They were playacting.
Why were they playacting?
It didn’t matter if they were playacting.
This is what I’d wanted. This.
Mommy, Daddy, and Big Brother. A house with a front walk instead of locked gates. Want to go shopping with me, Jenny? Want to help me cook dinner, Jenny? What’s the Knicks score, Dad? Ben’s being an asshole, Dad.
They want their daughter back. That’s all.
Even if she’s not their daughter.
They want her back so badly it doesn’t matter if she’s not their daughter.
It totally makes sense.
It makes no sense.
It was senseless.
Okay, sure—almost forgot. There was one member of the family who didn’t want his sister back.
I once saw this show called Ghost Hunters where this guy visited haunted houses looking for cold spots. The rest of the house might be ninety fucking degrees, but behind a certain door, upstairs in the attic, it felt like the middle of January.
You could actually see this guy’s breath coiling upward like one of those spirits he was supposedly hunting for, as he’d stare straight into the camera and solemnly proclaim: This house is haunted.
So was this one.
Haunted by someone who’d walked out the front door one day and never came back. One morning I’d caught Laurie staring at a picture of Jenny on the kitchen wall. When she heard me behind her, she’d quickly turned away, like she’d been caught cheating.
There were two Jennys in the house.
And it had its very own cold spot.
Ben.
I was looking for something to read.
Let’s be clear about that.
When I say something, I mean anything. A People magazine, a trashy romance novel, a grocery list.
Anything.
The goal being to get my mind off this merry-go-round it was on—spinning round and round and always ending back at the same place: Why?
It was making me dizzy. I wanted off.
Dad had left.
See you tonight, Jenny Penny.
Sure, Dad . . .
Laurie had left.
Have a great day, Jen.
You too, Mom . . .
Ben had left.
Bye, Ben . . .
Door slam.
The merry-go-round was beckoning. I already had the ticket in my hand. Cue the calliope.
TV wasn’t an option. There was only so much of Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kylie, and Kendall I could take before it all became white noise.
The downstairs bookcase contained actual books. The bookcase in Father’s house had contained superhero comics and places to stash drugs.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Of Suicide by David Hume. These particular books looking as if they hadn’t been opened in decades and had been possibly used as doorstops.
A bunch of Alex Cross novels took up most of one shelf, with Morgan Freeman’s face peeking out on one of them.
Stuck behind the Alex Cross novels, a thick manila envelope.
Let me be clear again. Just for the record.
I was just looking for something to read, and since that manila envelope was addressed to Laurie and Jake Kristal and the return address scrawled in the top left-hand corner said J. Pennebaker, Bakersfield, Georgia, I wanted/needed/desired to read more.
Pennebaker. I knew that name.
I carried the manila envelope to the couch and sat there staring at it.
Pennebaker.
The guy who’d called the house just before I’d decided to take a walk and run into Becky.
Tell Mrs. Kristal I won’t be calling again.
Someone calling to say they wouldn’t be calling.
Pennebaker. Joe.
Only it seemed to me that even then the name had sounded kind of familiar—just like Maple Street had, and Forest Avenue, and this house.
When I opened the envelope and looked inside, when I took the stapled-together sheaf of papers out and began perusing them—no, really reading them, the way I’d once read Ben’s Facebook entries, as if my life depended on them, my new life, because, well, it had—I remembered why.