You Were Here Read online

  “Or too busy thinking of that guy to sleep.” Another grin.

  Aidan Mackenzie. That guy. Even now, years later, those words swim on the surface of what he’d meant to her.

  “Maybe I should go,” Abby says. “Robert’s script is going out. I don’t know if I want to be here for that.”

  “You don’t think it will sell?”

  “We’ve been through it. Close calls. Celebrating for nothing. Only now I know it decides my future as well.”

  Hannah tilts her face to the sky. “He is how he is, right? I hate it, but I guess try to see it as noble? He wants to be sure he can provide.”

  “Right. That’s how I try to see it, because I love him and the alternative sucks—that he’s waiting for his life to start. Not ours.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. From the moment you met him, your life together started. You’re not waiting for anything. You’re in it.”

  Abby sets her wineglass on the ground beside her. The sky’s begun to blush, trees darkened in silhouette, branches black and stretching. Again she sees the oak tree, the chandelier, the table set and waiting. You’re not waiting for anything. And yet, since last night, she has the feeling that she is.

  The way Aidan sees it, there are three types of people from Makade: those who left, those who never left, and those who left only to return. That last category—the ones who left only to return—is deemed the worst. A reveal of uppity presumption (you think you’re too good for here) mixed with failure (guess you’re not). Not only is Aidan in that category, but he’s in a special offshoot. After all, he had the brazen gumption to leave for the Cities—albeit for college—and the sorry need to return, but as far as people could tell his choice to return was career-related, which spoke of failure as a man. Line to make detective in St. Paul must’ve been around the block was one of the first things said to him.

  So in a way he understands: his third forgery case in only months. Dues to be paid, a pecking order to remind him that he’s no better than the small-town guys. Forget that he went to high school here. Forget that he came back—over a year already—because he missed it. All that matters is that he’d left. Infuriating, but he gets it. What he doesn’t get is why he was called in on his day off, for a forgery.

  Dark shoe streaks on linoleum, Styrofoam cups on rookies’ desks, chipped ceramic mugs on the old-timers’. Aidan looks at the clock on the wall and then back down to Sergeant Budd Schultz, whose gray hair is more of an idea than an actuality. “You called me in for a forgery?”

  It’s then that he sees them. Roses. On the edge of his desk, long-stemmed and red. The night, just started, goes from bad to worse. Thinking of you— Ashley. What girl sends a guy flowers? The same kind, he supposes, who mends his shirt on the third date. The kind who buys you a vitamin B complex because she thinks you’re under too much stress. The kind you either marry or dump immediately. “I should’ve ended things a month ago,” he says to no one in particular, and sets the vase on a cabinet in the corner.

  “No, I didn’t call you in for a forgery,” Schultz says. “Rape, three AM this morning. Violent. Woman named Sarah Breining. In surgery now.” He scratches his temple. “Mother was even there, heaviest sleeper in the state of Minnesota.”

  Detective Clive Harris—a know-it-all, a walking spoiler, the last guy you tell anything—nods to the coffee machine in the corner. “Got the good stuff. Gonna rock around the clock.”

  That’s when Aidan sees it, a dark excitement. Officers with bags head straight to the secure evidence lockers; a few place hushed phone calls. Now he remembers another rape case. Just a couple of weeks ago. Lila McCale. “Serial rapist?”

  Schultz nods. “But worse. Like in Marshall. And they didn’t release key details then, so for it to happen the same way, I’m going with the ‘not a coincidence’ theory. Briefing in the morning.”

  Aidan says nothing, not about to give them the pleasure of him asking what happened there. He was in the Cities, not up on smaller town crimes, and they know it. “My old partner from SPPD is there now. If you want to talk to him.”

  “They’ll collaborate, they’ll send someone,” Schultz says. “Same M.O. But we’re keeping the details tight—no sense in a mass panic. Still gotta get fiber matches back, see if we get a positive link to Marshall, but meantime you might want to tell Miss Roses at the Station to keep her doors and windows locked. Double-bolted. Get a dog, set the alarm. I’m telling Carrie to skip her night class.” Again he scratches his temple, a red mark left behind. “This guy’s not done.”

