Authors: Judy Blundell
I run straight into Jeff. Literally. I bounce off him and fall.
“Where’s the fire?” he says.
The fire…the fire!
I
see
it then, I see the house burning. But is it in the past, or the future?
I can’t tell.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asks, crouching over me.
“He went crazy,” I say. “In the garden. He’s destroying it. You didn’t take care of it while he was away.”
Jeff shrugs. “It’s hard to remember everything he wants us to do.”
“You don’t understand. He’s out of control!”
“He gets like that.” Jeff pulls me to my feet. “Then he sort of shuts down for a while and disappears into the woods. That’s the good part. I think he’s afraid he’ll hurt us.”
“But what if he
does?”
His face hardens. “I’m not afraid of him.”
“Why don’t we all just jump him? Take that swipe card—I saw it in his pocket. We can get to the boat—”
“Shut up,” he says.
“We can get out of here!”
“Shut up,” he says. His gaze is flat and hard. “Shut your mouth and keep it shut and follow the rules. You don’t know crap. We’re in the middle of nowhere, man. We’ve got it good here.”
“You’re just as crazy as he is.” I try to push around him, but he grabs me by the upper arm.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places,” he says. His grip is tight. “My dad is an addict. So I get bounced around every time he’s in rehab. Or jail. Jonah is a meal ticket, and this is five-star dining. Got it?”
“I’ve got news for you,” I say. “You’re the one who’s in jail.”
His face tightens. “He’s not around all the time. When he’s not, Torie and I are in charge. I’d think about that, if I were you.” He squeezes my arm until it hurts, and then he keeps on squeezing. I try to twist away, but it just hurts more.
Finally, he drops my arm, but he keeps his eyes on my face. I’m trembling, and my arm is on fire. I walk past him, trying not to run.
Inside, I stop in the kitchen and splash water on my face. I take deep breaths, trying to get my focus back. Jeff’s words return.
Then he sort of shuts down and disappears into the woods…
He’s out there now, roaming in the woods, trying to get his control back. It’s now or never. I have
to try it when Jonah is here, because if I can get out of the house and past the wall, I’ll need the boat. I can’t rescue everyone, but I can get Emily and maybe Kendall. Once we get to the police, they can save the rest.
For a second, I waver. I think of pudgy Ruthanna at the dinner table, shoveling ravioli into her mouth. There is a sadness in her that is total. And Eli, and Maudie. They’re only eleven or twelve. How can I leave them?
I have to leave them. It’s the only way to get out of here. It’s the only way to save them.
There are no sharp knives in the kitchen, only butter knives, but I take one, along with a fork.
The other wing of the house is Jonah’s. It’s separated from the rest of the house down a long hallway. The door is locked, of course. I kneel, examining the lock, but I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about lock-breaking. I try to stick the blade of the knife in between the door and the lock. I push and push. Nothing.
A shadow looms behind me and my heart leaps into my throat.
“If you open it, an alarm will go off. The place is wired.”
It’s Hank, one of the twins who aren’t twins.
I slump against the door. “Oh.”
He’s eating a carrot stick. He waves it at the door. “You’ll never be able to break the lock that
way, anyway. You can’t use a butter knife to break a lock.”
“You know this?”
“I’m handy. My dad is a carpenter.”
The words cause him pain. I see a man in a room. Sitting in a chair. Dogs surround him, licking at empty bowls.
Hank shakes off the emotion. He crunches into the carrot. “Anyway, I’ve been in there. He needed help once, there was a busted pipe in his bathroom and he couldn’t fix it by himself. He needed someone with small hands. I’m good with my hands. There’s a control panel in his bedroom. I saw it. But you need his swipe card to get inside. There’s controls for everything. The shutters, the main power switch. There’s a generator and a backup generator. The swipe cards work on batteries, so even if the power goes out, the doors stay locked unless he opens them. He’s thought of everything. Even if you got in that room, there’s nothing you could do.”
“There’s got to be something. A phone…”
“He doesn’t bring his cell inside. He keeps it in the boat.”
“The wall…”
“It’s electrified, didn’t he tell you?”
