Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  “Hi,” Mom says. She sounds hollowed out, her voice rough. When I found her room empty at the motel, I thought she’d be happy to have left me. That’s not what this looks like.

  Maybe it’s a chance to change things between us. After all, she’s not really my mother, not when we’re both pulled from Gram like Adam’s rib.

  But then, this is who we are. Mom and me, the imprint of that left in both of us. There’s no changing that. There’s only moving forward.

  “You know you didn’t have to come back,” I say suddenly. “I can handle myself.”

  Her expression crumples into something too soft. I have to look away.

  “I know,” she says. “I know you can.”

  “So you can leave.” I shrug. “Tell Anderson I’m fine as I am. I’m almost eighteen anyway.”

  A breath of quiet, and at first I wonder if Mom’s considering it. But when I look at her again, it’s something else. She’s biting her lip. She’s nervous.

  “No,” she says. “No, I’m here.”

  Her hand shakes as she tucks her hair behind her ear, and my chest tightens. Everything about me, Mom and Gram is the same, down to our blood, but this, the way Mom tries and tries to hold herself apart. It’s only hers. Because Gram could do it—Gram did it every day—but it’s hard for Mom, and I can see the work she has to put in.

  “Here now,” I say. “Where did you go? When you left the motel?”

  “Um.” Another pause. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me. “Rapid City, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s been . . . ,” she starts before trailing off, looking away. And I hate that I know exactly what she means. “Actually,” she says, so loud it startles me, “I brought you something.” She ducks down behind the desk and comes up with a plastic bag.

  I just stare at it. Of all the things we’ve said to each other, all the scenarios we’ve run, I never expected this.

  “It’s a shirt,” Mom says, when she realizes I’m not going to open it. She pulls out a giant navy blue T-shirt with Rapid City written on the front in that stylized font they use on postcards.

  “You brought me a shirt from Rapid City,” I say. That’s all I have in me. Because she was supposed to stay here. She was supposed to wait. I would rather have had that.

  “I know,” she says, deflating. “I panicked. I got a call from your grandmother and I just . . . I’m not proud of it.”

  She sounds so tired. Usually we’d have hit a wall by now, but we’re both too drained to do anything more than talk. Just talk to each other, like people do. Maybe this is what we needed all along.

  “I know it doesn’t make up for anything.” She drops the shirt back into the bag, sits down heavily in the desk chair. “I made you a promise, and I broke it. I just wanted to fix it somehow.”

  “That would be a first.”

  She recoils, and I wait for the warm rush of pride, another point scored, but it never comes. She wanted to fix it. She tried. With Gram, with Fairhaven. She tried to tell me.

  “I followed your rules,” I say. Tremble and quiver, my chin crumpling. I will not cry. I will not cry. “Keep a fire burning, right?”

  Her breath catches. “Margot?”

  “I know everything. I did it, Mom.”

  I watch her wilt with relief. Wait for her to reach for me, to share this, because it’s only us. We’re the only ones who will ever know what this means, or what this feels like. But she collapses in on herself like she always does. And I get it. I do. She’s spent my whole life watching me grow, watching me turn into her, into Gram, into the sister she killed. Even if she didn’t know exactly how deep the sameness runs, even if she doesn’t now, it’s there in our faces. An echo in our voices. I don’t think I’d reach for me either.

  She takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. “And the Bible? The record I left? Did you find that?”

  “Yeah.” I don’t tell her about the other entries I read. I don’t think she meant for me to see them. But I’m so glad that I did. That I found my mother when she was young, when she was joking about Gram and when she loved her sister more than anything.

  “Good.” She drops her gaze, fidgets with the pencils in a cup on the desk. “I know it’s hard to understand, but—”

  “It’s okay.” I mean it. “It was the only thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” she says, the worst kind of laughter in her voice. “It was. Nobody ever should have given me something to look after. Not Katherine.” She looks at me now, resolve holding her body tight. “Not you, either. And I wish I could tell you I’m sorry I didn’t do better, Margot. I wish I could say that. But I did the best I could.”

  I try to hold it back. But I can’t. “It wasn’t good enough.”

  “I know that,” Mom says plainly. It doesn’t seem to hurt her the way I thought it might.

  “And you can’t say that you’re sorry?”

  She looks at me for a long moment. “No,” she says. “If you’d grown up like me, Margot—”

  “But I did.” If she can’t understand this, this most fundamental thing. If she can’t be sorry for it, then I don’t even know what we’re doing. “I grew up with you, Mom. You took everything Gram put on you and passed it on.”

