I’ll say.
“I know it’s nothing compared to your life. And it sounds terrible to say it. But it’s like the sister I knew . . . died.” He sighed heavily. “I could have talked her out of it. I should have tried harder. She’s somebody else now, and it’s too late to say sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
He was quiet for a long time. He stared at Lily’s grave, but it was like he was seeing something else.
“I told her . . .” he said, and his voice wavered. “I told her she was just asking for something bad to happen.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And she said . . . ‘You probably want something bad to happen to me. So I can learn my lesson.’ But I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said.
“But when she was getting sicker . . .” He stared at the ground. “Did she know? Did she know I didn’t really want something bad to happen to her? Or did she think I was glad?”
“She would never think that,” I said. “No sane person would ever think that.”
“And then . . . I left,” he said. “She was so sick at Christmas, and I still went back to school.”
“You had to. You couldn’t quit school.”
“But what if she’d died?”
“She’s not that sick.” I thought about Agatha. “She doesn’t seem sick at all, actually. Just zoned out.”
“I’ve abandoned her, though. I don’t think I realized that until I met you.” His eyes turned to meet mine reluctantly. “If I was rude to you in the beginning, that’s why. Because I’m . . . I’m ashamed. I’m a bad brother. And you being the way you are just makes it so much more obvious.”
“The way I am?” I asked, a little alarmed and hurt. “What am I doing wrong?”
“No, Margot,” he said, looking down at me. “I mean . . . you’re great.”
Oh, whispered my heart.
I looked up at him.
I liked the way his floppy hair lay on his forehead. I liked the softness of his brown eyes.
His hand was reaching down toward mine, an invitation, and I touched him and felt strong fingers wrap around mine.
“Your hands are so cold,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I managed to choke out. “They always are.”
“Here.” He pressed my hands against the heat of his chest and covered them with his warm palms. I could feel his heartbeat as if I held his heart in my fingers.
“Thanks,” I whispered.
He smiled.
The air around us seemed to blur into something glittering and dreamlike.
“What I wanted you to hear in the song I played for you,” he said, in a voice as low as the murmuring of the leaves in the trees overhead, “is that it was about you. It was about the way you walk, and talk, and—”
Before he could finish the sentence, I had pulled my hands free and used them to bring his face down to meet mine. Our lips touched softly, as softly as a feather floating to meet the silent ground. And then they parted, and touched again, hesitantly—and then the kiss took flight and the dreamy air swirled in around us, enveloped us like a tornado.
Mutually dazed, we pulled apart. But his hands were wrapped around my lower back, just above my waist, and he didn’t let go.
I leaned toward his chest and laid my cheek against his shirt, breathing in the air around him. It was that boy smell, warm and spicy and clean and dirty at the same time. I wanted to memorize his scent and carry it around with me forever.
“Margot, Margot,” Barrett whispered, and I turned back to his lips.
We kissed for a few minutes while the daylight fluttered its eyelashes and finally sank away. The aroma of wet soil rose around us. I read somewhere once that the scent of a freshly mown lawn is actually the cut grass screaming for help, and I felt something deep inside my body screaming:
Help, help, help.
But what kind of help did I need?
This kind, I thought, pulling him closer.
We kissed for a little while longer, until it felt natural to stop, although our hands were clasped together and we stood maybe eight inches apart.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
His lips pressed against my hair.
“We should go inside,” I said.
He nodded, and we walked hand in hand to the entrance of the garden. We closed the gates, but when I went to turn the key, it wasn’t there.
“Weird,” Barrett said, and we both looked around. “Did you put it in your pocket?”
“These pants don’t have pockets,” I said, sliding my hands over the places where any normal human would have sewn pockets into their design. “I’m sure I left it in the lock.”
I looked around, feeling suddenly sorry to be out here, in the fresh, dewy night.
“We can just leave it,” he said. “It’s okay.”
That suggestion, so mild and harmless, sent a wave of anxiety through me. “No,” I said. “We have to lock the gate.”
I began searching the ground around us—perhaps it had simply slipped out and was lying at our feet. But a quick visual sweep showed nothing, and even when Barrett took out his phone and turned on the flashlight, we couldn’t find the key.
I wandered a few steps away, drawn toward the pile of empty pots and spindly tomato cages sitting nearby.
“It couldn’t be that far,” Barrett said, but I knelt anyway and looked in the dirt. He came over behind me and held up his phone, moving it around.
“There,” I said, seeing the flash of metal barely sticking out of the soil. I reached over and grabbed it, but instead of the metal key, my fingers were clasped around a small buckle. I tugged it, and it reluctantly came out of the dirt. The metal part was attached to a thin strip of cracked, filthy leather.
“What’s that?” Barrett asked, leaning closer. His arm brushed my arm and I forgot what I was doing for a moment. “A collar?”
