by Andrew Pyper
WHAT SORT OF THINGS DID Ash do? Why was she a girl whose own mother might wish was never born?
Let me tell you a story. A short, terrible little story.
In the winter when Ash and I were twelve, there was a day of sun that followed a cold snap, a melting of snow that left slicked streets and dripping eaves. The very next morning, the cold returned. Sidewalks and driveways turned to ice rinks. And hanging from every roof, icicles as long and sharp as spears.
“Monster teeth,” Ash said when she saw them.
When we got home from school that day, the icicles were still there, though the forecast called for higher temperatures later in the week.
“We need to save one,” Ash said. “They’re too pretty to just die.”
She made me get a stepladder. When I returned, she directed me to the icicle she’d chosen, and that I had to climb to the ladder’s top to pull away.
“Be careful!” Ash said, a real concern for the ice that I’d never heard her genuinely express for another human being before.
When I handed it over to her she cradled it like a baby as she carried it to the garage and hid it under a bag of pork chops at the bottom of the freezer chest.
Months passed. At some point in the spring we both watched a TV show, a police procedural where the killer used ice bullets to shoot his victim through the skull. Only a trace of water was found in the pool of blood left on the floor, puzzling the detectives. “Ice! Completely undetectable!” the prosecutor declared during the trial.
That night Ash repeated the line, like a song lyric, on her way up to bed.
From the day I pulled it down for her she never mentioned the icicle, and neither did I. There wasn’t one of those days when I didn’t think about it, though. Imagining the electrocuting pain of it driven into the back of my neck as I slept. Waiting to open my eyes in the night and find her standing over me, the icicle held in both hands like a stake, her face set in the blank mask she wore when she wasn’t acting and was her perfectly hollow self.
Summer came. Long, unstructured days of waiting for something to happen.
And then it did.
I went out into the yard to look for something in the garage and found the dog instead. We’d only gotten him a few weeks earlier, a yellow Lab stray Dad brought home from Animal Services. Another gesture at normalcy.
Ash was listening to the Sex Pistols a lot at the time. She named it Sid.
The day was hot and the flies were already buzzing around Sid’s body as if looking for a way in. It was the blood that had drawn them. Red and glossy, still wet. All coming from its eye socket. The eye itself missing.
The dog appeared to be smiling. As if it had been trained to Lie Down and Be Dead and was waiting for the command to rise.
A puddle of pinkened water spread out around its head. I knelt down and touched it.
Still cold.
And at this touch, a thought. Spoken not in my voice, but Ash’s.
This will never stop, it said.
THEY TRIED SENDING HER AWAY.
Not that they sold it to Ash that way. They called it an opportunity.
We couldn’t really afford the prep school tuition and boarding fees at Cranbrook, but Dad said it was worth it no matter the cost. He told her it was a chance for her to “change course.”
This was when we were thirteen.
I remember driving with her and Dad up to Bloomfield Hills to drop her off. Me sitting in the front passenger seat, Ash in the back. She didn’t resist, didn’t argue. There were no tears from her or any one of us. She just looked out the window as our suburb greened into a fancier, more distant suburb, a trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. As if it were all her idea.
After she was shown her room she closed the door on us both without a word. I could feel Dad fighting the urge to turn his solemn walk into a run to the car.
Dad took me to his office. A drive down Woodward Avenue and into Detroit all the way to the Ren Center. He said he wanted to get some things from his desk, but it was really an unacknowledged celebration. Just the two of us, trying out jokes on each other, Dad telling stories I’d never heard before about when he was young. The city crumbling and beautiful all around us.
I’m not sure anyone really thought it would work. But for the three months Ash was out of the house and up the road in Bloomfield Hills something like peace visited our house. A quiet, anyway. The recuperative stillness of a veterans’ rehab ward, the three of us wounded but on the mend, shuffling around, feeling a little stronger every day. I cut my hair so that anyone could see my eyes. Mom even dialed back on the drinking. Tried out a recipe for Beef Wellington she found in a never-touched Julia Child cookbook. It remains the most delicious meal of my life.
Sometimes I thought of Ash and was reminded that my sister had never done me any direct harm. Threats, manipulations, frights, yes. But with me, she never carried all the way through in the way she did with others. I was the only one she spared, the one she kept close even if she didn’t know how to love, and in recalling this my happiness was momentarily grounded by shame. Yet soon the horizon of a life without her would come into view again and I wished only to see more of it.
And then I came home after school to find my father standing in the kitchen, red-faced, silently reading a letter torn from a Cranbrook envelope, and I knew Ash was home, that we would never try to ship her off again, that we would be punished for the attempt we’d made.
She’d been expelled. That’s all my father would say about it, though the letter contained more information than that. A naming of specific, unspeakable crimes. I could tell by the way his face changed as he read it. His features not just falling but going slack, a deadening.
When he was finished he folded the letter up into a rectangle the size of a business card. Left the house with it clenched in his fist.
Ash’s door was open when I went upstairs. A rare invitation to look inside and find her sitting on the edge of her bed, calmly writing in her journal.
When she sensed me standing there she looked up. Pouted. Blinked her eyes, the lids darkened by makeup the color of a bruise.
