BY MICHAEL B. TAGER
"What should we do now?" I asked, two years to the day Braden Carpenter disappeared. We were outside on my parents' deck, lying on our backs, staring at the sharp blue sky. It was Summer, a Wednesday, and we had already tried our old fort in the woods behind Tom's house and swung on the tire swing hanging from the Sycamore in Kimi's front yard and played Nintendo in my basement and it wasn't even eleven in the morning. We felt a little too old for all of it and that was not a feeling I was used to.
Tom didn't say anything. He was in a bad mood since he'd gotten his ass kicked by Derek Michner the day before. His bruises hung on him like the moon. He'd been getting into a lot of fights recently and Kimi and I whispered sometimes that he wasn't getting along with his step-mom again, but we weren't going to ask.
Kimi hummed and whistled like she always did and said, just casually enough that it had probably been rehearsed, "Why don't we see if we can't find Braden's body?"
Tom quickly agreed. "Yeah, you know his parents buried him in the wall."
Kimi pshed. "No, they took him out in the country and entombed him."
"Entombed?" I asked. "What do you think that means?"
"It just means buried," she said.
"I don't think that's true." I let it drop. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, just like I didn’t think that smashing pumpkins had been a good idea during Halloween or stealing some of Tom’s step-mom’s beer was particularly smart either. But I was not the leader and besides, it seemed like a thing that older kids might do. I really wanted to be an older kid. I think we all did.
We rode on our bikes to go to Braden's. He lived a couple streets away, in a more-forested area that the suburban expansion hadn’t quite reached, though plans were underway from all the signs advertising new builds. We didn’t pass anyone on the way and when we got there, we just hopped off our bikes and let them fall into the overgrown grass.
The house had been put up for sale not long ago. His parents allegedly spent all their money on private detectives and billboards and one thing led to another and then the bank repossessed. It was still empty because everyone in the town thought that the bank played dirty pool. We couldn't get the Carpenters their house back, but we could make sure the bank didn't profit. That’s what my dad said; sometimes people could be cool like that.
The house looked a lot like ours but Braden's dad had maintained a nice garden. It was mostly dead by then, but a couple wild peonies underneath the front windows did their best. We went around the house checking windows. It was only the third try before one slid up and we climbed in, one by one.
The entire first floor was empty and cold. Tom ran his fingers on the doorjamb where someone had marked heights. “This is disappointing."
"I guess so," I said. "I expected more stuff."
"They moved out, you idiots," Kimi said, one hand tapping on walls as if she knew what she was doing.
I rolled my eyes and Tom rolled his and then we joined her, knocking on and smelling walls, opening closet doors and looking up the fireplace. I shivered and wondered what we would do if we did find him. I didn't think we would (even at twelve I knew wild rumors like I’d heard were almost always bullshit), but I also couldn't rule it out.
The second floor was as empty as the first, just painted yellow instead of white, somehow even colder. The layout was the same as my house, with a narrow hallway and two small bedrooms on either side of a shared bathroom. I peered out of the window in the bathroom and felt wind brush along my throat, though it didn’t seem to be open. I leaned closer and saw a little crack in the glass that didn’t seem wide enough to let that much air in, but what did I know.
We didn’t linger in the two bedrooms. Unspoken was the understanding that one of them had probably been Braden’s. We might have been ghoulish poking around there, but like, we weren’t ghouls.
In the master suite, there was a pull-down staircase that led to the attic and we scampered up the ladder. There were some clothes in a heap in one corner and a lacrosse stick lying hidden beneath them. I could see the treads of our shoes in the dust.
The heat was brutal but it felt good after the frigid air in the rest of the house. It was almost as if the house resisted the heat outside and this was the only room where it lost the battle. It was a weird thought to have and I shook it away.
Kimi twirled the stick and looked around for a ball. "Did Braden play lacrosse? He wasn't on the team or my sister would have said. She was all of a sudden best friends with him after he disappeared. She knew everything about him."
"But they weren't friends, right?" Tom asked. He looked outside through a grimy window. “Your sister is kind of cool.”
"I doubt it.” Kimi thought for a moment. “And she’s not cool. She just sits at the right table.”
“Cooler than Braden was.”
“Maybe.”
There wasn't much else up there and the walls held no secrets, but I did find a stash of mildewed paperbacks in a deep pocket of shadows. Judy Blume and a bunch of baby books. Go Dog Go was the only one I recognized. I flipped through it but most of the pages smelled really bad. "C'mon," I said, dropping them. "Let's check out the basement."
To access the basement, we exited through the kitchen into the back yard. It was smaller than any of ours and fenced off with really high pickets. The grass was to our knees and the koi pond scummed over and swarmed with mosquitoes. There were a lot of fish still alive. That was nice, I thought.
The basement door didn't have a padlock and it opened without the creak I expected. Inside was a typical unfinished cellar. A long room with concrete floor, a boiler at one end, water heater stuffed in a corner. Stacks of rock salt and seasoned firewood. Totally normal and disappointing, except for how our breath turned into vapor. And of course, the smell.
"It stinks." Kimi held her nose.
