“I don’t know where to begin,” my mother says, tears welling up in her eyes once more. “You come home in a stranger’s clothes, half dead, having been God knows where. It’s like I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “Everything with Gavin happened really fast. I couldn’t tell you because I knew you’d never approve—”
“How could you be so stupid?” my father interrupts me, his booming voice making me jump. I’ve never seen him this angry.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I whisper, stung by his words. My father is usually the parent I can rely on to be level-headed and calm no matter what.
“They knew who you were,” he seethes, his elegant hands balled into fists. “They knew—they know—that you come from a family of means. . . . They tracked you.”
I nod, afraid to say anything because the vein on my father’s forehead is pulsing with rage. I shiver when I remember what Miss Roach called me. Walking bank account.
“You’re right. I brought this on him,” I say, my voice strangled and desperate. “If I don’t give them the money tomorrow, they’ll kill him. And it will be my fault.”
My father stands up abruptly, his chair clattering behind him as it falls onto the heated stone floor. His hair, usually arranged more precisely than a Japanese rock garden, is wild. His nostrils flare with anger. “Your circumstances brought this on him. We’ve worked so hard your whole life to protect you, Anthem, and then you just threw it all away for a boy you barely know. You’re lucky you’re alive.”
He stalks out of the room, and a moment later, I hear the clink of the crystal decanter at the bar. My father hardly ever drinks anything but wine, and never in the morning. I look at my mother through fresh tears. She puts her hand over mine and squeezes. Her touch is warm, if not comforting.
“He’s right,” she says. Her ashen face has a look of mourning, not for what’s already happened but for what will. For the mistakes I’m sure to make in the future, the ways I will disappoint her. “Promise me you’ll never do anything this foolish again. I don’t want to lock you in your room, but I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if you ever—”
“I promise,” I say. “Never again.” And in that moment, I mean it with all my heart.
Then again, my heart is in a jar somewhere in Jax’s lab.
My mother wields her sadness like a weapon sometimes. It controls our family and has for as long as I can remember. I think of the time four years ago when I found her passed out in bed, a vial of MemErase scattered across the silk sheets. She checked into Weepee Valley Psychiatric for a full month that time.
My father comes back in, holding a tumbler filled with two inches of scotch. The smell of the alcohol reminds me of the sterilizer that filled the air at Jax’s lab.
“Please,” I whisper, looking up at my father. “I’m sorry. I really screwed up, and I let you guys down. I know I don’t deserve your pity or your help, but you have to give them the money.”
My mother slumps in her seat like a wilted lily and shakes her head. “No. We need to go to the police.”
“Mom, you don’t know what they’re capable of,” I start, my heart whirring so violently I’m afraid my parents will hear it. “If they see the police coming, Gavin will die.”
“But, darling—” my mother protests.
“No.” The violence in my voice startles even me. “You might as well pull the trigger yourself.”
My mother pulls back, surprised and a little scared. She looks at my father, who nods, before turning back to me. “Okay, sweetie. If that’s what you want. The police can go on thinking you don’t remember anything.”
My father gulps down an inch of scotch and sits down heavily on one of the barstools at the kitchen counter. “Anthem, you have to understand. Even if we do give them this money, what will stop them from asking for more? They know who you are, they know who your father is. If we give in now, it will never stop.”
At the words It will never stop, I lose my thin layer of self-control. I’m sobbing again, my head in my arms, crumpled over the table like a used napkin.
I feel my father’s heavy hand on my back, then stroking my tangled hair. “Shhh. Don’t cry,” he whispers. It’s the worn-sounding plea of someone who has spent the last seventeen years telling his wife the same thing.
“Please. They’ll kill him, don’t you understand?” I say through my tears as I look up at him, at his stubbly chin, his worried eyes.
He shakes his head, and my eyes focus on his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallows. “I know it seems scary now, but there’s a very good chance they’re bluffing and that they’ll release him once they realize there’s nothing in it for them.” The conviction in his face is hard and unbending, a brick wall my fragile hopes have smashed against, shattering into dust. “We will not negotiate with terrorists, Anthem.”
