by Jude Watson
THIRTY
Torie finds me the next morning as I’m brushing my teeth at the row of three sinks in the girls’ bathroom. Kendall is next to me, washing her face. Ruthanna is just putting her toothbrush away.
“Hey,” Torie says. “I saw you. Last night.”
I shrug, brush, and spit. I’m leaning over the sink when she puts her hand on the back of my head and grabs my hair. She pushes me down hard. My teeth clunk against the faucet. I feel the impact shudder into the root.
“Oh, good,” she says. “I have your attention.”
Kendall backs up quickly, but hovers in the doorway. Ruthanna just vanishes.
Torie keeps my head against the faucet. She is amazingly strong. I have a feeling that if I try to resist, I’ll lose my front teeth.
She leans over, close to my ear. “I was the first,” she says, her words like bullets. Occasionally, for emphasis, she pushes me against the sink faucet. Not hard, just a bump, but it’s enough. My lip is still healing from falling down the stairs on the boat, and every time it hits the chrome I wince.
“He found me first. I’m closest to him. I’m the one he depends on. So don’t think you can come here and work it.”
“Hey, list—”
Bang. My face hits the faucet.
“Because I’m drawing the line.”
Torie’s words overlap with someone else’s. I flash suddenly to a blond woman, tan and thin, well muscled, perfectly groomed. I hear a voice echo. “I know your tricks. I’ve never drawn the line enough with you. Now I’m drawing the line.”
Torie leans in. “Let me remind you of something, Lizbet. You’ve already disappeared. Nobody’s going to know if you do it again.”
But I can’t avoid him. Something has changed between us. He watches Emily, but he talks to me. He singles me out. He directs remarks to me. He asks me how I like the macaroni and cheese. He offers to order new DVDs.
He likes me.
I can feel Torie’s and Jeff’s eyes on me. I know they are wondering how to handle me. I know that they will not handle me with kid gloves. I am heading to a cliff and I don’t know who’s going to push me off.
He comes and gets me now, in the middle of the night. I follow him like a ghost in my T-shirt and Gap sweatpants, what we all sleep in. We are both barefoot. His feet are long and white and feminine-looking. It makes him seem fragile, even though I know he’s not. He sits on the couch with his head in his hands. Sometimes he cries.
“I can’t sleep,” he says.
I get flashes, but they are confusing. I see him as a boy, running, breathing hard, barefoot on the oyster shells on the beach. I know someone is chasing him.
I see Nell, lying on the bed. I know she is dead. She is wet with rain. The wetness pools out on the sheets.
I’m tired during the day, from the nights spent with Jonah. And I’m holding on to what I can see and what I can touch, because I keep sliding into places that the kids hide deep inside their minds, places they don’t want to go.
But they go all the time.
Eli. His older foster brother tied him up and flicked matches at him. For fun.
Maudie. Is clumsy. That’s what her mother tells the doctor.
Ruthanna. Her mother died, and it was her fault. Her father told her so.
Dan. His father left him at his grandmother’s to play one day. Never came back.
Hank. His father drinks. His mother works two shifts. His brother died last year. He spends all his time alone.
Tate…
I am afraid of what’s in Tate’s head.
There is just too much pain in this house.
I can feel it. I can see it.
Everything parents can do, the world can do, to mess up a kid—it’s all here. It lives in their heads.
They feel safe here because they don’t know what safe is. This, they figure, is as close as they’ll get.
He tells me about Nell. That from the first, she was the one they protected. That there was something special about her. Out of all of them, she was the one they all loved.
When she got sick, the fragile bonds fell apart. The family disintegrated. The panic was a string that vibrated at a pitch they could all hear. The children walked around with dread, fearing the inevitable. Fearing that what they knew would happen would happen: Their father would not give in.
“I can remember better when you’re around,” he says. “You help me remember.” It’s two o’clock in the morning. He is lying on one couch; I am lying on another.
“That’s good,” I say, trying not to yawn.
“I don’t want to remember,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” A trickle of fear begins inside me. I feel him trying to push something away in his mind, something huge.
This is the thing he’s blocked from me.
This is the thing he’s blocked from himself.
“Her birthday is on Friday, you know. The birthday she never had. That’s when it has to happen.”
“What has to happen?”
“He was afraid it would all fall apart, that they would think he wasn’t fit.”
I smell burning. I smell the fire.
“He was afraid they’d take us away. He tried to save us.”
I see the glass shatter, fall into blackness. I hear someone pounding on a door.
“I don’t want to do it,” Jonah says. “But I have to save us, too.”
Friday. I try to remember what day it is.
I look out into the darkness. He is just a shape across the room. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to. It makes sense to him.
There is urgency in his mind now. He is racing toward a goal. He has given up controlling this. He has given up analyzing it. He has given up changing it.
Whatever he is heading for, in his mind, he will have saved us. In his mind, he’ll be able to rest.
