House of Glass

by Sophie Littlefield

  “All or nothing,” Jen repeated, the words tasting like metal.

  They had no reason to hold back now. And whatever shred of decency she’d thought she’d detected in Dan—the evidence that he was human, that he still operated from some moral code deep inside—she didn’t trust it now.

  “Well, what are we going to do, then?” Tanya said, standing. “We aren’t just going to sit here and let them come to us, Jennie. There is no fucking way we are going to do that.”

  She paced in front of the sofa. She reached in her pocket and pulled something out, something narrow that glinted in the dim bulb, something...familiar. It had a round loop at one end, a metal key ring, and she stuck her finger through it and twirled it around her finger nervously as she paced.

  “What...” Jen said, but the more she stared at the thing the fuzzier it got, the twirling arc of it making her dizzy, making her vision swim.

  “Oh, honey, you know what this is,” Tanya said, stopping in front of her. “Come on. Sid’s knife? I’ve carried it with me ever since that summer.”

  Jen stared, trying to fight through the swirling haze of memory and forgetting, of the past reaching out for her. It pixelated and scattered, grains of sand swept by the wind, leaving only what Tanya held in her hand. Near one end, something winked in the burnished metal, a coin of red, before Tanya jammed the thing back into her pocket.

  “Mom!” Livvy hissed, grabbing her wrist so hard that it hurt, yanking her back. “I hear them. They’re walking around again.”

  “We have to be ready,” Tanya said grimly.

  “But how?”

  “Well, we’re not just going to sit here and wait for them to come get us.” Tanya grabbed Jen’s hand and pulled her up.

  Livvy stood, too, the quilt falling from her shoulders to the floor. She put her hands through her mother’s and aunt’s arms, linking them all together.

  “I think I know what to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After Kate and her friend left, Teddy waited for Livvy, but she never came. Eventually the family he’d seen through the window came out of the restaurant, and one of the boys waved at him. Teddy followed them for a while, keeping his distance, but at the corner they crossed the street when the light was yellow, and by the time he got there it was red.

  He walked in the other direction, where the girls had gone, hoping he could find them. But the streets were almost empty. An elderly couple got into a car and drove away. Teddy decided that if someone asked him if he was lost, he would say yes now. He would nod his head and if they still didn’t understand, he would try to use his words.

  But no one else came along. Teddy walked down the empty street, passing all of the shops that were closed for the night. When he got to the corner, there was a store whose entrance was shielded from the wind and cold. For a long time Teddy stood in the entrance, hoping someone would come along. Finally he got tired and sat down, pulling the coat’s hem over his knees and shrugging his hands inside the sleeves to keep warm. But the tiled floor was too cold even with the coat, and Teddy started to cry. The mucus from his nose froze and became crunchy and painful. He wondered if Livvy and Mom and Dad were all looking for him now, unable to find him, and the thought made him cry harder.

  After a while he stopped crying and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of the coat. He tried the door to the store, but it was locked. He looked in the windows. Inside, a few lights were on, illuminating window displays. One mannequin wore a dress and black boots and a jacket and a purple scarf. The scarf looked like it would be really fuzzy. Her plastic wrists held several bracelets. In the other window was an orange purse with a big tag sticking out of the top. There were other things, too, shoes and socks and jewelry. Things his mom might like.

  If his mom was here, she would rub his fingers and his toes between her warm hands and they would tingle as they warmed up. She would make cocoa on the stove and let him put in the marshmallows, as many as he wanted. She would wrap him up in the soft green blanket and say “Where did your arms go, Teddy? Oh, no!”

  Teddy lay down inside the coat. He pulled the hood more tightly around his face and closed his eyes. A little while later he put his fingers in his mouth. He had promised Mom he wouldn’t do that anymore, but he was very sad right now, and sucking on his fingers made him feel a little better. Inside the hood, his face was warm. He had drifted off to sleep when he heard people yelling.

