Shortwave
by Stevie doCarmo

I’ve never told anyone.

Ever.

First off, who’d care? Am I the one the horrible thing happened to?

No.

Second off.

Just a person in proximity. A pip. Me. Who “liked” her, to use the adolescent parlance. Who’d admitted, or whatever, that’s what it meant. That whenever I looked at her across the room in pre-algebra class I wanted to cry.

Second off, what’s even to tell?

Some miniscule bit of electrical activity in a frontal lobe. Some clump of sticky dopamine or whatever molecules in some slimy gray wrinkle.

What’s seventh-grade “liking” beyond that?

Nanoamperes.

A wispy nothing.

So why not just tell it, then?

Because never. To anyone. That I was the pip—maybe the only one—with a crush on her.

The one person on earth fantasizing being in her pink-curtained bedroom. Braiding her hair. Swapping jeans and tees with her. Playing let’s-practice-kissing-boys.

I’d admitted it. Sometime that spring. And then she promptly vanished into the news.

Cops in the woods at the edge of the neighborhood.

ABC/NBC/CBS vans camped out at the community-center playground.

Third off.

For a while they were “all over” this one guy. The cops. This doughy middle-aged guy who lived down the street with his mom and did ham radio from the basement every day.

Nothing came of it, though.

Then they were all over her dad.

Ditto.

(Third off.)

The grown-ups at school were funny. Pretending she’d be back any minute. Like she was just off to Disneyworld or to North Carolina for some great-aunt’s funeral. Teachers. Our principal. That asshole vice-principal, even, with the wooden paddle on his office wall.

Till the school year ended they kept it up.

That’s when it became our parents’ problem. Explaining we’d likely seen the last of Bethany.

Call it the one time after my dad died my mother actually knew I was alive. That summer I wasn’t allowed out of the house.

No one was allowed out.

Days, weeks, months going by.

Next thing you know it’s years.

Third off. What if my telling it somehow severs my connection to her? And then there goes my chance—poof—for ever getting to where she is?

It’s bad, I know.

I know.

Thinking of it that way. As some sort of vacation destination.

Except for years now I’ve wondered: what’s it like being nowhere?

Because two different TV shows they put her on. Three years apart. With the 800 numbers for calling the FBI.

Plus a bazillion milk cartons and mailers.

Plus this famous psychic they consulted. Who sent them—the cops—to this rock quarry a hundred miles away. Told them to look for a horsehead-shaped boulder perched up on a sheared cliff.

They found it, all right. And when they dug under it they discovered a rusty metal lockbox full of human teeth.

Adult-male teeth chock full of antique gold fillings.

Bethany is nowhere.

True, I had that figured for a scary place for a while.

I thought I saw it once. One Thanksgiving when my mom’s VW Beetle broke down on the way home from grandpa’s, out on the commercial strip. We went into this bar-n-grill to find a payphone. This place between a used-car dealer and a Thom McAn shoe store. Inside, five or six grown-ups were sitting around a shadowy bar. Men and women. All of them alone. No one talking to anyone. Glasses of whatever in front of them, faces hidden in clouds of cigarette smoke.

On Thanksgiving.

I thought: here’s where missing people go.

I thought: this is nowhere.

At some point, though, I guess I semi-forgot about it.

I started thinking wherever nowhere is, it’s got to trump where I’m at.

Now when my mother reminds me she only had me because my dad wanted a kid so bad—but probably that was just the brain tumor working on him.

Or when Ron catches me at the fridge with the ice cream or Olive Garden leftovers in my face and says, Sure, keep eating, you must be starved from chasing skirts at that college all day.

Then I wonder. What would my mother do? If she shuffled back into the waiting room after her optometrist appointment and found my seat under the TV empty? Nothing but my tipped-over purse and sad, forsaken mittens there to testify I ever existed?

How would Ron react? If he came back to the car after a not-so-quick pit-stop into AutoZone and I was gone, car door still ajar, kicked-over Wendy’s soda down on the passenger floormat? (After he lost his mind about the floormat, I mean?)

What if they then had to watch weeks turn into months?

Months turn into years?

What I don’t know is where I am in those scenarios.

I mean, where am I?

Is there weather there? Are there supermarkets? Do people have jobs and go on vacation and get married and have kids and go to friends’ funerals when they get old and die?

Do they sit around watching TV shows urging them to call in information about their own whereabouts?

Do they have sex?

Are they ever tempted—after ten or twenty or maybe fifty years—to go back to their old lives? Reconnect with the pips they left behind? Do they ever try to get messages or signals through to them?

One afternoon last summer I discovered the shortwave band on Ron’s old boombox in the garage.

Hours I spent twisting that knob back and forth. Listening to strange languages, weird musical instruments. Freaky electronic blurps and scronks coming from who knows where.

I’d just started wondering in earnest if some place I was picking up had Bethany in it when I tuned in this scream. This bloodcurdling woman’s scream half-buried in roaring static like noise left over from the big bang.

Or maybe it was just some lost and scared low-earth-orbit satellite shrieking into the sunset.

Whatever it was, it made me remember that man. The ham-radio man. This one time I saw him from the backseat of my mother’s Beetle.

Months, this was, after Bethany disappeared. Months after the cops had finished “working him over,” to quote my mom. And being “all over him.”