“Please,” I repeat over and over, my whole body shaking now, a mix of hysteria and rage hot in my chest.
“Someday you’ll understand,” my father says gruffly, his eyes avoiding mine. I know now that there is nothing I can say to change his mind.
“Anthem.” My mother lays a hand on my head, gently smoothing my hair. Her red-rimmed gray eyes bore into mine insistently. “You’ve got to see we’re only trying to protect you.”
I slow my sobbing enough to stare back at her, my mouth trembling defiantly, while inside any lingering threads of hope have all snapped, leaving a sour, burning disgust in their wake.
“I understand,” I lie.
I turn to look out the window at early-morning Bedlam. A fog has rolled in now, blanketing the city in a deceptively serene layer of white. I stare out at the city wrapped in its veil, wondering where they’ve taken him, my monstrous heart itching in my chest, whirring blindly in my ears.
CHAPTER 13
It takes a half hour to refuse all my mother’s exhortations: to let a doctor visit the house and examine me, to start memorizing our cover story for the media, to eat something. This last request I give in to, demolishing a plate of eggs and three bowls of Lily’s bread pudding without tasting any of it. After that, I convince her that all I need right now is sleep.
I finally escape to my room with a box of cookies and two Brawn Bars tucked under my sweatshirt. I yank down the shades on my glass wall to block out the brightening day and collapse into bed. Hot tears begin to flow, faster than before. I press my face into my silk pillowcase to muffle the jagged wails emerging from my throat. When the fabric is soaked through, I grab my noise-cancelling headphones from the bedside table and crank up the score of Giselle as loud as it can go. I pull my thick white comforter tight around me like a straightjacket and start to weep again, this time silently, my body shaking with the force of raw grief.
I’m crying so hard I’m beyond language, beyond rational thought. All I see when I close my eyes is a film reel on repeat: the barrel of a gun pressed to Gavin’s temple, a hand squeezing the trigger, Gavin collapsing like a rag doll.
Finally, after two loops of Giselle, my throat and eyes feel like pounded meat. As the tears subside, a single coherent thought swims to the surface of my mind: I can’t let him die.
I pull off my headphones and listen to the thudding silence of my room. I look at my alarm clock—9:23 A.M. I force myself to stand and peel off the clothes Ford gave me, replacing them with a gray cami and a crumpled pair of jeans I find draped over the ballet barre bolted to my bedroom wall.
Standing next to the barre, my bare feet at just the spot where I’ve practiced pliés, pirouettes, and chassés for hundreds of hours, my eye is caught by a glittery twinkle on the top of my dresser. Two hair combs adorned with cheap crystals—part of the snowflake costume for last year’s Nutcracker recital. I reach for them, turning them over in my palm, a plan already forming.
Slowly, silently, I open my bedroom door and cock my head to listen. Lily’s in the kitchen, humming the chorus of an old rock ballad. Under her hu
mming, I hear the tapping of eggs against the corner of the counter, the sound of the yolks plopping into a ceramic bowl. From my father’s office, located on the lower floor beneath the kitchen—much too far away to be able to hear anything—I hear an avalanche of keystrokes as he types. I concentrate and listen, the keystrokes growing louder the more I focus on them. Like he’s typing on a keyboard attached to my ears. I lean my forehead against the door frame and close my eyes, still listening, trying to understand how. I shouldn’t be able to hear any of this. It’s like my ears are supercharged.
What has Jax done to me? I cover my ears up with my hands, and the sound goes away. I uncover my ears, and it’s back. I shake my head in wonder. As long as I can hear my parents, I know exactly where they are.
My heart revving, I round the corner of the master bedroom and push open the door. My mother lies sprawled across my parents’ enormous bed, a thin line of drool snaking from the corner of her mouth and pooling onto the brocade bedspread. She’s breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling slowly. I think of the commercials for Dreamadine: Dream it, live it, Dreamadine. Just one pill, eight full hours. She insisted on giving me a few pills after I finished eating, and they now sit untouched on the base of my ballet-slipper lamp.
