After life, p.5
After Life, page 5
“I didn’t do anything,” I said again. This time I tried to bathe every word with righteous indignation. I pointed at the chair where Soren had been, the crummy mess the only evidence that he had been there a second earlier. From down the hall, I could hear the sound of blocks tumbling out of their container and scattering across the floor. “It’s not my fault if he remembers things or believes things, or whatever. And it was only that one night…it’s not like I’m sitting around talking about it with him behind your backs! You can’t punish me because I just happened to tell you that he mentioned this Cole thing to me.”
“We aren’t punishing—”
“It’s not cute,” Troy interrupted. “Don’t you see that, Mara?” He threw his hands into the air. “You have to learn when it’s okay to tell stories and when it’s not. Even at four. We’ve been through this…six months ago, he told some kid at preschool that an evil creature held his head under the water and he couldn’t breathe and then he died. Does that sound cute to you? That kid had nightmares for weeks.”
“We had to have a meeting with the other parents,” my mom added and she looked down at the floor. “Look…we’re just making sure we’re all on the same page. We’re not mad at you. We’re a team. Right? We know you wouldn’t do anything to make this worse and we’re just asking for you to…”
Our heads turned in unison as Soren appeared in the dining room holding an armful of colored blocks.
“Someone build with me?” he asked.
Troy and my mom stayed mute. I could have slapped them both.
“I will in a minute,” I answered.
“Good,” my little brother replied. “We can build a tree house. Like the one I told you about last night with Carlie. The one in my backyard.”
Unaware of the power of that one sentence, he turned and walked back to his room. He dropped a yellow block as he went and it bounced back in the hallway. I looked to the ground and rubbed the dry skin between my eyebrows. I could feel little hairs sprouting and I suddenly felt a compulsion to rid them from my face. I picked at the hairs, as if I could pluck them with my fingers.
“Well,” was all my mother said as she reached down and snatched my uneaten breakfast off the table with a determined swipe. She tossed the plate in the sink and it hit the other dishes with a deafening clang. Then without a word, she walked over and turned on the water, drowning the uneaten pancakes and washing them down into the disposal.
As if denying me her cooking was a punishment. As if I was even hungry.
In the privacy of my room, I smoothed out the grocery mailer and inspected the facts as we had collected them. My mom and Troy had squirrelled Soren away to the sorry excuse for an aquarium (we lived in the desert, after all) and left me to my own devices—which usually involved a revolving door of social networking and homework. But now my hands hovered over the search bar itching to see if any of these keywords were true. I typed in: Cole, Brick, David, murder.
But I couldn’t press send.
I was curious, yes. And determined to understand, of course. But taking Soren’s stories to the next logical step felt like an even bigger betrayal. The truth is, at its best, nebulous.
At that moment, I didn’t know which I would find more disappointing: that Soren’s stories would disappear into the void, unprovable? Or that Cole and his murdered brothers existed. That they were real. That when the killer tried to hold Cole’s head underwater and vanquish him from the earth, he was not entirely successful.
That Cole came back.
5
“You okay?” Em asked. I nodded. Jared looked up from his phone to assess the scale of my neediness and then disengaged; he didn’t have time for coddling. I had spent the entirety of Monday mopey and out of sorts. During the weekend, I was relegated to my house and calculated family time, and the elephant in the room loomed large through every strained conversation and disingenuous act of happiness.
Peacock was back from his Friday absence, and he sat backward on the lunch chair, resting against the table. He was eating a bologna sandwich—the seventh grade of sandwiches, a wasteland of torture with no redeeming value. Little globs of mayo bubbled out of the sides and he licked them off before taking a bite. It was making my stomach churn.
“Someone die?” he asked, his mouth full.
“Cole, apparently,” Carlie answered for me. She winked and I nearly gasped. It was too soon to introduce the drama to others; too soon to lay bare the facts. It was like I had been sitting at the table clutching a towel around my naked body and Carlie had ripped it off in one swipe. I felt exposed and betrayed. She hadn’t been yelled at, she hadn’t spent her weekend hovering over the Internet vacillating between a decision as simple as an Internet search.
Em looked instantly sympathetic and ready to offer her condolences, but Peacock turned his head. “Who?” he asked.
I shot Carlie a glare. “Nothing. Ignore her,” I said, trying to imbue each word with warning so they would leave it alone. But no such luck. I was a pushover—a weakling. Carlie knew it, they all knew it.
“Is this a thing with a boy?” Peacock pushed.
“Wait, did someone really die?” Em asked, and she put one hand over her heart and the other on my knee.
“No.” I shifted uncomfortably.
“We don’t know who Cole is,” Carlie said. She waved her hand as if this explained it. But the blank expressions on my friends’ faces let me know immediately that they were not going to let this go. “Go on, tell them. Just like you told me.”
I wished for anything to interrupt me. Someone choking on an apple. A fire alarm. A school-wide lockdown. Any distraction could have worked. The last thing I needed to do was create a group of people who thought I was crazy.
