he looks immeasurably sad. Worse than the first day I was here, when he cleared out the TV room, pulling furniture out into the hall to make room for me, while I watched. “Kennedy, who do you think is paying for Elliot’s lawyer?”
I open my mouth, then close it again. I didn’t. I didn’t think about that at all. Elliot gets a lawyer, I testify for the DA; these are opposing forces, opposing motivations. “I don’t…”
“Look, I don’t want you to worry, but…”
“But what, Joe? What?”
He shakes his head at the table. “We need to make a decision here, and we’re running out of time.”
I’m staring out the window when he says it. At the dusk, settling to dark.
“Do you hear me, Kennedy?”
I’m breathing heavily, and it’s the only sound I can hear, and the room feels charged suddenly, like something’s about to burst.
“Did you know he won’t see me, Joe? If we’re paying for the lawyer, shouldn’t he have to see me?”
He freezes. “Why do you know this, Kennedy?”
I can practically see the wheels turning in his head. “Because I wanted to see my brother.” The brother I remember from the summer, not the one stuck inside a cell with nothing to do. I can feel the claustrophobia. My stomach hurts.
He sighs, but his shoulders remain tight, fixed. “That’s not a good idea right now. The trial starts next Tuesday.”
“Well,” I say, “don’t worry, Joe, because it seems like I don’t have a choice anyway.”
He’s looking at me like he’s missed something major, and he has. He’s trying to find out when I went to the jail, and how I got there. What happens in this house when he’s at work. All the things I do when he’s sleeping.
Maybe it was a mistake, telling him, but at least we’re not talking about the house anymore.
