by Kyla Stone
“I need to talk to you,” Ava says again in that high, frantic voice.
“Are you on something right now?”
“Of course not. I’m clean, I told you.”
“For how long? A day? You don’t look clean.”
“I am. Nine weeks. I’ve been seeing this counselor, down on the corner of
Magnolia and 10th street? It was part of the deal, to let me stay at the shelter.”
“You’ve been staying at a shelter? Are you serious right now?” With all the wealth her family has access to, and Ava is living like a homeless crack addict. Emilyn’s head starts to ache. She presses her fingernails into her palms.
“It’s a hell of a lot better than home,” Ava snaps. “Anyway, I’m clean. That’s not why I came here. I talked to my lawyer. She told me. What you told the cops, what you wrote on that witness statement.”
Emilyn looks away. Her chest feels tight, closed in. Her blood pressure is rising. She would rather be anywhere but here. “Ava—”
“How could you say that?” Ava shifts her weight from foot to foot. “How could you lie to them like that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Her voice is raw, her face haggard. She is thinner than Emilyn remembers. “You saw. I know you saw.”
Someone knocks on the supply closet door. “Get the hell out!” Ava shrieks. Emilyn winces. “You need help, Ava. Come back home. We can help you.”
“No! I can’t ever go back there.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Ava’s voice rises to an even higher pitch. “What the hell? You know why. Why are you acting like
this?”
Emilyn wants to clap her hands over her ears. She wants to flee, to find somewhere warm and dark and curl up into a ball and sleep. She wants to be nothing, to think nothing, to feel nothing. Instead she feels like someone sank an icepick into her belly. No, not a nebulous someone. Her own sister. “You’re the one who’s doing this. I’m only trying to help. I’m the one stuck trying to fix the royal screw-ups you keep creating—and it’s a hell of a mess this time, Ava. You needed money that badly, you could’ve come to me. I would have given you anything to keep you from doing this to Daddy.”
“It’s not about money.”
“It’s always about money with you though, isn’t it? Or should I say, drugs. You need money for what? Smack? Crack? Meth? And when Dad stopped giving it to you, you got the best revenge you could think of.”
“Who told you that? That’s a lie.”
Emilyn shakes her head wearily. The buzzing florescent lights hurt her eyes. “No, Ava. You’re the liar.”
“I’m not lying,” she hisses. “It wasn’t about the money.”
“No? Then you just hate him that much? You thought it’d be fun to watch his life implode?”
“No!”
“Then what? Why are you doing this?”
“Why am I doing this? Why the hell did I take this long, is the real question. My counselor at the clinic—Dr. Williams—she’s helping me see everything so clearly. She showed me I need to do this for myself. For the truth. For all Daddy’s secrets to be laid out for the world to see. Because I am not crazy.”
Emilyn takes a step toward the storage room door. “You’re acting plenty crazy. I think you should go, now. You’re causing a disruption to the customers.”
“You,” Ava says, stepping closer and pointing a shaking finger inches from Emilyn’s face. Her eyes are wild. “You’re the one always worried about disruption, aren’t you? Don’t let anything ruffle your feathers, rock your boat, shove it all under the rug or whatever the hell other metaphor you can think of.”
“Whatever nonsense you’ve convinced your welfare doctor of—that’s on you. But these lies, this elaborate charade you’re acting out, it needs to stop. Now.”
“How could you say it never happened?”
There’s a dull roaring in her ears. The headache throbs against her skull. “Because you made it up. Just like everything else.”
Ava shrinks back against the shelf like Emilyn slapped her. She blinks rapidly, a single tear quivering at the edge of her purple eyeliner. “You know. You know the truth.”
Things are fraying inside her. She stares hard at the yellow paint peeling in a long swath next to the light switch. She can’t look at her sister. “You’re beyond help. You’re choosing to do this, on purpose. You’re doing this to get back at him, at me, at all of us.”
Ava shakes her head, a hard jolt that loosens her beanie. Strands of white-blond hair fall across her eyes. She wipes hard at her face, smearing her eyeliner. “You can’t believe I’m lying. You of all people.”
The anguish in her sister’s face rips something deep inside her, but she can’t move. She can’t lift her arms and wrap them around her sister’s trembling shoulders. Ava’s emotions seem so real, so genuine. But they aren’t. She thinks about Shane, what he said last night. She thinks about the dolls, their frayed, shredded clothing scattered across the floor. This is all a masquerade, another manipulation to get what Ava wants.
“All you do is lie, Ava.” A buzzing in her skull is drowning everything out. “You lie to get more drugs. You lie to get whatever you want. You lie to hurt people. You lie to get attention—Daddy’s attention.” Tears scald the back of her throat. She fights them back. “And you’ve got it. You’ve always had it. Daddy cries every day over you. He’s not eating, he looks horrible. You’re all he talks about. Ava this, Ava that.”
Ava gives Emilyn a hard, stunned look. She takes several deep breaths, then rubs her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. She steps around Emilyn.
She feels the closeness of her sister’s body like static electricity, a current passing between them that sizzles, then snaps. Ava opens the door. She leaves without speaking another word.
