We Are the Ants (30 page)

The rational voice in my head knew Audrey was right, but the other voice—the one that loved Jesse and hated him and felt terrible for not trusting Diego—refused to accept what she was saying. “I know Jesse, Audrey. He would have left something behind.”

“He didn't.”

“I tried to ask his parents at the funeral, but they wouldn't speak to me.”

“I'm sure the police searched Jesse's belongings for a suicide note.”

“They didn't know Jesse; they wouldn't have known what to look for.”

Our server approached with a cheery smile that disappeared the moment he saw Audrey's grim expression. He dropped the check and scurried away. “I can't make this better for you, Henry. Jesse's gone, and we've got to move forward with our lives. You've got your family, a niece on the way, and a guy who really likes you.”

All those things were true, but I'd stopped paying attention as an idea struck me. It began as a spark and exploded, spreading like a universe within my mind. Audrey was still talking when I said, “Let's break into Jesse's house.”

“What?”

My thoughts whizzed around my skull so near the speed of light that I could never catch them. “It's Christmas Eve. Jesse's parents dragged him to Providence every year for Christmas. They won't be home. I know where they keep a spare key, and I know the alarm code.”

It was a perfect idea, and I couldn't understand why Audrey was staring at me slack-jawed and bewildered. “Why on Earth would we break into Jesse's house?”

“To figure out why he killed himself.”

“But why, Henry? Why does it matter?”

I slammed my fist onto the table, causing the plates of soggy pancakes and mugs of bitter coffee to jump. The other diners turned to stare, but I couldn't be bothered. “Because if Jesse didn't have a reason for killing himself, then his death was meaningless. And if Jesse's death is meaningless, then so are our lives. So is everything, Audrey. I thought you out of everyone would get that.” I threw some cash onto the table and walked to the parking lot. The night sky was clear, but I could hardly see the stars for all the streetlights. They were up there, though. I'd seen them from the slugger's ship. I'd seen them all.

The door opened and closed behind me, but I didn't turn around. “You know,” I said, “if we were on one of the planets in the Alpha Centauri system, looking toward Earth, we'd see Jesse still alive.”

“But he wouldn't be, would he?”

I shook my head.

“What would be the point of watching Jesse die all over again if we couldn't do anything to prevent it?”

“At least we'd know.”

Audrey walked to her car, unlocked the doors, and got in. She started the engine and rolled down the windows. I stood watching the stars. “Come on. If we're going to commit a felony, we've got to do it before my curfew.”

  •  •  •  

I spent a lot of time at Jesse's house when he was alive, but I never really looked at it until Audrey and I parked on the street and sat quietly in her car with the lights off. It was a typi­cal Florida house, which is to say there was nothing architecturally interesting about it. It had no history, no quirky lines or idiosyncratic ornamentations. It was solid and functional, though larger than most of the other houses on the street. The hedges under the windows were trimmed so perfectly, I doubt I could have found a single leaf out of place. The grass was green and neat, the mulch surrounding the various trees bright and woody. The driveway was marred by nothing, not even a single drop of oil. The Franklins' house was pristine, perfect, and sterile, right down to the tasteful white holiday lights that lined the edge of the roof, and the festive wreath hanging from the front door.

“Are we doing this?” Audrey asked. “If we're doing this, we should go now.” She'd been rambling like that for fifteen minutes, reciting everything she'd ever seen on TV about how to not get caught breaking into someone's house, and the penalties if we were. I wanted to tell her this wasn't an exam to be failed, but I got the feeling she'd melt down if I tried to silence her.

Audrey's car didn't stand out, which was a boon to us, as were the Christmas Eve parties happening at a few of the Franklins' neighbor's houses. One set of teenagers would hardly be remembered by someone who might have glimpsed us as they stood on their front porch, guzzling spiked eggnog and trying to avoid one more pinch on the cheek from Aunt So-and-So.

“In and out,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Franklin probably haven't even gone into Jesse's room since . . . Everything will look the same as it did the last time I was there.” I tried not to think about that last time or about what we'd done. I had to remain focused.

