by Nina Laurin
“Milton, you need to leave.”
He blinks, not yet comprehending.
“Now,” I say, raising my voice. “I want you to go home.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why. Just leave, okay? Get out.”
He looks hurt, confused. “No.”
“No? Just who do you think you are?” I snap.
“Your fiancé.” He holds my furious gaze in his, and it’s almost too much. But I have to make him leave, for his own sake.
“Ex-fiancé. We’re broken up, remember? Because I’m an alcoholic, addict, and thief.” I spit every word at him, watching him flinch a little more with each one. “And you have nothing to do here. So go.”
Any normal man would lose his temper by now, snap back at me, maybe even yell. Or slam his fist into the wall as close as possible to my head without actually grazing my hair, raising a small cloud of paint dust and making a dent in the drywall. Like my exes from a life before Milt would have done. I would have accepted it as normal, even as proof of love. But this is Milt, and instead of punching walls or yelling, he just shakes his head. “I only wanted to be there for you.”
“Well, I don’t need anyone to be there for me.”
For a moment, just a moment, he looks like he might lose it and say something I most definitely deserve to hear. But he holds back. The look in his eyes is sadness.
“When you change your mind, you know where to find me,” is all he says. He turns to leave, almost needing to duck when he passes through the low doorframe of my old room. I can’t help it; I get up from the bed and follow him, hovering in the doorway as he descends the stairs. I hear him say a muffled goodbye to Cynthia and Jim, who sounds nonplussed. The front door closes and locks behind him, and still I stand there like an idiot, barely holding back tears.
I’m not the one who should be crying, I know. How could I ever have seriously thought I could have a normal life? How could I ever have—
“Wow, now that’s what I call a scene. Addie, I nearly squeezed out a tear. What a performance.”
The voice is a shock, like a handful of ice thrown down the back of my collar by a playground bully. I spin around so fast I nearly lose my footing, and still, I can hardly believe my eyes when I see my stepsister standing there at the end of the hall. How long has she been there? What has she seen and heard?
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask, furious at the hoarseness of tears in my voice. Cynthia hadn’t said anything about my stepsister being here. Or maybe she had. I was so medicated and lost in my own thoughts that I could have easily forgotten.
And it makes no sense. There’s no reason for her to be here. She should be at her own fucking McMansion with her dentist husband. Sipping rosé with other suburban wives with too much time on their hands.
“I, unlike you, have a right to be here,” she says. The longer I look at her, the more I notice things that are out of place. Her mascara is smudged, and there’s a half inch of roots lurking underneath her tasteful caramel-blond dye job. She’s had to fake it since she was fourteen or fifteen and her natural cherubic-white hair turned a more ordinary ash-blond. And she’s wearing pink sweatpants. My steppie, wearing fleece that dates from 2004 and probably has something spelled in rhinestones across the ass. Her chipped toenails peek out from under the pants’ worn hems. The queen of sky-high heels is wearing flip-flops.
I take a step toward her, and instinctively she recoils, her back against the door of her old room with her name spelled out on a baby-pink plaque in black princess cursive, a crown over the middle a.
After all these years, I still can’t stand the sight of her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Eli Warren got away with what he’d done to his mother and stepfather. It sounds a little extreme, considering he will spend the next twelve years locked up—six in a juvenile psychiatric facility and six in adult prison. But when you consider the facts of the case, as I present them here, it becomes chilling to think that in a little over a decade, Eli Warren, then only twenty-four years old, will be walking the streets again. How much more damage will he do? Whose lives will he destroy? We have no way of knowing. But I can tell you, from my vast experience working with sociopaths, child and adult alike, when it happens again, it will be even more brutal.
—Into Ashes: The Shocking Double Murder in the Suburbs by Jonathan Lamb, Eclipse Paperbacks, 2004, 1st ed.