Emilyn sinks down to the cold concrete floor. For several minutes, she does not move.
6
The flies. They’re driving her nuts. There’s eleven of them now, spinning and circling, skimming and darting, hurtling themselves toward the window. They knock and thump against the glass and buzz in protest. Emilyn bends to wash her face and finds one writhing in a puddle of water on the counter of the sink.
She backs away. “Ugh!”
Shadow leaps onto the counter, spies the struggling fly, and stiffens. She lowers her sleek gray shoulders, ears flattened against her head, and creeps forward.
Emilyn turns away from the dance of predator and prey and leaves the bathroom. She quit work early today. All she can think about is the hearing. Her body is taut, the muscles in her shoulders and neck strained and aching, apprehension like a stone in her belly. She’s hunting through the kitchen drawers for a fly swatter when the doorbell chimes.
Her mother stands on the sagging front porch in her Prada pumps and lavender-hued Armani pantsuit. She glances around uneasily, like she’s about to be jumped by a mob of hooligans. Her hands hover at her throat, fingers massaging her pearls. “This place is kind of a dump, don’t you think?”
This is the first time her mother has come to the apartment since Emilyn moved in seven months ago. Shane’s tennis shoes are next to the door. She kicks them away and steps outside, closing the door behind her. “It’s my dump, paid for with my money.” She pushes down the rush of resentment. Her mother’s passive-aggressiveness means nothing right now. “What happened, Mom?”
“Oh, everything is alright,” her mother breathes, fluttering her hand in front of her face. “The judge dismissed the case without prejudice. It was Ava’s word against yours, and mine. And your father’s, of course. It was a long time ago, no evidence, yada yada yada.”
Emilyn lets out her breath in a long, slow sigh. “How’s Dad?”
“He’s fine, just fine. He will be. It’s just, the whole thing was such a shock. But he’ll be fine. We can get past this now.”
She looks over her mother’s should
er at the sun gleaming off the roofs and hoods of the parked cars. Across the parking lot, a mother wrestles a stroller through the front door of her apartment, her armful of groceries about to topple. A cool fall breeze rustles through the small maples planted next to the sidewalk, their branches nearly bare now. Red and yellow leaves spark and skim on the air. “Was Ava there?”
“Yes, she was. Looking as high and unhinged as I’ve seen her. I just—It’s simply too upsetting. I don’t want to discuss her. She is no longer my daughter.”
“I see.” Emilyn swallows hard, unsure how to feel. Triumphant? Or devastated?
A gap opens in the silence. Mother and daughter stand there, facing each other. Gloria’s hand flutters to her hair, her expression clenched like a fist. Emilyn’s arms hand limp at her sides. She doesn’t know what her mother wants from her. “Um. You’re welcome to come in, but we seem to be having a fly infestation right now.”
“Oh, no, that’s perfectly fine,” her mother says quickly, glancing back toward her Mercedes. She twists the pearls between her thumb and forefinger. “I wouldn’t want to leave my car unsupervised.”
Still, she doesn’t leave. A car horn blasts in the parking lot of the next apartment block. Someone yells something. “Shut the hell up!” a man screams back. A door opens and loud, pulsing music spills out.
“Is this what it’s always like here?”
Emilyn stiffens. “Do you need something, Mom? Is Dad okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine. I just . . . I stopped by because—” She twists around again, craning her neck to stare at something, Emilyn has no idea what. After a moment, she turns back around. The breeze blows her puffy hair off her forehead. “I have to ask you something.”
“What?”
“I have—I have to know.”
“Have to know what, mother?” Her voice sounds distant in her own ears.
“Certainly, Ava’s lying. She must be.”
The words feel like stones in her throat. “Are you asking me something, Mom?”
Gloria’s thin fingers are white as she fusses with her necklace. Her whole body is thin, almost gaunt. The pantsuit hangs off her bony shoulders. She squints at Emilyn, her face an argument against itself. “Is there—is there something I should know?”
Emilyn studies the pearls, how they glisten in the sun as they twirl beneath her mother’s fingers. This is not a real question. Gloria wants to assuage whatever motherly guilt is pricking her at the moment. She’s not interested in truth, only in shiny counterfeits. Emilyn knows this. It’s not an authentic question, it doesn’t require an authentic answer. And yet, at her mother’s words, the memory comes.
It comes unbidden, unwanted and unasked for—rushing through her with a startling ferocity.
There are shadowy images in her head. A moonless night. An opened bedroom door. Shapes moving on the bed. Her sister’s face a white oval in the dark. Her eyes black and blank as buttons, her mouth a frozen red line. Like a doll.
She shakes her head, hard, like a dog shakes water out of his fur. The images tumble and fade, slowly, sunspots on the back of her eyelids.
She can barely see these things. They are dreams, wispy and insubstantial.
“Mom.” She hesitates.
Gloria laughs too loudly and flutters her hand. “Oh, never mind! It was ridiculous to even suggest such a thing. Too much wine, too early in the morning.”
Emilyn doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Her words are shards of glass in her throat. Her arms and legs feel thick, heavy and stiff.
