Three months after Thomas turned sixteen, I tapped on his bedroom door and yelled that he was going to miss the bus if he didn’t hurry up. He didn’t say anything back, but Thomas was always running late, out-sleeping every cell phone alarm and human who yelled at him to wake up each morning. My cousins might have been brother and sister, but they had very different sleeping patterns. Cece was always awake before me.

Knowing Thomas slept like a hibernating bear, I abandoned my efforts and stood at the end of our driveway with Cece. We got on the bus without him and I spent the entire day at school not thinking anything of it. Thomas had been grounded more than once for missing the bus and then making Mom or Dad late to work because they had to come back and get him. I was thirteen, and I didn’t care about any of that. We were studying human anatomy in science class and the boys kept whispering and laughing and pointing to the medical drawing of a penis on page 268 of our science textbook.

That’s the thing about being blissfully unaware: I was telling Cece about the weirdly shaped medically drawn penis on page 268 when her brother was dying.

It was just after lunch, and we were playing tetherball outside when the lady from the front office walked out with a woman, whose name was Joan I think, and I vaguely remembered her as one of the ladies who worked at Mom’s office. Mom wasn’t a superintendent back then; she was a principal at the high school.

“Hi girls,” Joan said, bending down and putting her hands on her thighs to talk to us at eye level. Her short hair was dyed red and still smelled faintly like a hair salon. “Your parents sent me to come get you. And um, we need to stop and buy some asparagus.”

Since my mom was a principal and my dad was a firefighter, we had all kinds of safety regulations in our house. From first aid kits in nearly every room, to a laminated handmade fire escape route with our mailbox as the meeting place, my parents made sure we knew about stranger danger, how to safely hide in a hurricane, and how to administer basic first aid. We also had a code word. Asparagus.

“Don’t go with anyone for any reason unless they have the code word,” Mom had repeatedly instructed us during our bi-annual family safety meetings. “That’s how bad people kidnap children. They tell them something terrifying like their mom is in the hospital and then the kid will go with them because they don’t know any better. You two are not to believe anyone unless they have the code word.”

Joan had the code word. Cece took my hand and squeezed it and didn’t let go the entire time we rode in the backseat of Joan’s BMW. I knew something terrible had happened, but Joan wasn’t talking. Cece’s parents had died only six months ago, and the wound was still fresh. Now my parents? Where would we go?

But when we pulled into our driveway, there were two cop cars and my mom and dad, holding each other and crying. I looked at Cece and burst into a smile. My parents were alive. Whatever happened couldn’t be that bad because they were alive.

In the end, a female police officer had to tell us what happened because my mom was crying so hard she couldn’t get any words out. The memory of that uniformed woman kneeling on the grass, taking me and Cece’s hands in hers, has become a permanent fixture in my mind. Like a framed photo of brain waves, I can relive it day after day, never forgetting a word or a single piece of what that day looked like.

Her name was Officer Ruiz and she told us that Thomas was feared dead.

He never called my parents that day to tell them he missed the bus. Instead, he must have walked to school himself, even though it was thirteen miles away. His backpack was discovered at the top of small bridge on Lone Pine drive, just three miles from home. There was blood all over it and blood on the road. Below the bridge, the Telico river was high and flowing fast that day. It could have easily floated him miles down toward the coast.

It had the power to take him under. Take him whole.

Cece’s brows furrowed as Officer Ruiz talked to us. She was a lot chubbier back then than she is now, and she crossed her arms over her stomach and gave the officer this prissy look, her brows furrowed and cheeks red. “So you didn’t find his dead body?” she said, using words with less tact than I would have chosen. “That means he’s not dead.”

They never did find his body. But Thomas also never came home. And less than a year after our family had been all over the news for the tragic deaths of my aunt and uncle, we were on there again. Orphan Boy Presumed Dead.

And as everyone slowly came to accept the gritty reality of what happened to Thomas, Cece stood alone in her stubborn rejection of the truth. She claimed habeas corpus. Without a body, she refused to believe that Thomas was gone.

 

 

We’re sitting in Mom’s car in our driveway. Cece hasn’t stopped talking since we left her old house and I’ve barely heard a word she’s said. She talks animatedly, her pilfered ice cream scoop twirling around her hand. I can feel it happening, sense it coming like our feral backyard cat senses a thunderstorm before the clouds turn black. Cece’s medicated sanity is about to go off the rails again. She never believed that Thomas was dead, and I guess no one could blame her. She’d lost her parents and her brother in under a year, and as long as they never found a body, she wouldn’t let herself believe he was gone. Even though the blood later matched his DNA and they found bullet casings near his backpack proving what the police considered to be a shooting, a random act of violence that ended my cousin’s life mysteriously and quickly and horrifically. None of that matters to Cece.