“Look,” I started, and I stared at the floor. Someone had dropped a ketchup packet and someone else had stepped on it. A spurt of bright red stretched out on the tile and I looked at the shoe imprint trailing away from the scene. “My little brother thinks he used to be a kid named Cole…”
“Like he was kidnapped?” Emily asked seriously. Jared rolled his eyes. Whether he was reacting to Em’s question or the beginning of my story, I had no idea.
“No,” I replied. “Like…before he was born.”
Peacock froze mid-bite. A tiny bit of bologna fell to his lap. I tried not to gag. “Dude.”
“Oh,” Emily said, and she scrunched up her face like she was trying to process the implications. But she didn’t finish her sentence and her face stayed in a perpetual look of confusion.
“He remembers being murdered,” Carlie said when the silence became unbearable. And I hit her across her upper arm with the back of my hand. She flinched and clutched her arm, but laughed at me, unfazed.
“That’s messed up,” Peacock said. “Kids have wild imaginations.”
“My younger cousin used to think he was a dragon,” Emily offered. “Would get really mad if we didn’t call him by his dragon name.” Jared looked at her and then at me. He stared for too long and I had to look away.
The table fell into an unsettled quiet and I realized that divulging the news of Soren’s memories was an instant conversation killer. If I pressed forward—if I waxed on about what I’d learned about a soul’s rebirth or about the kids who remember—I would lose them. These were not people to whom I could readily admit my late hours on YouTube, or discuss the ethical implications of taking it to the next step. Already, the seed of my mental instability had been planted. Already, I could feel my fragile high school relationships shifting ground.
“Do you, you know, believe him?” Em asked, trying to be a good friend—or a nosy one.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. But they all stared at me, and this time Carlie was quiet.
“It kind of matters,” Peacock said. He wiped his mouth and waited.
“I don’t know, like, we’ve all had weird things happen, right?” Em said and she poked Jared in the ribs with her pointer finger. “Didn’t you like see that bandaged man one night or something driving back from the lake? That old legend…that ghost? Jared saw him.”
“No,” Jared answered. But his look conveyed a different story entirely.
“Anyway, Soren’s not a ghost,” Carlie interrupted. “He’s a reincarnated being.”
“So, do you believe him?” Em asked again in a small voice.
I looked them each in the eye and bolstered my strength and said with confidence, “Why not?”
“Why not?” Jared repeated with a smirk. “Because it’s like paranormal bullshit. But hey, if you’re into that thing now, that’s cool. The Dungeons and Dragon kids spend their lunches in the courtyard…in case you needed some,” he paused and pounded his fist against his chest, “solidarity in all things cuckoo.”
“You shut up,” Em said, and she nudged him. Her words were intended to silence him, but her tone had the lilt and curve of someone only half-heartedly convicted.
“Yeah,” Peacock said. “Shut up.” His tone was more appropriate. He put his sandwich down and shot Jared a glare. But Jared didn’t care. He puffed up his chest like I had challenged him somehow; like he, the big alpha dog of our measly lunch group decided that this topic was tragically beneath him. Everyone else seemed sympathetic. I tried to smile, but Jared continued.
“You can’t tell me to shut up. I don’t believe in that garbage.”
“Spoken like a true champion of all facts and knowledge,” Carlie said. “Or like a boy who still looks under his bed every night before he goes to sleep.”
“Whatever,” Jared said and he raised both middle fingers into the air.
I picked up my lunch and stood holding the garbage with one hand and my book bag in the other. We still had twenty minutes left, but I knew I couldn’t stay at the table. I was more of a puncher than a crier, but I felt like doing both. Believing me wasn’t a prerequisite for friendship. I mean, seriously. I knew how I sounded. But still I had expected something different from the people who considered themselves my friends.
“I’m going to the library,” I told them, and I mumbled something incoherent about studying and social studies.
“Don’t go. Don’t!” Em said and she pointed back to my seat. “Don’t be like that. Jared’s a dick.”
But I waved without a word, dumped my wrappers in the trash, and bolted out of there before anyone could stop me. As I walked away, my anger grew exponentially. Carlie, not Jared, was the source of my ire. Somehow, I felt set up, like she had paraded me in there and stepped back and waited for the chaos. Maybe she really did want to talk about it or maybe she really did believe me, but instead she had orchestrated the beginnings of social suicide.
I waltzed into the library and went straight to an open computer. Without thinking or waiting, I typed in the same four words I had typed into my laptop all weekend: Cole, Brick, David, murder. Proof would silence them. I didn’t need the mailer anymore to remember the important parts. I hit the return key without any hesitation and closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I stared at the top hits.
I let my hand slip from the mouse and I sighed.
There was an article about bricklaying, a retelling of the bible story of David and Bathsheba in LEGOs, and a site about people who denied the existence of the Holocaust. Something about a house for Nat King Cole. A website for injury claims. I scrolled through four more pages. There was nothing there; no news article begging for attention, no pictures of little boys named Cole and the hunt for his murderer. Of course not. Soren, I thought to myself. Of course not.
