s more and less there. I keep thinking of that conversation we had out in the snow when I asked him to co-teach and how it felt…something. He was distracted by something and I meant to ask him what but then when we went out after that Lexi was there the whole time and I know he doesn’t know L well enough for that sort of convo and then he was gone.
The police don’t like “he seemed distracted” when you don’t know what it was that was distracting.
It sounds so empty. Isn’t everyone distracted, like, all the time?
They also didn’t like that my answer to “What were you texting him about?” was “The Harry Potter scarf I knit for him.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” one of them asked me in that you are far too old for that you entitled millennial overgrown child tone.
I shrugged.
I hate that I shrugged.
* * *
—
“How well do you know him?” they asked me, over lukewarm police-station tea in an environmentally unfriendly disposable cup with the teabag in it, trying to be more than leaf-flavored water and failing.
How well does anyone know anyone? We had a handful of overlapping classes and all the game people know each other more or less. We hung out sometimes at bars or by the crappy coffee machine in the media building lounge. We talked about games and cocktails and books and being only children and not minding being only children even though people seemed to think we should.
I wanted to tell them that I knew Z well enough to ask him for a favor and to return it. I knew which cocktails on a bar menu he would order and how if there wasn’t anything interesting he’d get a sidecar. I knew we had similar views on how games can be so much more than just shooting things, that games can be anything, including shooting things. Sometimes he would go dancing with me on Tuesday nights because we both liked it better when the clubs weren’t so crowded and I knew he was a really good dancer but he had to have at least two drinks before you could get him out on the floor. I knew he read a lot of novels and he was a feminist and if I saw him around campus before 8 a.m. it was probably because he hadn’t slept yet. I knew I felt like we were right at that place where you go from being regular friends to help-you-move-dead-bodies friends but we weren’t quite there yet, like we needed to do one more side quest together and earn a few more mutual approval points and then it would be something a little more comfortable, but we hadn’t figured out our friendship dynamic entirely.
“We were friends,” I told them and it sounded wrong and right.
They asked me if he was seeing anyone and I said I didn’t think so and then they seemed like they didn’t believe me about the friends thing anymore, because a friend would know. I almost told them I knew he had a lousy breakup with that MIT guy (he had a noun name, Bell or Bay or something) but I didn’t, because it was ages ago and I’m pretty sure it was mostly because of long-distance issues and it didn’t seem super relevant.
They asked if I thought he would have done something—like jumped-off-a-bridge something—and I said I didn’t think so, but I also think most of us are two steps away from jumping off something most of the time and you never know if the next day is going to push you in one direction or another.
They asked me for my number but they never called.
I called and left messages a couple of times to see if they’d found out anything.
No one ever called me back.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER stands in a snow-covered field. More snow is lightly falling around him, clinging to his eyeglasses and hair. Surrounding the field there are trees, holding a dusting of flakes in their branches. The night sky is clouded but softly glowing as it hides the stars and the moon.
Zachary turns and there is a door behind him, a rectangle standing freely in the middle of the field, opening into a crystal cavern. Firelight flickers far beyond it, reaching out toward the snow, but the torch that was in Zachary’s hand a moment ago has vanished along with his owl.
The air in his lungs is crisp and bright and difficult to breathe.
Everything feels too much. Too wide and too open. Too cold and too strange.
In the distance there is a light and as Zachary walks toward it through the lightly falling snow it becomes many small lights strung along the facade of a very familiar building. A plume of smoke curls up from the chimney, winding its way through the snow and toward the stars.
He was just here. Was it only weeks ago? Maybe. Maybe not. It looks the same, year after year.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins walks past the indigo barn that looks black in the light and up the snow-covered stairs of his mother’s farmhouse. He stands on the back porch, cold and confused. There is a sword strapped to his back in an ancient leather scabbard. He is wearing an antique coat that has been lost in time and found again.
He can’t believe Mirabel sent him home.
But he’s here. He can feel the snow on his skin, the worn boards beneath his feet. There are twinkling lights strung around the railing and hung from the eaves. The porch is strewn with holly branches wrapped in silver ribbons and bowls left out for the faeries.
Beneath the scent of the snow there is the fire burning in the fireplace and cinnamon from the cookies that have likely just emerged from the oven.
The lights are on inside. The house is filled with people. Laughter. The clinking of glasses. Music that is unmistakably Vince Guaraldi.
The windows are frosted over. The party is a haze of light and color broken into rectangles.