  Like the girls in the grove. Everything happening over and over, and I have to break it. I asked Tess if understanding a person meant I had to forgive them. And I do understand my mom. I know how she saw what happened to her sister, how she killed Katherine with her own hands. I know how she kept me, even though I bet she’s spent my whole life wondering if she would have to kill me too. I know what fires she walked through now.

  ”You’re right,” she says. “I did. But you’re stronger than me, Margot. You are. You bore what I never could.”

  And the thing is, I know she means it like praise. Like pride. But it isn’t to me. Because yes, I bore this. I fixed it, but there’s a voice in my head, one I’ve never really heard before, and it says, I shouldn’t have had to.

  I shouldn’t have had to be strong. Not like that. I should have been able to break. Maybe one day all that strength can just be a gift my mother gave me, and not the tool I used to survive her. But I don’t think it’s today.

  “Well,” I say at last. “Thank you for coming back.”

  She fidgets with the plastic bag, watching me. “And are you? Coming back?”

  I want to say yes. I want everything to be fine, but whatever we do today to bridge the gap—it won’t hold. Not when I can still feel my whole life with her in every heartbeat.

  “Not now,” I say instead. “Not yet.” It’s what I can say instead of “I love you.” It’s what I can do to look after myself.

  Her face crumples for a moment. I watch as she blinks away tears, feel my own well up.

  “Not yet?” she says. She swallows hard, her knuckles white. I wait for the fight. And it’s there. I can see it in the tremble of her body, in the shut of her eyes. But she says, “Okay.” And she says, “Not yet.”

  It’s the kindest thing she’s ever done.

  THIRTY

  The Miller funeral falls on the hottest day of the summer so far. Eli and I go together, sit side by side in the first pew, a few feet from where the three coffins are set up across the front of the church.

  “Don’t ever tell me,” he said this morning when I showed up on the church steps in a black dress his mother lent me. “I’ll ask. But don’t ever tell me what you saw in their house.”

  It’s been a week, but it seems like yesterday. Mrs. Miller, still reaching for her phone. Mr. Miller in the closet, his body between his daughter and a shotgun. Gram told me she wasn’t there for all three of them, only for Tess. He could’ve stepped aside, but he didn’t.

  “I won’t,” I said. It’s not a hard promise to make. I never want to think about it again.

  There was no funeral for Gram. Mom left Phalene that night, went back to Calhoun and our old apartment. When I think of them now, I think of them toget
her, standing on the porch at Fairhaven in the light of an unending afternoon. I’m too far away to see their faces, but I know they’re watching me.

  I’ve been staying at Eli’s house, in his room while he sleeps on the couch. Every day Connors comes to pick me up, and he takes me to the station, and he tells me something new. Empty bank accounts one day. Piling debt the next. It is so easy to make this something Gram did.

  And it’s true, and it’s what happened. Gram killed the Millers. Gram treated the earth. Gram, Gram, Gram. But the fire caught the ridicine, turned the bones to something smaller than ash, and when I told the police to look in the grove, they didn’t find a thing. Just like Katherine. Mom knew what she was doing when she told me what would save me.

  It doesn’t sit right, that nobody will ever know all of it. Even the parts that were mine.

  Next to me Eli clears his throat and edges closer to make room in our pew for Connors and his wife. The church is packed, all of Phalene turned out to say goodbye to its brightest family. This would’ve been the Nielsens once. Way back, before any of this. Now the police won’t release what they found of Gram’s body, and why should they? So I can mourn her? I’ll do that just fine on my own.

  Tess’s coffin is between her parents’. White and shining, and next to it, what must be her school picture, blown up and encircled by a floral wreath. It doesn’t look a thing like her. But Eli’s staring at it like he can’t breathe, and so I reach over, squeeze his wrist once.

  The reverend takes the pulpit and the service starts. I shut my eyes, let it look like I’m praying. But really I’m not here anymore. I’m there, in that afternoon that lives at the back of my mind.

  Three more weeks until my eighteenth. Three more weeks at Eli’s house, of helping him sort through Tess’s belongings and find pieces of her to keep. They chose each other, he and Tess. Built a world between them and decided it was worth something. Whatever’s next for me, I want it to be like that.

  The reverend keeps talking. This will be over soon. I will walk out the door and I will go where I want and I don’t know where that is, but I have time, now, to figure it out. Time to build my own life. Time to decide how much of Mom I want in it.

  A summer afternoon, sunlight and sway, the crops growing green. Fairhaven bright with fresh paint, and two—no, three women on the porch, wearing the same face. A fire on the horizon. I could live here forever, in the memory of something I never had.