We warmed up like we usually did. Some infield practice and batting work. Carlie didn’t mention my hasty exit from lunch, and I decided not to poke at the wound. We worked on some new signals. Most of the time our coaches just picked our pitches, but Carlie and I liked to have our own language from catcher to pitcher. Our lecherous assistant coach stood in the dugout and ate sunflower seeds. He sucked off all the salt and then spit them to the ground in an ever-growing heap. Once the seed stuck to his chin. Twice I caught him adjusting his balls. He saw me notice, and he let his hand linger there a little longer that time; he spit out a stream of spit of seeds before he took his hand away. I thought about the Maddy rumors and couldn’t help but look disgusted.
After practice, I waited by the front of the school. My mom was coming to pick me up. When Carlie appeared, I hoped she would mention something, anything, about our day and take some responsibility. She sidled up alongside me and gave me a half-hearted hug.
“Rest up, partner. Game day tomorrow,” she announced and started to walk off down the sidewalk.
She was my best friend, but sometimes she had no idea what I needed from her. And I had no idea what the hell went on inside her head. We existed out of love and not understanding, and they tell you love is enough, but I think that is a lie. When she was pitching and I was catching, we were connected unlike anything I had ever experienced. Unstoppable energy. I wanted to take her back to the field and walk her to the pitcher’s mound and force her to stand there and look at me. Then, and only then, would she see that I was afraid.
6
School in the morning was a spectacle. Teens ambled around in the hallway in various levels of lucidity; before coffee, no one could really be held accountable for their actions. Everyone had a vacant, faraway look, and they stumbled or shuffled along, engaging in dimwitted discussions. Morning people were considered inhuman and banned from discussions with their chipper tones and too-loud laughs and generally positive dispositions. The coffee cart in the cafeteria had a line twenty kids deep, and they all shoved their money forward, itching to reward themselves for getting to school on time with sweet, delicious caffeine.
Some kids showed up with curled hair and meticulously cultivated coordinated outfits. Those kids had too much time on their hands. It was game day, so I was in jeans and my warm-up jacket. Last year’s team jacket was a boxy mess, and I hated wearing it. But one of the moms on the team took over ordering our accessories and this year the jackets were tailored. I loved the way it flattened my stomach and smoothed down around my curves. I’d never felt more attractive wearing polyester.
Before school, I waited for Carlie to arrive in our college and career center. It was a large room with computer stations and posters for colleges that most of us had never heard of. Come join us at this nice brick school in South Carolina for no other reason than because they sent us the poster. I chose to spend my time in there because it was perpetually empty. The counselor in charge was always late to school, and she arrived two minutes before the bell in a constant state of hurry, slinging coffee and bags and breathing loudly through her nose. I couldn’t remember one time that she hadn’t stormed through the doors of the career center frazzled; her consistency was comical. She’d toss her bags down and sigh loudly and stand with her hands on her hips and scan the room, as if she were looking for the reason she was late, again.
I had the room to myself when Carlie came in. We were twins in our jackets, our hair pulled up out of our faces.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning,” she said back. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a blue pocket folder. “Here.” It was neatly labeled with a sticker that read “For Mara” printed from her personal label marker.
I smiled and ran my hand over the sticker and opened the folder. Inside one pocket were pages printed off the Internet of various news stories. And in the other side there was an email from a local news channel and a transcript. She had a letter from a detective in Salem, too. I flipped through the pages. It was an odd gift this early in the morning without explanation. I looked up to Carlie to see if she was going to walk me through the files, but she was staring at the college posters with laser-like intensity. So, I dove in on my own.
Stapled together on the left side was a packet of missing children from Oregon. I scanned the faces and my stomach knotted. Babies and teens, all ages and races. Their smiling faces poised at the camera. These were the pictures their loved ones sent out to the world. Look for this kid. Memorize this face. One of the pictures was a gap-toothed boy, a forced smile on his face, the photo background a fake forest landscape. A little paragraph next to the picture told me that the child had wandered away from his family at the fair. And another small child disappeared without a trace during a church camping trip. One from school, one from under the watchful eye of a babysitter. I couldn’t bear to look at them without feeling ashamed and angry that these souls were missing. It was the saddest thing I could possibly imagine.
A girl about my age with a pink streak in her hair and a sullen expression had an even grislier story. She had fought with her mom at a restaurant and then climbed into a car with a stranger. A tan truck with Nevada plates. And gone. Poof. Never heard from again.
I put my tip of my index finger over her face and looked at Carlie.
“What is this?” I finally asked.
“Research,” Carlie answered. Her eyes dropped down to meet mine. There was an apology hidden in there somewhere.
“I already searched. No Coles or Bricks or Davids murdered together.”
Carlie nodded knowingly. “You gotta dig. Mess around in there. Keep looking…” she motioned to my lap where the folder sat.
“You just got right to work pulling together a file?” I asked with a smile. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the “For Mara” under my thumb. “Did you do this last night? Research dead and missing kids?”
“Not just last night…I’ve been working on it since I left your house that night. But hey, I also did trig homework, too. Wrote a poem. Smoked a bowl. I’m a machine, Mara, don’t question my abilities. Seriously, keep looking.”
“Okay. Okay.” I flipped through the pages again. This time Carlie scooted her chair closer and leaned in. Our legs touched.
