by Rory Power
A medic. I glance down at my flushed hands, feel the sting of a burn along my hairline like it only just now occurred to my body to feel any pain.
“Then what did you do?” Anderson presses, ducking to meet my eyes. “I want to get you looked after just like Officer Connors does, but we have to do this first. We have to do it now, Margot.”
Ignore it, I tell myself; ignore the flush of your skin and the roar of the fire, still there, still in your veins. Get this over with. “I tried to lift her. But I couldn’t. So Eli came. He carried her out. And that’s when you got here.”
For a moment nobody moves. I think maybe I’ve done it. Maybe this is just a mess we’re all in together, and there’s no blame hiding in any of it.
Then Anderson sighs. “I really wish you wouldn’t lie,” he says. “It’d be so much easier.”
“I’m not,” I say. It’s all I have the energy for. I am so tired and I don’t understand any of this. These men, asking about the fire when the real question is there on the ground, her eyes open, her heart still. Half of me wants to kneel over her again, to touch my forehead to hers and make sure I saw what I think I did; the other half is sick at the thought of it.
“All right,” Anderson says. “Then we need to go to the station.”
Connors adjusts his grip on me, holding my elbow loosely. “And we need to call Vera.”
“Well, sure,” Anderson says, rocking back on his heels. “But not just yet. Margot still has some things to tell us.”
“Hey,” I hear, and I watch Tess push off from Eli and come toward us. She gives the body a wide berth, but apart from that you’d never know she’d noticed it at all. There’s nothing in her of that fear I find under everything I do. “You can’t just take her, okay? Everybody here is a minor.” Her shoulder just brushing mine as she edges in front of me. “And like I said, Margot’s been with me all morning. So whatever you think happened, you can drop it.”
Anderson shuts his eyes briefly. “Save it for the station, would you?”
“She has to come too?” I ask.
“Of course. All three of you do.” Anderson nods to Connors, who turns away and speaks into the walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder. “You can call your families once we’re there.”
Our families. Mom. I haven’t even thought about that. But I should’ve. I should’ve been worrying about that from the start, because they’ll tell her where I am, the trouble I’m in, and she’ll be so angry.
“It’s all right,” Tess says to me. And when I look at her I’m surprised by the earnestness I can see shining out of her. I can’t really fit it together with the girl from town, the one with stolen bubble gum and a sly smile. “My dad will take care of it. I’ll talk to him.”
“You do that,” Anderson says, and the bare amusement in his voice makes me nervous. He’s enjoying this. A mess, a nightmare, a girl out of nowhere. And he’s enjoying it.
They walk me to the nearest cruiser. I guess I’m lucky they don’t handcuff me, but I haven’t done anything, I haven’t.
Still I can’t ignore it. Her face, staring, and I can see it even as they load me into the backseat, the vinyl sticking to my thighs, the seat belt too hot as it grazes my arm. I can see her looking at nothing, and I can see her looking at me.
The Phalene police station is back in town, on a corner opposite the pharmacy. It shares a parking lot with a church and with the town hall, a two-story brick building with dirty windows and a sign out front missing half its letters.
The station doesn’t seem like it’s in much better shape, but I barely have time to get a good look at it before Anderson is hauling me out of the cruiser and marching me through the lobby into an open room full of desks, the kind they call a bullpen on cop shows.
He leaves me there, in an uncomfortable plastic chair pulled up next to his desk, and disappears into an adjacent conference room, but not before telling me I won’t go anywhere if I know what’s good for me.
It’s cold in here, the air-conditioning running so hard that the window unit leaves a puddle underneath it, dark on the carpet. I wrap my arms around myself, think longingly of the clothes I left behind in Calhoun. It used to get cold like this in the winter, money too short to turn the heat up, and we’d stay up late, sitting on the couch, Mom’s body pressed close to mine, keeping me warm whether she wanted to or not. That’s the best care I got from her. The kind she didn’t mean to give.
