by Nina Laurin
“Milton,” I blurt, like it’s my last chance. For all I know, it is. “Wait. There’s a…thing I think I remember. Or maybe I imagined it. Or dreamed it, if I really did fall asleep.”
Alarm crosses his features. He doesn’t have time to hide it, and I nearly change my mind but realize it’s too late to go back. “I saw something,” I say, swallowing. My mouth immediately goes sandpaper dry. “On the road, someone jumped out in front of my car. I didn’t have time to see. A figure.”
Milton’s brows, a few shades darker than his sandy-blond hair, knit as he frowns. “Addie,” he says, “have you told anyone? Have you told the police?”
“Police?” I stammer. “Why would I—”
But in that moment, I’m miraculously saved from the mess I got myself into. I hear rapidly approaching clacking steps that don’t sound like a nurse’s orthopedic sneakers, and a moment later, someone yanks the plastic curtain out of the way. No hello, no are you decent.
“Jesus Christ, Andrea. Not this bullshit again. What on earth where you thinking?”
With maroon lipstick at seven a.m. and fury blazing forth off her gold-rimmed bifocals, the formidable Cynthia Boudreaux has arrived.
“I wasn’t drunk,” I say through gritted teeth. “I fell asleep at the wheel.” I don’t glance at Milt, and he keeps mum, thank God. The mysterious-figure-in-the-middle-of-the-road version of events has been forgotten for now.
The woman who raised me from age twelve dismisses me with a wave of her hand. She probably already knows I wasn’t in a DUI-related accident—the nurses or the police would have told her, because no such nonsense as patient confidentiality ever got in the way of Cynthia Boudreaux. I don’t understand why she’s here. Certainly not out of concern for me. Even if she had any, once upon a time, I sure did everything in my power to make sure this was no longer the case.
“They’ll be releasing her soon,” she says over my head at Milt. “I’m going to take her home.”
The ominous way she says the last word, with a subtle but present emphasis, tells me she doesn’t mean the town house.
“No way,” I protest.
“Did you get her stuff from Reception?” Cynthia’s icy gaze doesn’t waver from Milt, like I don’t even exist.
“Here,” he says, complying, handing her the plastic bag with all my belongings. I’m stricken speechless by the betrayal unfolding right before my eyes, and Milt studiously avoids looking at me. She snatches the bag out of his hand and peers in.
“Is her phone in there?”
“No.”
She fishes unceremoniously through my things, unzips my purse, and plunges her veiny hand with its gold rings into its depths, retrieving my wallet that she flips open and fleetingly inspects. “Anything else missing?”
“Why would anything be missing? Mom?”
For once, the m word fails to get her attention.
“Go check at Reception again,” she says to Milt. “Make sure we have everything. Her car keys. Where are her car keys?”
Milt looks uncertain. He opens his mouth to say something but cuts himself off, silenced by my adoptive mother’s sharp glare. The second he vanishes on the other side of the white curtain, Cynthia drops the act—it’s an instant, head-to-toe flip, a shape-shifter changing form. She takes her glasses off and rubs the bridge of her nose where the little plastic pads have left two kidney-shaped red marks in her foundation. Her shoulders drop, relaxing from the perfect politician’s wife posture; even her face itself seems to fall an inch or two, a mask with loosened strings.
“Do you think I don’t know what you’re up to?” she says in a hoarse, loud whisper. “Do you think you’re the only smart person around here? And if I can figure it out, so can the police.” She heaves a noisy sigh that smells like her herbal supplements and mouthwash. “I knew it would come back to bite you. I knew it.”
I lift myself up on my elbows. “Mom, what are you going on about?”
“Don’t mom me,” she snaps. “We’re well past that, Andrea, and you really should have thought about it when—”
“I wasn’t driving drunk, and I wasn’t texting. I swear.” I make a move to catch her hand, which she eludes. “Why did they take my phone? Was it the police?”
“And they have your thermal cup too,” she says dryly. “They’re analyzing the contents.”
A thought flits through my head: Good, let them think I spiked my coffee with some dregs of cheap whiskey I confiscated from one of my shelter kids; let them think I swallowed pills, whatever. I don’t let the thought show on my face.
“But that’s not the point,” Cynthia adds. “Anyway, we’re going home now; I already called our lawyer, and if they want to talk to you, not a word without him present, understand?”
