So I’m raiding our freezer and I’m going to make a pot roast, like my mother used to make every Sunday dinner back in Ohio, and then I’m going to pour a pitcher of iced lemonade and have all the people sheltering at Granfield gather around a table in the kitchen and share stories about their day and pretend that the world isn’t just piles of ash and fire anymore.
I burned the teddy bear.
I still don’t know how Daphne found it. She won’t tell me if it’s something Darren gave to her a while back, or if she found it somewhere.
All I do know is that we did not buy Daphne a teddy bear like that, ever—it’s always been unicorns for her, since she was old enough to babble and point to what she wanted—and the bear looks terrifyingly similar to one that held a pride of place in Darren’s apartment, like some remnant of a young field hand at Granfield manor from the last century.
I haven’t been in to check and see if it’s gone now, from his apartment. The teddy bear. I don’t want to know, I suppose. And I am so tired of living in fear.
I need to get a grip on myself. I’ve felt like this for too long—well before we all became locked in at home, my husband and children and these two familiar strangers.
What should be three, a little voice in my head reminds me. I did what needed to be done, I tell that little voice. I pinch myself on the side until it hurts so much it burns and I’m certain to leave a bruise, but my head feels clearer afterwards.
Fear’s been the constant filter I live my life through. Ever since the break-in that would have left Mark dead if Tobias hadn’t happened to be out walking that night and seen what was happening through our front windows. It’s this presence that sits far back enough that I can’t see it clearly, but I can feel it there, like a figure stalking me on my way home in the dark, determining which turns I take in order to make it to the end.
If I can get a handle on everything, I can get us through this. I’m certain of it.
Which is why I’m down in the finished basement of the manor, peering through the secondary freezer for stew meat. I’m sure Greta bought some. There are flanks of veal, and lamb chops frozen into their crowned rings. Hot dogs for the children and chicken breasts individually packed, to cook and shred for my lunch salads.
The thought of fresh lettuce crunching under my teeth makes my mouth water. We finished the fresh vegetables and fruits three days ago, and have been relying on canned and frozen packages to supplement the rice and beans available in the pantry. I’ve never eaten so much starch.
Tobias said the treatment for the aphids seems to be working, and that he’ll be ready to plant the seedlings into the ground in another few days. I didn’t ask him how long it’ll take for everything to start fruiting, or for those round heads of green to be ready to pick. The weather has been warmer, and I’ve opened the windows throughout the house, including Mark’s room, to air out the staleness of so many people being inside for so long. Still, it’s definitely possible that we won’t have enough to get us through until the garden takes off.
I wonder if anyone will bring that up at dinner tonight—the fact that I’ve made this sort-of fancy meal when we’re getting closer and closer to running out of food?
The freezer door swings open too far as I try to push towards the back, hoping to find the stew meat somewhere on the shelves. I dressed up today in my normal work clothes, and the thin fabric of my silk shirt makes it feel like the cold air is rushing past my bare skin. I have a video meeting later today with my board—I told them I might have trouble connecting though—and I need to look like I’m not running scared from anything.
I don’t usually wear foundation, but today I slathered it on in the hopes of covering the dark circles deepening each day underneath my eyes.
I finally give up on the stew meat and grab at a skirt steak instead. A flash of irritation flares up in me, because I don’t usually have to make dinner. I’d work all day, rush home to see the kids and help them with their homework, and then scarf down a plate of whatever Greta had made before going over to Mark’s rooms to see how he was doing. I was too busy to cook. I had a set limit to what I had to give to my life here at home.
And I work really well with limits.
“Mom?” The little voice is more a question than a request. Daphne’s bright head pops from behind the doorway leading into the “rumpus” room where we keep an older set of couches and chairs from before the remodel, along with the extra freezer.
“I’m coming up in a minute,” I call over to her, but I’m too late and she’s already moved across the room and wrapped her arms around my legs.
“What are you doing?” she asks. She’s shoved her mouth into the side of my thigh, and I can’t help but notice the dark wet splotch forming on my pants.
I reach down and stroke her hair. “Looking for stuff for dinner. What are you up to?” I force brightness into my voice. Glancing at my watch I realize that I’ve spent too much time down here trying to play homemaker during the apocalypse and that my board meeting is coming up in just ten minutes.
“I was going to play Candyland. Want to play?” Daphne turns her face from my leg and up at me. She’s always been an expert at pleading her case. “You said we’d play a game together if I worked on my lessons this morning.”
I gently push at her shoulders, encouraging her to let go and allow me to move towards the stairs.
“I can play with you later, sweetheart, but right now I have to go put this in the fridge upstairs and then log on to my meeting.”
Daphne lets go and trots alongside me. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I say, not able to help myself. I wasn’t expecting my daughter to give in.
“I’m going to go check on Margot,” Daphne says. “Maybe she’ll play with me.”
We head up the stairs, and I let Daphne go first. The steak is forming a soft fuzz of ice crystals and my hand smarts a little from the coldness pressing into my palm.
“We’re having pot roast for dinner,” I tell her.
