He Came Home•

The Caster sign comes up faster than it should.

My hands are already tight on the wheel before I even read the words. Welcome to Caster, Minnesota — Population 2,834. The green metal is rusted along the bottom edge, same as it’s always been, and my stomach drops so hard I almost pull over. I don’t. I keep the truck moving because if I stop now I’ll turn around and I’ll drive until my phone dies and my mother never has to know I was this stupid.

The road curves past the old water tower and suddenly it’s all there. The diner with the flickering neon. The strip of shops, half of them boarded up. The Piggly Wiggly where Sarah used to bag groceries before Ian killed her. I don’t mean to think that. It just happens. Everything in this town is attached to him whether I want it to be or not.

The U-Haul rattles over a pothole and a box slides in the back. I flinch. I’m jumpy in a way I haven’t been in four years, and that pisses me off because I made a choice to come back here. I’m twenty-one years old. I’m a vet tech. I start at the Caster Animal Clinic tomorrow at nine in the goddamn morning like a normal person with a normal life and I am not going to let a town full of bad memories turn me back into that girl who slept with a baseball bat next to her bed.

Except I’m already gripping the wheel like it’s the bat.

Main Street is dead quiet. It’s almost eight at night in late August and the heat is still thick and wet, the kind that makes the air taste like asphalt. A couple of kids on bikes cut across the parking lot of the hardware store. That’s it. Nobody out walking. Nobody sitting on porches. Caster learned to stay inside after dark a long time ago.

I turn left on Birch and my chest tightens because the building I’m moving into used to be a laundromat before someone converted it into apartments. Ground floor. Unit B. The landlord left the key under the mat like I’m in a movie where nobody gets murdered, and I just have to hope he’s right about that.

I kill the engine and the silence rushes in.

For a second I just sit there. The steering wheel is slick under my palms and I can hear my own breathing, too fast and too shallow, and this is the moment I should call my mother. Not to tell her where I am. Just to hear her voice. But her voice comes with too many questions I can’t answer yet, so I grab my purse and climb out and the air is so humid it clings to my skin like a second shirt.

The apartment is small and smells like paint and old dryer sheets. Two boxes in the kitchen. The mattress is already set up in the bedroom because I paid the landlord extra to haul my furniture in before I got here, and I’m grateful for that because right now my arms feel like rope and my brain won’t stop scanning the windows. It’s a habit I never shook. Every room I walk into, I check the exits. I check the locks. I check the distance between me and anything that opens.

I’m not scared. I’m not. I just notice things.

I notice the deadbolt on the front door is flimsy. I notice the bedroom window faces a row of pine trees so dense you couldn’t see someone standing in them if you tried. I notice the kitchen light flickers once before it steadies, and I hold my breath until it does because flickering lights mean something bad is about to happen in every horror movie I’ve ever seen, and I hate that my brain went there.

I heave the first box onto the counter and slice the tape with my keys because I can’t find my box cutter. A coffee mug. A stack of pot holders. A framed photo of my mom and me at graduation, both of us smiling too hard, her fingers digging into my shoulder like she was afraid I’d disappear. She almost looked happy that day. I set the photo on the windowsill and don’t look at it again.

The second box is heavier. I don’t know why I kept this stuff. Old notebooks from high school with doodles in the margins. A cracked phone case. A bracelet made of braided thread that I haven’t worn since I was eleven but I never threw away because Ian made it for me. He sat cross-legged on the playground and wove the threads together with his fingers, his knuckles scraped from a fight the day before, and he said, You don’t gotta be scared of anyone as long as you’ve got me.

He believed that. I think a part of me believed it too, right up until Christmas Eve.

I dump the bracelet back in the box and push the flaps closed and I’m not thinking about that night. I’m not thinking about how he was seventeen and I was seventeen and the whole town was lit up with those stupid candy-cane streetlights while Ian walked into Sarah’s house and just. He just.

My phone buzzes. Mom.

I watch it ring. Four vibrations, then voicemail. I’ll listen tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after. I’m not ready to lie to her yet and I’m definitely not ready to tell her the truth, which is that I drove twelve hundred miles back to the one place she begged me never to come back to because I can’t stop thinking about him and I don’t know why.

No. I know why. I just won’t say it out loud.

Memories don’t wait for me to be ready. They never do. I’m leaning against the counter and suddenly I’m eleven years old in the hallway at school, the light buzzing overhead, and Ian’s got this kid Danny pinned to the lockers by his collar. Danny’s crying. Ian’s mouth is right up against his ear and he’s whispering something I can’t hear, but Danny goes white, like sheet-white, and when Ian lets go he slides down the lockers and doesn’t get up. I asked Ian what he said. He shrugged and said, Nothing he didn’t need to hear.

