The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  If something had happened, it could’ve started right here, in this room, because I’d left the window unlocked.

  “What is it?” Ryan asked, standing in the entrance, his arms braced against the doorjamb, tension leeching from me to him.

  But it was something more—something I could feel starting up again, so familiar it was almost welcome, the one thing I understood. The way the hairs stood up on my arms, the goose bumps on my legs, the nausea in my gut. The reason Jan wrote that article about me.

  These were the things that had hurt my mother: the chemical burns on her back, the man who had taken her. It’s why, Jan thought—and wrote—I couldn’t bear the scent of anything chemically acrid.

  Was there something here, then, that my body understood? Something passed along to me from my mother? Fears were learned, but they were also inherited. Natural selection. Run from the lion. Jump away from the tiny, poisonous insects. They exist for a reason—we survive because of them.

  So what was it about a hollow, empty room? What was really to fear here? The night air, the scent of pine, all things I was familiar with.

  The scars on her back, a man who held her—all of this changed her.

  I remembered how she’d spend the days watching the news, reading through articles, focusing on all the horrible things that people were doing to each other.

  She’d read them out loud, and she’d ask me: You are trapped in a trunk, what would you do? Or There’s a mass shooting, how do you escape?

  She taught me to find the fears. She taught me to see them everywhere. It was our most basic instinct.

  What had she taught me to fear about this moment?

  It wasn’t Ryan, or the night, or the chill. It was none of those things.

  It ran deeper. Simpler. The empty, hollow room. The empty, sterile house. The emptiness.

  That I was alone now.

  The only thing possibly worse: that I had brought it upon myself.

  —

  I wandered around the room, slightly untethered, vaguely aware of Ryan following behind me. I saw the room in a new light—the mess, the drawers pulled open—and pictured, instead, someone crawling inside the unlocked window. Not my mother looking for me, but a stranger. I reached for the grate through the window, which was slightly ajar. Not quite how I’d left it.

  Ryan reached for my arm. “Talk to me,” he said.

  “I snuck out,” I said. “I left this unlocked. This is all because of me.” One way or another, it came back to this decision.

  She was unreasonable, I’d thought. An unlocked window grate wasn’t a big deal. Lightning wouldn’t strike twice.

  But I was wrong. I was so wrong.

  He moved closer, put a hand on my shoulder, closed his eyes for a moment, as if he was steeling himself for what came next. “Look, Kelsey, I’m going to say it again. If you believe someone came into the house, then we need to call the police.”

  Spoken like someone who had never been forcibly removed from his home.

  I shook my head, unable to make a decision. I’d never had to before. I did what my mom, or Jan, told me to do. I feared what she feared. I loved what she loved. And the one time I made a decision for myself—sneaking out—I paid the consequences.

  I wanted to sink into my bed, feel the familiar comforter, the four walls, the spiders crawling across my skin. All of it, if it meant knowing my mother was down the hall.

  “Kelsey,” Ryan said. “You have to do something.”

  There was a fifty percent chance it would be the wrong thing. Either way, I was the one who’d have to suffer the consequences. Not him.

  “Let me think,” I said, holding up my hands.

  My mother didn’t have a cell phone to call—there was no reason. She never left. She had her computer, and the landline, and the alarm system.

  “Okay. If I can get the alarm back on,” I said, “then she must’ve turned it off herself, or it was an electrical surge, and we wait. If I can’t…then someone cut it, and I’ll call. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Ryan said, sounding slightly less than sure.

  The idea was taking root—that there was some sort of electrical surge, taking out the alarm system and the phone line. Frying anything on the grid. I just had to reboot the system. It had happened once before, in a really bad thunderstorm, when I was little. I watched my mom come down to the basement, after the backup generator had kicked on a few moments later, and reboot the alarm system.

  I felt like I was tracing her footsteps, following the path to the basement, to the circuit breaker.

  “Hold on,” I said. I flipped everything off—the house going dark, and momentarily cold, and in the basement, our breathing seemed too loud. I listened for any other sounds. I was sure, in that moment, I’d hear someone breathing through the walls, if they were here.

  Ryan’s hand brushed my arm as all the equipment wound down. His fingers circled my elbow, and I felt his body pressing closer, his fingers holding firmer—as if he wanted us both to be sure.

  “Just a sec,” I said, and then I turned everything back on. The house came to life. The lights, the hum of the freezer along the back wall, air moving through the vents up above.

  Then I went to the main alarm box on the wall, pushed the reset button, and listened as the house let off a low beep—ready to arm. “Everything should be back up now,” I said.

  “So,” he said, “everything’s okay?” His face like the moment before we fell, when I reached for him—on the cusp of relief.

  Then there was silence, and suddenly in the stillness it occurred to me that I’d been overreacting. That there must be some simple explanation—an electrical surge, the police showing up at the gate, my mother letting them in. Maybe she’d had a health scare. Maybe she was in the hospital at this very moment, and someone was trying to call—but with the electrical surge, they couldn’t reach me.

  “The alarm works fine. Which means—”

  “What’s that?” Ryan asked, his head tilted to the side. He walked slowly toward the steps.

