“Yeah?”
“Is there a Zeke that lives there? Or a Ben?”
“Zeke and Ben?” she asked, sounding so wary of me. Why didn’t she just hang up the phone, for crying out loud?
“It’s the same person. They might go by Zeke or they might go by Ben. Or Benjamin, I guess.”
“No, there isn’t a Ben or a Zeke or a Benjamin or anyone like that here,” she said. “It’s just me.”
“Okay, well, sorry about that.”
“Who gave you the number?” she asked.
“Lydia? What’s going on? No one did. I must have misdialed. So sorry.”
“What’s your name?” she asked, but I hung up. My cell rang again and I declined the call and then blocked the number. It could not have gone worse. Well, no, I guess it could have been Zeke and he could have told me to go jump off a cliff. But at least then I wouldn’t have had to make another phone call.
After a few minutes of pacing, of looking at my mom’s sneakers, I went to the next number, a 919 area code, North Carolina, and heard a voicemail message that wasn’t Zeke. I tried the Oregon number. Nothing. I tried the Georgia number and a boy told me that I had the wrong number. I tried a few that didn’t even seem plausible and got the same results. And I was out of numbers.
And there was this little moment, a moment I never allowed myself, when I imagined that Zeke might be dead, that he was gone, and it didn’t matter how long I searched for him. It was such a brief little window, where he went from missing to dead, and then I brought him back, that boy at the pool, his busted lip, eating that watermelon, because that was the whole point. Even if it was just in my mind, I needed Zeke to exist in order to keep going.
I looked up his mother’s name, not her maiden name but as Cydney Brown, in Memphis, and found it easily, a number I had seen many times, but I had never wanted to talk to her because I didn’t want that barrier between me and Zeke. It had always seemed like fate would bring Zeke into my world, but it had not. And now I needed him. I dialed the number.
It rang once and then Zeke answered. It was him, I knew immediately. Not the voice I remembered, but it was him. Why was it this easy? Why hadn’t I tried this years ago? And then I felt so sick, the whole summer rushing back, and I knew exactly why I hadn’t tried before.
“Hello?” he said.
“Zeke?” I asked, so shocked to hear him.
“Hello?” he said again, confused. “Who is this?”
“Zeke, it’s—”
“Frankie?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, and I was crying. It had been so long, and just hearing him say my name, I felt the whole world stop for a second. I couldn’t breathe.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you calling me? What’s going on?”
“Zeke,” I said, but I still couldn’t get a breath. My chest was so tight. I thought I might be having a heart attack, but it was just a panic attack. It was just my entire life cracking open.
“Why would you do this, Frankie?” he asked. I heard another voice over the phone, an older woman, and she asked, “What’s going on?” and he said, “It’s Frankie, Mom.”
“Hang up,” she told him.
“I have to go,” he said, but I could still hear him breathing. I was trying so hard not to say it.
“Frankie,” he said, “are you still there?”
I hung up the phone.
I tossed it away from me, pulled my knees up to my chest, holding myself steady. You know what I was saying to myself, right? I was saying it. Again and again. I waited for the phone to ring, for Zeke to come find me, now that I’d found him. But the phone was so quiet. The house was so quiet.
I held on to myself, my eyes closed. I saw the poster in my mind, those hands reaching out. I didn’t know who the hands belonged to. Were they mine? I hoped not. I rocked and rocked. I prayed that my mom would not come check on me. I had no idea if anything else in the world still existed. My room went back to the way it was, my dumb posters and dirty laundry, candy wrappers everywhere, and I was a teenager, the summer heat making everything wavy, just before I met Zeke for the first time. And I let myself live in that temporary space, before anything had happened. And it felt so good, and I wondered why I’d stayed alive, why I ever left that moment. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, at four in the morning, I checked my phone. I was back in the real world. Zeke was gone again.
But I’d found him. He couldn’t disappear. I had his number. I had the address. I just had to dial the number again. I could call forever, hitting redial, over and over and over, until I pulled him back into the world that we’d made together. I wondered what he was doing right now, what he must have been thinking. He lived with his mom, maybe. Or she lived with him. I wasn’t sure.