“It’s just . . . I need to look for something in that house. It’s mine. You know, from that summer? It’s my backpack. He kept it for me after he found out about the posters. I want to see if it’s still there.”
“That’s just the worst idea I’ve ever heard, Frankie. My god, are you okay?”
“I think I’m gonna go over there,” I said. “I don’t think I can stop myself. I need to find it.”
“Frankie? I am begging you not to go over there. This is insane. Plus, she has a live-in nurse, who is there all the time. Okay, now, remember how I said that you weren’t responsible for the deaths of all those people? And, okay, Frankie, it’s probably—if you work out to encompass the whole world—it’s probably a lot of people who died. And that is not on you! But, if you kill Ms. Avery because you’re trying to get some backpack from twenty years ago, then that will be your fault.”
“Okay, I understa—”
“And what does it matter? You said the lady already knows. She’s gonna write the article, right? What does it matter if you get that backpack?”
“I don’t know . . . ,” I said, but I kind of knew, really very strongly knew. I wanted more proof. If I was going to take credit for it, I wanted more evidence. It was a strange thing, to have hidden it for so long, and now I was starting to get paranoid that no one would really believe me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But really I was thinking that maybe I could get Mazzy to visit with Ms. Avery, and maybe she could get the backpack. I had to calm myself down. I’d so quickly gone from terror over being discovered to intense anxiety that it would all make me look like an idiot, a fake. I decided I wanted some of those Little Debbie snack cakes, and my mom brought over two boxes, Star Crunch and Oatmeal Creme Pies, and I ate two of each very quickly, and for some reason this made my mom smile.
“You always loved junk,” she said, “Pop-Tarts and Zingers and Little Debbie.”
“Well, the house was full of it,” I said.
“And now you barely let Junie have any,” she said.
“If Junie ate a Zinger,” I said, “she would shoot into the air and explode like a firework. She would destroy Bowling Green like she was Godzilla.”
“Sweetie?” she asked me. The snack cakes had calmed me down, forced me to breathe, to chew, and it felt like I was sixteen again, sitting in our living room. When I looked at her, she said, “What about Zeke?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have to find him. I have to tell him.”
I’d been putting this off for so long, didn’t know what to say, how much to say. As soon as I got to college, got my first email account, the first time I’d really been able to surf the internet on my own, I looked for him. But I didn’t know his name. I knew his middle name was Zeke, but it was something he was trying out for the summer, or at least that’s what he had told me. I had no idea if he would still be using that name or, if he was trying to erase all evidence of that summer in Coalfield, if he was going by his first name, which I had never asked for and he had never told me. I sometimes wondered if I’d even misremembered his last name, if it was indeed Brown. And the internet wasn’t as all-knowing back then, so typing in Zeke Brown and Memphis was not going to get you very far.
But I kept checking, every few months, first on AltaVista and Excite and Yahoo!, then on Google, and I’d click through the results, but there just wasn’t anything there. I got on Friendster and then MySpace and then Facebook, though I never maintained any actual social media, still didn’t even use Twitter or Instagram, because I didn’t really want to use them and I didn’t really need to use them. But I’d search for him. Nothing, or nothing that, after just a little more digging, was really him. There was a point, after I’d published the first book, when I had money and I thought I could hire a detective, but it felt wrong, like if Zeke wanted me to find him, he wouldn’t make it so that I needed to involve other people.
Eventually, just searching for Ezekiel Brown finally let me hit some actual possibilities. There was a Benjamin Ezekiel Brown, born in the same year as Zeke, and Memphis had been listed in some pay-to-play sites that offered arrest records and felt very much like a scam. He might have been in Knoxville for a little while. I sometimes found hits connected to an address in North Carolina. But nothing I could pin down. Ben Brown was not an easy name to search. When his grandmother died after she moved into a nursing home in Nashville, I didn’t know until months later, after visiting my mom, and no newspaper even had an obituary for her. I gave up. Or, no, I always searched, but then I stopped when it felt like that next step was necessary, to actually reach out, to call a random number and hope it was him. To hear his voice as an adult, to hear something in it that let me know it was Zeke, I couldn’t make myself do it. I was waiting for him to tell me that he was ready to talk. But he never wanted to talk, I guess. He never wanted me to find him. And now I had to. Because, if I told Mazzy everything, someone would find him. And it felt so cruel to do that to him, to have someone else tell him that they knew the secret. It had to be me, no one else in the world but me.