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There was a Post-it stuck to the Mountain Dew:WELCOME BACK, PHOEBE!written in sloppy capital letters. It wasn’t signed, but of course, there was only one other person who had keys tothis place. And only one person who loved Mountain Dew so much he’d been arrested once trying to steal a six-foot-tall cardboard cutout of a two-liter from a gas station. He’d wanted it for his dorm room, he said.
I smiled to myself, shaking my head as I closed the fridge. It was actually kind of sweet that Conner had thought to leave me something.Sweetbeing the operative word, since I’d be in a sugar spiral in five seconds if I tried to subsist on his gifts alone. I’d have to go shopping in the morning.
But for now, I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was peel off these coffee-stained pajama pants and fall into bed. I only hoped that my dad had kept the bed in my brother’s or my old room. My brother had lived in this house more recently than I had, leaving only three years ago when he’d transferred from community college to a campus a few hours away. But when I checked out his room, I saw that he must’ve taken his bed with him at some point, or else my dad had gotten rid of it. There were still some signs that he’d lived there, like the hugeRed Dead Redemptionposter he had hanging on one wall, but otherwise it was just an old table pushed to one corner, a couple laundry baskets filled with household items and not a piece of laundry in sight, and the pieces of a computer laid out on the floor like someone had been interrupted in the middle of putting it together.
It did something to me, seeing the computer like that. I could picture my dad working on it, could imagine him trying to explain to Conner how some of the parts went together and then getting impatient when Conner kept asking questions about some aspect of the process my dad hadn’t gotten around to explaining yet.
For all I knew, it hadn’t happened like that at all. But for amoment, I could see it as clearly as if he were still alive and in this room. My dad, smiling gently as he described what a microprocessing chip did or whatever. My dad, slinging the motherboard across the room and leaving a dent in the drywall as he yelled at Conner tolisten, just fuckinglisten.
I took a deep breath before opening up the door to my old room. I hadn’t stepped foot inside it for fifteen years, not since I was fifteen and said I wouldn’t come here for weekend visitation anymore. My dad wasn’t the type to want a home gym or even a guest room, since he’d eschewed most physical activity and never welcomed a single guest. I had no idea what to expect.
It was exactly the same. My twin bed with the wrought iron frame, the blue-and-yellow quilt from Walmart, the black painted walls, the collages of eyes I’d cut out from magazines and tacked up everywhere. A desk in the corner where I’d spent most of my time, chatting with friends on my laptop. A vase of dried flowers on my dresser, a stack of my favorite movies on DVD. So that was where my copy ofHeathershad gone.
I found some more sheets in the linen closet—they had that closed-up scent of mothballs and neglect, but they had to be better than what was on the bed—and changed them out. Then I carried my bags into the room, plopped them on the floor, and made as quick work as I could of brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed.
The last thing I did before clicking off the light was rip every single eye collage off the walls. If I had to deal with oldAmerica’s Next Top Modelrejects staring down at me as I slept, I’d have nightmares of Tyra trying to “edge” me out by bleaching my eyebrows.
Well, the second-to-last thing. After I lay in bed for a few minutes, I sat up again, switching on the nightstand lamp and reaching down into my backpack for my bullet journal, where I’d been writing all my dissertation notes.
Encounter w/ strange man June 3, approx. 2 a.m. White, 5′9″, slightly scruffy, shaggy brown hair. Ripped T-shirt, jeans, no shoes. Origin and destination unknown, believed to be night wanderer.
I chewed on the end of the pen, wondering if I should include any other details. It had been too dark to tell what color his eyes were. His voice had been deep, with a rasp, almost... but I couldn’t write that. If my body was found in the woods behind the house, and investigators were competent enough to do a forensic analysis of this notebook, I didn’t want editorializing words complicating the narrative. Words likecompelling, or god forbid,sexy. I set the notebook on my nightstand, and switched back off the lamp.
TWO
I WAS AWOKEN THEnext morning by my phone’s ringtone, which started off as a mild robotic beep and ascended to something closer to a nuclear attack warning. It took me a few seconds to register that my screen was a mess of spiderweb lines, took me more to remember the events of the night before. I spent so long blearily staring at my phone, one eye still closed, that I missed the call.
It was impossible to tell who it even was, given the strategic placement of the largest fracture. But then there came a knock at the front door, a cheekyshave-and-a-haircutpattern, and I groaned. Conner. It had to be.
Still, I grabbed my old electric guitar from the closet just in case. If it turned out to be an intruder at the door, I could always clobber them with the instrument... or at least play an out-of-tune riff from “When I Come Around” until they left.
When I flung open the door, Conner was standing on thefront step, wearing these ridiculously oversized sunglasses and a doofish grin. “Hey!” he said, with way too much enthusiasm. “What’s with the guitar?”
I leaned the instrument against the back of the couch. “Nothing,” I said, opening the door wider to let him in. “I got in late, so everything’s still a mess.”
“Well, Phoebe, I didn’t expect you to work miracles overnight,” Conner said. “And what’s with the desk?”
I looked over Conner’s shoulder to my car, which should’ve had eight carved wooden legs jutting out from the top of the roof, four for each side, with a set of drawers and shelf. The desk wasn’t there.
Instead, it had been moved next to the house, tucked under the eave hanging over the garage. And unless somehow my Victorian writing desk had gained the ability to shimmy its way off my car and walk itself over here, that could only mean one thing. The Nighttime Wanderer.
(The Sidewalk Stalker? The Moving Man? The Barefoot Butcher? Let’s hope that last one never had any reason to stick.)
“This neighborhood is weird,” I said. “Get in.”
I locked the door behind Conner, taking a moment just to observe him as he looked around the living room. He was broader than I remembered—had he been working out? The idea of my little brother being enough of an adult to have a gym membership felt weird. But then I clocked the tattoo on his calf—Crash Bandicoot, doing his classic pose he’d do if you let the controller sit idle for too long, where he snapped his head back to look over his shoulder. Okay, that was more like the Conner I remembered.
There was a moment when we could’ve hugged. It would’vebeen most natural right at the beginning, when there was still the expectant pause before anything real had been said. Conner turned and smiled at me, and I reached for one of my dad’s magazines from the box by the door.
“What’s with all these?” I asked. “Did he get scammed into signing up for every subscription?”
Conner shrugged. “He got a lot of ’em from the free table at the library,” he said. “He liked to clip out the articles he found interesting.”
I flipped through the pages. Sure enough, there were several neatly cut rectangles sliced out, a ragged ridge in the spine where whole pages had been torn. I tossed it back on top of the box.
“I’ve been emailing with that real estate woman,” I said. “She recommended we try to get the house ready to list by mid-July, for people who might be looking in time for their kids to start school.” That gave us about a month and a half to get the house prepped.
Conner glanced around the mess, his gaze tracking from the old dishes left on a side table to the piles of laundry in the middle of the room to the flattened cardboard boxes that were wedged between the couch and the wall. I didn’t even know why my dad had so much stuff, so much useless junk and trash, and I felt myself start to get angry at Conner for not doing more to take care of this place earlier. To take care of our dad, who’d always felt like more his than mine anyway.