Fifteen years earlier: after the fire
Andrea has lost track of the days she has spent here, and the burn ward smell that clings to the bedsheets has seeped into her pores until she’s stopped noticing it. She slips from mind-dulling pain into fogginess whenever the nurse adds some painkiller to her IV. The bandages that cover her upper chest and back need to be changed daily, and another, older nurse comes in to do that.
Today, she stays a little longer, brushing Andrea’s hair with a little comb and even helping her wash her face. While she tears the comb through Andrea’s matted hair, she keeps chattering on and on about how beautiful it is, how lucky she is. Andrea doesn’t protest, even though something in the woman’s pleasant alto voice is strained today, unnatural. It’s what you say to ugly girls, that they have great hair. That’s what you say to girls who will never wear a low-cut prom dress or even a T-shirt without being stared at in the wrong way. Deep down, without even fully understanding it yet, she feels like she lost something she barely knew she had.
She can see it plainly on the other nurse’s face, the younger one who doesn’t hide her thoughts as well. When Andrea asked her about Eli, the woman stopped cold midway through changing the IV bag and the look in her eyes struck Andrea speechless. A moment later, she averted her eyes and pretended she hadn’t heard.
Because everyone knows it now. When the older nurse wheels her out into the yard, other patients stare and whisper—Andrea would like to believe it’s just her imagination, but she knows it’s not. She’s now known as the girl whose brother killed her family and disfigured her for life.
And all the while, when the older nurse changes the bandages, when the pediatrician comes in and asks her how she’s feeling, when the younger nurse brings her food even as her gaze avoids Andrea as if the blistering third-degree burns were contagious, something is brewing in the back of Andrea’s mind. Something not quite strong enough to break through the surface but growing stronger every minute she spends in this place. Something like a silent scream that started sometime when she saw the flames race across the carpeting in the hall and hasn’t died since.
The nurse, Belinda or Melinda or something like that, is plaiting her hair deftly, somehow managing not to pull or snag so much as a strand, and Andrea begins to understand. A sense of foreboding fills her long before the woman finally ties the end of the braid with an elastic band and says, with artlessly feigned casualness, “You have a special guest today.”
The police again? Andrea wonders. Did she say something wrong? Or maybe it’s the social worker, a young woman with bleached dreads and a tiny blue gem in her right nostril who came in to “evaluate” her—despite the sound of it, it came down to a few easy questions Andrea answered without hesitating.
She feels like she should ask who it is but she doesn’t have time. They are all there at once: the social worker, in a stuffy skirt suit that clashes with the rest of her, one of her doctors, a tall woman with curly hair, the other nurse, who’s wearing lipstick for the occasion. As soon as Andrea sees who’s following her, her guts twist. It’s not just one or two but a whole crew, with one of those giant fuzzy microphones and a massive camera, black and gleaming menacingly with its little red lights and lenses that look like gasoline spilled in a puddle. Another man, oblivious to Andrea and everyone around him, tests the flash of his Nikon. Another woman holds aloft an audio recorder. Andrea sees logos that are faintly familiar, local stations, a local paper.
But then some kind of commotion starts at the door, and they all part, as if on cue, cameras and lights and mi
crophones all turned to the doorway like they’re expecting the president. But instead, a familiar-looking man walks in, wearing a suit and tie, followed by a woman in a burgundy twinset, giant gold earrings gleaming beneath her bob hairdo. The woman, too, looks familiar, so familiar that Andrea forgets to breathe. The social worker steps forward. She looks uncomfortable, self-conscious, and stiff.
“Andrea,” she says in a convivial tone Andrea hasn’t heard her use before, “I’d like to introduce you to your new family.”
Flashes go off, and all the cameras and devices swivel to her at once, their shiny black eyes devouring her.
But Andrea is looking past them, past the social worker, past the man and the woman who leans forward with an expectant smile. She’s looking at the third person, the sullen girl standing behind them. She’s wearing a navy dress with a Peter Pan collar, and it’s so out of character that Andrea almost doesn’t recognize her at first. The girl glowers at Andrea from behind the short curtain of angel-blond hair that barely reaches her chin.