“Did you guys use to have a cat?” I asked. The band was so short it would barely have made it around my wrist. “Or a really small dog?”
“No, never,” he said. “Mom hates cats. And she thinks dogs are dirty.”
“It was probably a cat,” I said. I knocked loose a clump of mud, revealing a filthy bell. “Definitely a cat.” Then I rubbed away the caked dirt from the little tag, revealing a name: MISSY.
“It must be really old,” he said.
I sighed. What I really wanted was to find the key so we could lock the graveyard and go inside.
Barrett shone the phone around in one last defeated movement.
“There—” I crossed the path and walked down to the closest flowering plant, clusters of tiny purple and white flowers on thin, weedy stalks. Lying in front of it, as neatly as if it had been placed there, was the key.
“How did it get there?” Barrett asked.
I looked around. “Must have been the wind,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I was relieved just to have found it, so I tried not to dwell on the weirdness as I locked the gate and held the key in my hand.
We walked slowly back to the house, our hands linked together.
As we came around the corner, the back door of the house opened.
I dropped Barrett’s hand like it was a buttered eel.
Laura stepped outside. Next to me, Barrett stood straighter and took a deep, nervous breath.
“Well, hello,” she said pleasantly as we came closer. “What are you two up to?”
“Just out for a walk,” Barrett said. “I thought you were going to be in town tonight.”
“I planned to,” she said, leading us back inside. “I’d even booked a hotel room. But the pharmacy was able to finish the formulation three minutes before clos
ing. Wasn’t that lucky?”
“I’m glad Agatha can sleep in her own bed,” I said.
“Yes.” Laura gave me an appreciative smile. “Me too.”
As we came into the hall, she said, “Well, Barrett, I’m sure you have a lot of reading to get to.”
“I do,” he said, heading for the stairs. I hoped he wouldn’t even glance at me—Laura saw everything—but he did, one tiny look over his shoulder.
I felt her noticing, and inwardly I cringed.
Then she glanced down at her gold watch.
“I’m so sorry, Margot,” she said. “I just don’t think I’m going to have time to drop in and see you before bed. My schedule’s all thrown off because of the delay in town. And I have a headache, so I’d like to get to bed. Is that all right?”
“Of course,” I said. No offense to Laura, but it wasn’t like I relied on our talks to calm down. In fact, most of the time I found myself tensing up while anticipating her arrival. Laura could turn even bedtime into a formal affair.
When I got to the top of the stairs, Barrett stuck his head out of his bedroom, like a gopher, and grinned.
In spite of myself, I smiled back.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“Nothing important.”
Keeping an eye over my shoulder, he came out and walked over to me. I could feel the nearness of his body like a fire.
I glanced at his hands and then I couldn’t stop thinking about how it felt to have his fingers pressing gently on my back. As it was, I settled for holding his hand. His thumb moved across my fingers and sent shivers down my spine.
I wanted to lean in and kiss him. Then I thought better of it and pulled my hand away.
“See you at breakfast?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
I watched him disappear into his room. As soon as he was out of sight, something inside me sank a little. How could we do this with Laura around? It was obvious that she knew everything that went on under her roof. I didn’t have enough faith in my acting abilities to think I could hide the change in the circumstances between Barrett and me. I pictured myself trying not to make googly eyes at him over the breakfast table, and the image was horrifying.
Still, how delicious was it to have someone to kiss?
Very.
So delicious that I couldn’t stop myself from smiling from the time I went back into the nursery until I got in bed. I read for a while, growing sleepier and sleepier, until I realized that I was waiting for Laura’s entrance. I heard her and Agatha come in, but she didn’t even knock on my door.
It’s okay, I told myself. She’s just busy.
The next time my eyes started to slide closed, I set aside my book and switched off the light.
I fell asleep with Barrett’s gold-tinted profile projected in my head like a movie.
It was lovely.
Until the screaming started.
CHAPTER
18
IN MY DREAM, I was wandering around the graveyard by myself, looking for something . . . someone? Fingers of light reached through the trees and lit my path. I passed the stately memorials and elegant statues without taking much notice of them.
Who am I looking for? I wondered.
Suddenly, ahead, a flash of movement across the narrow path—a cat?
“Missy!” I cried, beginning to run. “Missy!”
I kept catching sight of her, even when the trees got so close together that I had to turn my body sideways to keep going. A shadow here, the flick of a tail there—
“Missy, wait!” I had to catch up with her—she wanted to show me something. But what?
I came around the corner and found Lily’s grave, completely covered in flowers. On the far side, the cat waited, perched on the grave marker.
I began to wade through the lilies toward her, but halfway there I realized that I’d made a huge mistake.