  I open my eyes, a breath unfolding like wings in my chest.

  Leave it there, I tell myself. Let the fire come. I’m on my way to being brand-new.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wrote this book so many times that I can’t quite remember what’s inside it, but what I do remember is the unfailing support I was so lucky to receive from the people around me. First, of course, to my patient and brilliant editor, Krista Marino, who read this book over and over again and let me take it in all the directions it wasn’t supposed to go before we found the right one. I don’t know where the book would be without you—presumably entirely in the second person and without an ounce of clarity inside.

  Thank you to my agents, Daisy Parente, Kim Witherspoon, and Jessica Mileo, and to the teams at Lutyens and Rubinstein and InkWell, who are so wonderfully supportive and who know the answers to my questions before I even realize what I’m asking.

  Thank you so much to Beverly Horowitz, Barbara Marcus, Monica Jean, Lydia Gregovic, and everybody at Delacorte Press for providing such a wonderful home for this book. To Emma Benshoff, thank you for being an incredible publicist and for being someone I can email about Taylor Swift albums. Thank you to the whole marketing and Underlined team—Elizabeth Ward, Kate Keating, Jenn Inzetta, Kelly McGauley, Jules Kelly, Josh Redlich, Kristin Schultz, and everyone else—for being the most incredible crew. You are so generous with your time, so kind, and so deeply fun. I’m beyond lucky to be working with you.

  Thank you to Regina Flath, genius designer, Alison Reimold, the artist of my dreams, and Trish Parcell, who knocked the interior out of the park. I am forever in your debt. Thank you so much to all the talented bloggers and Instagrammers who have supported both Wilder Girls and this book. I’m in awe of the content you create and of the work and dedication you put into your posts.

  Thank you to Sara Faring for listening to a hundred versions of this idea. To Diana Hurlbert, Rebecca Barrow, and Maggie Soares-Horne for reading early drafts and pretending they made any sense. To Emma Theriault for many hours of sprinting and shared misery. To Christine Lynn Herman for enduring an astonishing volume of direct messages about corn, and for your support, which I could not have done without. To a great many more friends, too, to whom I owe so much. I love you all.

  To my mom, who always shows up, no matter what. Thank you for meeting me here.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rory Power grew up in Boston, received her undergraduate degree at Middlebury College, and went on to earn an MA in prose fiction from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Rhode Island. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls and Burn Our Bodies Down. To learn more about Rory, go to itsrorypower.com and follow @itsrorypower on Twitter and Instagram.

  THERE IS A STRANGER WITH MY FACE.

  Ever since Margot was born, it’s been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot’s questions. No history to hold on to. Just the two of them, stuck in their rundown apartment, struggling to get along.

  But that’s not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And when she finds a photograph pointing her to a town called Phalene, she leaves. But when Margot gets there, it’s not what she bargained for.

  Margot’s mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what’s still there?

  Praise for Rory Power’s New York Times bestselling Wilder Girls

  “A staggering gut punch of a book” Kirkus, starred review

  “Evocative, haunting, and occasionally gruesome” Booklist, starred review

  “The perfect kind of story for our current era” Hypable

  “An ode to empowering women and a testament to the strength of female bonds” Shelf Awareness, starred review

  “Electric prose, compelling relationships, and visceral horror” Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Wilder Girls is so sharp and packs so much emotion in such wise ways. I’m convinced we’re about to witness the emergence of a major new literary star” Jeff VanderMeer, author of the New York Times bestseller Annihilation

  “The eeriness of Raxter Island permeates every scene, and Rory Power’s characters are fierce and honest, blazing from the pages. This is a groundbreaking speculative story – brutal and beautiful, raw and unflinching. I adored this book” Emily Suvada, author of This Mortal Coil

  “Wilder Girls is the bold, imaginative, emotionally wrenching horror novel of my dreams – one that celebrates the resilience of girls and the earthshaking power of their friendships. An eerie, unforgettable triumph” Claire Legrand, New York Times bestselling author of Furyborn

  “A feminist, LGBT+, sci-fi-horror story with all the tantalizing elements of gore, mystery, war, and love you can ask for. Real, flawed, brave girls against a world gone mad. A shudderingly good read!” Dawn Kurtagich, author of Teeth in the Mist

  First published 2020 in the US by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  This electronic edition published 2020 in the UK by

  Macmillan Children’s Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5290-2284-1

  Text copyright © Nike Power 2020

  Cover art copyright © Allison Reimold 2020

  Jacket art by Allison Reimold, Jacket design by Regina Flath

  The right of Rory Power to be identif
ied as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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