"Shit, it really does. Like something died," Tom said. I blinked at how naturally the curse word slipped from his mouth. We’d just started experimenting and I felt so self-conscious every time I said anything like that.
Tom poked around the firewood. I checked around the boiler. At one point, I laid my left palm against it and jumped as if burned. It was like ice.
"You ok?" Kimi was over by the sump pump hole, poking at it with a thin stick.
"Yeah," I said, looking myself over. "I'm fine." So weird how our expectations determine our reactions.
We couldn’t get used to the smell and the longer we stayed, the more I wanted to gag. I began to wonder if Braden really was buried somewhere down there. I kicked at the floor and looked for any weird discolorations, or cracks, or anything. I cringed at the thought of him just wrapped in concrete, like a mummy. Like he was…
“Entombed,” I muttered.
“What?” Kimi asked. She was looking around the pile of rock salt. Tom was on the steps, looking at the ground.
“Nothing,” I said, thinking about Braden. What if he really was down there? I shivered, thinking about what it must be like to never leave home again.
It was then that Kimi found the rat at the edge of the salt, partially submerged. It wasn't long-dead and the maggots hadn't yet finished eating it. Some of its fur seemed frozen. "What did it die of?" I asked.
Tom shrugged. "It's a rat."
"Yeah, but what did it die of? I mean, it had to die of something, not just being a rat?"
Tom didn’t look up and Kimi put her palms up to show she had nothing to answer with. I didn't know how to put into words what I meant. There was a vocabulary I didn't possess to express emotions I had only just started to know I had. Questions I couldn't even perceive that answers belonged to. I just knew that I was twelve and I sniffed adulthood, even if it was faint, and this boy I didn’t know would always be missing. And this rat was dead and this rat had no answers either.
We looked around for a few more minutes before giving up. We didn't lock anything behind us, just left the cellar and sighed at the pleasant heat of vacation, and through the side yard and onto the bikes that we'd carelessly left on the lawn. They were untouched and somehow that felt wrong. We’d just spent time rifling through someone’s life and why should our stuff be immune?
As we rode home, I realized for the first time that I was going to die. I hoped I would be like the rat and that someone would find me and at least know that I was gone. I didn’t want to be an empty house and some leftover garbage and empty questions.
Typically, when we parted ways, we gave each other a nod before heading into the nervous system of our families. We rarely said anything more because tomorrow always came and we didn't know a world without each other and do you ever say goodbye to your limbs?
But that day we got off our bikes at Kimi's (because Kimi's came first and then mine and then Tom's at the cul-de-sac) and we stood in a loose triangle and I put up my hand for a high five. They both tried to hit it at once and Tom knocked Kimi's away and her hand banged into my wrist and none of us felt satisfied. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"Yeah, definitely," said Kimi. "I don't have anything to do."
Tom said, "I'm grounded but I'll try. If not, day after."
At my stoop, I turned and looked for them but they'd already disappeared and the night was coming down like waves.
Kimi moved away at the end of the school year. Her dad got assigned to a base in Germany and off they went. They had a "take our shit" party and the three of us stole a can of beer and ran outside to the big Sycamore in her front yard and split it between us.
"Don't worry," she said. "I'll be back all the time."
"We'll write letters," Tom said. He paused and opened his mouth like he was going to say something else but decided against it.
We finished the beer and went back to the party where all the adults tousled her hair and asked the wrong questions. I rummaged through Kimi's things and came away with a stuffed bear that she won at a state fair using the dollar I lent her. When it was time to leave, we left. We meant every word we said, but this was before email and cell phones, so after she left, that was that. She came home once when I was in college, but I only heard about it after the fact.
A year later, Tom got caught shoplifting from the Stop-n'-Go. Just a pack of gum, but it was that “one last thing” his step-mom had been on the lookout for ’cause he was sent to live with his mother in Philadelphia. We met up once when I was out that way visiting grad programs. We didn't have much to talk about and when we finished our beers, we hugged and didn’t lie and say we’d keep in touch. He just said, “I’m really glad to see you, Hattie.” He'd grown much fatter and much happier.
When I was 26, my parents both died. One from cancer and the other from a car accident a couple months later. She'd been drinking. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t on purpose.
After I packed up three boxes and threw the rest out, I walked around the neighborhood. The Sycamore was gone and the fort behind Tom's house was down to two walls. It was a bright blue day and the breeze kept it just cool enough that I kept on walking until I arrived at the Carpenter House.
I saw the window I’d crawled into so many years before, broken glass jutting in jagged spears. The window above it, the bathroom window, was a black hole and I remembered the kid I used to be staring out of it. And above that, the attic window yawned. For a second I thought I saw someone standing there, looking back at me, so I squinted and held my hand to shade my eyes and saw only the ivy reaching up the walls, pulling the roof to the earth.
Michael B. Tager is a Baltimore-based writer and editor. He is the Managing Editor of Mason Jar Press, an independent publisher of high-quality books. Recent publications include Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Barrelhouse, and The Collagist, among others. He lives with his wife and cats, and is a part-time narwhal.