Tomorrow is Thursday. I have to gather all the hazy ideas, the things I know, the things I guess, the things I’m thinking, and make a plan.
I only have one day to set it up.
One day to make it work.
THIRTY-ONE
The next morning, I find Emily in the laundry room, folding socks. There are two machines, two dryers, drying racks, a row of detergents and softeners. He makes it as easy as he can.
Emily has a row of white socks lined up. She is concentrating hard, as though it is the most difficult thing in the world to match up white socks. She smooths each sock as she places it on the long table used for folding.
“Emily,” I say. “Are you okay?”
She isn’t really here. I can feel that her focus on the socks is absolute. She likes the repetition of the motion, the smell of the bleach. She likes how white they are.
I put my hand over hers to stop her movement. She slips it out and keeps going.
“Do you know what I was afraid of when I was little?” she says, looking down at the socks. “Not monsters, or earthquakes. Infinity.”
“Infinity?”
“I was in Sunday school. They taught us that in heaven, you just keep going on. Before I went to sleep, I’d think about that. I’d try to imagine going on and on, never being able to stop. I tried to imagine something never ending. And it used to terrify me. I’d run and get into my parents’ bed. Dad would ask me what was wrong, and I’d say I was afraid of monsters, or the lion at the zoo. Whatever. I thought it was too weird to tell him that I was afraid of infinity.”
She smoothes another sock, places one on top of it.
“Emily, we’re all in danger. We have to get out of here.”
She smoothes another sock.
“Emily, I’m thinking of a way. But it won’t work if we all can’t do it together.”
She begins to hum.
“I need your help. We have to face this!”
“This isn’t like you,” she says primly. She takes another sock and rolls it up like a bandage.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing bothers you,” she says. “You’re a closed system.”
She isn’t making sense, and I’m scared. I watch her fold socks. And then the truth crashes down on my head so dizzily I want to fall on the floor and grab onto the floor to keep myself steady.
I had never asked myself the questions that were staring me in the face about our friendship. Why did Emily drop the friends she’d known all her life, the girls who’d known her since kindergarten, the boys who knew her parents, the group that hung together through long Saturday afternoons, through endless rainy February weeks, through crushes, through bad teachers, through pizza on Fridays?
Why had she picked me? It certainly wasn’t because I was such a fun companion. It wasn’t because we could share our sorrows.
It was because she knew that I wouldn’t make her feel.
I would never ask her things. I would never push her. I would never make her cry.
She knew, with the cunning of the wounded, that I couldn’t turn away from myself long enough to even see her. She could slowly close herself off. And no one would knock on the door.
Her abduction by Jonah was an example of the worst possible thing happening to her at the worst possible time. She had already begun to disengage. Now she was filling up her head with distance. And soon, no one would be able to reach her.
I’m still shaken by my encounter with Emily, but I’m more determined than ever to follow through on the plan that’s forming in my mind. Kendall and I have the lunch dishes to do. She washes; I dry. We are only allowed to use the dishwasher at night. Too much power can blow the generator.
“I think we have a friend in common,” I say. “Marcus Heffernan.”
“Marcus?” Kendall looks surprised.
“He worked at the computer camp. I went there looking for Emily. She’s met him, too.”
“I’ve never really talked to Nell…Emily.” Kendall smiles, sort of dreamily, and the muscles in her face relax. For the first time, I realize that she could be pretty. “I had a big crush on Marcus. He was so nice to me.”
“You sang in that café he works in.”
“Did he tell you about that? He talked me into entering that contest. I was so nervous, I thought I would die. And then I won second prize! That was a good day.” Kendall puts away a dish. “Which was not the usual.”
“You had a hard time with your parents.”
“Yeah. How about you?”
“My mom is dead. I never really knew my dad.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well.”
A rather pathetic attempt at sympathy, but never mind.
“Have you ever seen Jonah have a meltdown?” I ask her, handing her a dish.
She looks around before answering me. “Yeah.”
“Scary, huh?”
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to.
She reaches up to replace the dish on a shelf.
“Did you know that the original house burned down?” I ask.
“No.” She takes a dish, glances at me, then back down at the dish.
“The children were trapped inside.”
She doesn’t look up, but the dish is dry, and she keeps rubbing.
“Don’t you wonder what Jonah is trying to make up for?”
“It’s none of my business,” Kendall says. “It’s none of yours, either.”
“Kendall, it is my business. It’s yours, too. The anniversary of the fire is this Friday. He’s got something planned, and it’s not a party. Where do you want to be?”
She puts the dish away. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“I wish everyone would stop saying that!”
“What are you saying, Lizbet? That—”
“My name is Gracie.”
“Gracie, then. What are we supposed to do? Swim?”
“If I said I could get us out of here, would you come?”
“You can’t—”
“Just answer the question.”
Kendall hesitates, biting her lip. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I say. “That’s a start.”
