Authors: Judy Blundell
Thursday night is clear. I can see the stars overhead in the skylight. He is on what I’ve come to think of as his couch, looking through the photo album he’s made of all of us. I am across the room on mine.
He passes his fingers across the photographs.
“I worked so hard,” he says sadly. “The thing is, I can’t let you go.”
I take a beat, breathe. I wish like crazy for an adult to be here, someone who knows what they’re doing. I have a sudden, immense respect for Dr. Julie Politsky. “I think you can,” I say.
“They won’t believe that I did a good job. That it all worked.”
“We’ll tell them,” I say.
He brightens. “You’ll explain?”
“Of course.”
He considers this. Then he shakes his head. He shakes it over and over. “No. No. They still won’t get it.” He sits and clasps his hands.
“You ran onto the beach,” I say, prompting him. “You were barefoot.”
He looks up. The moon casts a bone-cold light on his face. “He wanted to bury Nell here. I
couldn’t let him do that. He wanted all of us, the children, to bury her. Even the little ones. To dig the grave. I couldn’t let him do that. They were so scared. So I used the radio. I sent a distress signal.”
“And he saw you.”
“He chased me outside.”
“Did he catch you?”
He looks up at the moon and doesn’t answer. Then he reaches into his pocket, takes out his card, and enters something. Slowly, the skylights close. Now there is nothing but darkness. It’s suddenly hard for me to breathe.
“I saw the flames from the beach,” Jonah says dreamily. “I ran. When I got closer, I heard the pounding.”
The pounding on the door. The father had locked them in.
“What did you do?”
“I broke the window. The ones in the front, they got out. It wasn’t too bad yet. I was looking for you.”
For Lizbet.
“Some of us got out. We all said it was an accident. To protect him. After that, we left the island. We moved up north, near the border.”
He looks at me. “You understand, don’t you? I had to show them how it’s done. And they won’t get it.”
I see now. I thought the
they
he talked about had
been the public, the media, the world at large. But
they
are two particular people—his parents. He is trying to show his
parents
how to make a family.
“Here’s the ironic thing,” he says. “After all this, I see that he was right after all. I understand him now. I’ve lived his life. He couldn’t bear to be separated from us. Isn’t that the definition of a good father? I thought I could save you all by giving you love. But it’s not enough. It won’t keep us together. People grow up, you know. People disobey. People want to leave. Isn’t that funny, that I forgot that?
I
was the one to disobey.
I
was the one who wanted to leave. I’ve come this far and I’ve made a circle. I’ve made a circle. But I can still make it right this time.”
I understand it now. He blames himself for everything. For Nell’s death, because he didn’t send the distress signal soon enough. For the fire, because he sent the distress signal at all. He had pushed his father past desperation into madness. His father had set the fire and locked his family in, because he couldn’t bear to have them taken away.
And now it’s up to me. I’ve spent all day preparing for this moment.
“Nell never had a birthday party,” I say.
“No.”
“We should do that. We should give her a party this time. Do it right this time.”
This catches him. He turns to me and his gaze is brighter.
“Yes,” he says. “This time I’ll get it right.”
“She didn’t want to say anything,” I say. “You know how she is.”
“Of course.”
“We should do something.”
“Well, of course, that’s what we should do. We have to bake a cake!”
“Of course,” I say.
“Frances will sing. And Tate will play guitar.”
“Susannah and I will bake the cake.”
“Cool!”
“And Eli and Maudie will make the decorations. A family celebration.”
“I can’t wait,” he says. The look of childish anticipation on his face makes me turn away.
Naturally, Torie is no help with baking the cake, but I find the recipe book and manage to do it. I even find birthday candles. Long ago, Jonah had stocked the closet with paper plates and party hats, but the kids say that they never celebrated birthdays before. If they remembered their birthdays, they kept it to themselves.
Tate sets up the projection screens in the dining room. Everything is ready to go.
Everyone has a job to do.
And now everything just has to go as planned.
This is our best shot.
Maybe our only shot.
Because if we fail…I don’t want to think about if we fail.
It is four o’clock when we call the others to the table. It looks festive, with streamers and paper plates. Jonah has a party hat on. He pokes his head in the kitchen. “Is the cake ready?”
“Yes.”
“Should I get Nell? I’ll get her.”
He ducks out again. He is sixteen again. He is
going to get his sister, to take her to the party she never had.
He is that far gone. He has no sense now of who we really are. He is in a place that is somewhere between the past and the present.
We turn out all the lights. Torie is ready in the kitchen, the others ready to run to the bedrooms and playroom. Hank is behind the door. Tate is ready by the computer.
