Ben Winters - World of Trouble

I stand up again. My head spins with stars. I walk a tight circle. What else?

Slow down, Palace , says Detective Culverson, slow down , says Officer McConnell, and I tell my ghosts to hush up now, tell them to be still a minute because I can’t slow down, I won’t—there’s no time .

Lily is still on the edge of the field, moaning and shaking.

“Hey,” I say to her. Walking over quickly. “Hey. Are you okay?”

She shakes her head and wipes at her mouth with the back of one sleeve. “No,” she whispers, barely moving her mouth. I step forward, closer, so I can hear. She says, “I don’t know what happened.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I remember running. Through the woods.”

“From what?”

“Just—that’s all I remember. Running.”

“From who?”

She starts to talk but she can’t talk, no words come out, her mouth hangs open and her jaw quivers.

“From who , Lily?”

“I don’t remember .” Her hands come up in front of her mouth. “I had to. No choice. I had to. It was just… run.” The words escape one by one from behind the barrier of her hands, each little syllable encased in its own small bubble. “Run… run… run…”

I ask her again—from who—from what—why were you running, but she is done, she has stopped cold, stopped like a clock. Her hands come down, away from her frozen mouth, and her face is pure blank, staring forward. I peer into her eyes like narrow windows, as though if I look hard enough I can see through them and into the darkened theater of her mind, watch whatever happened to my sister unspooling inside Lily’s eyes.

Lily’s not her name. I still don’t know her name. I have to learn her name.

I have to learn everything.

Attacker finds two girls in the kitchenette.

Corners them both and slashes victim one. Assuming she’s dead, he chases the other one, victim number two, chases her out into the woods. And I can’t help it, I’m thinking of good ole Billy, back at the RV, Billy draped in his bloody apron, holding a doomed chicken by the neck.

Meanwhile victim number one is hurt but alive and she stumbles to her feet and out of there, down the hall, trailing blood.

Perpetrator has more success with victim number two. He catches up with her out here, in this field; he slashes her throat down to the windpipe and she dies for real. Victim number one, meanwhile, is stumbling around until she collapses in another clearing in these blood-soaked woods.

Killer stalks back, panting, knife dripping blood, back down the hall to the kitchenette, and then—disappears.

The basement. I have to get down to that basement.

I turn to go back, find Cortez, get back to work, but then I stop.

Entrances and exits, murmurs Culverson. Finish the scene .

He’s right, except with a shock of clarity I am aware that it’s not he who is right, it’s me, I’m the one who is recalling that it’s a rookie move to clear a crime scene without giving a thought to entrances and exits. It’s him I’m hearing, but it’s really me—anytime I hear a voice telling me to do something, Detective Culverson’s mild voice, or my mom’s or my dad’s or Fenton’s or Trish McConnell’s. At a certain point you have to concede to yourself that it’s just you out here.

I walk the perimeter of the crime scene now, slowly, in the rain. I’m looking for a broken spot in the bushes where the victim or the killer crashed in, looking for evidence of a third party, and what I find instead, lying there innocuously beside a shrub on the far end of the clearing, is a backpack with the Batman logo on it.

I gaze wonderingly at the bag for a couple seconds, and then kick away the dirt and bend to lift it. It is instantly familiar, even comforting, the weight of it, the feel of the straps. It’s my backpack, from when I was a kid. Fourth grade, fifth grade. Obviously Nico borrowed it from me at some point, obviously she was using it out here, taking it wherever she was going, but in my grief and confusion it is a baffling and magical sight: an object has been stuffed into a time machine at the beginning of my nine-year-old summer and popped out here in the woods on the day and time I found my sister dead. I lift it gingerly to my nose, as if the bag might still smell like eraser dust, bologna sandwiches, scratch-and-sniff.

It doesn’t. It smells like dirt and the woods. It is bulky at the top but light, bulging irregularly. I tug the zipper and out tumble bags and bags of popcorn and chips and candy: Lay’s and Cheetos and Kit Kats and granola bars.

“I knew it,” I tell Nico. I steal a peek at the body, her body, shaking my head. “I knew it was you.”

She took the full contents of that vending machine is what it seems like, even the crappy little items that no one ever wants, the Necco wafers and mints and thin packs of Wrigley’s. I can picture her snaking her thin arms up the inside of the machine, again and again, fashioning a coat hanger into a hook to make sure she got it all. The old trick. You’re welcome, fatties!

Buried beneath all the candy and chips is the rest of Nico’s belongings. Shorts and shirts. A couple of handguns, a box of bullets secured with a scrap of Scotch tape. A pair of walkie-talkies—not just one, the pair. Underpants and bras. Animal Farm . A rain jacket, wrapped up tightly and secured with a rubber band. A red plastic flashlight, which I flick on and off. The bottom of the ancient Batman backpack is lined with layers and layers of duct tape to keep it from opening up and everything falling out.

I wipe tears from my eyes with the back of my hand.

She was on her way out.

The rest of this ridiculous club had at long last given up their foundational ridiculous idea, accepted with only a week left that this rogue military scientist was dead or still in jail or otherwise a no-show. Godot wasn’t coming after all.

But not Nico. Not my stiff-spined little sister. She wouldn’t accept the obvious.

The situation is what it is , said Astronaut, and she said, I disagree .

Even when the rest of them were ready to go to the backup plan, to slip underground and seal themselves in and cover their ears, my headstrong incorrigible younger sister was slipping out with a backpack full of junk food, bound for a military facility four hundred miles away, to track the infamous Hans-Michael Parry like Sasquatch, pin him and bring him to heel.

She was off to save the world all by her goddamn self, if that’s what she had to do.

I let myself laugh, just the tiniest bit, but not for long, because her plan didn’t work, because someone didn’t want her to go. Someone followed her out, her and Lily, and cut their throats and left them to die.

As I shrug the Batman backpack onto my shoulder I find one last piece of evidence, just beside her body, poking up out of the mud. A slim stick of molded black plastic, curved at one end and jagged at the other as if snapped off.

It’s the stem of a pair of sunglasses. I tug it out of the mud. I hold it for a long time in my palm and then I tuck it carefully in my pocket. The rain trickles down my face.

I don’t know anything yet, not really, I still have almost everything to learn about what happened to Nico.

But this, this piece of plastic, I know what this means.

“Acceptance of loss is not a destination—it’s a journey.”

This was explained to me by a specially trained grief counselor, how recovering from the unexpected death of a loved one “is not a discrete event that happens at a specific moment in time,” but rather a “process” that unfolds over all the slow years of a lifetime. I met with parades of such counselors in my teenage years, variously competent representatives of the healing community: bereavement experts, therapists, child psychologists. My grandfather would bring me and sit with open impatience in the waiting room, working the crossword, an American Spirit behind his ear waiting to be lit. His skepticism casting a distinct pall over all efforts to make me well.