“What if Jesse didn't leave a note, Henry?”

“Then he left a journal entry or an e-mail he never sent or a video he recorded on his phone that no one thought to check. There has to be something.”

Audrey grabbed my hand and held it to her chest. She was sweating through her thin Muppets shirt. “Finding out why Jesse killed himself won't change anything.”

“You're right. It'll change everything.”

I got out of the car before I lost my nerve. I was halfway across the lawn when Audrey caught up. I hoped to find out that Jesse had killed himself because someone had molested him when he was little or because his parents beat him or because he'd had a crisis of faith and couldn't reconcile being gay with his belief in God. I didn't actually believe any of those things were true, and I didn't want to think that Jesse had been tormented by them, but if there had been some horror in Jesse's life that had driven him to suicide, at least I'd know it wasn't my fault.

Audrey stumbled, and I caught her by the elbow. Anyone watching would have thought we were just a couple of tipsy kids. I led her around the side of the house to the back patio. The waterfall splashed into the pool, reminding me that I needed to pee. I pushed my bladder aside and went straight for the Christmas cactus on a metal shelf with a dozen other plants. Red-and-white blossoms burst out of the padlike stems. The key was under the pot. Jesse's parents hadn't even known he'd kept a spare for those nights he needed to sneak in. I put it to its intended use one last time.

As we entered the house, Audrey hooked her finger through the belt loop of my jeans and crept so closely behind me that her breath warmed my neck. The alarm beeped its insistent warning, and I silenced it with Jesse's birthday. The outside lights poured through the windows, but even without them, I could have navigated my way through the kitchen, to the living room, and up the grand staircase to Jesse's room—third door on the right.

“We don't need to do this, Henry.” Audrey whispered even though the house was empty, and there was no one to hear us. The house felt more than empty. It felt gutted.

“There are answers behind this door.” There was also truth, memories of times that sparkled in my mind like exposed bits of broken glass in a heaping pile of shit. Some of my best days happened behind that door, and they would never happen again.

I turned the knob, pushed open the door, and turned on the light. Jesse's bed stood in the center of the room, unmade; his long chest of drawers lined the far wall, the surface crowded with dirty clothes and half-empty water bottles and whatever scraps of the day he'd pulled out of his pockets and tossed there; across from his bed was a TV stand with a TV and four game systems, the controllers on the floor; and a small desk hunched in the corner, bearing the weight of a hundred books on its back.

Only, none of those things were there.

They should have been; they'd always been before. The books changed, the dirty laundry rotated items, but the fundamentals remained constant.

Audrey poked her head in, pulled it back out, and looked around. “Is this the right room?” She already knew the answer. She'd spent more time in Jesse's house than I had.

The bed was gone, the dresser gone, the desk and books and game consoles. Gone. Even Jesse's posters of the Broadway shows he'd seen—
Miss Saigon
and
Little Shop of Horrors
and
Wicked
—were gone. Jesse's parents had transformed his bedroom into a sewing room. The walls were painted a tasteful yellow, antique shelves filled with bolts of cloth in every color lined the walls. Drawings of gowns were tacked to a corkboard, and racks held examples of work in various stages of completion.

Jesse wasn't there. It was as if he'd never existed at all.

“Henry . . .”

Audrey put her hand on my shoulder, but the weight was too much, and I sank to my knees. There were no truths to find in Jesse's bedroom. No absolution.

I didn't cry. There was no point. There was no point to anything. “It's all fucked up, Audrey. Jesse's dead, and it's probably my fault because I didn't love him enough or I wasn't good enough for him and he kept so many secrets from me that I thought maybe if I'd known I could have stopped him from killing himself, so I pushed Diego because he's the first person who's made me think maybe I was wrong, maybe it wasn't my fault, and maybe I could press the button and have a future that wasn't meaningless, but I pushed him too far and now he's gone too.”

Audrey knelt beside me. She held my hand to her chest. “Henry, Diego's not gone.”