Her tiny body stops on the step above me and I have to grip the railing for a moment with my free hand to avoid bumping into my daughter.
“Can I have peanut butter and jelly instead?” Daphne asks as she keeps facing up towards the light of the open doorway.
“You can’t have peanut butter, remember? Margot is allergic.”
That was another mystery in this house of mine, although I’m fairly certain it was Felix who’d brought it home from school one day and hid it in the kitchen, too embarrassed to admit that some of his classmates had made it their business to try to get him in trouble.
We’d had a conversation with his teacher just before the pandemic hit. One of his classmates is deathly allergic to peanut butter, and all the families had received a note home at the beginning of the school year that we couldn’t send food with tree nuts of any kind in our children’s lunches.
I know Felix would have never done that on purpose. He would never hurt anyone.
But my son is also quick to point out how much smarter he is than other people, which is probably why the other kids at school dislike him, to the point of hiding a jar of peanut butter and package of Graham Crackers in his book bag and then telling the teacher about it in the hopes of getting him a week of detention, or worse—getting him suspended.
“Okay,” Daphne says.
We’re at the top of the stairs, and she turns left towards her room as I move right to the kitchen. I’ll head upstairs to the library with my laptop for the meeting once I put the meat in the refrigerator to defrost.
“Okay?” I ask again.
“Bye, Mom,” she calls over her shoulder, a skip in her step.
I turn towards the kitchen, disappointment in my daughter like a rotten fruit in my mouth.
18
Margot
The knife slices through the soft flesh of my thumb so swiftly that it takes a few moments before I realize I’m bleeding. It’s not until I look down at the cutting board cove
red in a jumble of carrots and splotches of my own blood that I notice the pulsing throb in my left hand.
“Oh my God, you’re bleeding!” Brenna rushes over to my side of the counter and, gripping my hand and holding it taut against the wood of the cutting board, she pulls me to the faucet and starts rinsing out my wound.
“I’m fine.” I shush her away. “I’m a nurse, you know?” I crack a smile at her and press a nearby dish towel into my thumb to staunch the bleeding, but Brenna doesn’t smile. She’s pumping dish soap onto the board and carrots, and steam rises from the hot water pouring from the faucet. I reach over to dip my hand underneath the stream, and flinch back. Now my left hand is both scalded and sliced open.
I usually don’t cook.
But Brenna was so excited when she came to find me in Mark’s rooms and announce that she was making a special dinner tonight, and that everyone would sit down together at 7pm. Mark was having a difficult time talking today, but he didn’t even need to ask if he was coming too. “We’ll move you to the kitchen. A little special excursion, darling. It’ll be good for you,” she said to her husband, stroking his wrist over the fresh bandage I’d put on. His own wound was healing nicely, and soon there’d only be a thin white line where he’d managed to break open his skin.
“You should go wrap that up,” Brenna tells me.
“It’s fine.” I flick my wrist, dish towel still cocooning my left hand. “I just need to hold some pressure on it until it stops bleeding.”
“Be more careful next time.” She stares into the mound of soap suds billowing from the sink. “We can’t take risks like that.”
There’s a heavy pause between us.
I don’t know where Darren’s body is, or even if Tobias buried him. That evening, I’d checked on Mark and he’d asked me to close his windows because the air streaming in had smelled of smoke and burnt plastic.
“We’re going to be okay.” I say it for both our benefits. “We were protecting them.”
Brenna reaches out and grips my hand, the one wrapped in the dish cloth, and squeezes hard. Very hard.
I think she’s worried about me getting an infection or being more hurt than I’m letting on, so I move closer to her and put my forehead against hers. Our noses touch, and the soft breath from her mouth carries the fragrance of mint toothpaste and something wild and sweet, like the soft green stalks of dandelions my sisters and I would pull from the ground and suck on in the springtime.
“It’s going to be okay,” I repeat. I edge her hand away and pull the cloth from my own hand. The bleeding has stopped and all that’s left of my error is a soft white slice of skin separated from the pad of my thumb. “Almost good as new.”
But Brenna stays there, unmoving and unwilling to look at me. Which is when I realize that she didn’t mean I needed to be more careful with myself.
“Until the gardens start producing, we have to account for every bit of food. We can’t waste anything.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I move back to the sink, taking a step sideways from her, and start to rinse the vegetables again. “I’ll be more careful.”
Brenna shifts the cutting board and the vegetables from my hand and walks back over to the central island counter in the kitchen. “You should probably go check on Mark, shouldn’t you?”
Sometimes she talks to me as though I’m a complete stranger.
Sometimes it’s like she can barely stand to look at me.
I think about two nights ago, tangled together in my bed. She came to find me that night. She’d wanted me.
But I correct myself. She’d wanted someone.
I set the knife down into the hot soapy water of the sink and slink off through the kitchen hallway. I’m not sure where I’m going, only that I need to get away from Brenna.
The carpet in the hallway glows with the light coming through the windows. I’ve spent most of the day in Mark’s smaller rooms, talking with him about nothing in particular. I could tell that he was feeling lonely when he woke up this morning—Brenna had been in for a few minutes to announce her dinner plans, but she hadn’t stayed for long because of a meeting she had with her company.
