Episode 73: Gone (Liam)

He’d just drive on back there and make sure it was all okay. Make sure he hadn’t lost his mind. It was too late for that anyway right? When people had psychotic breaks, it was right after the tragedy – or before, if it was that kind of break – but Liam had made it over a year.

He drove back to the Whitaker place.

It was a field.

The white house with the cobblestone foundation, the red barn, the animals, the stable, the shed.

Gone.

Not gone like someone took them, gone like they’d never been there.

Just like before. Only this time, someone else was parked there. Mim Whitaker, and she’d gotten out of her car and sat on the big boulder that normally set in the corner of the barnyard.

He drove on up to the side of the road and let his window slide down into the doorwall of the truck. “Hey,” he said.

If Mim Whitaker was alive, maybe he wasn’t crazy.

“Hey…” she had smudged-up cheeks that she ignored. “I don’t know what happened. Did my dad call you?”

“He did, yeah,” Liam said. He didn’t know what that had to do with much. “Yesterday.” He shut his truck off and got out. “Well,” he said, looking up the hill of meadow toward where the house should have been, “It didn’t burn down. Just gone.”

“Yeah…it’s really gone. Their phones are off too.”

She was doing okay, when it came to it. He looked at her – she’d gotten pretty sometime when he hadn’t been looking, lost all that teenage awkward. Honey blonde hair and eyes the color of a forget-me-not. She didn’t look like the Mim Whitaker he’d known most of his life.

Now she just looked…

He didn’t know what. She should’ve looked lost or something, but she looked set on fixing this.

He looked at his phone. It still worked. “Yup, guess so.” He looked at her. “You’re real, right?” He wasn’t crazy?

She laughed. “Maybe we were exposed to some chemicals and we’ve both been hallucinating. Yes I’m real.” She stood up, tucked her hands in her back pockets, and looked up the hill too.

“You busy today?” he asked. “Or you want to figure this out?”

She had on some kind of flowered blouse and the sunlight glowed through the parts where her body didn’t block the light. She squinted at him. “I’m free. What are you doing?”

Well, he’d been supposed to fix the fence and probably have some pie because Mim’s mom Jade loved feeding people, and then he’d go home and stare at the wall and try not to think.

“I can tell you what I’m not doing,” he joked. “Fixing that fence.”

She laughed.

“Police?” he suggested. “What would we even tell them?”

“I don’t know. All the pictures are in the house.”

Right, because if you were going to say someone was missing you needed a picture of them to show the police.

“How do you think someone managed it?” she asked him. “I was only gone a few hours.”

He looked at her for a minute. He just didn’t know how to say it. It was unbelievable. “Um,” he said. He gestured. “I mean…it’s not gone, it just wasn’t there.”

“It had to be there,” she protested, and he sighed. Wouldn’t it be nice if he was picking her up to take her out to dinner, or to a game. Not this. “I grew up here,” she added.

“Well.” He tried to think of something to say that wasn’t dumb. Something that would help. “You want to go back and look around? I don’t think someone planted all those prickly bushes and baby trees.”

“I don’t know,” she said, all exasperated and jokey. “Maybe we both went to the wrong place.”

He laughed.

“I don’t think we should tell anyone…”

Somewhere in his chest, his breath snagged.

“Your family is gone,” he said. How did she intend to manage that, alone, without telling anybody? “Gone. And you don’t want to find them?”

Losing his family near killed him. If he could go find them and bring them back from somewhere, he’d tear down the world to do it.

“I know what’s real,” she said, in her own mental place, almost too far for him to reach. “I lived there. You know it’s real. But if we go down and tell the police about it they’re going to admit us both.”

They would, and they’d have good reason to be worried about him.

He sighed, a long breath that would’ve been a ring of smoke if he smoked like his dad had. “It’s got to be on fire maps. Every house is on the maps for first responders.”

She nodded her head. “Okay, we’ll go there.”

Well. Okay then.

“It’s closed,” he warned, and then he jangled his keys. “But I can get us in.”

“It’s not closed if you’re there,” she pointed out, and he laughed again while they got in the truck.

Nice thing about the fire station was, it was right up the road. It only took a minute to drive through.

He pulled into the lot and parked in front of the second bay. That was the old tanker from the forties, nobody needed that except on parade day.