“I’m not going to your house,” I say, struggling to contain the anger that fills my chest. “I’m going home. I’ll ask Milt to drive me.”
“Milton is coming too,” she says, not missing a single beat. “Just keep in mind, your sister is there, so at least have the decency to behave.”
At the news that my adopted sister is home, an electric tingle of alarm shoots down my spine, and I know that whatever it is might not have anything to do with the crash after all.
And it must be really, really bad.
“Mom—”
A nurse comes in, her bulky presence overfilling the small space, all canned hospital cheer and smell of disinfectant. Cynthia puts her glasses back on and reluctantly steps aside, letting the nurse yank the catheter needle out of my arm and disconnect me from the heart rate monitor. For better or for worse, I’m being let go.
The nurse is professional and efficient, and before I know it, I’m seated in a wheelchair, a piece of folded-up gauze stuck to the crook of my elbow with clear tape. The whole time, she manages not to look me in the eye once, and whenever she speaks, I feel like she’s talking at me, not to me. Like Cynthia’s been giving her lessons.
Just as she hands me over to another nurse, a short Filipino woman, I turn and glimpse at her over my shoulder—in time to catch her looking. An expression races across her face but vanishes before I can make anything of it, facial muscles relaxing and eyebrow creases smoothing back to a waxy neutrality.
I recognize this look, or one like it, from many years ago.
From after the fire. When I forever became That Boy’s Sister.
CHAPTER THREE
The woman whose friends knew her as Cassie hid a difficult start behind her cheerful, optimistic demeanor. Photos from her youth show a beautiful, smiling girl with piercing green eyes and long, glossy brunette tresses, teased up per the dictates of late eighties fashion. But by the time her children, Andrea and Eli, were born in 1990, that smile had faded.
The children’s father had an extensive arrest record for felonies ranging from petty theft to battery and assault. Cassandra had lost touch with her only remaining family, an elderly aunt, and dropped most of her friends. Her coworkers reported that she showed up with bruises poorly concealed by makeup.
When the twins were only two years old, she finally snapped. After a particularly violent episode, she pressed charges against her first husband and spent several months at a women’s shelter. She could have easily gone down a familiar path: more dysfunctional relationships, alcohol, drugs, and eventual tragedy. But instead, things took a good turn. She found a job, which allowed her to leave the shelter and move into an apartment with the twins. For several years, Cassie worked long hours on minimum wage, still managing to support herself and her children. Eventually, she got a cashier job at a furniture store, and shortly after that, she married the store’s owner, Sergio Bianchi.
Now a housewife living in a spacious suburban home, Cassie’s future looked as bright as ever. But everything was shattered when tragedy found its way back into Cassie’s life, from the place she least expected it.
—Into Ashes: The Shocking Double Murder in the Suburbs by Jonathan Lamb, Eclipse Paperbacks, 2004, 1st ed.
Fifteen years earlier: before the fire
Crouched on the brick border of a flowerbed across from the school playground, Andrea stares at the face of the hot-pink watch around her wrist. She wiggles its translucent strap with bits of glitter trapped in the plastic. It’s uncomfortable, even on the loosest setting, too small for a twelve-year-old, and the buckle leaves a sweaty red welt in the plump, pale flesh of her wrist. That’s why she keeps the watch hidden under her sleeve at all times.
Other girls don’t wear watches with cartoon characters anymore. Other girls paint their lips in front of the bathroom mirror during breaks and smoke during lunch, perched on the windowsill next to the window that only opens a smidgen. Andrea thought she might like smoking: The smell of it, whenever she dashes in and out of the bathroom unnoticed, tickles her nostrils in a way that’s not unpleasant, and it makes her ponder other exciting possibilities like stealing sips of Miller beer at a high schoolers’ party, or even making out with boys. She’s not entirely sure what making out consists of and how it’s different from just kissing. But she knows these are the things she’s supposed to want, even though she can never quite get a clear mental image.
