Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  When I put my face back against the viewfinder, something shifts inside the apartment. There’s a dark shadow that moves from one side to the other, blocking out the green numbers glowing out of the microwave display for a second or two before everything comes back into focus again.

  I look over at the next window, hoping to keep track of whatever was moving inside Darren’s apartment as it made its path across the space, but I don’t see it again.

  I’ve never been inside Darren’s place, so I don’t know if there’s a stairwell in the middle of the building or another way to get in besides the outer door I can see. Whoever was in there might have gone through another door and down the stairs. Or stayed up on the second floor, hidden from the windows for some reason.

  I move my telescope so that I’m watching the door of the mill barn. It’s the only exit to the building that I can remember from when I’ve wandered around outside, which I totally admit isn’t that often. I’m not really the outdoorsy kind of kid. Whoever or whatever was inside would have to go out that way, I figure.

  Unless it was an animal, like a squirrel or a raccoon, that somehow got in.

  But what’s the likelihood of that, when Mom had said they’d locked his apartment up tight and they would know if Daphne or I went over there and started messing around.

  I look at the door for hours, until I can’t sit any longer and my empty stomach tells me I need to go downstairs and eat something. The whole time I’m there, though, nobody comes out the door. The apartment seems to be empty, and I start to believe that what I saw was just a trick of the light.

  15

  Margot

  After Brenna leaves I sit for what seems like a long time in bed and stare out into nothing. The sounds from Felix’s room have stopped, and I figure Brenna has gone to comfort her son from his bad dream.

  She’s a good mother. Attentive. Kind. Affectionate.

  My skin feels raw from last night. There are a few small abrasions on my thighs and breasts, but they don’t hurt so much as pulse under the tight surface of my skin. Tracing the places Brenna touched makes me miss her though.

  My mother used to stare out into deep spaces, ignoring my sisters and me as we tried to get her attention. I don’t know what she was thinking about when she’d disappear like that. Some days she wouldn’t get out of bed.

  I jump up and throw on jeans and a sweater, pull my unruly hair back into a ponytail, and wash my face clean and bare, avoiding the mirror affixed directly above the sink. I don’t take a shower because I can still smell her on me and it’s a welcome distraction from the other thoughts burning through my head. There’s no way to know when she might want to be together again, like that. Or even if she will.

  I spit into the sink, wipe the extra toothpaste that always spills from the edges of my mouth on a towel, and grab my key card from my bedside table where I keep it at night. I bite down on my tongue hard with my teeth, breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, and leave my room so that I can give my lover’s husband his medicine and a sponge bath.

  Lover. It’s such a silly word. But Brenna isn’t my girlfriend. She’s not even really my friend. We’re just filling up the empty spaces inside each other. What else do you call that?

  I swing through the kitchen on my way to the medical wing so I can grab a quick sip of coffee and one of the energy bars Greta stockpiled in the pantry well before this pandemic. The shelves look emptier than I imagined them, and I think about eating only half a bar and saving the rest for later, but the growl in my stomach insists that I put some energy into my body. I didn’t eat much yesterday, or the day before that. I don’t have much of an appetite, but the slight tremble in my fingertips tells me otherwise.

  Nursing 101. Are your client’s basic needs being met? Are they hungry, cold, tired, frightened? What can you do about it?

  When I close the pantry door Daphne appears at my side like a little sprite. She doesn’t seem affected by a day and a half holed up in the panic room while we disinfected everything, which is good. Kids are so resilient. They can recover from pretty much anything.

  “Do you want to have breakfast with me?” she asks, swinging a teddy bear from her hand in a wide arc. I don’t recognize the toy, but then again Brenna’s kids have more to play with than my sisters and I shared together in our entire childhood.

  “I have to go check on your dad.” I bite into the protein bar and immediately take a sip of coffee from my mug. The bar feels like sawdust in my mouth, and I need something to wash down the chalky residue. I gag a little trying to get the liquid down my throat.

  “Those don’t have nuts in them, do they?” Daphne stares at me intently. “Aren’t you allergic to nuts?”

  I cough and take another sip.

  I’d already checked the packaging before taking a bite. Soy and chocolate and coconut, but no actual nuts. Brenna had automatically asked if I had any allergies when I initially came to work for them—apparently Felix had an egg allergy they’d caught only by mistake and a trip to the ER—and it’d been one of our first real conversations when I told her about my family’s own scare after I ate a friend’s peanut butter sandwich at school and had to be rushed to the hospital.

  We were more a bologna and ketchup kind of family. My older sister, Teresa, did most of the grocery shopping, and she hated peanut butter, so she never bought it.

  “I’m fine,” I assure Daphne, but she keeps staring at me and I wonder if she’s scared about something else and just hiding it well. Maybe being in the panic room was scarier for her than I first realized.

  I reach out to her, but she moves away and sits down at the kitchen counter in the corner, near the large picture windows and French doors that open onto the patio.

  “I can eat whatever I want,” she says proudly. She pulls up a chair and settles the teddy bear next to her. “So can teddy.”