What did she do when she noticed I was gone? Did she try to call me, realize I left my phone behind? Is she looking for me at all? Or is this what she’s waited for my whole life? For me to decide to leave on my own so she doesn’t have to make me?
I don’t know which would hurt me more. I left to get away from her, and I left to get closer, and I try to imagine explaining it, sometimes, to other people. That yes, it’s exactly what they think, and nothing like it, and a hundred other things at once. I will always wish I were hers, and will always want to be only my own. I haven’t found a way yet to make the two fit.
Today only complicates it. The police will call her, they’ll call her to tell her what happened, and for her it’ll be like a gift. Here it is, a reason to stay as far away from me as possible. I know something I shouldn’t. I’ve seen something she didn’t want me to. My sister.
Because that’s the only way to put this together. Maybe I imagined it, the way our faces matched, but everyone else saw it, too. Anderson said it himself. Me and my sister, a girl I never knew. Will never know.
But I can’t swallow it. It won’t work. Mom, in the hospital, two babies in her arms. Mom, choosing me. Keeping me. That’s the impossible thing of it.
Why didn’t she leave us both?
And if she had a choice, why was I the one she wanted?
Maybe that’s where all of it comes from. The wrong choice, the wrong girl, and Mom with resentment souring in her blood. I slump forward, rest my head in my hands. I came here looking for my grandmother, looking for family, and this is what I get. Of course it is.
The bullpen door swings open. I sit up as Tess and Eli come in, Officer Connors behind them with a look on his face like there’s nothing he’d rather do than die right on the spot.
“—can’t wait to give him a call,” Tess is saying, victory in her smile as she turns to face Officer Connors, walking backward, nearly colliding with one of the desks. “Because you really do have to call our parents right away. I’m only seventeen.”
“I know,” Connors says wearily.
“My dad will want to speak to your captain, and I’m sure they’ll sort it out. After all, we’d probably have to cancel that fundraiser we’re hosting for you if this goes on too long.” She bats her eyelashes, shoots me a grin, and there’s the girl I met this morning, sharp and bored and better than you. It’s who I might’ve been, I think, if I’d grown up here. But that’s not true, is it? It means something else to be a Nielsen. I’d have been that girl in the field. The body in the burn.
“For the love of God,” Connors says, pointing to his desk next to Anderson’s, “sit down, and please, just for a minute, stop talking.”
He edges around Eli, whose hands are shoved in his pockets, his eyes empty. I wonder if the memory of the body is picking him apart the way it’s doing to me.
“Where are you going?” Tess calls as Connors heads for the conference room. “Don’t you want to separate us? Make sure we can’t get our stories straight?”
The door slams behind him. Through the broad window I watch him toss his hat down on the table and say something to Anderson, who rolls his eyes.
“One day, you’re going to annoy someone into murdering you,” Eli says, sitting heavily in the chair like mine that’s pulled up to Connors’s desk.
Tess smiles brightly. “What a way to go.” The glitter of it fades as she turns to me, taking in what I’m sure must be a sight. My hair coated in ash. My skin pink, blisters waiting underneath. I got too close for too long.
“Shit,” she s
ays. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat, nervous. “Thank you both. For sticking up for me.”
“We were just telling the truth,” Eli says. He’s watching me the way the police did. Wary. Suspicious. “We were, right?”
“Yes,” I say in a hurry. “I know how it looks, but—”
“Lay off, Eli,” Tess cuts in. “She was just in a fire.”
His hand cracks down on Connors’s desk. “Yeah, so was I. I know you think this is a great story, but you have to be serious, okay, Tess? We could get in a lot of trouble.”
“For what?”
I stay quiet as Tess steps between me and Eli. She’s defending me. I don’t know why, but she is. I’m not about to stop her.
“I believe Margot,” she keeps on. “She said she came here alone, so she came here alone.”
Eli shakes his head, pushes to his feet. “You’re being naive.”
