Gone

“Cabel—what kind of name is that?”

Janie ignores her. Wishes she hadn’t said anything in the first place.

“You better not get knocked up, alls I can say. A baby ruins your life.” Janie’s mother shuffles off to her bedroom.

Janie stares at her as she goes. Shakes her head. “Hey, thanks a lot,” she calls out. She pulls out her phone and turns it on. There’s a text from Cabel.

Didn’t hear you leave. Where’d you go? Everything okay?

Janie sighs. Texts back. Just woke up early. Had some stuff to take care of.

He replies. You left your shoes here. Want me to bring them, or?

Janie debates. Yeah. Thx.

11:30 a.m.

He’s at the door. “Mind if we go for a ride?”

Janie narrows her eyes. “Where to?”

“You’ll see.”

Reluctantly, Janie follows him to the car.

Cabel heads out of town and down a road that leads past several cornfields, and then acre after acre of woods. He slows the car down, squinting at the occasional rusty mailbox, scanning the woods.

“What are you doing?” Janie asks.

“Looking for two-three-eight-eighty-eight.”

Janie sits up and peers out her window too. She says suspiciously, “Who lives way out here in BFE?”

Cabel squints again and slows as they pass 23766. He glances in his rearview mirror and a moment later, a car zooms by, passing them. “Henry Feingold.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I looked in the phone book.”

“Hunh. You’re smart,” Janie says. Unsure. Should she be outraged or eager?

Or just ashamed that she didn’t think of it first?

Another mile and Cabel turns into an overgrown two-track gravel drive. Bushes scratch the sides of the car and the track is extremely bumpy. Cabel swears under his breath.

Janie peers out the windshield. The sun beats down between the tree branches, making it a striped ride. She sees something blurry about a quarter-mile away, in a clearing. “Is that a house?”

“Yeah.”

After a couple of minutes, Cabel driving agonizingly slow over the bumpy driveway, they come to a stop in front of a small, run-down cabin.

They get out of the car. In the gravel turnaround there’s an old, rusty blue station wagon with wood panels. A container of sun tea steeps on the car hood.

Janie takes it all in.

Bushes surround the tiny house. A wayward string of singed roses threatens to overtake a rotting trellis. A few straggling tiger lilies are opened wide, soaking up the sun. All the other flowers are weeds. Outside the front door sits a short stack of cardboard boxes.

Cabel steps carefully through pricker bushes to the dirty window and peers inside, trying to see through the tiny opening between curtains. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s here.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Janie says. She’s uncomfortable. It’s hot and the air buzzes with insects. And they are invading someone’s privacy. “This place is creeping me out.”

Cabel examines the stack of boxes in front of the door, looking at the return addresses. He picks one up and shakes it near his ear. Then he sets it back down on the pile and looks around. “Want to break in?” he asks with an evil grin.

“No. That’s not cool. We could get arrested!”

“Nah, who’s going to know?”

“If Captain ever found out, she’d kick our asses. She’s not going to go easy.” Janie edges toward the car. “Come on, Cabe. Seriously.”

Cabel reluctantly agrees and they get back into the car. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want to know more? The guy’s your father. Aren’t you curious?”

Janie looks out the window as Cabel turns the car around. “I’m trying not to be.”

“Because he’s dying?”

She’s lost in thought. “Yeah.” Knows that if she doesn’t invest in Henry, she can write him off as a problem solved when he dies. He’ll just be some guy whose obituary is in the paper. Not her father. “I don’t need one more thing to worry about, I guess.”

Cabel pulls the car out onto the road again and Janie glances over her shoulder one last time. All she can see are trees.

“I hope his packages don’t get all wet next time it rains,” she says.

“Does it really matter if they do?”

They ride in silence for a few minutes. And then Cabel asks, “Did you get anything from Henry’s nightmare yesterday? I was afraid to ask after our little misunderstanding of doom.”

Janie turns in her seat and watches Cabel drive. “It was mostly the same as before. Static. Colors. Woman in the distance and then I saw Henry in the dream too. Always sitting in that same chair. He was watching the woman.”

“What was the woman doing?”

“Just standing there in the middle of a dimly lit room—it was like a school gymnasium or something. I couldn’t see her face.”

“He was just watching her? Sounds creepy.”

“Yeah,” Janie says. She watches the rows of corn whiz past in a blur. “It didn’t really feel creepy, though. It felt . . . lonely. And then—” Janie stops. Thinks. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“He turned and looked at me. Like he was maybe a little bit surprised that I was there. He asked me to help him.”

“Other people in dreams have seen you too, right? They talk to you.”