That’s when she knows she’s been cheated. Like in one of those stories where the genie grants your wish word for word, but it isn’t quite what you had in mind.
And in that moment, the scream that’s been gathering in the back of Andrea’s throat like a storm finally tears its way to the surface and breaks free.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Leeanne regains her composure, the smirk returning as she plays with the ends of her hair.
“So,” she says, “he cracked. Again.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I say under my breath.
“Or what? You’re going to make me?” She smiles sweetly. It looks like she’s let her lip injections lapse. Her whole face has a droopy, unhealthy look to it in spite of the uniform fake tan she’s been applying since her teens. “The psycho sister of the psycho brother. That’ll make a nice interview. I should go talk to some of those guys outside.”
I advance toward her, fists clenches at my sides. Panic flits across her face, but she doesn’t have time to react. I slam my palms down on the door, trapping her between my arms, and she lets out a shriek. Steps thunder behind me, and I turn around to see Cynthia racing toward us, barefoot, her shoes in her hand. “Stop it right now!” she bellows. I let my arms drop to my sides as Leeanne cowers by the door, hands covering her face.
“Why is she here?” I snarl. “Did you bring her on purpose? To gloat?”
“Fucking psycho,” Leeanne murmurs behind me.
“Language,” Cynthia snaps on autopilot, but there’s no real energy behind it. “Jesus, Andrea. She’s not here to gloat. Did you think that—”
“Then why doesn’t she just go back to her mansion? She just wanted in on the action, is that it?”
“Fuck you, Andrea,” Leeanne says, her voice tired. She slinks away from the door, past me, to stand near her mother, her arms crossed and her hands tucked under her armpits—the same pose she always took when she’d done something bad she was trying to hide. Her hair falls into her eyes, and she huffs. “I’m not here to gloat. Only you could think that, because you think everything revolves around you. If anything, you should be gloating.”
“Leeanne,” Cynthia whispers angrily. I look from one to the other, trying to puzzle out what’s going on.
“Charles and I are separating,” Leeanne says with a grimace. “I’m here to stay until we work out what to do with the house. And since the market for luxury housing isn’t exactly booming in this economy, it could be a while.”
My breath whooshes out of my lungs, and I slump like a deflated balloon. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Like hell you are,” Leeanne says with a shrug. “So for the time being, you’ll have to put up with me. And if I were you, I’d take it down a notch, because I’m sure those vultures outside will be very interested in what I have to tell them. Not to mention that woman. What did she say her name was? Figueroa?”
Cynthia starts to say something, but I’m no longer listening. I storm past her, through the half-open door of my old room, letting the door bang against the wall as I push it aside. I grab my purse from the bed where it’s sitting, sling it over my shoulder, and thunder down the stairs. Leeanne’s mocking laugh reaches me from the second floor, followed closely by Cynthia calling my name imploringly. When I glance over my shoulder, she’s coming down the stairs, shoes still clutched in her hand.
“Wait!” she calls out, an ugly, screechy edge to her voice. “What are you doing?”
“Going home,” I say, to myself as much as to her. I look around: The key to her car hangs neatly from the hook by the front door. I grab it as I shove my feet into my sneakers. When she sees what I’m doing, she yells at me to stop, but she’s too late—I’m already opening the front door.
I thought I was ready for the flashes exploding in my face, for the swarm of shouting people. Still, it takes the breath out of me in a way I didn’t expect—memories come flooding back. Memories of another time, of the first time Eli ruined my life.
“This way, Andrea!” someone yells, and I instinctively look. He’s a tall, scrawny guy, and all I can see of him is the man bun atop his head since his face is hidden behind a camera that snaps and snaps and snaps.
“Andrea! Did you see your brother? Did he call you? Did he come to your home?”
And in the meantime, the hipster keeps snapping away. Well, they’re about to find out I’m not a twelve-year-old girl anymore.