“Miss me?” she said.
3
* * *
After the failed Cranbrook experiment, our family carried on as it had before, or tried to, which is to say we lived in even sharper anticipation of the Truly Bad Thing we knew was coming.
Over the months that Ash and I moved deeper into teenagerhood our distinctions became more exaggerated. My friendlessness graduated into a kind of sustained performance art, a survival stunt like the swami we watched fold himself into a plastic box on TV and remain for days, silent and unmoving. As for Ash, her public charms grew even more assured, her private cruelties more disturbing. It wasn’t any side effect of puberty, either. She wasn’t “maturing.” She was becoming something else. And though my father, mother, and I never spoke openly of what that might be, I think we could imagine, with looming individual horror, the inhuman shapes she might choose.
It only got worse after Mom died.
Within days of our father coming home from work to find her in the bathtub, drunk and drowned—the very afternoon that followed the morning of our mother’s funeral—Ash asked if I would come to the house of the boy she was seeing at the time, Brendan Oliver, and walk her home. It was an odd request on several fronts, considering we’d stood by a hole in the ground of Woodlawn Cemetery and watched our mother be lowered into it just two hours earlier. But this was Ash. Free of grief, of boundaries. It was all she could do to keep the trembly-cheeked “near tears” look fixed to her face at the graveside as long as she did before bursting out of the rented limo and running into the house to call Brendan and see if he was around and wanted to see her.
He was. He did.
“Could you come by Brendan’s later, Danny? I need to talk to you about something,” Ash said before she swiped her lips with strawberry gloss and headed out the door. It wasn’t a request. And I knew it
wasn’t something she wanted to talk to me about, but something she wanted to show me.
I made it to the Oliver house on Derby Avenue shortly after five and tried the front doorbell though I figured there was little chance of anyone answering. At seventeen, Brendan was even older than the other older boys Ash was moving between, a wide-jawed senior on the basketball team known for his success with girls. He was the sort of aggressive, taunting, self-certain kid who went unquestioned in his actions, a towering collection of physical gifts set to play for Ohio the next year, not so much above the law but, in our world, the law itself.
All of this, along with the absence of his parents’ car in the driveway, meant that he probably had Ash to himself somewhere inside. He would be murmuring his commands in one of the curtained rooms. He would ignore the doorbell until he was through.
It made me wonder what Ash wanted me here for. And as I thought about that, in an instant, the first real grief of the day arrived. The realization that my mother was gone forever came over me in a blanket that left me gasping and blind, reaching for the porch railing and blinking out at the street until its trees and awnings returned to focus. And when they did, I glanced back at the Olivers’ door to see the hall light behind the pane of decorative glass dim and brighten. A sound, too. The low hum of machinery.
Ash had said something about Brendan’s dad having a workshop in the garage behind their house. Even as I started up the driveway toward it I was thinking, If I know there’s a workshop back here, she wanted me to know it. The conclusion that followed—If I’m going to look through the window, she wants me to—didn’t stop me from lifting my nose over the splintered window frame to peer inside.
At first, it seemed like they were dancing.
Wrapped close and swaying to a slow song I couldn’t hear, the side of Ash’s face held against his chest and Brendan folded over her like a question mark. But it wasn’t a dance. His shirt was off, for one thing. And their movements were a single-bodied negotiation: he trying to get her to the floor, where his Dondero High hoodie lay as a makeshift bedsheet, and she keeping him up, nuzzling her cheek against his ribs, directing his lips down to hers with a hand.
Without turning her head Ash glanced over to the window. Found me.
She related a couple of facts through her eyes alone. The first was that she’d been waiting for me to get there, had worked to situate herself and Brendan where they were at that moment, and now, finally, she could begin.
The second was that the standing bandsaw behind Ash was on.
It looks so sharp! Like teeth!
I could hear her voice, her very words from moments ago, like the trace of an echo in the air. She would have gasped after speaking them so that he could feel the heat of her breath. Mock-scared, mock-aroused. But the excitement real.
Could you turn it on, Brendan?
I watched him kiss her as she arched to meet him. Her eyes closed. His wide as an owl’s bearing down on something small and doomed in the grass. Eyes that watched as Ash took his hand in hers and guided it toward the smooth table of the bandsaw. The blade a steady blur of motion.
It happened fast, though not that fast.
There was time for Brendan to see what was about to take place and stop it before it did. He could have pulled his hand away, jumped back from her touch, demanded to know what the hell she thought she was doing. Instead, he watched as I did as Ash placed his hand on the table and slid his splayed fingers into the spinning saw’s gray teeth.
If he screamed, I don’t remember the sound of it. What I remember, before running down the driveway to the street, before I voiced a scream of my own, was Ash opening her eyes. Making sure that I saw.
What was important for me to see wasn’t the violence, the seductive ease with which the bandsaw parted two of Brendan Oliver’s fingers from the rest of him or the neat jet of blood that left what could have been an attempt at a valentine’s heart on the plank wall, but how she’d made him do it to himself. He hadn’t fought her, hadn’t protested. He’d been as interested in seeing what she had planned for him as I was. And it would only be later, after telling his parents it was an accident and the revocation of his invitation to play for Ohio and the new, hollow resignation that haunted his face whenever I saw him, usually alone, on the streets of Royal Oak over the years afterward, that he realized the beautiful girl in his father’s workshop hadn’t stolen a part of him but the whole thing.