“I’m being a nice fucking person, actually.”
This feels like a fight they’ve had before. I watch as the two of them eye each other, tense and defensive, and I wait for it to spark into something worse like it would with me and Mom. Instead, Eli goes soft.
“Yeah,” he says. “That too.”
Tess glitters with triumph, her face shining as she grins over her shoulder at me. “He’s all right sometimes,” she stage-whispers. “I mean, it’s rare, but it does happen.” Eli sighs, long-suffering, as she faces him again. “Can you ask about a first-aid kit? Now?”
“Anything else I can get you?” he says flatly.
“Iced coffee. New car. World peace.”
“We’re friends why, exactly?”
“Phalene’s got limited inventory.”
“Oh, very nice.” He flips Tess off with a smile, and she does the same before he’s off across the bullpen, heading for the conference room door.
“Sorry about that,” she says, sitting in Anderson’s chair behind the desk. “We just get like that sometimes.”
She doesn’t seem worried, doesn’t seem to care that she’s in the station, being held for questioning. It’s probably easy to brush off when the world belongs to you. When you know that no matter what, you can’t be touched by something like this. Tess is in no danger. She never has been, but she certainly isn’t now, not when it was me the police kept pinned between them. Me, with a matching body out on the road.
“You really do believe me, then?” I ask.
“You saw that girl and you threw up. I feel like that’s hard to fake.” Tess turns serious for a moment, keeping her voice low even though the officers are behind a closed door. “But you get how it looks, right? She must be related to you or something. Whether you know her or not.”
I understand, I do. I’d be asking the same thing if I were Tess. And I wish I had a better answer for her, something harder to snap in half.
Somebody must know her. Somebody must have that answer. She was there, in that field. She had to have come from somewhere. “You said you live near Vera, right?” I ask. “If you’ve never seen her before, do you think she could’ve been hiding that girl at her house?”
Tess leans back, her glance flicking to the conference room, where Eli is waiting for one of the cops to answer the door. “That’s a big secret to keep. And she looked our age. Could you really hide a whole person for, like, eighteen years?”
I’d like to ask my mom the same thing, but I don’t say so.
She shrugs. “Then again, Vera doesn’t exactly invite people over. I’ve never even been there.”
“Seriously? Not even once?” I find that hard to believe. This is a small town. Isn’t it supposed to be friendly?
“She’s come to our house before, but we never go to hers.” Tess fakes a full-body shiver. “Vera’s like Medusa if Medusa knew what a casserole was. You’ll see when you meet her.”
She didn’t sound like that on the phone, Gram. She sounded like something better than what I left in Calhoun. I ignore the cold fear that wakes in my stomach. She’ll be good to me. I know she will.
I watch as Tess fiddles with a stack of Post-its on Anderson’s desk. A few are already stuck to the drawers of his file cabinet, one with a last name on it that looks almost like mine. I lean in, anxious to get a better look, but before I can, Tess takes one of the Post-its and sticks it to my forehead with a smack.
“Beautiful,” she says. “Are they calling her for you? Vera? Or are your parents here? And God, how strong are Nielsen genes? You guys look like those ‘spot the difference’ pictures.” She purses her lips, considering me. “But a really hard one. Not the kind they have in those dentist office magazines.”
“Okay.” I snatch the Post-it from my forehead. “You can stop.”
She winces, and I immediately feel terrible. Eli can do that, can knock her back a little, because he knows her. Who the hell am I?
“What?” Connors says across the bullpen, finally opening the conference room door. Eli asks for a first-aid kit, ignores the looks the two of them give me. Whatever damage the fire did to my skin is the least of my concerns.
“So?” Tess says. “Your parents?”
For a second I have no idea what she’s talking about, and then I remember. Who will they call for me?
“My mom, I guess,” I say. “But she doesn’t really count.” Which makes sense to me but, judging by the look on Tess’s face, doesn’t to her.
“Why not?”