  Aidan leans back in his chair. “Shit. What the hell happened in Marshall?”

  Before Schultz answers, one of the rookies enters the room. “Sorry,” he says to Aidan. “If you’re not busy. Call from one of your cases. Rebecca Sullivan.”

  Aidan looks down and sees Rebecca Sullivan’s name on the forgery file.

  “Go,” Schultz says. “Make it quick.”

  —

  Rebecca’s building is one of those mid-seventies contraptions with a long hallway of short green AstroTurf carpet and doors that lead to uniform apartments, each one with Navajo-white walls and Formica countertops. Everything smells musty, like a sweater from the Salvation Army. It’s been almost ten minutes, and so far all Aidan can tell is that Rebecca’s one of those women who need attention, who’s had it all her life and patterns her days in ways to lessen its loss. She’s late thirties in a way that tells you her twenties were the good years.

  “And no one saw him try to run you over with the car?” Aidan asks.

  Rebecca folds her bare legs on the couch, knobby knees extending a bit beyond the cushion. Smoker’s lines splinter from her lips. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does that mean it didn’t fall?”

  Aidan smiles. “You mean make a noise.”

  “Fuck you.” Her mouth opens in something like a smile, and Aidan sees the pink of her tongue press against her upper molar in a strangely suggestive way. “No,” she continues. “No one saw him try to do it. If someone was there, he wouldn’t have done it.”

  “There a reason you and your brother been fighting?”

  “Him forging my mom’s will’s not enough? You’ve got the file. Or maybe you don’t have to read it.” She pats the couch cushion beside her. “Come join me and I’ll tell you a tale.”

  The officer standing by the door shifts his feet, staring at the rug. Beside him, on the wall, is a photo of two blond kids, the younger boy’s hair sticking up as if amped by electricity.

  Aidan doesn’t move. “I know you’re contesting your mother’s will.”

  “I’m contesting what he did to my mother’s will. Rick hated her, always did. And he hates me, because me and my mom were close. But now he’s in her house—the one she wanted me and my family to have, that she told me we would have. My boys don’t have a yard. Okay? I know that might not seem like a big deal, but boys need a yard. Used to be they could run around at her place, she even got a climbing structure for them, but now they can’t do that. So that’s one thing. That’s the current thing. Then there’s other factors, like he’s a fucking asshole.”

  Aidan looks again to the picture on the wall.

  “I had blond hair when I was a kid,” she says, watching him. “My brother and I were towheads till my dad was killed. Then our hair went black.”

  “Killed?”

  “Accident. Car accident. I say killed because it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Your kids were asleep when this happened? Tonight, I mean.”

  “No, but they were inside. I was outside. Where the car is. Where cars tend to be. I might as well be talking to my husband.”

  “Your husband doesn’t believe you?”

  “You see him here?”

  “I’m not ignoring you.”

  “You’d be the first.”

  Aidan glances at t
he officer by the door, who shrugs.

  “You’ve been here, what,” she says to the officer, “six times?” She looks back at Aidan. “I’m about ready to set a place at the table for Officer Hughes.”

  Officer Hughes shakes his head. “We’ve had no proof your brother’s even been near here.”

  “Again,” Rebecca says, “I’ll bring up that tree in the fucking forest.”

  Aidan fills out the report on her kitchen counter. By the stove is a stack of mail, the top envelope with his high school’s emblem. The reunion invite. He lifts it up, glances at the recipient’s name. “I was in the same class as your husband.”

  “Really? Same as my brother then, too. Before he left, I mean.”

  Rick, her brother—Rick Sullivan. Now Aidan places him, remembers him from freshman year, studying the bulletin board at the end of the hall during breaks to make it seem as if he were alone for a reason. Pants that were always too short, the hazard of being tall in a life of hand-me-downs. Once he’d gotten in trouble for having a garter snake in his locker—whether he’d put it there or not, Aidan doesn’t remember. Nor, he realizes, did he see him beyond that one year.

