We said I love you, and I bid him farewell. It was time to prepare for Audrey.
An old turntable sat in the corner of our bedroom. I ran my hand across the lid and blew the film of dust from my skin. My fingers fumbled with the needle and managed to drop it at the outside edge of the record.
As I rested on the bed, the light still on, I worried the couch might be a better place to wait. Audrey might not expect that. She might head into the bedroom out of habit. But if she started her evening treks in the living room, I would just meet her sooner on the couch.
The melody of the flamenco guitar merged with the scratching along the hardwood. I sang, loud and out of tune, to drown the sound of both.
Don’t look at the doorway, I thought. Don’t watch for her. She’s not there. Pretend she’s not there.
But the record ended, and the scratches continued. And on this evening, she crooned lyrics as well.
“Kaylee. Kaylee.”
The crystalline voice approached with sing-song elegance. The turntable rotated, and the speakers emitted a blank din. I wanted to yank the cord from the wall and obliterate the noise, but Audrey appeared, face to the floor, and called my name again.
“Kaylee.”
I stared at her, but she moved toward me anyway. Perhaps I never stopped her at all. Perhaps it was always Daniel that kept her at bay, though he never knew she was there.
Her gnarled fingers gripped the fringe of the rug, and she breached the imaginary border I worked for years to defend.
“Audrey, please,” I said. “Please don’t.”
I moved across the mattress to Daniel’s side. Audrey shifted around the front of the bed to reach me. Her hands clawed at the comforter and I eyed the door, wondering if I could make it down the hall before she could seize me. But she would return. She’d never stop. I’d earned this.
Wrenching herself onto the bed, Audrey sat next to me. She smelled of faint floral, and her skin remained as perfect as it was in the senior picture her mother cast out. My bare feet dug into the sheet as I pushed against the headboard to escape her. With a graceful surge of her body, she leaned toward me, and I realized where the cinnamon and roses of her parents’ house had gone.
There was no decay on her. No sign of what she’d done to herself. No inkling of age. Just a beautiful young woman perched near her friend.
She pressed her lips to my ear, her soft breath warming my skin.
“Kaylee, I want to tell you something.”
Like her face, the voice remained unchanged, and on hearing it again, I suddenly remembered the missing poster in her room. It was an impressionist painting of Victorian ladies in a garden. My gift for her twenty-second birthday. Her last birthday.
Tears salting my cheeks, I wished I had listened in Sunday school and could recite a prayer, any prayer. Audrey would remember one.
The saccharine rhythm stirred the air. “I only wanted to tell you what I’ve done.”
“What, Audrey?” I closed my eyes as her red curls fell against my face. “What have you done?”
“You’ll see soon. Just know it’s for you, Kaylee. It’s for you.”
I didn’t move for hours. I feared if I opened my eyes, I would find her still sitting there.
Outside, the cars whirred up and down the suburban street, and the newspaper ricocheted off the front door. The moment the heat of daylight streamed through the window, I phoned 911, and an ambulance took me to the county hospital.
“Run every test you can.” I shed my clothes and climbed into the white gown. “There’s something wrong with my baby.”
Three hours and a litany of needles and tubes later, an ER nurse comforted me with a stiff, patronizing smile.
“Darling, there’s nothing wrong,” she said. “You have one healthy pregnancy.”
I nodded, the charts and sonograms mocking me from their roost on the wall.
“Do you need a ride home?”
“I can walk,” I said.
As I crossed the parking lot, I called Daniel. An unfamiliar voice answered.
“Are you Daniel Cooke’s wife?”
“Yes,” I said. “Who is this?”
Brain aneurysm is the nicer term for a stroke. Nobody thinks a hearty man of thirty can die of a disease associated with the elderly, so doctors say brain aneurysm to help the family make sense of it. But I knew what killed Daniel, and it wasn’t a tiny blood vessel giving way.
“Who found him?” I crouched on the pavement and prodded a piece of gravel along a crack in the sidewalk.
“A coworker,” the voice said.
“How’d a coworker get into his room?”
From the other end of the line, there was nothing but white noise.
“Did the coworker happen to be female?” I tucked my index finger against my thumb for leverage and flicked the piece of gravel into the air.
“Yes.”
“Please keep the details to yourself,” I said, “but send my husband’s body home. I’d like to bury him this week.”
I stayed with my parents while they made the preparations for Daniel. The next three days, all I could do was lie in my old bed and sob. Audrey never came to visit, and I imagined her in my house, resting on my side of the mattress. She could wait for as long as she needed to finish me too.
Roses were the blossom of choice for the calling hours, and as I stood in my mourning garb next to the coffin, I gagged at the scent.
“Can you send the flowers away?” I covered my mouth.
“They’re making me sick.”
My mother vanquished the reminders of Audrey, and I thanked her.
Faces poured into the cramped room. Like an assembly line, the stream of bereaved kissed my cheeks and offered psalms of sympathy. I pretended I was someone else.
A hand suddenly gripped mine, gripped with a fragile yet unearthly grace.
“I’m sorry about your loss, Kaylee,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Truly, I am.”