And besides, the cigarette smoke makes her think of Sergio, her mom’s husband. Sergio is supposed to have quit, but she knows he still sneaks cigarettes on the balcony when her mom isn’t home. She caught him once, when she came home from school fifteen minutes early. She felt strange watching him, leaning on his elbow on the balcony railing as he exhaled smoke through flared nostrils. He looked different alone, lost in his thoughts as he tapped the ashes over the railing. A tiny spark detached itself from the glowing tip of the cigarette, drew a luminous orange arc in the air, and winked out gracelessly to a black point. She felt like she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to. Like watching scary movies through a crack in the door.
He caught her looking after only a few seconds, but he must have thought she’d been standing there for a while. He didn’t look alarmed. He waved her over, and she trudged through the backyard, right through the snow Sergio was supposed to shovel from the pathway but didn’t. Now it had developed a grayish crust that crunched under her boots. Sinking to midcalf, she stumbled over.
“Let’s keep this a secret, hmm, kid?” he said. “I’ll get you something you want, and you don’t tell Mom, all right?”
This was when she could have asked for one of those charm bracelets, or a new set of gel pens, or a Discman, or bedazzled jeans with the butterflies above the hems like the other girls had. She would have gotten it—she was fairly sure—because if she told her mom about the cigarette, there would be yelling, and there was a chance Sergio wouldn’t get to be her dad anymore, which was not what she wanted. She still isn’t sure why she didn’t ask for something nicer.
Now she glances at the watch, and the long, thin hand with the jumping pink heart on it seems to twitch and jerk in one place without ever moving. Only ten minutes are left until the lunch hour is over, and Andrea considers going back, slinking along the wall to wait in front of the classroom even though you’re not supposed to before the first bell. Bathrooms have been her respite until this year, but now the lip gloss and cigarette girls have claimed them as their fiefdom, and she’d sooner throw herself off the roof.
A noise, and her head snaps up. It’s a wrong noise. It’s coming from the fire exit by the gym where she snuck out. The door wails and groans as someone swings it wide open, and then it crashes shut. She hears giggling and excited shrieks. She knows who she’ll see before they come into her range of sight.
Andrea is twelve, and the girls are thirteen. Her December birthday not only shortchanges her on birthday gifts, which double as Christmas presents, but it also makes her one of the youngest in her grade. And in those few months that feel like a chasm she’ll never be able to get across, all the others seem to have picked up on things intuitively, things Andrea still has no clue about. Andrea isn’t a pretty girl. She’s not rich enough to compensate, and she’s never been smart. She’s just a strange, lonely girl, in an age before smartphones, before the internet was ubiquitous, before strange, lonely girls had online friends to confide in and blogs to fill with bad poems.
She is, however, smart enough to know what they’re here for. Under the sleeves of her sweater, yesterday’s bruises make themselves known, and her right ribs throb with every inhale. The girls are coming. There’s one especially, Leeanne, who is the worst of them all. Whenever Andrea thinks of her, even when she’s not at school, even on Saturday mornings when Sergio is making pancakes for all of them, her stomach twists with dread. Her heart starts to race like when the teacher makes them run laps in gym.
The laughter and voices grow closer and closer, and Andrea knows she must hide. A panicked glance around confirms that she has nowhere to go, only open space everywhere; the playground won’t hide her. So she does the only thing she can: She ducks behind the brick border and flattens herself against the earth. She lets herself think that maybe, just maybe, the border is tall enough to hide her. Maybe if Leeanne doesn’t see her right away, she’ll think Andrea is hiding somewhere else, and Leeanne and her posse will leave.
The ground is mind-bogglingly cold, and damp seeps through Andrea’s gray sweater, the one Leeanne called a dishrag last week. Andrea stuck it in the trash once she got home, but her mom fished it out and made her wear it again. Her jeans are black, and the mud won’t show as much, but the sweater will be ruined. Andrea presses her cheek into the earth and flexes her fingers in the dirt. It’s so cold that her hands go numb at once.
The steps grow closer, and Leeanne’s peals of laughter ring out right over her head. She squeezes her eyes shut.
“Oh my God. Look at her. What is she doing?” The voice belongs to another girl, and every word drips with disdain.
Andrea barely has time to draw a breath. A hand grabs the back of her collar and pulls her up as if she were a kitten.
“Eww! Let her go, Leelee. So gross,” says the first voice.
“You disgusting little pig,” Leeanne’s voice sneers, so close to Andrea’s face that she can smell her strawberry gum. “Look at yourself. You’re repulsive.”