“So help me break into the room, and we’ll turn off the power.”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “I’m not rocking the boat.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I don’t understand any of you.”
“That must be because you come from a place you want to get back to,” Hank says. He shrugs.
“What about the other kids?” I ask. “What about the young ones, like Eli and Maudie? Don’t they deserve better than this?”
Hank pops the rest of the carrot in his mouth. “Don’t you get it? We’re all in this alone.”
He hears a noise and he freezes in fear for a moment. It is the back door opening. Jeff coming back, maybe. I don’t care. But Hank does, and he quickly and silently moves down the hall.
I lean against the door for a moment. I have felt pain before that made me rock and howl. And I have felt trapped in a deep hole of sorrow with no way out. But this is different. This is horror wrapped in a normal package. This is knowing that the worst isn’t behind me. The worst is ahead.
And I’m the only one who cares.
That night it rains, a hard, steady rain that drums on the roof insistently. We eat our meat loaf in silence. Jonah is distracted, as though he is listening to voices from far away.
He is.
Every so often his fork drops to his plate with a clink, and he sits, staring into nowhere.
Torie and Jeff glare at all of us, keeping us in line. The threat of violence hangs over us, impossible to misinterpret. I’m not sure what they’d do, but I’m sure they’d do it. They are the most desperate of all of us. They’ve lived on the streets. They want this safe berth. They want the food, and the clothes, and the warm bed. For them, this place
is
their future. The only future they can see. It was no accident that Torie had mentioned Jonah’s money right away to me. She would do anything to protect her status here.
Torie directs us to clear the table, moves us with shoves when Jonah isn’t looking. Everyone is quieter tonight. They move fast and efficiently. Jeff hovers over us in the kitchen, watching us put food
away, stick the dishes in the dishwasher. Jonah stays at the table.
As we’re getting ready for bed, Kendall whispers to me, “He doesn’t like the rain.”
“Whoa, is he living in the wrong part of the country,” I say.
She twists her mouth as if it’s been so long since she smiled that she doesn’t remember how.
We all go to bed, and the house is silent except for the clamor of rain. When I see the flashlight, I freeze. I’m remembering Jonah outside in the garden, slashing at the plants, the sharp edge of the hoe coming down and scoring the earth. But I slip out of bed. The flashlight tracks me as I move toward him.
“Go back to bed,” he says. He looks glassyeyed, and he’s perspiring. His hair is matted to his forehead.
“I’m afraid of the rain,” I say.
His gaze doesn’t stop; it just keeps roaming.
“I needed to check on Nell. Is Nell all right?”
“She’s fine,” I say. The light rests on Emily. I know she is awake, but her eyes are closed. She has drawn herself up into a tight little ball underneath the covers.
“Go to sleep,” he says to me, but there is no force behind his words. He’s not aware of me, really. He’s looking at Emily.
He looks with a hunger that frightens me. He looks capable of anything.
I sag with relief when he turns and leaves the room. What I want is to crawl back into bed.
What I do is follow him.
He passes through the dark playroom and into the living area. He sits on the couch and takes off his glasses. His head falls into his hands. I don’t say anything. I don’t try to hide. I stand in the darkness, watching him.
“My head hurts,” he moans.
There is a flash, but it isn’t lightning, it’s another vision. I am so open to them now, it’s like the boat locks in Seattle, the water rushing in, filling the compartment, and everything rising with it. Only here, it is the past. I think it is because Jonah lives with the past. I can pick it up so easily from him.
It is Nell, I see now.
Nell is sick, very sick.
The father stands in the doorway. He won’t let the mother go in.
I can hear the voices, but nobody’s mouth moves.
They are frozen like statues.
The human body is perfect,
I hear. It is Jonah’s voice. I am hearing the memory through Jonah.
She has received the right caloric input, the correct balance of nutrients. Her body will fight this without our help.
The mother is crying silently. Her hands are tightly clasped, as if she thinks that by taking on the posture of begging but not speaking, he will somehow listen to her.
Jonah stands behind them, the oldest boy.
Father. Dad. We can use the radio.
She needs no help.
He closes the door.
The vision fades.
“You wanted to help her,” I say to Jonah.
His head is still in his hands. “I wanted to.”