I dart through the master suite, my heart roaring in my chest. My mother doesn’t stir, but my father could walk in at any moment.
I race to the vanity and reach under it to find the little button. The mirror slides up the wall, and I face the keypad in a blind panic. I don’t know the code. Think.
My fingers travel over the glowing keys. If I get the code wrong, an alarm will go off that will wake my mother. I’ve spent enough time with her here to know the code is six digits. Our zip code? My parents’ anniversary? No, I realize. It’s simple. There’s only one set of numbers Helene Fleet would choose.
I punch Regina’s birthday into the keypad with shaking fingers, for once grateful for all the September twenty-sixths I’ve spent at the cemetery. The low beep and the faint sound of the steel unlocking tells me I’m in. Just then I hear a door open down the hall.
There are dozens of drawers to choose from, but I don’t have time to browse. I think back to the Orphans’ Ball, to my mother’s $50,000 valentine. I have no idea if her other jewelry is worth more than that, or less. The ruby necklace will have to do.
I open the bottom drawer and pull the necklace off the black velvet it sits on, stuffing it into my back pocket. I shut the drawer and push the button, rearming the security on the jewel safe. I race past my mother again, who has turned toward the wall in her sleep.
A moment later, I’m in my room, conscious of my father speaking to Lily in the kitchen. With shaking hands I bring the largest ruby to my lips, kissing the cold, bloodred stone the way the nuns in school kiss their rosaries.
After stashing the necklace in a box under my bed, I consider the cloud-shaped blue pills my mother gave me. “Dream it, live it,” I whisper, putting them both on my tongue and heading to my bathroom for a swig of water to wash them down. If I’m going to try to hand the necklace over in exchange for Gavin’s life tomorrow night, I’ll need to get some sleep.
Before the drug hits my bloodstream, I dig my cell phone out of the bottom of my backpack and send Zahra a quick text—i’m ok. don’t worry. will call u tmrw, too tired now. xox. Then I quickly turn it off, unable to cope with whatever communication is stored inside.
I spend the next eighteen hours obliterated on Dreamadine.
All day and most of the night, I slip in and out of an uneasy sleep. Sometimes in my dreams the Midland River is filled with boiling acid and when I fall in, my skin peels away in sheets. In other dreams, the kidnappers douse Gavin in kerosene and light a match, and I wake up sobbing.
In the last one, I’m standing at the observation window of a sleek hospital operating theater, powerless as Jax sews the head of an ostrich onto Gavin’s body. Its hideous black beak opens wide as it squeals and shrieks with pain.
CHAPTER 14
I wake up scratching at my chest through my sweat-damp T-shirt at 4:06 A.M. on Friday morning. For a few blank seconds, I’m disoriented enough not to remember what’s happened. But when I run my finger along the seam of my stitches, it all comes crashing back. This is almost the exact time Gavin was kidnapped three days ago. Thoughts of what has to happen tonight start to run through my mind, and soon I’m too wired and anxious to sink back into sleep again.
I flip on my bedside lamp and wait for the sun to come up, wishing there was some way I could stop myself from imagining the horrible things that are happening to Gavin, from wondering if he’s even still alive. I need to stay off the internet and away from the news, since according to my parents, I’m all over it. They’ve already come up with a cover story at the urging of the Fleet Industries’ lawyer and PR consultant, Lyndie Nye.
“You were visiting your cousin in Exurbia and went for a walk in the woods by yourself, and you got lost. Your phone was dead. You found a cabin and waited for your cousins to find you,” my father muttered through my closed bedroom door last night. I opened the door and gave him a look that said I didn’t like how stupid the story made me sound, but he just turned his palms up like it was out of his hands. “It’s already out there. You’ll have to live with it.”
