Stephen Markley - Ohio

Bill watched the bartender chat with the couple about the midwestern fury beyond the windows. “Like a fist smacking the city,” said the bartender, and he poured them another round. They toasted the storm that had brought them together for this fleeting evening.

“Bill.” Stacey stared at him until he looked at her. “Do you have any idea where Kaylyn is?”

He set down his scotch, and released a long, careful breath. He’d heard conspiracy theories before. You can’t really traffic in left-of-the-left-wing politics and not hear about the thermite charges that brought down the WTC towers or the Bilderberg Group engineering the entire global economy for its benefit. He’d suffered so many disappointments and defeats in his life. He’d lost so many people he cared about. He had no friends, no network, no family he could ever safely return to. He had only his compatriots in this underground experiment and the constant paranoia they shared. He’d battled depression, drug abuse, and so many notions of suicide that he’d forgotten some of the most bizarre ones. (Once, while driving through the Cumberland Mountains he’d noted a guardrail that, if busted through properly, would allow him to die in a kamikaze crash into a piece of dragline machinery currently taking that mountain apart.) He had no patience for fantasy anymore—not his or anyone else’s. And yet, when Stacey reached the part about Kaylyn, he returned to his night with her. That night. And he heard her story again and recalled all the holes, odd ends, and blank spaces, which, despite his fog, had seemed eerie and bottomless even then.

As the light outside dimmed and night crept in, the city’s skyscrapers looked to him like an infrastructure built from the skeletons of gargantuan monsters and then the marrow set ablaze.

“Kaylyn,” said Stacey. “She managed to somehow vanish. I know she was mixed up with Kirk, Frank, and Amos. Kaylyn ran, and when she ran, she had to give up the game. She couldn’t risk keeping up the fiction of Lisa.”

“And you think I know where she is?” Bill asked.

“Do you?”

“No.”

One of the people Stacey spoke to, who provided her with no leads, no clues, no viable information, was Hailey Kowalczyk. She’d cornered Hailey at the retirement home during her trip back to see Bethany Kline (lying to Maddy that she was visiting Patrick and his family so that she’d want no part of the trip). Stacey finagled her old classmate Hailey into inviting her over for a beer. She caught up with Hailey and Eric, got an offer to stay for dinner, and demurred. It wasn’t until she asked Hailey to walk her to her car that she managed to ask about Kaylyn. For her part, Hailey thought she acted the role perfectly. Rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and told Stacey the only story she told anyone: the last time she spoke to Kay was when she drove her back from rehab in 2013. When Stacey pressed her, Hailey explained that she’d wanted nothing more to do with her childhood friend from Rainrock. The girl was either clean or she wasn’t. When she gave Kaylyn $1,100 from her savings account and drove her to the bus station in Mansfield, Hailey justified it as she always did: she was her friend’s protector, her guardian. Because she was the only person who truly knew Kay, knew every last devil inside her. She had to help Kaylyn because as a girl, she’d been robbed of something, hurt in a way that she could shield from view but never control. It fell to Hailey, time after time, to save her. And she would. Unconditionally.

Hailey volunteered no other information, and Lisa’s name never came up.

Stacey had watched Kowalczyk carefully, unable to decide if she believed her. She considered spilling her theory about Lisa, but it still felt outrageous, paranoid, and seeing this version of Hailey, a heavyset wife and mother with bags under her eyes, dressed in nursing garb as she prepared for the late shift, quashed any will to articulate her deepest fear. They embraced before she left, and it amazed Stacey how old they all were. Back home in St. Louis, she and Maddy would fight more than they would fuck, argue more than they would say “I love you,” dote over their son, worry about every sharp table corner, wall socket, and fever, and she would remember they were adults. Hugging Hailey, she did not feel like an adult, but perpetually cast back through time. An awkward teenager, jealous and horny and sad and buoyant, forevermore.

Eric, who listened to all this from the kitchen window, knew his wife was lying. Because Hailey had left the house in the middle of the night in October 2013, saying only that Kaylyn had done something stupid and needed her help. Eric, who loathed this junkie woman his wife could never get away from, demanded an explanation. All Hailey had to say about the matter was that it was the final, absolute last time she’d ever help Kay. They’d had a blowout fight about it. He’d suspected things about Hailey their entire marriage. She was secretive, private. When they’d been in financial jams (so very many times) she’d always have a stash of money to ease them through. He didn’t understand why Hailey lied to Stacey Moore, but he also didn’t care. After that fall night in 2013, it turned out Kaylyn really was gone. Eric Frye pretended to be putting away dishes when his wife came back inside, and neither of them brought up Stacey’s unsettling, probing visit ever again.

Stacey had tried to see Tina Ross at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, but Tina wrote her a polite letter denying the request. In the letter, Tina apologized for trying to hurt her. She was seeing a therapist now and leading a Bible study group. One thing of which Tina was certain, she knew nothing of Kaylyn nor her whereabouts, and it was best for her to stay focused on herself. Dragging up the past was not the way to go about that, she explained. She’d pled guilty to quite a few felony convictions (kidnapping, first-degree manslaughter), but she would be up for parole in just another five years. Cole or her parents visited almost every weekend, and strangely, Tina wondered if prison hadn’t changed her for the better. She could focus. She could draw breath. Her therapist told her the only thing she had left to do was to face what scared her. She sometimes thought she could feel God inside of her again, that she had somehow, against all odds, plunged into unfathomable hope.

One of Tina’s letters of apology arrived in the mailbox of Allison Beaufort, who tried to read it with hate, but by the time she finished, it had all melted away. She’d liked Tina so much, never understood why Todd dumped her. One thing Allison knew about her son, he was angry. Had been since he was a boy, and rightfully so. Life had done him dirty from the start. She had tried her best. She kept a row of photographs on the mantel in the living room: His senior picture where he wore a blue polo and leaned against a tree. His football picture, on one knee, grinding his upside-down helmet in the grass of the field. His peewee football photo, from maybe fourth or fifth grade, a huge gap in his smile where a front tooth had come out. She took care of the rescue dogs, fed them, gave them a home, and sometimes she sat with one of the oldest and sweetest of the mutts, head on her lap, and together they’d watch the night while she prayed for her son.

Bill stared at the sparkling polish of the table’s surface, fixing his eyes on a knot in the wood, a black divot that could have had a map of the world carved into its depths. An uncomfortable silence descended. Stacey felt a hot flash of sweat break out on the small of her back. She’d tripped an unseen wire. She couldn’t read Bill’s serene face, showing the first ticks of deeper lines, and this infuriated her.

“I haven’t heard from Kay. Not since high school.”