“If anyone asks,” he said, “Selmy or anyone, I’m taking my turnout gear home to wash.”

“When was the last time you washed it?” she asked while she walked inside the station.

“It’s been a while,” he confessed. “When was the last time I needed it?”

He knew. It was the Butte fire, last fall, they’d fought in the brush for three days before the line held. Some idiot decided to burn without a hose near on a windy day and lost her house and half her land.

“Alright,” Mim said. She looked around the relay office, taking in the switchboard and the maps and all that paper everywhere.

Liam just took in the one map, the one that mattered.

“So you’re taking it home to wash, because it’s getting dusty,” Mim said. “I love lying to Selmy.”

He laughed, and he stared. There was some unincorporated land, some farms, some dead ranches, some people that just liked their trailer far from everyone else’s.

The Whitaker farm didn’t have a lot number. That was just plain dumb. The numbers jumped right from 2367 to 2371, when by rights there should’ve been a 2369 Cobbs Hill Rd.

“Does this mean I’m homeless?” Mim asked.

“You can stay with us until you get this sorted,” he promised.

Well. He was bringing a girl home. It was just Mim, but he knew what his mom would think, what neighbors would say.

He looked at her. She was a girl. She’d just graduated high school. He’d known her most of his life. She was smart and funny and…

And she’d just lost her family.

No way was he going there. He knew what it was like. Maybe someday, when she was feeling better.

“Thanks, Liam,” she said. Aw, now she was all vulnerable. It brought out his protective side.

He locked up the fire station, kept his eyes on that lock and not on Mim. Then they got back in his truck and he changed the subject fast. “What are you doing now you’ve graduated?”

“Just working a little, at your mom’s shop.”

Right, he should’ve known that. He did know that, it just wasn’t what he meant.

Every couple years his mom got a new girl to help out in her little skin care place downtown. Mim might just stick around, his mom thought.

“What about school?” he asked.

“What about school?” she laughed. “Maybe in a few years. I’m saving for it.”

And at the rate his mom paid, she might just make it to college before she turned eighty, assuming she didn’t spend any money ever.

“What do you want to do when you get there?” he asked.

“I guess that depends. If the shop works out, maybe chemistry.” She looked down at her lap as her face got rose-pink. He wasn’t sure why that would make her blush. “I mean cosmetology…”

Sure, she did. “They’re practically the same thing anyway,” he teased. He fought off this feeling that he should put his hand on her thigh and tell her he didn’t care. He could at least do the second part. “I liked chem in school. Everything fit a pattern.”

She looked at him, smiling. “And you can make anything, understand everything and how it works together. What did you study when you went to school?

“Oh,” he looked out at the road. “I dropped out last year.”

“Because you weren’t studying anything?” she teased.

He relaxed against the seatback. He’d expected her to go off about the bombing, like everyone did, but she was in a different place again. Refreshing.

“I know you dropped out,” she teased.

He looked at her again, then back at the road with a smile on his face he was trying not to have. “I couldn’t decide if I wanted to do agriculture or science. Every time I did ag classes, I got bored, and every time I did science classes I got restless.”

“Restless?” she asked. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I like moving. Sitting around doing math isn’t moving.”

“What about agriscience?”

He liked that she had a solution right away, even if it wasn’t the solution he wanted. “I thought about maybe field geology. Lots of walking, camping, stuff like that.”

“If rocks excite you, y- The rocks!” she exclaimed.

“What? What rocks?”

“At the house. They’re always going on about rocks in those shows. Date the rocks and you know how old something is. I bet the aliens didn’t think to mess with the rocks.”

“Yeah,” he thought out loud. “But carbon-dating is like…thousands of years. Can they do it for new rocks?” And if they could, Mim would have to find someone willing to do it.

“But,” he added, because she was so disappointed. “We don’t have a lot of sandstone up here and your farm…Let’s look and see if the land is granite or sandstone.”

“Okay!” she said. She leaned back into her seat too.

He looked at the road again and realized they’d been driving to nowhere for who knew how long. He just enjoyed her company that much, that he’d gone and driven right past her house.

“So if there’s sandstone,” he said, “that land is weird. If there’s no sandstone, it’s even weirder.”

“And if there’s no sandstone, for some reason the ground was erased and replaced but our minds weren’t,” she added.

