Dad’s eyes were far off. And then they sharpened again, taking in his surroundings, the papers in my bag, me. “No, no, not here. She was at the house.”
“When, Dad. When?” She disappeared right after graduation. Right before I left. Ten years ago . . . The last night of the county fair. Tick-tock, Nic. Her cold hands on my elbows, the last time I touched her.
Not a sighting since.
We stapled her yearbook picture to the trees. Searched the places we were scared to search, looking for something we were scared to find. We looked deep into each other. We unearthed the parts of Corinne that should’ve remained hidden.
“I should ask your mom . . .” His eyes drifted again. He must’ve been pulling a memory from years ago. From before Corinne disappeared. From before my mother died. “She was on the back porch, but it was just for a moment . . .” His eyes went wide. “The woods have eyes,” he said.
Dad was always prone to metaphor. He’d spent years teaching philosophy at the community college. It was worse when he was drinking—he’d pull on lines from a book, reordered to suit his whim, or recite quotes out of context from which I’d desperately try to find meaning. Eventually, he’d laugh, squeezing my shoulder, moving on. But now he would get lost in the metaphor, never able to pull himself back out. His moment of lucidity was fading.
I leaned across the table, gripping his arm until he focused on my words. “Dad, Dad, we’re running out of time. Tell me about Corinne. Was she looking for me?”
He sighed, exasperated. “Time isn’t running out. It’s not even real,” he said, and I knew I had lost him—he was lost, circling in his own mind. “It’s just a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile.” He moved his hands as he spoke, to accentuate the point. “That clock,” he said, pointing behind him. “It’s not measuring time. It’s creating it. You see the difference?”
I stared at the clock on the far wall, at the black second hand moving, moving, always moving. “And yet I keep getting older,” I mumbled.
“Yes, Nic, yes,” he said. “You change. But the past, it’s still there. The only thing moving is you.”
I felt like a mouse in a wheel, trying to have a conversation with him. I had learned not to argue but to wait. To avoid agitation, which would quickly slide into disorientation. I’d try again tomorrow, from a different angle, a different moment. “Okay, Dad. Hey, I gotta get moving.”
He pulled back and looked at me, his eyes roaming across my face. I wondered what version of me he was seeing—his daughter or a stranger. “Nic, listen,” he said. I heard the ticking of the clock. Tick-tock, Nic.
He drummed his fingers on the table between us, twice as fast as the clock. There was a crash from the other side of the room, and I twisted in my chair to see a man picking up a tray of dishes he must’ve dropped while clearing tables. I turned back to Dad, who was focused on his plate, twirling his pasta, as if the last few minutes hadn’t existed.
“You really should try the pasta,” he said. He grinned, warm and distant.
I stood, stacked the edges of the paper against the table, matched his warm, distant smile. “It was really good to see you, Dad,” I said. I walked around the table, hugged him tight, felt him hesitate before bringing his hand up to my arm and squeezing me back.
“Don’t let your brother sell the house,” he said, the conversation in a loop, beginning anew.
* * *
THE PORCH LIGHT WAS on and the sky almost dark, and I had a message from Daniel when I parked the car in the gravel driveway. He’d be back in the morning, and I should call if I needed anything, if I changed my mind and wanted to stay with him and Laura.
Sitting in my car, watching the lantern move with the wind, the light casting shadows across the front of the house, I thought about it. Thought about driving straight across town and pulling out the blow-up mattress in the unused nursery. Because I could see us, the shadows of us, a decade ago, telling ghost stories on that porch with the dancing light.
Corinne and Bailey rapt with attention as Daniel told them how there was a monster in the woods—that it wasn’t a thing they could see but a thing they could feel. That it took people over, made them do things. I could hear that version of me in my own head, saying he was full of shit. And Corinne tilting her head at Daniel and leaning back against the porch railing, sticking out her chest, placing her foot against a slat of wood, bending one of her long legs, and saying, What would it make you do? Always pushing us. Always pushing.
I hated that the ghosts of us lived here, always. But Laura was almost due, and there wasn’t a place for me there, and even though Daniel had offered, it was implied that I would say no. I had a house here, a room here, space here. I wasn’t his responsibility anymore.
I pushed the front door open and heard another door catch at the other end of the house, as if I had disturbed the balance of it.
“Hello?” I called, frozen in place. “Daniel?”
Nothing but the evening wind shaking the panes of glass in a familiar rattle. A breeze, thank God.
I flipped the wall light switches as I walked toward the kitchen at the back of the house, half of them working, half not.
Daniel wasn’t here. Nobody was here.
I turned the deadbolt, but the wood around it was rotted and splintered, the bolt cutting through the frame whether it was locked or not. Everything looked as I’d left it: a box on the table, a used glass in the sink, everything coated in a fine layer of dust.
The ring. I took the steps two at a time and went straight for the nightstand, my fingers trembling as I reached inside the ceramic bowl, frantic heartbeats until my finger brushed metal.
The ring was there. It was fine. I slid it back on my finger and ran my shaking hand through my hair. Everything’s fine. Breathe.
The bed was still bare, but the sheets were folded and stacked on top, the way Daniel used to leave them when he started taking over for the things Mom couldn’t do. I moved the shoe boxes back to the closet and the rug back under the legs of the bed. I centered the jewelry box under the mirror, a dust-free square where it had sat for the last year, at least. Everything resettling. Realigning.
I felt the memories doing the same. Falling back into place. The investigation. All I’d left behind, neatly boxed away for ten years.
I looked around my room and saw the rectangles of discolored paint. I closed my eyes and saw the pictures that had hung in each spot.
My stomach churned, unsettled. Corinne had been in every one.
A coincidence, I thought. Corinne was so wrapped up in my childhood, I could probably find her shadow in anything here if I went looking for it.
I needed to find out what thought had surged and then faltered, driving Dad to a sheet of paper and an envelope with my name. What memory had been flickering from the dying portion of his brain, begging for attention before it faded away for good. Corinne. Alive. But when? I had to find out.
Everything was stuck here. Waiting for someone to step in and reorder the evidence, the stories, the events—until they came together in a way that made sense.
In that way, Dad was right. About time. About the past being alive.
I walked down the wooden steps into the kitchen, the linoleum shrinking away from the corners. And imagined, for a moment, catching sight of a girl with long bronze hair, her laughter echoing through the night as she skipped up the steps of the back porch—
Tick-tock, Nic.
I had to focus, make sense of this house, and get out. Before the past started creeping out from the walls, whispering from the grates. Before it unpacked itself from that box, layer after layer, all the way back to the start.
PART 2
Going Back
It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards.
—S?REN KIERKEGAARD
Two Weeks Later