  Teddy sat up and saw three teenage boys across the street, sitting by the bushes at the end of a parking lot. One boy was on a skateboard, rolling it slowly back and forth, and the others were sitting on the curb. One of them had leaned a bike against a light pole, a trick bike with a low seat and thick tires. Teddy decided he wanted a bike like that when he got old enough.

  The boys were smoking, which Teddy knew was one of the worst things you could do. Also, none of them were wearing helmets. Teddy wondered if their parents knew that they were riding around without helmets.

  A police car pulled up across the street with its signal casting a strobe of blue light. The boys leaped up and scattered. One of them jumped on the bike and pedaled away, and the other two ran, leaving the skateboard behind. They made it around the side of the building, dodging trash cans, and disappeared.

  Two policemen got out of the car, not hurrying. One of them picked up the skateboard and said something to the other policeman and they laughed. Teddy stood up uncertainly. His mom had always told him he could go to a policeman for help anytime he was lost or scared. She said he didn’t need to be afraid of them, and that he could tell a policeman anything. She had shown him how to talk to a policeman. Teddy pretended to be a police officer, and Mom pretended that she was lost and afraid, and she practiced saying her name and their address. She said he could practice, too, and they had switched and then Mom got to pretend to be a police officer. She was good at it. Teddy thought she would be a really good policeman.

  Teddy walked slowly toward the policemen, his heart pounding. He was a little bit afraid of crossing the street, even though there were no cars. He looked both ways, left, right, left again. He started across the street, and one of the policemen noticed him.

  “Hey,” the policeman said, looking surprised. “Hey, what have we got here?”

  When Teddy got close, both officers bent down so they could look at his face. The light on top of their car was still lashing the street with its light, making Teddy blink.

  “Hey, where’d you come from? One of those guys your brother?” The policeman pointed in the direction where the boys had run. But Teddy didn’t have a brother, and even if he did, his mom would never let him come out here at night.

  “You out here by yourself?”

  “Where are your parents? Are you lost?”

  The officers took turns asking questions, and Teddy pushed his lips together and tried not to start crying again. He hoped they would let him get in their car. He wondered if they had the heat on. The sleeves of the borrowed coat dragged along the ground and, too late, Teddy wondered if they would think he had stolen it.

  “Did someone bring you here?” The policeman was talking slower now. He was starting to look worried. “Hey, listen, son, what’s your name?”

  Teddy opened his mouth and made the shape of his name. There were two clicks with his tongue, for the ‘t’ and ‘d’ sounds. He had practiced it many times before with Mrs. Tierney.

  “I can’t hear you, little guy. Can you tell me your name?” The other policeman seemed nice. His nose was pink, and he had ears that stuck out from his head, and he was smiling encouragingly.

  Teddy shook his head. He didn’t think he could say his name right now.

  But he was so cold, and maybe, definitely, those guys that came to the house were gone by now, and Teddy just wanted to be home with his family. Teddy pushed out his breath the way Mrs. Ti
erney showed him to do when he was feeling scared.

  “Do.”

  Teddy was surprised. Mrs. Tierney said the words were in there when he was ready to use them. At home, with his family, he never thought about where the words came from. But with other people, they stayed stuck inside.

  He tried it again. “Do.”

  “Do?” the first cop said, like it was a question.

  Teddy pushed out his breath again and then he said, “Do you know my mom?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Inches away, Tanya’s eyes shone in the faint light that seeped behind the stairs. Tanya had the gift of stillness. She’d always been able to keep her body motionless. Jen was restless, a fidgeter, and her thighs and ankles were cramping from crouching so long under the stairs.

  She couldn’t see Livvy’s face. Through the spaces between the steps she could make out only the curve of her bare shoulder, the quilt that had slipped off her as she dozed in the chair, revealing the swell of her breasts under the thin tank top that Jen had found in the giveaway box.

  Of course, Livvy wasn’t really asleep, and the quilt hadn’t slipped down by accident. Livvy had arranged it very carefully after dragging the chair over near the wall so that someone coming down the stairs couldn’t avoid seeing her lying there. She’d moved the lamp, too, so that she’d be bathed in light, almost spotlighted once they turned off the overhead bulb.