I raise my arm and slap the camera out of his hands. He didn’t expect it, and the heavy thing draws a wide arc as it swings on the strap around his wrist. The strap slips. He tries to catch it and fails. Crash. Broken glass and plastic. Cursing, he dives to retrieve what’s left of the camera while I look at the others, who have fallen into a kind of stupor I know won’t last.
“No comment,” I say, pressing the button on the fob. Cynthia’s SUV beeps, and I climb into the driver’s seat. I can only hope my license isn’t suspended, although there’s no reason it should be. I haven’t done anything wrong, and as far as I know, I’m not suspected of DUI.
I turn the key in the ignition and then pull out of the driveway and onto the street. The SUV is the kind of heavy, clunky gas-guzzler only someone like Cynthia would drive but right now it works in my favor. None of them dare throw themselves in front of the vehicle and try to play chicken.
Still, I zigzag around familiar streets of the neighborhood for ten or fifteen minutes until my hands are no longer shaking and I feel confident that no one is tailing me. Only then do I direct the car to the highway.
I’m going back to the town house. To the only place I can still call home.
* * *
To my surprise, when I pull into my driveway, I don’t see any journalists lying in wait. At least as far as I can tell. It could be that they decided I wasn’t interesting enough or realized I had nothing new to tell them. Or it could mean something else has happened to draw them away. Some new lead or new development. I try not to think about it too much.
The town house is the last in a row of four, the corner unit that cost fifty grand more than one sandwiched between two identical ones—all for a couple of windows and a couple of hours of natural light daily, since that side faces north. But to Milt, the price difference wasn’t an issue. The whole street is like that, identical blocks of four identical houses, in that modern cube-like shape, burnt-orange brick and black trim and shiny thermal windows for Denver winters. A garage and a patio in the back. The embodiment of middle class, whatever that means anymore.
I normally never use the garage, parking instead in the vast driveway that fits my prehistoric car and Milton’s Prius just fine. But today I go the extra mile—key in the combination, climb back behind the wheel as the garage door slides up, and then pull in next to the boxes of books I never unpacked and Milton’s old road bike hanging on the wall.
But if I’d been hoping I’d feel safer or more comfortable here, among all the things we picked out and arranged ourselves,
I was wrong. The house is Milt’s, and he bought the lion’s share of all the furniture—since, of course, all I could afford on my own, with my social worker salary, was Ikea. Once again, I find myself feeling like the charity case, slack-jawed with awe at someone else’s house where I’m now supposed to live.
He never reproached me for any of that. He even gave me the room with the biggest window to use as my office, which I rarely used—whenever I had work to finish at home, I’d just huddle on the living room couch next to him, my Mac balanced on my lap.
Ever since he moved out, I’ve fallen behind on cleaning. On my way to the coffee machine, I step over a clear bag of recycling I never took to the curb. I take a look at the counter and groan. Coffee cups sit haphazardly all over the place, their varying levels of cold coffee leaving rings on the ceramic. I push them to the side and start the espresso machine, which whirs to life at the push of a button. I can instantly smell the coffee beans being ground up somewhere deep in its chrome core, and it covers the stale smell of the dishes and discarded takeout containers.
While I wait for the coffee, I run upstairs and get the phone charger from where I usually leave it plugged in, next to the bed. I come back down and plug the phone into the socket by the kitchen counter, thumb the power button, and hold my breath. My relief hardly bears description when the empty-battery icon appears. So the phone’s not dead—just the battery.
While the phone charges, I busy myself emptying the coffee cups and washing one of the mugs for myself. My head throbs. A Tylenol would be nice. Sadly, in the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom, I’m greeted by a row of empty bottles I never got around to throwing out. I rattle them one after another, but all I have are expired allergy pills and a blister pack of sore-throat candies. I gather up the empties and toss them in the trash. Through the hollow clatter, I hear something, and my head snaps up, a jolt of panic racing up my spine.