Later I found out he promised to push Danny’s eyes out the back of his head.

I told him that was too much. I was eleven and I thought you could just tell someone something was too much and they’d listen. He did listen. He never said anything like that in front of me again. But the other kids started crossing the hallway when we walked by, and I knew. I knew he was still saying things when I wasn’t there.

And then the gifts started.

The dead cat in my locker was first. I opened the door and there it was, stiff and gray, its mouth open like it had died screaming. I screamed too, so loud a teacher came running, and I lied. I said I didn’t know how it got there. I lied because Ian was my only friend and I was twelve years old and nobody else in the whole world wanted to sit with me at lunch.

The dead poodle outside my window came a few months later. I woke up and there it was on the grass, a little white puff of a thing with a pink collar still on, arranged so neat it looked like it was sleeping. I threw up in the bathroom and brushed my teeth twice and went to school like nothing happened. You get good at that when the person who makes you feel safe is also the person who scares you the most.

The Labrador was different.

That night, Christmas Eve, I was seventeen. The whole town was on edge because Ian had escaped from Fresh Meadows Asylum. The alert went out at dinnertime. My parents locked every door, every window, pulled the curtains shut, and my mother made my father sit in the living room with his hunting rifle across his lap. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the floor with my back against the door, shaking so hard my teeth chattered, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ian looked like the last time I saw him. Fifteen years old, already tall, already beautiful in a way that felt wrong. His eyes had gone still in the months before they took him. Like something behind them had stopped moving.

I was so scared he’d come for me. That’s what terrified me most. Not that he’d hurt me — that he’d find me and look at me and I’d see the thing behind his eyes.

But he didn’t find me. He found Sarah.

The next morning, when we finally unlocked the doors, there was a Labrador Retriever lying on my porch. Dead. Big, yellow, its fur matted with dried blood around its mouth. And under its body, tucked so carefully it hadn’t blown away in the wind, a piece of paper with words written in what I knew was blood.

For my best girl. Never forget me.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just stood there with my bare feet on the cold porch and I folded that letter and I put it in my pocket and I never told anyone I still have it.

My mother had us packed and gone within thirty-six hours. States away. Far enough that Ian couldn’t find me even if he wanted to. But he found Sarah and he left me the dog and somehow that mattered. I tried to visit him once, two years ago. I drove seven hours to the asylum and the doctor at the front desk told me family only. Doctor Leonard, his name was. He had these thin little glasses and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and he said, Miss, Mr. Kessler doesn’t receive outside visitors. I asked if there was any family left. He didn’t answer. I stood in the parking lot until my feet went numb and then I drove home.

Now I’m here. In Caster. In an apartment that smells like dryer sheets and paint, three miles from the asylum where Ian has been locked up for four years. My job starts tomorrow. My boxes are unpacked. It’s dark outside and the pines are black against the sky and I can’t stop looking at the window.

I pull the letter out of my purse. I’ve read it so many times the blood has faded into brown and the paper is soft as skin. I don’t read it tonight. I just hold it.

Then I hear something outside.

Not a car. Not a branch falling. It’s a sound I can’t place, something small and rhythmic, like footsteps trying not to be footsteps on the gravel near my bedroom window.

The air in the apartment goes still. My pulse slams into my throat. I am twenty-one years old and I am not that scared girl anymore, but my body doesn’t know that. My body is already moving toward the window.

I push the curtain aside.

Nothing. Just the pines, black and heavy, and a strip of moonlight on the gravel. No movement. No sounds now except my own breathing.

But I know what I heard.

I slide the deadbolt on the front door and check the lock twice. I lean my forehead against the doorframe and I count my breaths until my hands stop shaking, and I tell myself it was nothing. A cat. A raccoon. This is Caster, and it’s quiet, and quiet places make noises at night.

I don’t believe that. But I can pretend until morning.

Tomorrow I’ll drive past the asylum on my way to work. No reason to. It’s not on the route. But I know I’m going to do it anyway because that’s why I came back. Not for the job. Not for the town. For him.

And if something was outside my window tonight, I’ll find out what it was. Later. When I’m not standing in the dark with my heart in my ears.

Right now I walk to the kitchen, grab the coffee mug from the first box, and fill it with water from the tap. My hands are mostly steady. I drink the whole thing in three long swallows, and I don’t look at the window again.

But I keep the letter in my pocket.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I start.