THIRTY-TWO
Jonah spends most of Thursday in his part of the house, but I see him from time to time. He pads out in his socks, looks us over, goes back again. There is none of the usual hearty encouragement. None of the beaming smiles. I come to know a particular muscle in his jaw that jumps and quivers, like a burrowing insect under his skin.
I am the one who sees that he is fighting something, and I am the one who knows that if he loses, we lose, too.
Kendall is a reluctant ally, but she is an ally. I move fast before she has a chance to change her mind. I tell her we have to talk to the other kids one by one. Except for Torie and Jeff. Kendall says darkly that they’ll never agree, but I just tell her to leave them to me. I just wish I knew what I was going to say to them. The thing is, if they’re against it, the plan won’t work. They’ll see what’s up and stop us before I can get it rolling.
We get Dan and Hank to go along by tackling them separately and telling each of them the other one didn’t want to go along with the plan. So they both agree. Hank is proud because he has the important role to play. Dan thinks maybe going back to live at his grandmother’s house isn’t so bad after all, because she has a pool.
I find Tate watching a DVD of some suspense movie. He keeps freezing a frame, then pressing PLAY, then freezing it again. I stop by his chair. Tate is the one boy here who gives off waves of disturbance. His gaze is brittle and hard. I see hurt in his past, deep hurt, starting with him in a crib, and a father standing over him, shouting. I don’t want to see what else is there.
I don’t want to see anything I’ve seen inside these kids. I don’t want to see the misery and the neglect. I don’t want to think about what I’m sending them back to. I just want them to live.
I tell Tate what I think is in Jonah’s head. I don’t know if he’s listening, or if he cares. He stares at the movie, flicking the PAUSE button on and off.
I know better than to try to convince him. I just lay it out.
“Know what God does?” he says. “He sticks it to you. That’s what my dad used to say. It’s our job to take it and shut up.”
I know something about Tate. I’ve seen how he watches Kendall. I don’t want to know what he’s thinking. It’s another reason to get Kendall out of here. In the meantime, I’ll use it.
“Kendall is with me on this,” I say. “She thinks we can’t do it without you.”
I watch his thumb hover over the remote. It hits PLAY.
“Okay,” he says.
Maudie and Eli agree because we’re older and bigger and seem to know what we’re talking about. Eli is used to being told what to do, and Maudie is afraid of being left behind.
It is Ruthanna who surprises me. When I tell her I have a plan to get us all out of here, I don’t have to say another word. She lifts her head, her lank hair hanging in her eyes, and says, “My name is Erin. And I’ll help.”
It is Emily who is the problem. She listens to me lay out the plan, her face a blank.
“No,” she says when I finish.
“But Emily…”
“He’ll kill us,” she says.
I exchange a look with Kendall.
“We’ll protect you,” I say.
“Easy to say. It’s not you he wants.”
Finally, I say the only thing I can say. “It’s all decided. Everyone else has agreed. You’ll be safer going along with us.”
She looks at me, her face full of fear. But at least it isn’t that blankness.
She doesn’t say no.
So I take it as a yes.
THIRTY-THREE
Now it’s time to tackle Torie and Jeff. If I can get one of them to agree, the other might cave. I decide Jeff will be first.
He flips around the music channels, MTV and BET, all afternoon. Usually with a plate of nachos or potato chips on his lap. The rest of them stay out of his way because if you get between him and th
e screen, you get yelled at or kicked at.
I sit down on the couch.
He looks over, surprised. No one except Torie ever joins him.
I watch TV with him for a while.
“Can you imagine what people would say if they knew about this?” I ask finally.
Jeff snorts. “Who cares?”
“Think about it. One billionaire, eleven kids, a house full of toys…They’d be killing each other to get camera crews in here.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’d be wild.”
“Katie Couric would be, like, salivating to get your number,” I say. “Diane Sawyer would be sending you chocolates. Everybody wants an exclusive, right?”
Jeff doesn’t say anything this time. It’s a good sign.
“Geez, you think life is sweet in here, imagine what it would be like if you were on the cover of People, telling your story.” I blow out a breath. “Sheesh.”
“People magazine is lame,” Jeff snorts.
“Of course, you wouldn’t want to say too much, because there’s the book deal, too. Or the TV movie. They always want to do a TV movie.”
He looks at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Who do you think they’re going to interview—weird Tate?” I say. “Eli? Ruthanna the mouse? No, they want the smart one. The one with charisma. The one who can tell the story so people will listen. The one who’s telegenic.”
This gets him thinking. He likes that he’s telegenic. His gaze is shrewd now. “What’s going on with you?”
“I have a way to get out,” I tell him.
He laughs. “You have a death wish.”
“It’ll work. And once you’re out, do you think you’re going back on the streets? Into the system? I don’t think so. You’re going to be famous. The media can’t leave this stuff alone. You’d have to play it right, not overexpose yourself. You’d have to be the spokesman of the group, say things right so that you’re the one they want to interview. Do you know what a sound bite is?”