  I watch as Daphne swipes a petite hand across her face and rests her chin in it, her elbow balanced on the edge of the table. She sits there for a few moments, quietly alone, before I get the point.

  “Do you need help getting your breakfast?” I finally ask. I glance down at my watch, and figure I have a few minutes still. Mark needs his medications in the morning, but a few minutes here or there on either side won’t hurt him.

  “Yes, please.” A smile crosses Daphne’s face, and I feel one of the tight spaces in my chest loosen a little.

  I ask her what she’d like, turning towards the fridge and automatically reaching for the milk on the side door.

  “Toast and peanut butter, please.” She twists towards the teddy bear and leans her head down, as if the toy is whispering in her ear. “Teddy would like some, too.”

  “I don’t think we have peanut butter,” I tell her, “but you can definitely have some toast with jelly.” Brenna was really insistent to keep her house nut-free after hearing about my allergy. As I swing the door closed though, I ignore the carton of eggs sitting on the top shelf.

  “I want peanut butter,” Daphne insists, and throws her arms over her chest. “Mommy keeps some in the bottom drawer, with the paper plates and napkins.”

  “Okay,” I say, trying to appease her. Daphne’s face has turned bright red over the course of the last several seconds, and I remind myself that everything about this situation that is hard for a grown-up is probably ten times harder for a child.

  After pulling a plate from the cupboard and putting two slices of wheat bread into the toaster, I go to the drawer and pull it open. Sure enough, there’s a jar of peanut butter nestled in among the rarely used paper plates and plastic cups.

  I know my allergy isn’t so bad that I can’t even touch a peanut, but I still feel a little cautious grabbing at the jar.

  The toast pops from the two slots in the toaster and I snatch a butter knife from the cutlery drawer. I need to get over to Mark.

  I wonder if Brenna is still with Felix. Maybe she’ll be over with her husband by now.

  “Here
you go.” I put the plate of toast down in front of Daphne, along with the jar and knife. I’ve seen Daphne butter her bread before, and I figure she can do this for herself.

  I turn, not really expecting a “thank you” but a little disappointed all the same that Daphne doesn’t say anything at first.

  “Teddy needs you to do his toast,” she calls after me.

  “I need to go help your dad,” I remind her over my shoulder. My eyes catch hers for a moment, and the change in her face makes me almost stop.

  “But Teddy can’t do his toast by himself.” Daphne’s voice becomes a whine, but her face remains furious. I’ve never seen one of Daphne’s tantrums, although one night over a glass of wine Brenna talked about how hard it was to get a therapist to come to the house to help Daphne with her “anger issues”.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammer, not sure exactly what to do. I’ve already delayed long enough. I need to get over to my patient. “I can come back later and help your Teddy with his toast.”

  “No,” Daphne screams. She jumps up from her chair, knocking over her plate and tipping the jar of peanut butter so it oozes out of the container and onto the table. “I want it now!”

  I instinctively start to back away, and bump into something behind me.

  “What’s going on here?” Brenna says. She looks tired, with deep circles under her eyes that I didn’t notice in my room earlier. She still has on the same clothes from yesterday, and her hair has a look of needing to be washed.

  Brenna’s eyes dart from me to her daughter, and widen as they take in the scene.

  “Daphne, where did you get that peanut butter from? Margot is allergic. You know that.” She reaches to right the tipped over jar.

  It’s my turn to glance between Brenna and Daphne. The little girl had known exactly where it was, and she’d said her mom kept it there.

  Then Brenna’s eyes fall on the teddy bear seated next to Daphne.

  “Where did you get that?” Her voice is so quiet that I almost can’t hear her. She repeats her question when Daphne doesn’t answer, cowering in her seat instead. “Where did you get that bear, Daphne?”

  “I don’t know,” Daphne replies, and she’s hunched into a small ball, with her head tucked into her chest and her shoulders folded in, like she’s trying to disappear.

  Brenna steps over to her daughter and bends so her face is right in line with Daphne’s.

  “Where. Did. You. Get. It?” Brenna’s lips barely move, but the panic makes her voice sound like she’s shouting the words.

  “I don’t know,” Daphne mumbles again. Brenna whips herself upright and then lunges towards her daughter.

  “We need to burn it,” Brenna says. “Oh my God. I thought we were safe!”

  “What? I don’t understand. What do we need to burn? I have to go check on Mark, give him his medicine.” I try to rush over and separate the two of them, but Brenna moves away first, clutching Daphne’s toy as her daughter sits there looking terrified by how upset her mother is.

  “The bear,” Brenna shouts at me. “The bear from Darren’s apartment!”

  16

  Day 7

  Tobias

  I can’t put it off any longer. With Darren gone, there’s been this unspoken agreement between the adults at Granfield that I would manage the outdoor responsibilities as much as possible, and that Brenna and Margot would split what needed to be done inside with the children and for Mark.

  We’ve been rationing our food, and although Brenna has asked me every night to come in for dinner, I still have enough to eat in my apartment. I’ll have to get food from the manor house eventually though.

  Until they run out too.

  Which is why I need to do this before it’s too late.