“You wanted to call for help on the radio.”
“I did want to!” He raises his head, and his face is streaked with tears. His pale skin is wet and glows in the darkness. I can smell him now. He is sweating. “I sneaked in to see her. She was so sick.”
I see him again. It is Nell he is carrying in the rain.
He didn’t kill her.
She was already dead.
“You tried to get help,” I say. “You tried to get her to the boat.”
“I thought…if I could get her to the mainland. To a hospital.”
“It wasn’t your fault she died, Jonah.”
“It was her birthday. She was thirteen. She was excited about that. About being a teenager. Being one of the older ones. Every birthday we thought, I am closer to getting out.”
He curls up in a ball, resting his head on his elbow. “You know how when someone you love dies? It’s like running into a wall. You bang your fists against it because you can’t believe it’s
real.
You can’t believe you won’t see that face again. You can’t believe you won’t hear that voice. You
can’t believe
it.”
“I know,” I say. I swallow against a throat suddenly dry.
He looks up at me without moving. “You do know.” In the dim light, I can see only the gleam of his eyes.
“Tell me,” he says, and I know immediately what he wants me to say.
It is like the storm outside is inside me, and if I open my mouth it will rush out in a flood. This is the moment, this is it, this is the time when I
must
say it, crazily enough, on this nowhere island, to this crazy man full of pain.
I open my mouth. I feel something crack inside me like ice. Then the words come. “My mother is dead.”
“How?”
“A car crash. She got caught between a semi and a truck. The truck was carrying oranges.”
I can taste it suddenly, orange in my mouth. Jonah rises to a sitting position, his eyes on my face, not leaving. I have never felt so listened to before. He is listening with his whole body. He is eager to
hear. He wants to fill up on my pain, he wants to know it. He wants to share it.
No, he doesn’t want to share it.
He wants to take it for himself. He wants to
own
it.
And I want to give it away.
“The oranges rolled all over the road. She was…she was choking to death. On her blood. The oranges…I can’t see it. But I
smell
it. I smell it sometimes. I
taste
it. I can’t eat oranges. I can’t even smell them. The smell makes me sick.”
My mouth still open, I start to cry. The tears run into my open mouth. I collapse on the couch across the room from him. My sobs are so strong they wrench my belly. I reach for a pillow and grab it, slam it on my knees and push my face into it to cry. I’ve done this before. I know what to do with this kind of tears.
I thought this kind of crying was over.
It will never be over.
I almost feel a kinship with him now. Jonah knows that the grief that marks you never leaves. What haunts you, haunts you. Just when you think it lets go, it comes back with teeth and claws.
“I asked her not to go,” I say into the pillow.
“You couldn’t have stopped her.”
“That’s what people say. But they don’t know. I could have.”
I lift my head. The pillow is wet. I am lying in a stain of my own tears.
I look at the damaged man across the room. I want to say,
I am damaged, too.
I don’t have to. He already knows it.
He crawls over to me. He lifts my chin so that we are at eye level. His gaze is tender.
Now I smell the burning again, and this time I see the house on fire and the children running. A window blows out, the glass flying into the night air.
His face is close. His eyes unfocus. His whisper is anguished and hushed and for my ears alone. “I don’t want to do it, Lizbet. Help me.”
Torie finds me the next morning as I’m brushing my teeth at the row of three sinks in the girls’ bathroom. Kendall is next to me, washing her face. Ruthanna is just putting her toothbrush away.
“Hey,” Torie says. “I saw you. Last night.”
I shrug, brush, and spit. I’m leaning over the sink when she puts her hand on the back of my head and grabs my hair. She pushes me down hard. My teeth clunk against the faucet. I feel the impact shudder into the root.
“Oh, good,” she says. “I have your attention.”
Kendall backs up quickly, but hovers in the doorway. Ruthanna just vanishes.
Torie keeps my head against the faucet. She is amazingly strong. I have a feeling that if I try to resist, I’ll lose my front teeth.
She leans over, close to my ear. “I was the first,” she says, her words like bullets. Occasionally, for emphasis, she pushes me against the sink faucet. Not hard, just a bump, but it’s enough. My lip is still healing from falling down the stairs on the boat, and every time it hits the chrome I wince.