Jonah leads her in. Emily looks terrified. Frozen.
“Come on,” he says, urging her. “It’s a surprise.”
She shakes her head, not moving.
“Get in there,” Torie hisses to me. “The wacko is going to blow it.”
I burst in with the cake. We sing “Happy Birthday.” I try to give Emily courage with my gaze, but hers keeps sliding away.
Tate flips on the projections. The screens light up with a summer rainstorm. The rain is rhythmic. It would be soothing, but Tate has pumped up the volume.
Jonah stops singing. “Stop it! Stop it!” he shouts. “Turn off the rain!”
Tate turns up the volume.
“No!” Jonah yells.
Emily is supposed to take his hand now. That was the plan. She doesn’t do it.
Hank moves toward Jonah. Emily remains standing still. She covers her ears with her hands as Jonah yells to turn down the rainstorm.
“Now!” I yell, and we scatter.
We all count in our heads as we run. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. They are running to the computers, to the space heaters in the bathrooms. I run to the dishwasher, Torie to the two ovens. Six. Seven. Eight. Jonah is shouting, but it’s just noise now. Nine. Ten.
At the same moment, we flip on everything we can. Torie cranks the oven to five hundred degrees and switches on all the burners. I switch on the dishwasher to its hottest setting. Maudie has started the three dryers. In the bathrooms, the heaters are on, the blow-dryers for the girls’ hair. In the playrooms, the TVs, the computers, the stereo.
The generator blows.
We are plunged into darkness.
I push open the door to the dining area. I can see faintly by the light coming from the skylight in the living room. Jonah is whirling, shouting. Emily has dropped to the floor, out of sight, rolled into a ball. Hank is moving, dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, almost invisible. I see the gleam of his hand as he slips it into Jonah’s front pocket. Emily was supposed to prevent Jonah from grabbing Hank by distracting him, but she didn’t. Jonah
turns, but he doesn’t feel Hank’s hand, he just sees him.
“What are you doing?” he says to Hank. “Where’s Nell?”
Hank hands off the card to Jeff and they are running now, running toward the front door.
“Where are you going? It’s her party! What’s happening?” Jonah screams.
I run forward and drop to the floor.
“Go,”
I tell Emily.
She is frozen. She shakes her head.
“Emily, listen.” I plead. I grab her face.
“We have something to go back to.”
Her expression changes slightly, but her arms are still locked around her legs. She ducks her head down.
I physically push down her legs, unwind her arms. I scream for Kendall. Together, we pull Emily out from under the table.
“Go,” I say, pushing her.
And somehow her legs move, and she goes, Kendall half-pulling her.
The other kids are running to the front door, where Jeff is swiping the lock. There is a backup generator, but I know it takes a few minutes to kick on. Maybe five. Maybe more if we’re lucky.
I run to the front door. Hank puts the card in my hand. Jeff is already out the door with Torie.
Hank looks hesitant. “I’ll come with you.”
“No. You have to get them on the boat. If I’m not there in five minutes, just go.”
“Gracie…”
I can hear Jonah behind me, bellowing like an animal. He is tearing the house apart, looking for Emily. Looking for Nell in order to save her again.
I will be alone in the house with him. The fear of that is in my mouth, in my stomach. I’ve never felt so afraid.
“Go,” I say to Hank, and push him out the door.
I run through the dark house, dodging the furniture. I race down the hallway toward the door to Jonah’s wing. He is in the playroom. I tell myself I have time enough to do this.
My hands are shaking so badly that I can’t swipe the card. I fumble and drop it. I hear him move from the playroom into the big living area. I swipe the card, and the light glows green. I push the door open.
I run down a short hallway. His bedroom door is open. There is a twin bed with a blanket, a chest of drawers, and a wall crammed with computer equipment. Hank has told me where the panel is. I race to it and swipe the card, getting it right the first time. The light shifts to green and I open the panel.
My fingers scrabble down the neatly lettered spaces.
SECURITY WALL.
I turn the switch from
ON
to
OFF.
BOATHOUSE SECURITY. OFF.
His arms are suddenly around me, around my waist, and he lifts me up as though I am a doll and throws me. I land hard on my knees. He drags me
by one arm. I am screaming at him to stop, the pain is so bad in my arm, but he’s not hearing me. His gaze is cloudy; his face is red with panic and rage.
Suddenly, he throws himself down on the rug next to me. I smell smoke again, but this time I know it’s real.
“Lizbet,” he says, curling up next to me, holding me down with one arm. “This time I won’t leave you.”