“He told me about being in juvie and about how he got sent there for beating up his dad to protect his mom, and I accused him of smashing the windows in Marcus's car.”

“Oh, Henry, you didn't.”

“I fucked up so bad, Audrey.”

As she was about to say something, the floor beneath us vibrated. I leapt to my feet. “Shit!”

“What?” Audrey asked, but I was shutting off the light and grabbing her hand to run.

“Someone's home.” Jesse's bedroom had been over the garage, and it had always given us plenty of warning when his parents came home so that we could dress and compose ourselves and pretend we'd been playing video games while alone in his house rather than what his parents knew we'd actually been doing.

“I thought you said they were out of town!”

“They should be.” We flew down the stairs, but I stopped at the landing.

“What?” Audrey whispered.

“I need to check one more place.” Audrey pulled my arm. “You go. I'll meet you at the car.” I dashed back up the stairs before she could stop me.

Jesse's parents had practiced a fairly distant approach to parenting. They did the things parents were supposed to do, but they'd generally let him do whatever he wanted. He hadn't needed to password protect his computer to keep them from prying or hide anything he didn't want them to see. They respected his privacy. It was the cleaning people that made him nervous. Mr. Franklin couldn't keep a housecleaner for more than a month, so the ever-changing array of people parading through his bedroom while he was at school had caused Jesse to develop a healthy sense of paranoia. Jesse owned few valuables he considered worth hiding, but those he did he kept in a hollow space under his bathroom sink.

I didn't have much time, so I gave up attempting to be quiet, and ran through Jesse's bedroom to the connecting bathroom. His parents had redecorated it as well, though not as radically. I dropped to my knees, opened the cabinet doors, shoved the stacked toilet paper out of the way, and reached into the hole. I felt around for the cigar box he kept his treasures in, but it wasn't there. I reached as deeply into the hole as I could, twisting my arm around to feel with my fingers, but I felt nothing. The box was gone. Everything was gone.

I'd never know why Jesse killed himself. My sole consolation was that I only had to live with that for thirty-six more days.

I crept out of the room that no longer belonged to Jesse, and stood at the top of the stairs. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin were arguing in the kitchen.

“Don't use that tone with me, Russell. I set the alarm before we left.” Mrs. Franklin's voice was an iron rod.

“You're right. It must have disarmed on its own.”

They fought while I stood quietly trying to figure out how to escape. The stairs were the only way down. When I heard footsteps coming my way, I ducked into the linen closet and shut the door behind me. I held my breath, praying that neither of Jesse's parents needed clean sheets or towels. Five minutes must have passed before I heard water running from the direction of the Franklins' bedroom, though it felt like days. I cracked open the door and peeked down the hallway. It was empty.

I ran down the stairs, through the dining room, and to the back door. I opened it, and as I prepared to dash to freedom, a voice called my name, and I froze.

“Henry Denton?”

I could have kept running. I should have kept running. Mrs. Franklin hadn't seen my face. She wouldn't have been able to prove that it had been me in her house. But I turned around anyway.

“Hi, Mrs. Franklin.”

The last time I'd seen her was at Jesse's funeral. She'd worn a dignified black dress and hadn't cried. The last year hadn't changed her. She still wore black. Her blond hair was wavy and loose, curling around her neck. So much of Jesse's looks had come from her—the slightly upturned nose, the eyes that saw through all bullshit, the long, thin fingers—and it hurt to see pieces of him standing right in front of me.

“I wanted to . . . I needed to see . . . I can't believe you turned Jesse's bedroom into a sewing room.”

Mrs. Franklin's mouth moved, but no sound came out. Her face was emotionless, a blank lump of clay. There was nothing left for me to say, nothing left for me in that house. All traces of Jesse had been eradicated.

“Henry, I—”

I didn't wait around to hear the rest. I bolted out the door and didn't stop until I reached Audrey's car. The lights were off, but the engine was running, and she peeled out as soon as I was inside.