  “Where’d Rick graduate?”

  “He didn’t. My uncle was a housepainter, gave him a job. He quit school.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, well. He’s the one with the house. For some reason.”

  Aidan just nods and goes back to filling out the report. But then he pauses and moves the stack of envelopes away from the stove, thinking of the silent, sleeping kids.

  Three bottles of wine later and they’re on the patio, the fire an orange plume between them. Rosemary and burning pine fill the air and the sky is mostly dark, though clouds closest to the moon are lit up, great swaggering tumbles of light. Hannah sets a tray of cheese and crackers on a stool, a bowl of grapes alongside.

  “I have a Sauternes in the fridge,” she says, and disappears back inside.

  In the kitchen window, Abby sees her reaching for the appropriate glasses in a top cupboard. When did this happen? Gradually, of course, but with the house it’s suddenly obvious. Gone are the years of late-night runs to Denny’s, turkey sandwiches dipped in ranch dressing, sweatshirts over pajamas, counting out exact change. Replaced by sturdy patio furniture and a view of the city, weekends early to bed, podcast commutes and scripts that need to sell. On the other side of the fire pit Robert sits back in his chair, eyes closed, enjoying the moment.

  “You okay?” Hannah asks when she returns, noticing Abby’s distraction.

  The glass of Sauternes gleams in the firelight. Abby smiles. “I’m good. Sometimes I just miss us.”

  “Me and you?” Hannah squeezes into the chair next to her. “We’re still here. Evolving, but still here.”

  “We don’t wear pajamas anymore to Denny’s.”

  “No, that is true. We don’t. Not for a long time.”

  Ben places another log on the fire, which sways, ducking and dancing. Fire moves like a boxer, Robert once said to her when they first met. Even that seems long ago. Then she saw her life so differently; never would she have guessed that nothing would change in four years. Again she thinks of Aidan Mackenzie, that sense she’d had when she was younger that they would be together. What does he look like now? Though Abby refuses to join Facebook—InYourFacebook, she calls it—she now thinks of registering just to see. She’d heard his parents moved back to Idaho when he was in college. Could he be there? A log cabin, a flannel shirt, thick, sturdy arms. Irish Spring soap and pine.

  Hannah takes the cheese plate from the side table and holds it before Abby, who reaches toward the knife but stops when she sees the crackers. “Sesame seeds.”

  “Crap,” Hannah says, leaning forward, squinting. “I didn’t even check.”

  It’s a little oversight, but a detail Hannah never would’ve missed before. There’s no way around it, her best friend’s life has changed, filled with so much that’s wonderful, so much that Abby is thankful for, and yet she can’t help but feel left behind, can’t help but miss the days when Hannah stood beside her, studying ingredient lists, stocking up on Benadryl just in case, back in the days when it was just them and there were no expectations yet, no ways to fall behind.

  “I’m fine,” Abby says, trying to be. “This is perfect.” She lifts her glass, the flare of light like a strike of happiness.

  —

  Later that night Abby lies in bed, eyes open. Will she have the dream again? State of mind, her mother used to say. If you go to sleep thinking of the dreams, you’re summoning them. Partly true, she knows, but not thinking of something that worries her is almost impossible. Still, there’s no reason to think the dreams are back. One nightmare is one nightmare. Think of something good: Robert selling his script, their future house, string lights and wind chimes, summer dinners in the garden with pots of lavender and fig trees, fruit like giant drops of purple.

  Then her mind veers back to Aidan Mackenzie, the first day she’d met him, late in October of their freshman year, the world a torrent of orange and red. Even before he’d stepped on campus he’d been talked about—Olympic developmental soccer team, only a freshman, six feet already. There’d been a rain, one of those fall rains that take down leaves and moisten an already damp earth. Laundry steam a slow wisp from the side of a house. Streetlights still on. Even now Abby remembers the red of his mother’s car in the gray morning as she idled two blocks from the school. I’ll be fine, Abby heard him say before the car finally left. While he stood there, unmoving, facing the school and his unknown, Abby pretended to hunt for something in her backpack. That this athlete, handsome even from across the street, status already a given, would be nervous, would ask his mom to drop him off blocks away, was something that had never occurred to her, and immediately she was charmed. He was tense, uneasy. She could see it as she stepped onto the dark pavement.