“He found me first. I’m closest to him. I’m the
one he depends on. So don’t think you can come here and work it.”
“Hey, list—”
Bang. My face hits the faucet.
“Because I’m drawing the line.”
Torie’s words overlap with someone else’s. I flash suddenly to a blond woman, tan and thin, well muscled, perfectly groomed. I hear a voice echo. “I know your tricks. I’ve never drawn the line enough with you. Now I’m drawing the line.”
Torie leans in. “Let me remind you of something,
Lizbet.
You’ve already disappeared. Nobody’s going to know if you do it again.”
But I can’t avoid him. Something has changed between us. He watches Emily, but he talks to me. He singles me out. He directs remarks to me. He asks me how I like the macaroni and cheese. He offers to order new DVDs.
He likes me.
I can feel Torie’s and Jeff’s eyes on me. I know they are wondering how to handle me. I know that they will not handle me with kid gloves. I am heading to a cliff and I don’t know who’s going to push me off.
He comes and gets me now, in the middle of the night. I follow him like a ghost in my T-shirt and Gap sweatpants, what we all sleep in. We
are both barefoot. His feet are long and white and feminine-looking. It makes him seem fragile, even though I know he’s not. He sits on the couch with his head in his hands. Sometimes he cries.
“I can’t sleep,” he says.
I get flashes, but they are confusing. I see him as a boy, running, breathing hard, barefoot on the oyster shells on the beach. I know someone is chasing him.
I see Nell, lying on the bed. I know she is dead. She is wet with rain. The wetness pools out on the sheets.
I’m tired during the day, from the nights spent with Jonah. And I’m holding on to what I can see and what I can touch, because I keep sliding into places that the kids hide deep inside their minds, places they don’t want to go.
But they go all the time.
Eli. His older foster brother tied him up and flicked matches at him. For fun.
Maudie. Is clumsy. That’s what her mother tells the doctor.
Ruthanna. Her mother died, and it was her fault. Her father told her so.
Dan. His father left him at his grandmother’s to play one day. Never came back.
Hank. His father drinks. His mother works
two shifts. His brother died last year. He spends all his time alone.
Tate…
I am afraid of what’s in Tate’s head.
There is just too much pain in this house.
I can feel it. I can
see
it.
Everything parents can do, the world can do, to mess up a kid—it’s all here. It lives in their heads.
They feel safe here because they don’t know what safe is. This, they figure, is as close as they’ll get.
He tells me about Nell. That from the first, she was the one they protected. That there was something special about her. Out of all of them, she was the one they all loved.
When she got sick, the fragile bonds fell apart. The family disintegrated. The panic was a string that vibrated at a pitch they could all hear. The children walked around with dread, fearing the inevitable. Fearing that what they knew would happen would happen: Their father would not give in.
“I can remember better when you’re around,” he says. “You help me remember.” It’s two o’clock in the morning. He is lying on one couch; I am lying on another.
“That’s good,” I say, trying not to yawn.
“I don’t want to remember,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” A trickle of fear begins inside me. I feel him trying to push something away in his mind, something huge.
This is the thing he’s blocked from me.
This is the thing he’s blocked from himself.
“Her birthday is on Friday, you know. The birthday she never had. That’s when it has to happen.”
“What has to happen?”
“He was afraid it would all fall apart, that they would think he wasn’t fit.”
I smell burning. I smell the fire.
“He was afraid they’d take us away. He tried to save us.”
I see the glass shatter, fall into blackness. I hear someone pounding on a door.
“I don’t want to do it,” Jonah says. “But I have to save us, too.”
Friday.
I try to remember what day it is.
I look out into the darkness. He is just a shape across the room. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to. It makes sense to him.
There is urgency in his mind now. He is racing toward a goal. He has given up controlling this. He has given up analyzing it. He has given up changing it.
Whatever he is heading for, in his mind, he will have saved us. In his mind, he’ll be able to rest.
Tomorrow is Thursday. I have to gather all the hazy ideas, the things I know, the things I guess, the things I’m thinking, and make a plan.
I only have one day to set it up.
One day to make it work.