The generator kicks in, and the lights come on. I see his face, his unseeing eyes. I cringe when he strokes my hair.
I get a flash of his stroking his sister’s hair. They are lying on the floor, waiting to die.
Smoke is in the room, and Lizbet is coughing.
Suddenly, Jonah raises his head.
He tries to pull Lizbet, but she slumps down.
He sees something—a light? He crawls toward it.
And I am back again here, with my head on the rug, and Jonah’s hand on my head.
A moment ago, all that was in my mind was a scream. I couldn’t focus or think. Now I know the only way out of this is to think.
“You left me last time,” I say.
He ducks his head to my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I came back inside to get you. I didn’t realize it would be so bad. I had to get out. This time I won’t leave without you. This time I’ll do it right.”
That’s it,
I think. I have it now. This time, he won’t be the one to get out. Getting it right means he’ll stay with Lizbet. Stay in the fire.
“Let’s go out together,” I say. I can’t see the fire, I can’t feel it, but I can smell it and the panic is shivering up my legs.
He raises his head and looks into my face tenderly. “I won’t leave you.”
“Jonah, please,” I beg. “Please.”
“You are my family,” he says. “Let’s just go to sleep.”
The smoke is in my lungs now.
I press my face down as far as I can, to find air.
I can’t breathe.
I cough and cough. My lungs are filling up with blood.
My lungs are filling up with smoke.
Smoke and blood.
My mother is dying.
Lizbet is dying.
I am dying.
They burst back in the room then, all the kids, every one of them. My face is pushed into the carpet.
I’m coughing, but there is no smoke in the room.
But the smell is real. The fire is in another part of the house.
Torie grabs Jonah’s arm, Hank grabs the other, Jeff grabs him by the neck, and all together they
pull him off me. He kicks and screams like a child, bawling, his face red, but they manage to hold him back until I’m on my feet.
They drop him, and we run for the door. He’s on his knees, struggling to get up.
Somehow we scramble through the door. Smoke is hanging in the living area. We run to the front door.
The fresh air is a relief. It is a surprise to me to see that the sun is shining. That seems the strangest thing of all.
The door is open in the wall, and we race through it. He is still running after us, running across the beach barefoot, as we reach the boathouse door. They’ve propped it open, they were smart. We race down the dock, jump into the boat.
Torie gets behind the wheel. “Does anyone know how to drive this thing?”
He’s on the deck now, pounding toward us. “Don’t go!” he roars. “Don’t go! Please!”
Tate jumps into the pilot seat and turns the key that is dangling from the lock. He does something else and the boat begins to move. Jonah jumps from the deck, his arms whirling, his legs pumping. We feel his hands slap the boat and then the boat is moving and he goes under.
Jonah appears above the water. The wake of the boat slaps him in the face. His mouth is open, sucking in air, sobbing.
He howls.
His gaze locks on mine. “You’re my
family!”
he shouts.
“I have a family,” I whisper as the boat chugs out to the open sea.
This time, it is me who hears the footsteps, hears the sob that escapes despite the hand pressed against it, trying to hold it in. I lay awake, listening, as Shay moves down the hall. The door squeaks as she enters the kitchen. I can’t hear the birds yet, but I can just make out the trees outside my window.
I’ve been back for a week now. A week of eating and sleeping and not answering the phone. Shay took the week off from work. It’s the biggest story to hit Seattle since…well, since anyone can remember.
There was a compass on board, so we headed east, hoping we’d bump into land before we ran out of gas. We saw the ferry before they saw us, and we found the flares in the emergency kit. At first, it was just logistics. Calling parents, getting back to Seattle. Then the media storm broke on us the next day. We woke up famous.
Emily’s parents took her away, down south to Rocky’s sister in Portland. Torie and Jeff have been on
Good Morning America,
the
Today
show, and I hear they’ll be on the cover of
People
next week. They are heroes. The oldest kids who protected the rest
of us. They are getting everything they wanted, and I wish them well with celebrity. Somehow I doubt they’ll be able to handle it.
All the rest of the kids have landed back at home—like Kendall—or in social services—like Tate.
They found Jonah waiting on the beach, sitting barefoot, staring out to sea, the house still smoking behind him.
He had started out with street kids. Maybe in the beginning he was really trying to help them. Torie and Jeff were the first. Then he started contacting kids on the Internet. He’d make sure they answered him in cyber-cafés and didn’t tell their parents. When he found out that Emily had written him on her computer, he’d made her take it with her when she came to meet him. Because Beewick Island was so small, he wiped the library computers himself. Emily let him into Rocky’s and he wiped Zed’s computer, too, because Emily had used it. He had gotten sloppy with Emily, because she could be traced through the computer camp, and Kendall had already disappeared. So he asked his publicity department to remove her from the photos, just in case one got into the Seattle papers and triggered a link.