“I miss meetings,” Mark had said, and I’d squeezed the soft ring of his ankle underneath the blankets as Brenna triggered the keypad and left.
I decide I could use some fresh air, and turn towards the outer door that leads from the main entranceway and the “grand” staircase. The chandelier hanging above the black and white parquet floor is enormous and imposing, and I’m thinking about how money seems to make things more beautiful than they deserve, when I bump into someone.
Such an enormous house, and I can’t seem to find a quiet space to myself.
It’s Felix, of course.
He’s been pacing the rooms of the house these last few days. Sometimes I can hear him counting under his breath. Once I was sitting in the forgotten library, scanning the spines of the books hoping to find something to read that would let me escape from the thoughts that seem to clog my mind up at night when I’m trying to sleep, or waiting to see if Brenna will come visit me, and I heard him sweep by, murmuring “Six-hundred and forty-five” followed by a pause and a soft shuffle. “Six-hundred and forty-six.”
Today I don’t catch the number he’s on. He may have been counting in his head, since I didn’t hear him come up beside me. There are so many places in this house that seem to swallow the light. The more sunshine that pours through the windows, the deeper the shadows in the corners become.
And Felix seems to love lurking around in the shadows.
“I’m sorry,” I say for the one-thousandth time today. Quarantine is making me way too pliant. “Did I mess up your counting?”
Felix eyes me like a rabbit caught in a snare. I smile and brush a lock of hair that’s fallen in front of my eye, hoping to ease the nervous tension that surrounds him.
“You have blood on your face.” He gives me a quick nod and then takes another step in the same direction he was heading.
There’s a soft murmur in his wake, but again I don’t catch the number he’s on.
I pass a mirror in the hallway and dare to give myself a glance. There’s a wide streak of bright red smeared across my forehead and down towards my cheekbone. It must have come from my thumb when I brushed my hair out of my face.
I thought the bleeding had stopped.
When I look down there’s another bead of blood sitting on my skin like a jewel. I go to suck it off with my mouth and hopefully stop the blood flow, but I’m too late and it falls like a single drop of rain onto the pristine white tile below my feet.
I don’t bother to wipe it up.
Instead, I walk in the opposite direction of Felix and head through the front door, towards the open space of the fields.
19
Tobias
Julie’s mane whips in the breeze flowing across the bright yellow field. The winter hay is turning green and peppered with bright yellow orbs as it overstays its place in the turned soil.
I’m hoping to figure out how to work the main tractor that Darren used with the harvest attachment, but it’s harder to use than it seems. One look at the swinging blades underneath the housing told me I needed to be careful.
Colleen always thought that I was a little too impulsive. “Why don’t you just stop for a moment and think it through,” she’d tell me. The last time she said that she was rubbing at her stomach, our little glimmer stretching her skin, pulling out the fabric of her shirt like a promise you could hold in your hand.
I thought I listened to her when we were together—that I was a good husband—but memories do strange things the more you try to revisit them. They shift and stretch in ways you never expected.
Margot pats Jasmine’s neck next to me. She’s a vision of spring beside me, with her dark green sweater and sleek hair bouncing against her shoulders in time with Jasmine’s stride. The sun catches both of them in a pocket of light as the clouds move above us, and for a mo
ment the two of them are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time. Even more beautiful than seeing those little white specks disintegrating on the plants in the greenhouse.
But not as beautiful as the way I remember my wife.
Not nearly.
Even still, I can’t help but smile at the two of them, and Margot catches me looking over. She whips her head back to the front, focusing on where Jasmine’s taking her, and I think I’ve ruined the moment. I want to call over to her that it’s not what she thinks it is, but Margot shouts something over the snap of the wind that kicks up as we move further towards the edge of the woods.
“She’s magnificent, isn’t she?” she calls over.
She bends down again and gives another quick pat to Jasmine’s broad neck, and I see the touch ripple through the horse’s body out to the tip of her tail, where it shakes itself out in a whirligig of motion. Jasmine always has been a show-off.
We’ve been riding fairly slowly, strolling along the field, but at Margot’s touch Jasmine seems to decide that it’s time for her to show what she’s capable of. Rearing back slightly, I watch the two of them canter down the field, headed straight for the tree line of pines that edges our open fields.
Julie whinnies underneath me, and I give her a tender squeeze with my heels.
“Okay, girl,” I signal, and she doesn’t wait a second longer. We’re racing, and the cool air of the afternoon rushes through my body rather than over it. The speed acts like a release valve, and the tight coil inside my head unfurls the faster we go.
I cast another glance over to Margot, and see the same intensity on her face I’ve caught sometimes when I watch her sitting with Mark. She’s determined to make this work.
I was in the stable when she came to get me, which was a surprise in and of itself. Before I got my sleepwalking under control there’d been a few awkward encounters in Margot’s room—awkward and embarrassing and kind of awful really—so I’d tried to give her as much distance as possible afterwards. She’d apparently decided to do the same, because today was the first time she’d been in the stables since she’d arrived at Granfield.
Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists Page 8