The other two girls start to make oinking noises. Andrea’s collar cuts deep into her neck. She tries to steady herself on the brick border but her hands slip off it. Tears are stubbornly sneaking from under her shut eyelids.
“What a shame. You got mud all over that nice sweater. What will Mommy think?”
Andrea opens her eyes to see Leeanne’s rapturous grin just inches from her face. She has a little bit of glittery pink gloss on one of her front teeth. The light of day brings out the pimple on her forehead that she coated with concealer. She wears that cropped puffy coat with the white fur trim that all the girls envy. Leeanne’s parents are rich, and she has everything. Lip gloss, platform shoes, bedazzled jeans, rabbit fur collars.
Suddenly Andrea knows what to do. Leeanne is leering while her two cronies keep on oinking, pressing their fingertips with pink-polished nails into their noses to turn them up. Andrea raises her hand, unclenches her fingers, and plants the handful of mud into the dead center of Leeanne’s white coat.
For a moment, everyone is stunned into silence. Then Leeanne’s shriek nearly splits her eardrums. The girls yelp oh my God and look what she did and what a little bitch. Leeanne’s grip loosens on Andrea’s collar, and just as Andrea draws in a lungful of air, Leeanne’s palm connects with her right cheek.
The slap goes off like an explosion and sends her flying right back onto the muddy lawn. The world tilts as she lands on her side, the impact knocking the wind out of her.
“You bitch! You’ll pay for this,” shrieks Leeanne. Andrea realizes her mistake, but all she has time to do is curl up on her side, pulling her knees up to her chin. Leeanne’s pointy-toed boot digs into her side, right into yesterday’s bruise, drawing a gasp from her. Her mouth fills with mud as more kicks rain down from all directions. Suddenly, they stop
, and she realizes the ringing isn’t inside her skull—it’s the bell far overhead.
When she opens her eyes again, the girls are gone. But she can’t go to class—she knows that. She barely finds the strength to sit up. Tears are running down her face freely now, and she smears them along with the mud all over her cheeks.
“Hey! Addie.”
She spins around and sees a lone, lanky silhouette sauntering toward her. She wants to call out to him, but if she opens her mouth, she knows she’ll start to sob.
“What happened?” He crouches to be at her face level, and she turns her head away. “Shit. Leeanne again?”
“Mom will kill me,” Andrea murmurs, surprised that it’s the first thing that comes to mind.
“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
“For the sweater.”
Her brother’s face blurs with the tears in her eyes. Eli is everything Andrea is not, like he’d leeched all the bright colors out of her when they were still in the womb, and some of the girls are already starting to look at him in that way, giggling behind their hands.
“Don’t worry about the sweater. I’ll switch with you.” Their mom buys their clothes at Walmart, and he’s wearing the same gray sweater with fitted cuffs, except scrupulously clean. “Come on, Addie. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
She lets go of a tiny sob. Eli grins and picks up some of the mud at his feet.
“Hey. Look.” Under her puzzled gaze, he smears the dirt along his hairline and down his cheek. She can’t help but giggle. “Feel better? Come on. We’ll be late for class.”
“You’re not going to go to class like this,” she says.
“Sure I am. Boys will be boys, right?”
CHAPTER FOUR
They smuggle me out the back like some celebrity after a stint in rehab. So it really must be that bad, I think, trying not to let myself panic.
Milt takes the back seat on the passenger’s side, next to me, in Cynthia’s black, shiny Cadillac SUV. The morning is obscenely bright and sunny, and the car is stuffy like a toaster oven from soaking up the sunshine in the parking lot. I watch my adoptive mother jab the buttons irritably with her manicured finger until the fans start their quiet hum in the four corners of the car. My sweat cools on my upper lip. Here, in the gauzy aroma of Cynthia’s lilac air freshener, I notice the sour, stale smell wafting from me. It can’t be coming from the clean clothes Milt brought me from home, my favorite old jeans and a sweatshirt I’d left thrown over the back of a chair in the bedroom, in another life. It seems to seep from my very pores, and I detect my own fetid breath, which means it’s even worse than I can tell. I smell not too unlike my charges when they show up at the shelter, hoping for a place to turn in for the night, or at least for a cup of coffee and five minutes in a tepid shower.