The board of Jonah’s company has hired the best defense team in the country, and it looks like they’ll plead the insanity defense.
I told Shay and Diego all about it, or about most of it. I couldn’t tell them the way Jonah ate away at my insides, the way he made me hurt. But I think they knew. Diego got in about fifty pounds of trouble for taking me to the park that day. I don’t think Shay had forgiven him until I came back.
I don’t think Diego had forgiven himself, either. It turned out that one of those three-year-olds in the park had gotten lost and hysterical, and by the time Diego returned the little boy to one of the nature walk instructors, I was gone.
I think Shay must have lost ten pounds while I was away, and she doesn’t even mention it. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she walked into the room at the Seattle police station. I’ll never forget how she held me, like I belonged to her, like losing me would have killed her. I didn’t know she felt that way.
I swing my legs over the bed. I pad outside to the kitchen. Shay is sitting at the kitchen table with a wadded up tissue in her hand. She’s staring out at the darkness. A pot of milk is on the stove on a low flame.
“So did you and Mom become blonds?” I ask, sitting down.
Shay’s eyes are red-rimmed. Her mouth is taut from crying, from trying not to cry. I see raw grief on her face, and it stuns me. She’s been hiding it from me, I realize. She didn’t want to add to mine.
She had let me know, in a thousand ways, how much she missed my mom, but she never let me see her pain. I’m not sure if that was the right way to go, but I understand.
She clears her throat. “Carrie looked fantastic. Like she’d spent a month in the sun. I wanted to look just like her, so I left it on too long. It came out sort of platinum, and not in a good way. So we tried to dye it back, and it sort of looked greenish. So she looks at me, and she says, ‘Maybe we should try on hats.’ I just remember lying on the bathroom floor, laughing so hard. She could laugh so hard…”
“She would totally lose control.”
Shay looks down at her hands. “You know, I just remembered this. I said something about how we’d have to learn to dye our own hair because we’d have to get rid of the gray when we got older, and Carrie said, ‘I’ll never have gray hair.’ She said it totally seriously. I thought she meant she’d be lucky. But now I wonder if…”
“If she knew she’d never get old. If she was…like me.”
“Maybe that’s why she was always in such a hurry to live her life.”
I absorb this. I wonder what it would be like, feeling that you wouldn’t live long. I realize there are parts to my mom that I didn’t know, deep parts, quirky parts. It’s not just my memories that define
her. Shay lost her, too. I want to hear those memories now. Now I’m ready to listen.
Shay gets up and pours out the hot milk. She’s made enough for two, just in case.
“Do you ever…sense her?” she asks. I can tell this is hard for her to get out. And I can tell how badly she wants me to say yes.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s absolutely nothing good about being psychic that I can see. It’s a curse.”
She takes a sharp, indrawn breath as she breaks up the chocolate into two mugs and brings them to the table. Then she pours in the milk. We stir, our spoons gently tinkling.
“You got ten kids out of hell because of it. That’s good.”
“It almost didn’t happen that way.”
“But it did.” Shay blows on her drink. “You can use it. Not let it use you. That’s all I’m saying.”
We take a sip at the same moment, and swallow.
“Do you still get flashes of him?” Shay asks.
I shake my head firmly. “Not new ones.” The memory of what he had done and seen is enough to keep me awake at night. The memories of the kids I tapped into gave me a glimpse into a world I didn’t want to know, a place where love had withered at its root.
It’s going to take me time.
“Loss can stretch you into a new shape,” Shay
says. “Jonah was handed too much, and he didn’t have the foundation to handle it. He couldn’t find a way to live that made sense.”
I take my first sip. I like it like this, when the chocolate has just started to melt, when I taste milk and just the beginning of the sweetness.
“You’ll always be sad, Gracie,” Shay says. “That doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy.”
“Yeah,” I say.
The light is changing. It is blue, bluer than blue. We hear the birds begin to squawk.
“By the way,” I tell her, “Joe Fusilli has a crush on you.”
A small smile curves her lips. “Yeah?”
She props her bare feet up on the sill. I put my feet next to hers. I remember the day I stared at her feet and transferred all my hatred onto her toes. Now I see how her foot is shaped like mine, how her toes are all almost the same size, like mine. I hold the warm cup cradled against my chest. In his loony way, Jonah was right about something.
You just can’t get away from family.