“Or,” he added too, so they’d know what they were doing when they got there. He turned the truck around and tried to get a guess of where he was. “Or the ground was always that way and something else was going on.” Some kind of trick or something.

“Call Selmy,” she said with an assertive voice. It wasn’t bossy, he thought assertive was the right word. It said ‘I know what I want, and you’re going to help me get it.’ “Ask him if he knows a Mim Whitaker or a Gramm Whitaker. If he doesn’t, just say you helped someone with a flat.”

Now that was a good idea.

He dialed Selmy.

“Hey,” Selmy said. “You need something?”

Selmy was about five years older than Liam and sometimes he thought that made him a dad and not a friend.

“I helped this girl with a flat tire, her name’s Mim Whitaker. You know her?”

There was a pause. He heard Selmy spit. “Nope, I don’t. Want me to look her up?”

Wasn’t any point in doing that. “No, I think she’s alright,” he said. “She just thought your name sounded familiar.”

He hung up before Selmy could say anything else.

This was big.

He looked at Mim. “You like not existing?” he asked her. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but it wasn’t.

“Well then why the hell do you remember me?” she asked. Her voice got higher with each word until she was almost shrieking. She sighed. “Sorry. I just…no sandstone means no one will ever believe us.”

He took in a breath of air and told her about how he’d been heading up the driveway when the place had disappeared, and then he’d had to get his truck out of that field and back onto the road before someone asked him what he was doing there. He’d gone home and had lunch and a good nap before he went back to check it out again.

“I hope your mom remembers me,” Mim said. “Two days from now is payday.”

He laughed, and wondered how she could be so poised with all this going on.

His phone rang. He looked at the number in the window and unfolded it. “Hey, Selmy,” he said.

“Hey, that girl? You said her name was Mim Whitaker?”

“Yeah,” Liam said, short.

“Hey, turns out she’s wanted in South Carolina, repeat DUIs. She with you?”

“Yeah,” Liam said, short.

“You mind bringing her down to the station? We can send her home to her family and get those charges out of the way.”

Selmy sounded so honest, but Liam knew he was lying.

“Yeah,” Liam said, short.

He hung up the phone.

“Huh,” he said, long.

“Huh, as in?” she asked. Her knuckles were white against her seat.

“That was Selmy. He wants to meet you. Says you’re wanted in South Carolina.” He shook his head and met her eyes. “Doesn’t feel right.”

“You know me, Liam,” she said. He liked that she didn’t beg him or anything, she just said it like it was. “He’s lying.”

He clicked his tongue. “Yup. I know you. Up for a drive?”

“To where?” she asked.

She pulled out her phone and got to work doing something, he wasn’t sure what. He drove.

“Where do you think would be safe?” he asked her.

“With you…that’s a very flexible answer today,” she said.

His neck got hot.

“I trust you,” she went on. “How much money could you get away with earning for jobs?”

He thought about Selmy, about hiding.

“Selmy knows my truck,” he said. “I bet your car doesn’t even exist.” He looked at her as he drove. “What do you mean, get away with earning?”

“I mean, if I was going to pay you for work, what’s the most you could lie your way around showing up in your account?”

“Um,” he considered. “We’ll just say someone owed me back pay.”

No one was going to look at his bank account.

She asked him for his account info, and he gave it. He figured if she was going to steal from him, she wouldn’t get too much. The money from the bombing was somewhere else.

“So, my car?” she asked. “You don’t think Selmy would be onto the property if he’s up to something?” She laughed. “I’m getting too conspiracy-minded.”

“If it’s there,” he told her, “we drive off.”

“What about your mom?” she asked. “You should drop me off at the bus.”

He’d have to text his mom, soon. Something vague and girl-related.

“My mom,” he said. He ticked facts off on his fingers. “She doesn’t know anything about this, she’ll be glad I’m off doing something instead of sitting around the house, she’ll be shocked I’m with a girl.”

Mim laughed as he pulled up behind her car. He shut off his truck and tucked the key up in the visor. Hopefully, Selmy would get it back to his mom.

Then they got in her car and she drove.

He looked back behind him, one last time, at his truck.

Goodbye, he thought.

He didn’t know why, but he had this feeling he wouldn’t be back.

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