  Jen worried that the plan was too contrived, too obvious, but she’d been outnumbered. After listening to Livvy’s idea, Tanya agreed that it was their best shot, and when Jen questioned whether the plan had any chance of working, she said “Come on, Jennie, they’re men. They’re driven by what’s in their pants.”

  Because men, to her sister, were all alike, unable to ignore their animal natures. When Jen suggested that while Ryan would be distracted by the sight of her half-clothed daughter, Dan might have other things on his mind, Tanya only snorted.

  Jen and Tanya crouched side by side under the stairs and didn’t speak. As the minutes ticked by, Jen decided that it would be better if it was Dan who came down to kill them, and not Ryan. For one thing, he was slower and clumsier, more likely to hesitate when she and Tanya made their move. And she couldn’t help thinking he was more likely to feel guilty and uncomfortable at the sight of her daughter stretched out seductively.

  At last, when Jen’s knees were numb and her ankles quaked from the uncomfortable position she was holding, they heard a sound at the top of the stairs, the key being turned in the lock, the squeak as the door opened on its hinges.

  Tanya reached for Jen’s hand and gave it a squeeze, a final encouragement, a promise to stay by her side. They heard footfalls on the stairs, slow and heavy, and Jen knew it had to be Dan.

  “Jen?” he called. His voice was heavy, freighted with inevitability and exhaustion. “Aw, Livvy,” he muttered as he descended, and Jen knew that she’d been right, that it wasn’t lust that stirred in him when he looked at her daughter, but the weight of what he had to do.

  But she also had a job to do. As his foot landed on the step in front of her face, she reached through the space between the stairs and grabbed his ankle, her hand closing around the smooth twill cuffs of her husband’s trousers. She yanked with all her might, and he stumbled, cursing as he scrambled to keep his footing, but Jen held on. Tanya made a sound like a rabid dog tearing the throat out of a rabbit and jammed their father’s knife into the back of Dan’s ankle, and Jen felt the tendon snap like a fistful of rubber bands, and he screamed and fell down the stairs.

  Livvy had burst out of her pretend slumber the minute Dan stumbled, diving to the floor and rolling out of the way. As he went down, he shot the chair where she’d been lying a second earlier. A second bullet struck the wall, chipping the cinder block.

  Jen still had his pants cuff in her fist, and she held on for dear life, even as he kicked at her with his good leg, smashing her knuckles. His hips were on the bottom step, his torso on the floor, his arms flailing. He kept screaming as Tanya seized his ruined ankle and kept slashing at it. Jen let go and scrambled around the stairs in time to see her daughter kick Dan’s face, landing a square blow to his jaw. It made a cracking sound, like snapping kindling for a fire. He kept yelling until Livvy kicked him a second time and then the sounds he made were more like wailing. Blood bubbled between his lips, and Jen figured he’d bitten his tongue. She hoped he’d bitten it clear through.

  “Quick, get his gun,” Tanya yelled. Dan grabbed Livvy’s leg, and she lost her balance and went down hard barely two feet away. He managed to jerk his leg free from Tanya and rolled onto his stomach, and Jen watched in horror as he struggled up onto his elbow, never letting go of his gun.

  The door at the top of the stairs banged against the wall, and Ryan clattered down the stairs. He managed two shots before he reached the bottom, but they went wide since he was trying to avoid hitting Dan. He stomped hard on Tanya’s wrist, which still jutted through the stairs, and she screamed as Dan barked something and fired.

  Tanya’s body bucked and lurched, her head banging on the stairs above her, and then she slumped down to the floor, as formless as a bag of rice.

  Livvy screamed, and Jen crawled the last few feet to her daughter, covering her with her body. Dan tried to get to his feet, and collapsed in pain, his gun falling to the floor and sliding out of reach, his useless foot twisted grotesquely. Ryan bounded over him and crouched inches away from Jen.