As the predawn sky moves from black to periwinkle, I pick up the copy of Gatsby Gavin loaned me on our fifth date and find the places he’s highlighted, looking for solace. My breath catches at a line he’s double-underlined in black ballpoint:
. . . and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
I read it twice, wondering if Gavin thinks of me the way Gatsby thought of Daisy. I hope not. If I was ever gleaming, if I was ever safe and proud, I’m not now. I want more than anything to be able to tell him that I don’t care about money. To tell him we’re not doomed the way Gatsby and Daisy were, because we can remake our lives somewhere else. But that might never be possible.
Everything depends on tonight.
By the time seven rolls around, I’ve decided the only way to stay halfway sane today is to go to school. At least the crowded hallways of Cathedral will distract me from the twisted images swirling through my mind like chunks of black ice in the Midland. And anything will be less stressful than the silent fury I feel in the presence of my father. I’ve just started buttoning my school uniform shirt, a white blouse with the CDS crest on the pocket, when I hear my mother’s delicate fingers tapping on my door.
“Just a minute,” I say, but she pushes it open anyway. I turn quickly so that I’m facing away from the door and hurry to button the shirt from the top down, my hands shaking.
“Hi, Mom.” I finish the final button with a numb smile on my face.
“School so soon? I thought this morning we could go to Doctor Sprogue’s office—”
“I told you, I’ll go to the doctor in a few days,” I say, roughly pulling on the brick-red knee socks that complete the Cathedral uniform. “I’m fine, really. The pills calmed me down a little. School will help me get my mind off everything.”
She nods slowly, her lips squeezed into a rosebud of resignation. She gives in more easily than I expected. “I guess the doctor can wait. Let me see the cut,” she says, lifting my curtain of hair off the right side of my face.
This morning when the sun rose, I unwrapped the bandage and discovered my wound completely healed, nothing more than a thin white scar along my hairline. “All better.” I shrug, hoping she’ll drop the subject. “It was just a scrape.”
“Thank goodness for that. Have you done something different with your makeup?” she asks, her gray eyes puzzled.
I shake my head. What makeup? Apart from glancing at my healed forehead, I haven’t had the guts to face the mirror.
“Your whole face looks . . . different, somehow.” Sh
e smiles. “You look beautiful.”
I shrug and turn away to rummage through my backpack, not wanting her to examine me too closely.
“Never mind,” she says, leaning over and grabbing me in a tight hug. “I’m just so glad you’re back.”
I breathe in her sugared-lemon smell, pretending for a moment that I’m still six years old, still her little doll. Our hug is cut short by an embarrassingly loud growl from my stomach. “Is Lily here yet? I’m dying for some pancakes.”
When my mother pads back down the hall to find Lily, I turn to the mirror and look at my reflection. She wasn’t exaggerating. My eyes are a vibrant, richer green. My lips are pink. My normally pasty skin is flushed with color. But the biggest change is my hair. The usual carrot orange has morphed into a shiny, wine-soaked red, glowing bright as fire. My heart whirs with alarm, and I lean so close to the glass that my forehead almost touches the mirror.
A half hour later, I’m in the backseat of the Seraph, being driven to school by Serge. I lay my head against the white leather seat back. Up above us, through the sunroof, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of North Bedlam whizz by.
I put my hand in the pocket of my plaid pleated skirt and finger the ruby necklace, my fingers traveling over one jewel at a time.
“So.” I clear my throat and address Serge. “Some week, huh?”
“Quite a week, yes. I’m pleased to see you are looking . . . remarkably well,” Serge says evenly as he turns the Seraph onto Thorn Street and begins to pick up speed.
“Did my parents . . . brief you?” I have my fake story for the press, but I can tell by the silence hanging in the car that Serge knows about Gavin.
He nods. “I understand they have chosen not to negotiate.”
“Yes,” I manage to say.
“Sometimes fortune surprises us, Miss Fleet.” Serge’s eyes look at mine a little too carefully in the rearview mirror. I sense a question in his gaze, but he doesn’t ask it.
The Brokenhearted Page 8