My feet were beginning to sink into the soft ground. Every step required a massive effort to lift them free. But before I could turn around and go back, I had sunk too far to pull myself out. For a moment, I thought the flowers were growing freakishly high, but then I realized that I was the problem—I was being dragged underground.
Soon I was up to my waist, grabbing for the flowers, as if they would help me. I imagined I could feel slender fingers in a vise grip on my ankles, helping the process along, and all the while, the cat sat just out of reach and primly cleaned her paws.
At one point, I tried to dig in the earth and my hands came up filled with tiny bones—and then I heard muffled ringing and saw the collar dangling from the fistful of mud I was holding. These were Missy’s bones. I frantically shook my hands and the bones went flying, lost among the lilies.
Suddenly, I felt the cold, wet grit of the soil on the back of my neck, and my shoulders and arms were completely submerged. The mud, inches below my nose, smelled of death and ruin.
Then the cat looked up and dashed away, and I turned my head to see what had frightened her.
There was someone lurching toward me, through the trees—moving not with the easy gait of the living, but the stilted, horrific stagger of the dead.
And just before the mud poured into my mouth—
I screamed.
I screamed, and I screamed, and I screamed.
* * *
I WAS SHAKEN awake, and the person who leaned over me in the darkness was so like the stumbling figure from my nightmare that I drew in a breath to scream again.
But then she slapped her hand over my mouth and leaned closer.
It was Agatha.
When she saw that I recognized her, she pulled her hand away, and then wiped it on my pillow in a gesture that would have been funny if I weren’t slowly getting used to the idea that I wasn’t about to be swallowed by the earth or hunted down by a zombie.
Then she watched me. After a second, she reached over and turned the nightstand light on, and I could see her face.
She looked normal, basically, but there did seem to be something—a minute spark of interest more than she usually showed.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I get nightmares sometimes . . .”
She watched me evenly.
“I was getting pulled under,” I said. I had to say it aloud, to make it less real. “Down into the dirt.”
And then something incredible happened.
Agatha’s eyes meandered to my face. Then they locked together with my eyes.
And she opened her mouth.
“I,” she said.
Suddenly, the door opened behind her, and she shut her mouth.
With dread, I thought, I’ve woken Laura.
It wasn’t Laura, though.
It was Barrett.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I was still watching Agatha; though her expression had changed, her attention drifted. Whatever she had been about to say, it was gone. Finally, I looked up at Barrett.
“Bad dream,” I said. “I think I scared Agatha. She came in and woke me up.”
“Do you want me to go get Mom?”
That was the opposite of what I wanted. I shook my head. I was relieved that she wasn’t there already—how could she have missed the screaming? “No, don’t bother her,” I said. “She had a headache.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Her headache medicine is really strong. You could probably scream in the same room and it wouldn’t wake her.” He touched his sister’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Aggie, go back to bed.”
She waited a few seconds. Having spent as much time with her as I had, I knew this was a choice. She didn’t really want to leave. I felt a pang of affection and gratitude toward her.
Eventually, though, she did go. And then I was alone, in
my bedroom, with Barrett standing over me. I felt distinctly aware of how close his body was to my body.
The room was dark and quiet; the nightmare still lurked in the back of my mind like a specter.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, yes, but . . . I can’t go back to sleep right now. It’ll just start right where it left off. I’ll end up screaming again.”
“Do you want me to get a chair and sit with you?”
No. I didn’t want him in a chair. I wanted him to sit next to me. I wanted him to put his arm around me and let me put my head on his shoulder. I wanted to put my hand inside both of his hands. I wanted him to slowly turn his face down toward mine, and I wanted him to kiss me.
I patted the bed, and he hesitantly lowered himself. I reached over and took his hand, which felt dangerous and wild.
He took a deep breath. “Do you want to talk about your dream?”
I shrugged.
“Was it about . . . your family?”
“No, it was . . .” It was about your family. “It was . . . vague.” I took a shuddering sigh. “I guess I forgot how bad they can be, since I don’t have as many as I used to.”
“That’s a good thing,” he said.
“I guess. In a way, it makes it worse, because I got used to them. Now I’m just going to worry every night that they’ve come back. And wake up your sister. And make your mom hate me.”
I expected him to say she wouldn’t hate me, and I was prepared not to believe him. But he didn’t say anything.
I closed my eyes. “I miss my mom.”
“What was she like?”
“Funny. And smart. And strict, but kind of a pushover, too. Like, if we did what she said most of the time, we could always get away with stuff the rest of the time.” Mom’s face appeared in my thoughts, her curly hair, her double-pierced ears that I found so embarrassing—like some part of her had never outgrown her edgy teenage years, even though she was a middle-aged dentist. The freckle that was centered above her left eyebrow and always made her look weirdly like she had a secret. “I miss her so much. I miss them all.”
The Companion Page 17