  Up close, she could see a faint sprinkling of red along his hairline, the shadow of the acne that must have plagued him as an adolescent. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the shot.

  “Look at me!” Ryan shouted. Jen could smell his breath, hot and sour in her face. Livvy struggled to get out from under her, writhing and trying to push her off. But Jen would protect her daughter until her heart stopped beating. Her body would stop a bullet before it could reach Livvy, and if that was the cost of a few more seconds of her daughter’s precious life, she’d pay.

  “I said, look!” Ryan grabbed her neck, his thumb crushing her windpipe, shaking her. She opened her eyes and stared at him, taking in the foamy spittle at the corner of his mouth, the bottom teeth that crowded and pushed against each other. He had a faint scar under his chin.

  “Do you have any idea how fucked up this is? Huh?” More shaking. “This is all on you. Not me, you!” He waved the gun around the basement. “You got enough shit down here for a whole other house. You want to know what’s in my mom’s living room? A La-Z-Boy she pisses in when she’s drunk and a TV that weighs like five hundred pounds. How’s that fair?”

  Underneath her, Livvy went still for a second, and Jen thought she’d hurt her somehow, crushed the breath from her, but then she felt her daughter’s hands at the back of her own head. She gave a mighty shove and Jen’s neck snapped forward and her forehead smashed into Ryan’s face, so hard she saw stars. The gun went off, and Ryan cursed and let go of her throat. Jen’s vision had gone blurry, but she dived for the floor, trying to find Livvy’s hand to drag her down with her.

  Jen called her daughter’s name and blinked until her vision cleared. Ryan had his hand over his wrecked nose and blood was pouring through his fingers. He was on his knees, his free hand frantically scrabbling around on the floor. Livvy dived, fast and sleek like when she was on the soccer field, and came up with his gun in her hand.

  “Mom—” she yelled, but Jen was already there. She grabbed the gun from her daughter and watched Ryan spin on his knees, realization dawning in his eyes as his hand fell away from his nose. Jen curled her finger around the trigger, and was surprised by how easy it was, the way they made these things so that a nice lady from the suburbs who’d never fired so much as a Super Soaker would know exactly what to do. She squeezed, and the blast rocked back through her shoulder.

  Half of Ryan’s face disappeared.


  A grunt behind her made Jen turn just in time to see Dan up on his hands and knees, crawling painfully toward his own gun, dragging his bloody leg. He had almost reached it when Livvy kicked it, and the gun went skittering across the concrete floor, spinning in a lazy circle as it slid, bouncing off the base of the shelves. Livvy stomped Dan’s hand and then jumped out of the way.

  “Don’t you move,” Jen screamed. “Dan, don’t you do it.”

  He was crying out in pain, holding his smashed hand close to his body. It was already swollen, the skin angry purple, and Jen hoped her daughter had broken every bone.

  “Livvy, back up,” she said, needing her daughter outside the field of bodies. Tanya was sprawled next to the stairs, with one foot flung awkwardly over the other, an arm across her face. Ryan had fallen on his side, mercifully hiding the gore where his face had been. Dan was sinking slowly onto his stomach, whimpering and clutching his hand.

  It was clear that Dan was beaten. Jen looked down at the gun in her hand. She turned it over so that she was looking at her fingers wrapped around the grip, her manicure still perfect except for a small chip in the polish of her ring finger.

  She pointed the gun at Dan, aiming at his chest.

  Dan had brought evil into her home. He’d shot her husband and her sister, and Jen would never have another chance to find her way back to them. Because of him, she had lost the two people who had loved her more than anyone else in the world.

  Shooting Ryan hadn’t exactly been a challenge, given that he was only a foot away, although she couldn’t even remember aiming. But she’d done it. She had killed him. A shudder passed through Jen’s body, a loosening of her bones. She’d taken a life, a life that had once meant something to someone.

  The young man she’d killed—whatever his real name was—he deserved to die, after what he’d done to her family: shooting her husband, allowing her son to escape, forcing her daughter to endure two days of terror.