“I think there’s more to it,” he says.
“What if there isn’t anything else that connects us?” I say. “What if he’s just a predator, and like any predator he has an appetite for a specific kind of prey. Torch is his hunting ground of choice.”
Bailey is quiet a moment as he goes to town on those fries. He’s an unapologetic eater, too. I can tell by his build that he works out, the definition of his muscles, the way he carries himself, the solid strength of his arm back in the woods. But he’s got that softness to him of the person who loves food. He’s not the guy counting calories and opting for the vegan plate.
“But none of you look especially similar,” he says finally. “Same age, I suppose. All of you beautiful, but in really different ways. Not like you all have dark hair, or the same color eyes.”
Heat rises to my cheeks at the compliment. But it sounds like a throwaway line, so I don’t acknowledge it.
“Maybe it’s a kind of energy he’s picking up on, rather than anything physical,” I say. My root beer is gone. Should I have another one? I lift my glass to the waitress, and she gives me a thumbs-up. “Do you have pictures of the other girls?”
He takes out his phone and slides it over. He’s created a layout with all four women, including me in one image. It’s my Torch profile picture, which Jax took. It’s not the worst shot of me. She told me to think about getting laid—which made me laugh; that’s when she took the picture. My eyes glitter with mischief.
“All women of means,” he continues. Then more gently, “All suffered extreme childhood trauma.”
A painful ache has settled behind my eyes. I rub at my temples, push my plate away.
“Maybe it’s just coincidence that they all dated him? Maybe he has nothing to do with what happened to them?”
“Possible,” he says. “But highly unlikely. I’m not a big believer in coincidence.”
The waitress brings my second root beer. I sip at it. It’s not as good as the first one, for some reason. Now it tastes sickly sweet. My stomach protests a little at its greasy contents.
“What brings you up here today?” he asks again.
I focus on my burger, which is almost gone, rather than look at him. He must have seen me kneeling at the graves. He knows my history. This place, as much as I wish it wasn’t, is a kind of home.
But that’s not why I came. I came because of the article I found. Because of Melissa Farrow, who also had a connection to this place. There are answers here maybe. Maybe the answers have always been here.
“I just come here sometimes. To manage things. The graves. The house.”
That’s true, too. I don’t want to admit that I’m here looking for you. We’re both looking for you, but for very different reasons. If he finds you first, I may never get what I want.
What I also don’t say: when I come back here, I’m overcome with homesickness for a place that never existed. A word I read comes to mind: solastalgia, a miserable tangle of solace, desolation, and nostalgia. Glenn Albrecht defines it as the distress of seeing a familiar environment bitterly transformed by drought, fire, flood, war. But it describes perfectly how I feel about my childhood.
“When I mentioned this town last night, you didn’t say anything.”
“Didn’t I?”
Again, with that unreadable expression, a blink of his icy eyes.
“I get it.” He polishes off his burger, glances at his phone. “You don’t trust me. We all have things we don’t want to talk about, or even remember. I just wondered if you were trying to follow his trail. You know, playing amateur detective. Maybe looking for Melissa Farrow.”
“No,” I lie. “Nothing like that.”
“Do you know her?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
“But you grew up here. So did she.”
I shrug, my eyes drifting back to the television where the game continues. Someone scores. More cheering.
“I wouldn’t say I grew up here. After my father came back from his deployment, he moved us into the house he’d inherited. It sat on twenty acres, and I was homeschooled. My dad—he wanted to move away from modern life. The world of men, as he called it. We weren’t part of the community in that way.”
He’s doing this slow nodding thing. It’s oddly comforting, as if he was perfectly present in the conversation. “I understand.”
“So we were here, but apart. My dad—he wasn’t well. I know that now. He had untreated PTSD, was self-medicating, a heavy drinker. There were problems even before he went overseas, I think. Some history of bipolar disorder in the family.”