My knuckles turn white as I grip the steering wheel. My heart’s been pounding so hard on the drive home that it’s now sprung full on into an anxiety attack and I am freaking out.

I catch the tail end of Cece’s sentence, “—he probably got amnesia all these years and was picked up by a potato farmer and brought back to Idaho and now he finally remembered where he’s from and he came home to find us.”

Why a potato farmer would be driving through Texas is beyond me. She turns to me, her eyes wide and full of adventure. “He came to find us and we weren’t there, Lilah. Can you imagine how terrifying that was for him?”

“You’re forgetting the fact that if he came looking for us, he’d have come to my house,” I say. I cut the engine and shove the keys deep into my left jeans pocket so she can’t do something crazy like try to take them from my hand. “That’s where he lived when he was killed. He lived right here.” I point at our house in front of us, grateful to be home, but that’s only part of the problem right now. I need to get Cece back inside and take her mind of this ridiculous subject before she takes it too far.

I keep my voice calm. “Life isn’t a fairytale. Thomas is dead. I’m sorry, but he is.”

She shakes her head and chuckles under her breath. “You’re just like those people who believed the world was flat even after scientific evidence proved otherwise. I feel sorry for you, Lilah.”

Gritting my teeth, I throw open my door and jump out of the car. Cece does the same and I quickly lock the doors with the remote on the keys. “Where’s your scientific evidence?” I say, my voice rising even though I know I need to keep it down. Therapy lessons on dealing with bipolar people fly at me from all angles, but I ignore each one.

“If you’ll recall, the evidence is that Thomas’s blood and backpack were left on a bridge. The people whose job it is to determine these things have decided that he’s dead. I miss him too, Cece, I do. But he’s gone. We need to go inside and make a police report that someone’s been in your old house.”

Even as I say the words I know I can’t do it. Not yet, not when I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near that house while my parents are gone. Great, that’s just one more thing I have to freak out about. I need to get Cece inside the house immediately. Later, I can talk her into pretending we never went over there. We can “find” the moved cologne bottle when we go with my parents next week.

“Let’s talk about this inside,” I say because I know from experience that when you tell her to shut the hell up, she’ll only explode on you. This is not what I need on the first day of my parents’ trip. If I screw this up my mother will never forgive me. I walk toward the house, praying that Cece will follow. She does, and when we get inside I let out a sigh of relief.

Cece’s going on about the facts that she’s invented in her head, this stupid amnesia story she’s talked about so much over the years that even I can pretend that it might be true. While she talks, I punch in the passcode on the screen by our front door. It arms the entire house, locking us inside. It’s the kind of security system they use in retirement homes. You can’t get outside unless you have a code or you press the emergency button, which unlocks the doors but it also calls the police. The windows don’t open either. My parents installed it after Cece’s first terrifying manic episode where she kept leaving the house to find Thomas herself. We don’t use this lock all the time. I don’t even think we’ve used it in years.

But I’m using it now.

Cece folds her arms across her chest. “That’s how it’s going to be?”

I straighten and do what I’ve been taught to do at our family therapy sessions. Stand my ground as one of Cece’s guardians. “I can’t risk you running off to look for Thomas again,” I say, pressing my lips together so they turn down and let her know how sorry I feel for doing this. “You scared us really bad all those times you tried to run away. You can’t do that again, not now.”

“I was a stupid kid,” she says, gnawing on her bottom lip. “Obviously, I wouldn’t run away now. I’m older and smart enough to do my research. We should alert the news, get another press release and tell him to come home. Maybe he just needs to know that we still want him. If he has amnesia, he might think—”

I cut her off with a loud sigh. “Cece, stop. I loved Thomas and I loved your parents. But they’re all gone now. All we can do is move forward and focus on our own lives.”

Cece drags her hands down her face. “Stop it with the therapy bullshit, Lilah. We used to be friends.” She shakes her head, her jaw clenching. “You used to be on my side.”

“I am on your side.” Even I can tell the words don’t sound right. The truth is, Cece and I are strangers now. We don’t even go to school together anymore. She rides the bus and I get a ride with Kit.

“You’re not,” she says, turning and walking toward the hallway. “Maybe you used to be, but then you became just like everyone else.” She stops in front of her bedroom and turns back, fixing me with a blank stare. “A judgmental bitch.”

“Cece—” I call out, but it’s futile because she’s already slammed the door in my face. I guess this is okay, though. She’s pissed but she’s not manic. Maybe this will all blow over and she’ll be back to normal in the morning. All I have to do is keep her calm until my parents get home. Then she’ll be their problem, and I can go on with my life.