Love in the Time of Serial Killers(2)

Driving ten hours straight must’ve scrambled my brain, because his words made me snort and then break into full-out laughter. It was absurd—this random conversation that barely hit polysyllables, the giant desk strapped to my Camry, the fact that I was here at all, standing in front of a house that I had very few fond memories of. It was two in the morning and I was wearing coffee-stained pajama pants because I’d thought it would be brilliant to dress so I could roll right into bed when I arrived, only I hadn’t factored in my stunning inability to drink from the right side of a to-go cup.

“My dude,” I said. “If you think this desk looks heavy, you should see my trigger finger on my Mace in about five seconds if you don’t back off.”

He looked at me for a moment, almost as if he were about to say something else. And maybe it was coming up on time to reread The Gift of Fear again, because I realized that the butterflies in my stomach weren’t from anxiety but from . . . anticipation. Like there was some quiet watchfulness in his expression that pierced through my armor, and I wanted to know what he saw there.

But instead I turned back toward the desk, making a show of tightening a strap even though that was the opposite of what I was trying to do. When I glanced over my shoulder a minute later, he was gone, as stealthily as he’d arrived.

My forehead dropped to the roof of the car, my grip around the legs of the desk relaxing. I was so tired. I doubted anyone would be interested in stealing a desk, and it wasn’t supposed to rain that night. I should go inside and go to bed and let this be a problem for rested, freshly caffeinated future me to solve in the morning.

I grabbed my backpack out of the passenger side, hauled my bigger duffel out of the back seat, and locked up the car. My dad’s neighborhood was older, somehow escaping the homeowners association restrictions that would regulate things like streetlights, so it was dark, too. I gave one last sweeping glance around the street—to the left, where an outside cat looked up from its position laid out on my neighbor’s driveway, to the house to the right, where a single light still shone through one window. Satisfied I was alone, I headed up to the front door of my dad’s house.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Musty, like a damp towel that had been left on the bathroom floor too long, with a slight antiseptic undercurrent like that same towel had been sprayed with Windex a couple times. This must’ve been what Conner meant when he said he’d been coming by once a week to “clean.”

The place sure didn’t look clean. That wasn’t completely Conner’s fault, I knew—my dad had been a bit of a pack rat, not so bad they’d put him on a TV show but definitely hoarder-adjacent. Even as I walked in, I stubbed my toe on a plastic tub filled with magazines and mail in the entryway, and then knocked a broom to the floor. The bristles of the broom were covered with cobwebs, lest I think Conner had been using it.

I set my bags down on the first empty expanse of floor I could find in the living room. My dad’s room was to the left, but there was no way I could sleep in there. He hadn’t died in there or anything—it had been a heart attack at the grocery store, mercifully quick, the doctors had told us—but still. It was my dad’s room.

I opened the door anyway, just to see inside. More magazines, stacked next to the bed and fanning out from where they’d toppled over. What had it been with him and magazines? I’d never even thought of him as much of a reader. But he’d been such a sucker for those commemorative magazines at the checkout aisle in particular, 100 Greatest Films or Remembering D-Day or Photographs That Changed the World.

Next, I checked out the kitchen, not expecting anything edible, but just hoping that there wasn’t some open bag of sugar that had fallen over in the pantry and been allowed to attract ants for the last six months. When I opened the fridge, it was surprisingly clean—and with a large bag of Kit Kats and a twenty-four pack of Mountain Dew inside.

There was a Post-it stuck to the Mountain Dew: WELCOME BACK, PHOEBE! written in sloppy capital letters. It wasn’t signed, but of course, there was only one other person who had keys to this place. And only one person who loved Mountain Dew so much he’d been arrested once trying to steal a six-foot-tall cardboard cutout of a two-liter from a gas station. He’d wanted it for his dorm room, he said.

I smiled to myself, shaking my head as I closed the fridge. It was actually kind of sweet that Conner had thought to leave me something. Sweet being the operative word, since I’d be in a sugar spiral in five seconds if I tried to subsist on his gifts alone. I’d have to go shopping in the morning.

But for now, I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was peel off these coffee-stained pajama pants and fall into bed. I only hoped that my dad had kept the bed in my brother’s or my old room. My brother had lived in this house more recently than I had, leaving only three years ago when he’d transferred from community college to a campus a few hours away. But when I checked out his room, I saw that he must’ve taken his bed with him at some point, or else my dad had gotten rid of it. There were still some signs that he’d lived there, like the huge Red Dead Redemption poster he had hanging on one wall, but otherwise it was just an old table pushed to one corner, a couple laundry baskets filled with household items and not a piece of laundry in sight, and the pieces of a computer laid out on the floor like someone had been interrupted in the middle of putting it together.

It did something to me, seeing the computer like that. I could picture my dad working on it, could imagine him trying to explain to Conner how some of the parts went together and then getting impatient when Conner kept asking questions about some aspect of the process my dad hadn’t gotten around to explaining yet.