If there’s a good way to explain how we are, Mom and me, I’ve never found it. “It’s just not how we work,” I say. They’ll call her, sure, but it won’t matter. Mom couldn’t even tell me Phalene existed—no way would she actually come here, not even with the police reeling her in. “And I came here for my grandmother, anyway.”
Tess lights up. That’s what she wanted. An actual admission from me. Yes, that’s what I am. Yes, that’s who I belong to.
“My mom never told me about any of this,” I say. I mean to draw the story out of Tess, to unspool it inch by inch. But I don’t have to.
“Not much to tell, really. After the drought Vera ran Phalene into the ground. Pretty much everyone used to work for her. So you can guess how that turned out.” Tess starts using the Post-its to cover the screen of Anderson’s outdated computer. “And then the whole mess with the fire.” She pauses, cocks her head. “I guess we have to call it the old fire now.”
“What happened—”
“This,” she says, gesturing to me with one of the sticky notes, “being the new one.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I got that. What happened with the old fire?” If that’s what has everybody looking at me like I know more than I do, I need everything she can tell me.
But she just shrugs. “It’s like”—she puts on a voice that’s probably supposed to be an imitation of her parents—“something we don’t talk about. But the gist, as far as I know, is that there was a fire at Fairhaven and Vera lost her daughter.”
Lost Mom. So that’s why she left Phalene? A fire? That can’t be everything. She’s hidden this town from me my whole life—there has to be a bigger reason. For the secrecy, and for the way the police treat my last name like it’s a warning. “And that’s why Anderson thinks Nielsens are trouble?”
“That, and the fact that he’s an incurable asshole.” She grimaces. “And probably the dead body has something to do with it.”
Right. I wonder what the police think the truth is. Some of it is clear enough. Me and that girl out there together, setting that fire. But there’s my grandmother, too, hovering around every word like an echo. She has to know something. This secret has to belong to her. To Fairhaven. I just don’t quite know what it is yet.
“Anyway,” Tess says, “I’m sure Vera will be here in a bit to handle everything, and in the meantime you have me on your side. Anderson and Connors can say what they want, but I was with you this morning. I told them, and I’ll tell them again. They can’t do anything to you, okay?”
She sounds so certain.
It’s never been anything but all right for her. But I keep thinking of the look on Anderson’s face as he loaded me into the cruiser, and I don’t think it’ll be all right at all.
“Okay,” I say anyway, and she leans across the desk toward me.
“Great. Okay, hold out your hand.”
“What?”
She nods to the computer screen, now fully covered in Post-its. “I need something else to do, don’t I?”
Bewildered, I stick out my left hand, palm up. Tess’s little smile breaks wide and she’s laughing as she grabs my wrist to turn it over. I watch her methodically tear a sticky note into little strips and start to fit one on each of my fingernails.
“I’m a genius,” she says grandly when she’s done. “I have such a future in nail art.”
“I’ll be your model,” I say, and Tess snorts. “Take me on tour.”
A noise—someone clearing their throat. I look up, startled, and instinctively hide my hands under my legs, the paper strips falling to the floor. I’d forgotten we were here for a moment. Forgotten what was waiting for me.
Officer Connors is waving me over to the conference room, a bright red first-aid kit in his hands, as Eli meanders back toward me.
“Come on in here,” Connors says. “You can fix yourself up while we talk.”
NINE
At first we just watch each other, Anderson and Connors on one side of the long conference table, me on the other. The first-aid kit is lying open on the table in front of me. I haven’t touched it, even with the pain ripening my skin. I had nothing to do with this—with the fire, with the girl. Not even enough to be hurt by it.
“How old are you, Margot?” Connors says finally. He’s leaning forward, his hands folded together on the tabletop.
That seems safe enough. And it’ll be a reminder to them that there are rules to follow. “Seventeen,” I say.
“You have ID?” Anderson says.
I shake my head. “I left it at home.”