I hadn’t seen her enter through the foyer, and I wondered if she could materialize like her spectral daughter. I studied the features so like Audrey’s. She embraced me, and my body collapsed into her arms. We remained together in the center of the room for a long time, not caring that we blocked others from the casket.
Before she departed, Mrs. Anderson shuffled a small envelope into my hands. “I brought you a copy of Audrey’s note,” she said. “I don’t know if it will help now or make things worse, but I think she would want you to read it.”
I pulled myself from the crowd and retired to an empty hallway near a vacant viewing room. The glue on the fresh envelope released its hold, and my fingers gripped the letter that had terrified me since my mother took me aside during my wedding reception and told me Audrey was gone.
Clean black letters with buoyant curves covered the page, and I recognized the handwriting from the surreptitious notes we passed during study halls and recesses. My eyes closed as I amassed the nerve to read it. Then I inhaled and began.
***
Dearest Daniel,
You robbed me of my happiness. You robbed me of my life. You even robbed me of my best friend. I don’t know what the next life holds, but in this moment before I’m about to meet the one who made me, I swear with all the life left in me that I won’t let you hurt her like you hurt me.
Yours, Now & Forever,
Audrey
***
For the first time, I felt the baby kick. My hand fluttered to my stomach on instinct, and I lingered in the hallway of the funeral parlor and didn’t move or speak for almost an hour. Guests waltzed past, their arms and shoulders and hair brushing against me as they offered condolences. But not until the overhead lights dimmed and my parents grasped my hands did I stir from my position. They asked if I wanted to stay with them for a while longer. I requested to go home.
I sat awake every night for a week. Audrey never returned.
THE FIVE-DAY SUMMER CAMP
Oh, what fun you’ll have!
That was all we
heard from our parents the morning we left for camp.
My older sister Madeline rolled her eyes. “They pretend I haven’t already been there.”
We had nothing to pack—the camp would issue our uniforms when we arrived—so I sat cross-legged on the floor of our room as Madeline made her bed. She was careful about it, tucking this corner and smoothing that wrinkle, as though this was the most important task she’d ever performed. Our mother called upstairs to tell us to hurry so we wouldn’t miss the bus, but I didn’t move, not until Madeline was finished.
Nearby, the comforter on my mattress was undisturbed. I never slept where I belonged. Every night, once the lights went out—all over the city at nine o’clock on the dot—I would creep across the floor and curl up beside my sister. She was warm, and her skin smelled sweet like cinnamon, like a home we’d never known. Tucked beneath her blanket, I invented silly stories of us floating on clouds or swimming a mile beneath the ocean, tales that usually made her smile. But last night, she’d shaken her head and said, “I won’t always be here, Arabella. You need to grow up and stop hiding in make-believe.”
I pretended not to hear her. She was always morose right before camp, and this year was worse than most. This was her third year. Her last chance.
“And what if the rumors are true?” our mother was asking when Madeline and I came downstairs. “What if it runs in families?”
“Everything will be fine,” our father said, his tenor steady as the tides. “The men at camp know best.”
When they noticed us standing there, they smiled as if everything was perfectly normal. This was how they always looked. Our parents never screamed or cried or even frowned, except on Red Days, and this wasn’t a Red Day. This was a normal morning, and they were a normal mother and father.
“We hope to see you soon,” they said to Madeline before turning to me and adjusting my shoulders so I wouldn’t slouch.
“Did you make your bed?”
I smiled. “Of course.”
“You’re a liar,” Madeline said when we were alone on the sidewalk. “You haven’t made that bed in years.”
“Nope.” I looped my arm in hers. “And I never will.”
She laughed, and the crisp melody of her joy was like a most beautiful rapture.
“What a dreadful little sister I have,” she said, and hugged me so close I could barely breathe. Above us, a small red light pulsed at the top of the streetlamp. We pretended not to see it. We weren’t supposed to know about the neighborhood cameras. There were many things we shouldn’t know, but knew anyhow. Adults always thought kids were too stupid to figure out the truth, and sometimes, it was easier to let them go on believing that.
Up and down the sidewalk, other kids like us waited for the bus, and all the parents grinned from their front porches and bid us farewell. In five days, they would drive to camp and retrieve us—or retrieve most of us—but the yellow bus took us there. That was the rule.
For the bonding experience, said the official itinerary I’d memorized when it arrived in the mail last month. Your children must feel like they belong.
My heart fluttering in my throat, I waved once to our parents. Madeline never looked back to say goodbye.
***
Day One Itinerary
Arrival at Camp
Student Orientation
Snack
Lights Out
***
The bus was crowded and hot and smelled as salty as fresh tears. Everyone tittered in their seats, flinging insults and spit-balls. Most of the kids were fifteen like me, first years who’d never been to camp. Madeline was the only third year among us.
“Freak,” someone yelled at her, and the strident voices laughed in refrain.
She and I huddled together in the back. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll protect you.”