  Brenna and I walked through the greenhouse on Day 3, after we’d finished disinfecting and the fire had burned low enough that we didn’t have to worry about it spreading or sparking. We found nearly fifty different types of plants that Darren had sprouted from seeds or almost-full plants ready to go into the earth. Tomatoes and cucumbers, potatoes and butternut squash. Lettuces. Kale and spinach. Brenna had an app on her phone she’d downloaded that let her take a picture of the plant, and a few seconds later it spit out the name across the screen. It wasn’t perfect—my mother grew sugar pumpkins every summer to make pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, and I’m certain that whatever is growing vines across the furthest table of the greenhouse is not a pumpkin, even though that’s what the app said—but it was better than trying to figure them out on our own, using the limited internet we have or trying to search out a gardening book in Darren’s apartment. It was a small miracle that Brenna could get online as long as she did.

  She explained it to me when I asked, something about towers and signal boosts and operating at peak capacity with entire cities on lockdown and everyone trying to work from home, but I still don’t quite understand how any of that affects us way out here. All I know is that, since the lockdown order came, getting online has been sporadic at best and I’m really glad I don’t have to try to run a company through a computer, like Brenna has to.

  I was planning to plant the seedlings soon, now that the days are getting longer and the ground is thawing, but when I went to check on the plants two days ago there was something else in the greenhouse. Little white flecks of dust spread out on the green planters.

  Aphids.

  I know from my mother too that aphids are a death sentence for most plants. They’ll eat the leaves, and then the stalks, and then the roots. Once seedlings are infected, there’s nothing you can really do except give up on the plants—or poison the aphids.

  But poisoning the aphids means that you have to poison the plants and the soil, which is obviously a tricky business.

  When I told Brenna about all of this, she just stared at me with a look that made me want to melt into the floor and then asked me, quite nicely, if I could fix it.

  So I’m fixing it.

  In the gardening shed, there are lots of different chemicals. Lots of skulls and crossbones written across packages, promising to kill anyone who misuses them, which isn’t exactly a confidence boost for me. But I have to do this. Otherwise we’re going to starve.

  Even though the internet’s been spotty, late at night a few times I’ve gotten on—I figured Brenna wouldn’t be trying to have meetings in the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t be making it harder for her to work—and I’ve been able to see what’s happening outside of Granfield.

  People are sick. People are dying.

  The National Guard is deployed through almost all major cities in the US. Grocery stores are ransacked and people are hoarding toilet paper.

  There are a few headlines about families being attacked on roads, as they try to get to the border crossing and make it over into Canada. Some reporters are claiming that there are gangs forming, taking advantage of people sheltering at home and using this pandemic as an opportunity to take what they want.

  A lot of gun stores have been emptied out.

  The poison I need is in a bright blue bag, nestled on the bottom shelf next to the mothballs and the vermiculite. It says right on the bag that it’s ideal for killing aphids.

  I need to mix it with two parts water, and then spray everything down until its sopping wet. The aphids will die, but hopefully the plants will live.

  A tight vice squeezes around the sides of my chest as I fill a spray can with the right proportions of chemical and water. When Darren came down sick, and we went through everything to clean away the potential infection he might have spread, I had to stop Brenna from soaking the seed starts and their containers in bleach. She’d been shaking, unwilling to listen to me and shouting that we needed to keep the children safe. That I was putting them in danger.

  Margot eventually pulled her away, after Brenna started shoving and punching at me.

  And now I’m poisoning the plants myself. The thought of just burning the plants and the greenhouse down flits across my m
ind. Fire is cleansing. We could start fresh.

  That’s something my mother said a lot after the trial.

  “You need a fresh start,” she’d tell me on the phone.

  But I didn’t want a fresh start. I wanted Colleen.

  And we can’t start fresh, unless we want to start ourselves straight into starvation.

  I hoist the sprayer into the air, aimed at the tomato plants first. I swear I can hear the insects munching on the greens, on the food that we’ll need. Their hungry mouths are making a symphony of destruction right here in front of me.

  They need to be stopped.

  I spray, and the mist flows over the plants and coats the leaves. I work meticulously, from table to table, until the entire garden of seedlings is treated.

  Now all we have to do is wait.

  I put the can back next to the shelves, but I don’t empty it out. It says on the bag that multiple treatments might be needed, and that if I didn’t see the white specks of the aphids reducing in number within twenty-four hours I’ll have to hit them again.

  Of course, the more times I spray them, the longer we’ll have to wait before we can plant them, before we can hope to have any food to harvest from them.

  I check to make sure the nozzle of the spray can is turned off, so it isn’t releasing vapor into the enclosed space of the greenhouse, and then I head back to my horses.

  It’s time for their nightly feed, and my hands tingle at the thought of their rough manes slipping through my fingers, as though the world isn’t crumbling around us.

  I don’t let myself think about what we’ll do if the gardens die, and the only living things left at Granfield are the people. And the horses.

  17

  Day 9

  Brenna

  I’ve decided to have a dinner party.

  The thought sounds ridiculous, I know, but the past week has been tough and I don’t think my body can take any more unwelcome surprises. I desperately need something to look forward to, something I can control.