  I thought he was talking about the alarm beep, or the vibration of the equipment above, coming back to life—but then I heard it, too. The faint hum of an engine revving. The slow crunch of gravel under tires, getting nearer.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I pictured the police, coming to tell me something about my mom. Something I wasn’t ready to hear. Maybe she’d been hurt, or felt sick, and called 911. Maybe she’d panicked about me, called 911, and they came, couldn’t calm her, took her away.

  I placed a hand to my stomach as I walked up the stairs. This was it. This was the moment my life would change. I could feel how pivotal it was, the police showing up—my mom not okay and everyone learning the truth. The only place I’d ever known would no longer be mine.

  I pulled back the front curtains, but I didn’t see any car.

  The night was dark—darker, because of the lights reflected in the windows. But I thought I saw a shadow moving toward the front gate. I flipped on the outside lights on instinct, and whatever I thought was moving stopped. Everything within me turned on edge. Something prickled at the back of my neck, and for once, I didn’t try to ignore it.

  “Turn off the lights, Ryan,” I said.

  Slowly they shut down, one by one, my image dimming, and then disappearing, in the reflection.

  There it was, just beyond the ring of light shining at the front gate—a shadow. From a tree? Or a person, watching the house?

  My fingers fumbled at the alarm pad beside the door. I pressed and held the Arm key, listened to the house beep twice, letting me know we were safe. The gate was locked. A current was running once again through the wire at the top of the fence, with its high, spiked bars.

  “What is it?” Ryan asked. I could feel his breath on the side of my face in the darkness.

  I backed away from the window, not wanting to be seen.

  I tried to talk myself out of the impending panic: I see the danger everywher
e. I see the danger in everything. It isn’t real. Irrational fears.

  I tapped the glass with my index finger. “Tell me what you see,” I whispered.

  Ryan frowned, then leaned close to the window, his breath fogging the glass. “The bars of the gate. Trees.” He leaned toward the side. “I can kinda see the edge of my car.”

  “That’s it? Look at the shadow at the edge of the light.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

  I stood beside him at the window, shoulder to shoulder, to point it out—but the shadow was gone.

  I backed away from the window, panic lodged in my skull, words stuck in my throat. I ran to my room, fumbled for that key in the top drawer, and pulled the window grate shut, turning the lock and pushing the glass shut.

  “Kelsey? What’s happening?” Ryan had followed me to my room, and he was watching me, focusing on my shaking hand, still gripping the key. And I wondered whether he was asking what was happening outside, or what was happening to me.

  Paranoia. A trick of light. My mind making me see things that weren’t there. This was the fear talking. Crawling out from the corners, turning the safe into every different horrifying possibility. Impractical fears of things that would never happen. I was falling apart in front of Ryan Baker, and I couldn’t even stop myself.

  But my mother was missing.

  My mother was gone….

  I ignored the question in his voice and ran back to the front window. There was nothing there. I moved from window to window, tracing the perimeter of the house—my eyes tracking the iron bars, a familiar comfort. I pulled open the living room curtains, and turned on the back lights, just as a shadow darted quickly behind the rails of the back gate.

  The entire room was buzzing.

  I saw it. I was sure.

  “Ryan,” I said, my voice wavering. “Call the police.”

  I had my back against the wall while Ryan still stood at the window with his phone in his hand, peering out into the dark between the gap of curtains. The difference between me and Ryan could be best summed up right here. I was hiding, imagining the worst, and he was curiously assessing the scene. He was not panicking unnecessarily, imagining all the terrible things people might do to each other.

  I craned my neck to see the alarm console beside the front door, the red light, the word Armed, and let out a slow breath.

  Ryan held the phone to his ear, his face pressed into the beige curtains, like he was about to give a practical, firsthand account of what he was looking at. There are shadows moving around the house. Right, no big deal, but you don’t understand, someone is missing.

  Maybe my imagination was running away with me—maybe these were just a slew of illogical fears that I’d succumbed to, with nobody here to pull me out. Maybe I was taking Ryan down with me. Fear was contagious like that.

  Two minutes later, and I was already second-guessing what I saw. How could I trust myself, when I heard my mother’s words echoing back? It could’ve been the wind moving branches, a trick of the light, clouds moving across the moon, an animal even.

  I looked at Ryan, about to voice my thoughts. “Maybe…,” I began.

  But then he pulled back from the window, lowered the phone, frowned at the display. The light of the phone display lit up his face in the dark, an eerie, unnatural glow. He tried again. Frowned again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The call won’t go through. I can’t get any service,” he said.

  My phone was on the kitchen table, where I’d wasted time staring at it, debating what to do. Doing nothing.

  Move, Kelsey. Do something.

  I walked across the room, feeling for the furniture as I passed—dark shapes in a darker room. My limbs tingled like they had when I’d woken in the car, hanging upside down—like they understood, even before I did, the wrongness of the situation.

  I squinted against the bright display in the dark and dialed 911, but as soon as I hit Enter, the call dropped. I looked at the display—Searching for service. I shook my head at Ryan, then said, “Same here,” in case he couldn’t see me. I picked up the corded phone hanging from the wall, but all I heard was the faint click, the dead air.