It was dusk when the camp came into view against a scrim of velvet mountains and skeletal trees. Years ago, kids spent June through August here, but now it was a revolving door of classes all summer. We filed off the bus past the last students, who were graduating in their bleached white tunics. They smiled and waved at us with an odd little salute. I waved back, but Madeline grasped my hand and pulled me away from them, marching us along the walkway and past a stout cabin. Next to it was a strange metal contraption the size of a work shed. Through a thin chimney, it spewed ash and smoke into the air.
“What’s that?” I asked, but Madeline said nothing.
At the entrance of the main lodge, a row of men arrayed in peacoats greeted us with stern faces. The air shimmered with July humidity, but even swathed in layers of wool, these figures never thawed.
“Welcome,” they said, but I didn’t believe them.
Inside, the lodge radiated pine cleaner and something vaguely rotten, like a mouse caught in last week’s trap. Posters covered every wall. One announcement listed the camp’s rules, and another said in black block letters, IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. My favorite featured a cartoon face with an animated expression and a slogan beneath it. You should smile all the time.
I grinned back at the poster, eager to oblige.
The lodge was Spartan and consisted of a large mess hall with long wooden benches for eating and listening to lectures, a narrow den filled with taxidermy animals, and our sleeping quarters, where rows of metal beds were lined up like graves.
The men in peacoats locked the doors behind the last student and handed us each a white tunic.
“Banish the old,” they said, and demanded we change right there in front of one another.
We were all red-faced at the idea, but we knew not to argue with government men, so Madeline sheltered me as I stripped down and yanked the muslin over my head.
After we were dressed and our old clothes discarded, the men ordered us to the wooden benches for orientation.
“Pay attention,” they said, and clicked off the lights. “There will be a test at the end.”
A gentleman with a serious face materialized on the screen alongside a little girl who smiled as though she’d never had a bad thought in her life.
“The best people are happy people,” the man said. “And at the end of your stay here, that’s exactly what you’ll be. A good child. A happy child.”
The little girl chortled. “And who wouldn’t want that?”
I scratched at the collar of my tunic. No wonder Madeline was glum. Three years of bad lectures and bad fashions would make anyone grumpy.
“These five days are the beginning of your new life,” the man in the video said, his face comically hangdog for someone lecturing on happiness. “A life free of pain, misery, and deceit.”
“Hear that, Arabella?” Madeline asked without inflection. “You’ll lose your favorite hobby. No more lying. No more make-believe.”
Her eyes glistened in the glow of the screen like she was ready to cry.
“It’s okay,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “I’ll find a new hobby.”
When the video was over, the men in peacoats distributed white wafer bars, and sent us to bed. In our shared room, the other kids gobbled down their snacks with gusto, but Madeline shook her head, and when no one was looking, she tucked both our wafers under her mattress.
“But I’m hungry,” I whined.
“Not safe,” she said.
I snuffed and leaned against the window. Outside, the metal chimney near the cabin no longer seeped ash. It was peaceful now.
At nine o’clock, the lights went out, and the others soon quieted. When the last voice faded to a murmur, I tossed off my sheets and crawled to Madeline.
“Back to your own bed,” she whispered. “Before someone sees.”
But I didn’t want to leave, so I coiled tighter around her and made little snoring noises as though I was already asleep.
“Faker,” she said, and pinched my arm until I giggled.
“Where should we go tonight?” I rested my head in the crook of her arm. “How about the moon, where we ca
n dine on craters of cheese? Or maybe Mars. We’ve never been to Mars.”
Madeline sighed. “We’ve never been anywhere, Arabella. Except our own neighborhood.”
“And here,” I said. “We’ve been here too.”
But this place wasn’t so different from home. On the ceiling, a camera winked at us in the darkness, its red light smoldering and strange like a distant, unknowable planet.
***
Day Two Itinerary
Breakfast
All-Day Lecture
Communal Supper
Lights Out
***
At breakfast, Madeline stared at the floor and ate nothing.
“The food is poison,” she said. “To make us more docile. Like livestock to the slaughter.”
I didn’t know if that was true, but I was too starved to care, so I devoured a heaping bowl of porridge. The mush was bland yet metallic.
Before the day’s lecture, the men in peacoats taught us a new kind of wave, the same one the graduating class used yesterday.
“It shows respect,” they said, which made sense, since I’d seen our parents do it whenever government men zoomed past on their daily patrols.
I perfected the movement, up and out with the arm, but Madeline’s hands rested in her lap.
“You’ll be sorry,” the men said.
The lights faded, and the little girl and serious-faced man were back with a diagram of a medical syringe.
“Shots are never pleasant,” the little girl said, and scrunched up her nose. “But it’s a small tradeoff for happiness, don’t you think?”
“And the good news,” the man said, “is once you’re treated successfully, you’re inoculated for life.”
“That means no more shots.” The little girl grinned. “Super cool, right?”
I scoffed. So far, nothing here was cool or fun.
Dinner that night was more porridge, bland as breakfast, and I choked down only half my rations. Madeline had nothing at all.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked, but she just shrugged.
The other kids were already asleep when the lights went out at nine. I was tired too, but I couldn’t rest, not without Madeline. I climbed up on her mattress, and pretended not to notice the tears streaking her cheeks.
And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe Page 9