“Dinner next Thursday, darling?” Her mother moves off the porch, stepping gingerly over a crumpled beer can on the sidewalk.
She doesn’t even notice when Emilyn fails to answer.
7
It takes Emilyn the better part of the afternoon to go to the store, make her purchases, and return to hang the fly tape in the bathroom. She bought fifteen strips, three for each wall not including the door, plus six to place around the sink and the toilet. She finishes as the sun is slanting through the windows, casting everything in a fiery orange glow.
She lays down on the bed she made this morning—corners tucked in, wrinkles smoothed to a flat finish, pillows stacked neatly—and folds her hands over her stomach. Her heartbeat thumps against her fingers. Shane will be home in half an hour, and they will make their usual Wednesday night homemade pizza and salad together. It is a routine she has grown accustomed to. Shane is warm and comforting, like a favorite pair of fuzzy slippers.
Shadow leaps on the bed and nuzzles against her neck. The kitten turns in several tight circles and nests herself in Emilyn’s hair. She wonders what Ava is doing right now.
She turns her head and stares through the opened bathroom door. Already two black bodies wiggle against the sticky fly paper.
There will be more. There are legions of them. She will never kill them all. They don’t come from the outside. They don’t come from the cracks in the caulking of the windows or the fissures between the doors and their frames, or even through the front door as it opens and closes.
Flies congregate where there is rot. They swarm to ruin, to pestilence and decay. Flies feed off of decomposing flesh, off the putrid, blighted bodies of the dead.
They are here for her.
8
On Thursday night, Emilyn heads to her parents’ big white house on Lake Michigan. She should go inside and greet her mother and father, sit down to a dinner of chicken parmesan, and engage in an evening of strained conversation. She should placate her mother and comfort her father. She should support them in their time of need, should be the good daughter she’s always been. Her father is all alone, now. She is all he has.
But she doesn’t walk up the flagstone steps and open the heavy wooden door. Instead, she follows the sandy path between the dunes down to the beach, her sneakers sinking into the sand. The wind snarls her hair, whipping tendrils into her face.
The sky is a stone-washed gray, the moon glinting weakly behind a scrim of dark clouds. The air is cold, biting into her exposed neck and cheeks. She’s the only one on the beach as far as she can see in either direction.
Of the two of them, Ava loved the water the most. She would swim out as far as she could go, well past the buoys, until her head was just a speck in the vast expanse of the lake. Emilyn didn’t care for swimming. She’d sit on the shore, her arms wrapped around her knees, and watch her sister swim.
Sometimes the dot of her sister would disappear, hidden by the waves, the shimmer of the sun on the water. Her heart would clench in her chest, her breath frozen in her lungs. She wouldn’t move until she saw Ava again, her tiny head bobbing far, far away.
She listens to the crash and murmur of the waves and imagines Ava out there in the lake, swimming in the dark, her strong arms cutting through the waves, pushing herself further and further. She was always trying to leave, to get away. Or was it the waves that pushed her out, against her will? The powerful undertow yanking her beyond the breakers, into deep water?
Now she’s gone. And the hollow ache in the center of Emilyn’s chest tells her just who is at fault, just who chose not to see, not to hear, not to know. That thought, that niggling truth lodged like a splinter in her brain. It thrusts deep, a stabbing pain that will not dissipate. It will not go away. Like the flies.
There are no flies out here. The wind is blustery, the air fresh and wet, the sky black and wide and full of diamonds. She thinks suddenly of Shane. If there’s nothing rotten to feed on, the flies will leave. They will die. Maybe you have to cut off the rotting thing, carve it right out of your chest if you have to.
She tugs her phone out of her jacket pocket and punches in the number. It rings four times before she hears the click and the sound of her sister’s voice, exhausted and broken.
She doesn’t have the words yet. Her mouth is bitter as ash. But she will speak. There is so much to say and do. But first, there is this. There is now. What she needs her sister to know.
She isn’
t alone.
“Ava,” she whispers. “It’s me.”
* * *
The End
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Interested in my other books? Check out Beneath The Skin and Who We Are Instead. Don’t miss the included preview of both books starting on the next page!
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Thank you for reading!
Preview: Who We Are Instead
By Kyla Stone
When her father suffers a massive heart attack, 21-year-old photography major Lena McKenna rushes home—only to discover that her rebellious younger sister, Lux, has disappeared. In a house long haunted by the memories of her mother’s tragic death, Lena attempts to pick up the broken pieces of her life.
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As their father’s condition worsens, Lux leaves a trail of devastation in her wake. Lena must make a choice: escape her past and leave her sister behind, or turn and face the demons that threaten to destroy them both.
Chapter One
“What happened?” I ask. My hands tremble as I rinse the developer tray in the stainless-steel sink and stack it on the shelf.
A security officer stands in the doorway, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He’s slender, with pinched, watery eyes and a narrow face.
I’m the only student in the university’s darkroom. I’d just finished the last print when the officer knocked on the door. I switch off the red safelight and blink against the harsh, florescent light. The darkroom smells like fixer and developer, chemicals as familiar to me as a favorite perfume.