  “Try sending someone a message,” I said. Jan. I’d text Jan. I need help, I wrote, but a message popped up in response: Failure to send.

  I looked over at Ryan, and from the way he was staring at the phone, he was getting the same result. I walked toward him, half his body in shadow. His eyes were wide, his body still and contained, and I recognized his expression from the moment we felt the cable snap. The knowledge that we were falling. The realization that it was all out of our control…

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, going back to the gap between the curtains. I stared at the alarm beside the front door, still flashing Armed.

  The feeling of spiders crawling across my skin. Everything about the situation whispering Wrong. Like a cold breath across the back of my neck.

  “Could be an electrical surge,” he said. “Like you said before. Rolling blackouts or something…” He was grasping for anything—nails and skin on metal and me—just like when he fell.

  “For cell phones, too?” I asked.

  He stepped back from the window, pressed his lips together, and he didn’t answer. He was doing the same thing I was—trying to find a reasonable explanation, to tamp down the paranoia, or the fear, but one of us had to say it. One of us had to face it.

  “Or,” I said slowly, instinctively grabbing his arm, pulling him back from the window, “something’s blocking our calls.”

  Something. Someone.

  I hadn’t made a decision, and now it was too late. My fault. My inaction. And now we both had to pay for it.

  Our eyes locked, his mouth slightly open. “You saw someone out there?” he asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I felt acid rising in the back of my throat.

  He quickly scanned the walls, the doors, the windows, jerked the curtains closed and backed toward the center of the house, pulling me with him. Even in the dark, I could tell he was closing his eyes. “This place is a fortress,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

  This place was not a fortress. It was built to withstand a strong storm—to provide for us if we couldn’t reach the outside world for a week or two. It was built to protect us from intruders—until help could arrive. It was designed to alert, to alarm, to tell us to call for help, or to run. None of which were options at the moment.

  “There are cameras in my mom’s office,” I said. His arm brushed against mine, and our fingers linked together as we made our way through the darkened hall.

  “It could be nothing,” he said. “It could be anything.” He meant it to be reassuring, but his hand was cold and his grip was tight, and I wondered, once more, whether he was talking to himself.

  “Ryan, we need help,” I said. Just to make sure he understood—this house was not a fortress.

  —

  The blinds in Mom’s office were slanted open, and I reached up to close them before turning on the screens for the security cameras around the property. I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. I wanted to see without being seen. It felt like the upper hand, even if we were, at the moment, trapped.

  I watched the screens flicker to life as Ryan stood beside me. The light reflected off the pictures and the framed artwork lining the walls, but everything seemed colorless and dull. The screens were black-and-white, grainy and pixelated, and I could only see the area illuminated by the outside lights—like a stark, oval orb. The gates remained closed.

  Fortress, I told myself, trying to make it so.

  “I still don’t see anything. Tell me exactly what you saw,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, replaying it. “I saw a shadow out front, and then it was gone.” I shivered. “And when I turned on the back lights, I saw a shadow dive to stay hidden.”

  He looked ov
er his shoulder, at the windows closed up tight. “So it could just be neighborhood kids or something,” he said. But he pressed his lips together, and he didn’t look at me when he said it.

  I said nothing in response.

  Ryan was watching the video feeds on the wall above us, frowning. He must’ve been able to feel all the pieces crushing in on us, each one more wrong than the last. My mother gone, the phone line out, our cell phones blocked, a shadow out back. He could explain away each on its own, but all together? No, he couldn’t. And he knew it.

  He turned to face me, and he placed his hands around my shoulders, as if this alone could keep me safe. “They’ll leave,” he said. “They’ll realize we’re here, and that we see them, and they’ll leave. People don’t want to rob a house with people home, Kelsey.”

  As if we could wait it out and be fine. I rested my forehead against Ryan’s chest for one heartbeat, two, before I pulled myself together.

  “In the basement,” I said, pulling back. “We have everything down there, in case of emergency. There has to be a way to make a call.”

  In the safe room, we had anything we might need, in any possible emergency situation—and now I needed them.

  —

  We kept the lights off.

  I felt my way through the dark hallway, stumbling around the corners, until I found the basement door.

  There was nothing. No source of light. No ambient glare from the streetlights far away or the moonlight through the windows. I didn’t know the way by heart in the common rooms, not the way I knew the steps from my bedroom light switch to my bed, or the way I could count the paces as I ran down the hall to my mom’s room when I was little and prone to nightmares that I could never remember.

  She’d curl her body around mine, and I knew nothing could happen to me as long as she was there.

  The dark was not a fear of mine. The dark was my home. I could hide inside it, with the four walls of my bedroom keeping me safe, and go still—and nothing could touch me.

  But even that wasn’t true. This house was not made of impenetrable steel. It never occurred to me we might not be safe enough here, with the bars and the alarm and the reinforced locks and the grates over the windows. But take away our phones, cut the alarm, and we were on our own. It was all just a matter of time.