  The first thing she said to him as she approached: Are you the one from Idaho?

  When he turned, everything changed. Untethered, an immediate severing from what had held her in place her whole life—she’d not even known it was possible, the feeling.

  The second thing she said to him: Wait, do I know you? Because in that moment she knew she did.

  And though he’d arrived in the state only two nights prior, he searched her eyes at the question. I just got here, he finally said—a reply Abby would recall later that night and later many nights, because he’d not answered her, not really. They’d walked to school together, and when they arrived it took all of ten minutes for him to be claimed by a different crowd, their paths forever fissured.

  The way he’d been pulled, she remembers. A glance back at her. Thank you, she thought she saw him say. Of course they’d had the following years of school together, but their paths crossed at most in halls or at desks not too far away but never close enough. For those minutes, however, in that gray morning with the devouring brilliance of turning leaves, he’d been just hers.

  For a while longer she thinks of him, the thoughts a familiar fit and comfort, until at last the tangled beginnings of sleep weigh in, her eyes staying shut longer with every blink. Nonsensical thoughts and images sprout off wildly, transforming and merging.

  Bougainvillea. Branches with thorns like fangs, petals thin and reddish pink, a fury of fevered skin. Abby’s head is at its base, and as she looks up, the wood of the branches thicken and the petals begin to fall. Her eyes are closed as they drift onto her lids, brushing her lips. But the moment she sweeps them away, she sees that the branches are now that of the oak tree, limbs wise and twisting into a sky of burned-out gray. Beside her, the table and chairs wait, and the shimmering sounds of the meadow gather into whispers, whispers that begin to take shape just as the ground beneath her shifts and opens and her body starts to sink. It’s when the dirt falls into her mouth that Robert shakes her awake, and it ta
kes her a while to realize that the sounds she’d made in her dream must have filtered into the outside world. Something about that doesn’t seem right, as if a thin layer has been pierced.

  Her heart is wild. The back of her neck moist with sweat, hair damp. Three AM. The same time that used to jolt her awake, a chasm in the night. Robert watches her, the lights all now on. He tells her he had no idea.

  But it wasn’t just the dark meadow. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t breathe. This time the whispers gathered and became her own voice. And what she felt was fear. Pure, serrated, helpless fear, as over and again she said a name.

  Claire Ballantine. Claire Ballantine. Claire Ballantine.

  2

  Then

  SOMEONE’S CALLING HER NAME. Claire hears it three times, faint, like in a dream, a scream rendered nothing more than a whisper. Past the window, plunged into the black night, the lake water is dark as oil, slick and smooth. The parlor is empty. No one’s there. She faces the door, convinced the voice will emerge again, but the only sound is the pace of the grandfather clock. She must’ve imagined it. It happens frequently in this house, the hope—or fear—that someone is there when they are not.

  She turns back to the window. On the walnut table beside her is a silver tea set and Van Briggle’s Despondency vase, a large vase with a man curled at the top, hands on his knees, head facing the opening, a seemingly endless void. The mulberry and blue matte glaze deepens toward the top, becoming almost black as the figure emerges, a form lifting from moroseness. When Claire first saw the vase in her early twenties, years had passed since her debutante ball, and she’d resigned herself to either a loveless arranged marriage or being alone. In preparation she steeled herself against either option with her pottery, and since she’s fallen in love not just with the vase but with the man who created it, a man who could’ve understood the slight sadness she’s always carried within her. Artus Van Briggle, dead from tuberculosis at only thirty-five years old. He knew he was dying when he created the piece, and after Claire learned this, she saw within it both love and mistrust of the human form, the fragility of such vessels, the emptiness we cling to. That first time, though, upon finding the piece, she’d seen only herself. Not dying from anything other than life.