But whatever it was, Waylon and I stayed seated on those barstools for a very long time.
I step into my house now and greet Roscoe at the door, scratching behind his ears before pulling off my coat and making my way toward the kitchen. Then I pour myself a glass of water before walking to my laptop.
“Give me one minute,” I say to him, tapping the keys as the glow of the screen illuminates my face in the dark. I refresh my browser and check my email: no response from Dozier. Then I take a deep drink and click back to the article, scrolling down to the comments again, the liquid suddenly lodging in my windpipe, making me choke. I sputter out a gag, slamming the glass down on the table as I feel the water claw at the lining of my throat.
I cough, blink a few times to clear the tears from my eyes, and refresh it again, but it doesn’t matter. It still looks the same.
The comment is gone.
“Shit,” I whisper, leaning back into my chair. I should have taken a screenshot. I refresh again, just to be sure, and am met with the same blank screen where that sentence stared back at me just a few hours ago.
He’s in a better place.
I stand up and slip off my shoes before lacing up a pair of sneakers and fastening Roscoe’s leash to his collar. Even though I just got home, I have an urgent need to get out of this house again. It feels like there’s something heavy settling over it, like the sensation of a storm as it moves quickly and quietly across the sky: bloated and ominous. It doesn’t feel safe.
I exhale as soon as we get outside, the cool night air filling my lungs and making them burn. We walk down our porch steps, and Roscoe veers right, the way he always does, until suddenly, I hear Waylon’s voice in my head, enveloping me like a blanket of fog.
“Maybe you need to stop retracing your footsteps. Maybe you need to try a new path.”
I give Roscoe a tug, stopping him in his tracks.
“Let’s go this way,” I say, turning left, forcing him to follow. “Do something a little different tonight.”
We walk silently for a while, venturing deeper into the darkness, the road like an inkblot bleeding into the distance. As usual, the houses are dead, all their lights off. There’s a deafening quiet to the neighborhood, more so than usual, and it’s making my thoughts ring a little louder, rattling around in my mind like loose change in a jar.
I’m used to thinking about Mason, of course. Talking about Mason. But lately, I’ve been thinking about other things, too. About Ben and our beginnings; about Margaret and my parents. About what happened back then and how my entire life seems to be one giant question mark. A string of ellipses and unresolved endings, the answers dark and murky, like sitting on the dock, feet submerged in the water, trying to find your toes through the muck.
And then there’s that feeling again. That feeling that the answers are so close, within my reach. That someone, somewhere, is trying to tell me something—or that I already know something, and I just can’t retain the thought. It’s like waking up groggy and trying to remember a dream, the outlines of it fuzzy and fading. Racking your brain, attempting to recall words or shapes or sounds or smells, anything to get you just a little bit closer to the truth.
But after too much time, it withers away, getting erased from your memory, like the ashes of a burnt building getting swept up in the breeze.
Roscoe and I have been walking for about twenty minutes now, and although I’m not as familiar with this part of the neighborhood, I can tell that we’re starting to make our way back home. We’re nearing the marsh, and at this point, my pupils have fully dilated, my eyes adjusted to the night. I can see things more clearly: the outline of toys abandoned in front yards, soggy newspapers left in driveways. An overturned garbage can, the owners too lazy to secure the lid. There’s trash scattered across the sidewalk, the work of raccoons, and that’s the problem: Nobody ever stops to wonder what happens in the dead of night, all the things that take place when the world is unconscious. The strangers who lurk in the shadows, crouching low beneath a window or twisting the knob of an unlocked door. The animals who hunt, warm blood dripping from their teeth as they feast on the meat of another. We just assume that when we fall asleep, the world does, too. We expect it to resume exactly as it was in the morning, untouched. Unbothered. As if life just stops because we have.
But that’s not true. Even before Mason was taken, I knew it wasn’t true. I was always keenly aware of the evils that mask themselves in the cloak of night; the horrors that haunt the world while we sleep.