4
* * *
If you ask the Detroit police today where they keep her file, they’ll tell you Ashleigh Orchard is a cold case. A girl who bicycled off with some friends to watch a matinee of Dead Poets Society at the Main Art Theatre to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, but instead led them down Woodward Avenue toward downtown.
All four of them would have understood the audacity of a bike ride into Detroit. It would take them into the world they normally viewed from behind the windows of their parents’ cars, the doors locked. Homes abandoned and burned each year on Devil’s Night. The gangs of Hamtramck and Highland Park left to themselves by police. Whole blocks returning to weedy fields, bricks piled here and there like funeral mounds.
Ash’s friends wanted to know why. Why was she making them do this?
“I want to show you something,” she said.
Ash didn’t slow. She pedaled on shining ballet-class legs, her long, yellow-blond hair waving against her back like a farewell.
It was Lisa Goodale who finally turned them around. Lisa Goodale, pretty in the kittenish way that never ages well and who was doing ninth-grade math over for the third time in summer school and who taught blow job techniques to other girls (I came downstairs into our basement once to find her holding a banana before her puckered lips), who shouted, “Ash! Seriously!” and pulled over to the curb at the corner of Woodward and Webb.
Ash carried on for a moment. It seemed she hadn’t heard. But then she, too, stopped. Gave them one of her killer smiles.
“Aren’t you curious?” she said.
“No,” Lisa called back. It wasn’t true.
Ash went on smiling and smiling. And though I wasn’t there, hadn’t yet been called upon to rescue her, I can see her face as clearly as if I stood on the same corner with those girls. Possibly even clearer, as it’s a smile I’ve seen since. A look that says something like You couldn’t possibly know what I know. Or One day, I’ll show you all the things I can do. Or I always win. You know that, right?
What she said in words was, “Don’t tell.”
Then she stood on her pedals, working up to cruising speed before sitting on the saddle once more. The three girls watched her shrink into the shimmering waves of heat over the pavement, her hair now a finger tut-tutting them, reminding them of an oath to secrecy they never made.
It was only after none of them could see her anymore that they started back.
AFTER THE GIRLS TURNED AROUND Ash cycled on to (or was carried to, driven to, dragged to) an abandoned house on Alfred Street. That’s where she was burned alive. Down in the same cellar where the remains of Meg Clemens, a classmate of ours who had gone missing ten days earlier, were also found. Two girls, same age. Two bodies almost erased forever by fire, except something went wrong the second time around. Whoever did it, whoever knows, left Ash unfinished. Screaming in a pit at the bottom of a house nobody had lived in for longer than she and I had been alive.
There are even fewer witnesses, even less known about what Meg Clemens did or where she went after her mother gave her a ten-dollar bill and watched her walk out the door of her house on Frederick Street, a block and a half from where we lived. Meg wrote for the school paper, publishing “investigative reports” about the nutritional atrocities of the cafeteria. She wore glasses, tortoiseshell frames a little too big for her face that slid, charmingly, down her nose. She regularly declined invitations to go out with boys, so that she bore an unfair reputation for being stuck-up. That was all anybody knew about her. Or all that I knew about her.
Two girls, both raised on the same playgrounds and schoolyards and in the family rooms of Royal Oak homes with the Stars and Stripes hanging over one of every three front doors. It naturally gave rise to fears of a connection, despite the police’s reminders of a lack of evidence. In the Holiday Market aisles and standing at the video store’s New Releases wall our parents allowed themselves to whisper about the possibility of a monster living among us, plucking their children off the street.
Meg Clemens’s disappearance was a mystery that started our minds down paths that led to private horrors, our own individually imagined outcomes, none of them good. But it was, for ten days, still only what the authorities were orchestrated in calling an “isolated incident.” Then Ashleigh Orchard disappeared, too, and they had to stop calling it that. Two girls old enough to be referred to as “young women,” an acknowledgment of their knowing looks in the photos that appeared on the news. “Young women” meaning the enjoyment of independence, of mysterious, troublemaking time spent outside their parents’ view.
And sex. “Young women” meant sex, where “girls” did not.
AFTER THE FIRE, WHEN I was in the hospital, the investigators asked if my sister had any reason to entertain suicide, and I told them there was no chance of that. It was impossible to think of Ash leaving behind all she’d claimed for herself in Royal Oak, the school she half ran and the “best friends” she’d anoint and abruptly exile for no apparent reason and the older boys who literally threw themselves off rooftops into backyard pools and streetside snowbanks to win a flicker of her attention. She would never abandon me, the brother she wished dead most of the time but also needed in a way neither of us could begin to describe.
I know because I went into the house to save her.
It was a mansion once. When that part of town was more than ruins, more than brick and glass returning to meadow. A stately home for some doctor or city-builder, then deserted, the windows wide and black as dilated pupils. All of them billowing smoke when I drove over the curb in my mother’s car and sprinted for the open door.