He was standing alone by the mailbox in his mother’s unkempt front yard, up by the sidewalk. His big moon belly hanging out the bottom of his too-small undershirt. Sobbing. I mean, like, inconsolably. Racked, as they say. Bent at the knees and waist, this long rope of snot hanging off his beard.

I thought, too, about this boy I knew in junior high. Bobby. Him telling everyone at lunch one day he’d seen Bethany’s mom being taken from their house by EMTs, strapped to a gurney, kicking and screaming.

She was “no longer a functioning unit,” he said.

I thought about my dad. The time he told me while I was sitting next to his bed in the hospice place it was totally fine if I liked girls. He’d always been partial to them himself, he said. And when I said boys were good, too, he gave a funny smile, kind of embarrassed, and shook his head a little, and looked away.

What if I crushed so hard on Bethany because I picked up a signal from the universe? Saying she was going to vanish?

What if some equation she chalked up on the board when Mrs. K called her up front had a hieroglyph in it only I could read?

An I’m-going-nowhere hieroglyph.

Is that why I always wanted to cry in math class?

I’m connected to her. To Bethany. Like no one else.

Secretly.

More every year.

Being secret is what keeps it alive.

When I drive through the old development the houses look tired. Beat. Small.

I mean small. The whole neighborhood. The yards and driveways. The garages with the basketball hoops mounted on them. So low even I could dunk on them.

It’s sunset when I park by the curb at the edge of the woods. Get out of the car. Walk into the motionless trees.

I’m not a hundred feet in when she steps out from behind a tree in front of me. Startling me. Making me do what must look like an impression of a flabbergasted person, clutching my head, bent at knees and waist. My mouth an O.

It’s Bethany, all right. Even with that crazy haircut.

Those pretty green cat eyes.

She’s my own age!

OshKosh overalls she wears. And maybe nothing else. Not even shoes or socks.

Hey, she says.

She looks embarrassed. Kind of guilty or what’s-the-word. Sheepish.

Where have you been? I say. My gosh, all the people looking for you!

She shrugs. Sort of silly-like.

Nowhere, she says.

We both laugh.

So what’s that like? I say. Nowhere?

Another shrug. One freckled shoulder pistoning up and down in an orange ray of sun.

It’s not a place, she says, like you usually think of places. It’s more like—quantum-science stuff. You know? Like when they say certain particles aren’t actually in one place? They’re in all the places they could be in, all at the same time?

I can’t even guess what expression this puts on my face, but she says, I know. But that’s what it’s like being nowhere. It’s like being everywhere you might be, all at once.

I’m still puzzling this out when she says, I can only stay a minute.

Please don’t go, I say.

I say, You have no idea.

I do, though, she says. That’s why I came. To tell you I miss you, too. Okay? And I’m so proud of you.

I wipe my face with my hands. I’m crying, I guess.

What for? I say.

For going back to college, for starters, she says.

Really? I say.

She smiles at me. Steps toward me, her bare feet crunching leaves and twigs.

She holds my hand in hers.

It’s warm. And real.

She’s beautiful. Even with her short-cropped boy’s haircut, all lumpy and uneven like someone cut it with garden shears.

I never got to go, she says.

I tell her everyone there is younger than me.

Please, she says. What are you—like, thirty?

We laugh.

I’m your age, I say.

She nods. But she looks like I just said something in Chinese.

Let me come with you, I say. I’m so lonely. I want to be nowhere, too.

Nuh-uh, she says. That’s not how it works. You can’t choose it, okay? It’s just a thing that happens.

She pulls me close.

She smells like trees. Like leaves and pinecones.

She kisses me.

It’s so nice.

I press my nose to hers.

I’m just a pip, I say.

She says, Enjoy it while it lasts.

I’ll admit I’m not sure what this means.

They found these teeth, I tell her. Under a rock.

Her face lights up. That was me! she says. I was there! I was the horsehead rock!

Again: I can’t guess what expression.

The bazillion milk cartons, too! she says. Like this clears things up.

And the gold fillings! she says. And the psychic’s deck of cards! Those were all me!

She’s disappearing now. Even though I’m holding her. Bright orange sun shines right through her head, her face.

Please don’t go, I say. I’m clutching her around her waist, gripping her overalls. Even though I can’t really feel them anymore.

I love you so much, I tell her.

She kisses my wet cheek. Maybe. It’s hard to tell now.

Go outside and look up at sunset, I hear her voice say. There’ll be a star moving across the sky. Not blinking, just moving. That’s me, she says.

She’s gone. Nothing in front of me but trees and bright orange sunset.

Then there’s this terrible noise I’m sure is a bear about to attack.

It’s just Ron, of course. Snoring.

Like clockwork.

Not the snoring. My springtime Bethany dream.

Jesus Christ, Ron says when he comes down to the kitchen. It gives me the heebie-jeebies when you cry in your sleep.

For about two seconds I’m ready to tell him. What it’s about. The crying. Probably because we had so much fun once. Senior year of high school. The concerts, the parties. The friends.

I think: maybe if I make the first move. I think: maybe if I share something important.

I always think it. Then I never do it.

I’ve never told anyone, in fact. Ever. That I was the pip—maybe the only one—with a crush on her.

Until now, at least.

But then who’s tuned in here anyway?