Open House: A Novel

by Katie Sise

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?” The bare skin on my arms feels cold and itchy, and I pull the blanket higher.

  “I mean, you know, your art and stuff,” Josie says. “What about our plan to live together in New York after school’s done?”

  “What does Noah have to do with that?” I ask. She shrugs, and I try to picture what it’s going to be like when we graduate, when we make it to New York and live in an apartment together and try to get our paintings into shows. But lately when I try to imagine some great future for myself as an artist, I just can’t do it. I try to conjure up the images: me walking the streets of New York City, meeting new people, and painting new things. But no matter how hard I try to fill in the spaces with everything I’ve always wanted, it all looks blank.

  NINE

  Haley

  An hour after Haley and her mom delivered the news to her dad, Haley sat alone on the worn carpet in the Waverly public library and worried about how hard he’d taken it. She was sitting on the floor and leaning against the stacks of books, her butt asleep, when she got a text from Josie’s brother.

  Got something to drop off for you from Noah. You home?

  Haley exhaled, not wanting to communicate with anyone right now. She pulled her knees tighter against her chest. I’m at the library, she texted back, thinking that would end the communication, but instead Chris shot back a reply.

  I can be there in five. See you soon.

  Haley sat up straighter against the shelves. Books pressed their spines into hers. I’m on the second floor, she texted back, and then tapped her fingertips against the scratchy carpet. She tried to breathe, inhaling the mustiness of the library she’d loved as a little girl. Her mind had been spinning ever since her meeting with Rappaport. She’d told Dean she wanted to be alone, and when he blanched, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to want to be alone so much, certainly not after what had happened at the police station and then with her father. She still saw her dad’s body like a silhouette in her mind: slumped forward, shoulders heaving as he wept. She knew Dean wanted to be the person to comfort her, and she’d let him, listening as he told her over and over that this was the news she’d been waiting for, the news that confirmed what she knew about Emma’s death to be true. But now she desperately needed to be alone, and to think.

  Haley heard Chris before she saw him. It was a quiet library, and the sound of his work boots climbing the rickety stairs made her rise unsteadily. She leaned against a bookshelf, but the angle felt awkward, and as she straightened, Chris emerged and caught her standing there. If she appeared strange to him—waiting in the middle of a row of books, her arms crossed over her chest—he didn’t let on. “Haley,” he said. The carpet muted the sounds of his boots as he walked toward her. When he stopped, Haley was grateful for the few feet he kept between them.

  “Are those for me?” she asked, glancing down at the brochures in his hand, surprised at how nervous she felt. But Chris didn’t pass her the brochures. Instead, he brought a hand quickly over his mouth, as if he were brushing something off, and said, “I wanted to talk to you.” He looked morbidly uncomfortable, and Haley waited for him to say something. They’d never been alone together.

  “I got called in to the police station,” he finally said, his blue eyes locked on hers, lashes blinking. “We all did, you know?”

  “Josie and Noah, too?” Haley asked.

  Chris nodded. Why hadn’t Josie or Noah said anything to her? “And?” Haley asked, trying to keep the territorial snap out of her voice. She didn’t want anyone else talking about her sister. Emma belonged to Haley and her parents, not to them.

  “I was high that night at the party in the woods,” Chris said, his words hushed.

  “You and everyone else,” Haley replied, more gently this time.

  “I’m just trying to say that I don’t remember much,” Chris said. “I really liked your sister, but I always thought she, you know, I thought what everyone else thought.”

  Haley wanted to cover her ears with her hands like a child. Why was he here?

  “The things she said to me this one night we got together . . .” Chris went on, and Haley’s heart picked up speed.

  “I didn’t realize you’d ever been more than friends,” she said.

  “We weren’t,” Chris said quickly. “Trust me.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Haley said before she could think better of it, but Chris didn’t seem to take it personally.

  “I know what it’s like to lose someone,” he said, running his hand through his dark hair. “I think you know me and Josie lost our dad. Well, my dad, Josie’s stepdad. And Josie lost her mom, too. My dad didn’t treat Josie right after her mom died, because he never wanted her in the first place. He took stuff out on Josie, stuff that wasn’t her fault.”

  “I’m sorry,” Haley managed. Maybe he wasn’t the enemy.

  “Your sister was . . .” He started again, and when his voice trailed off, Haley waited. She’d learned how to listen in the hospital. You had to keep your mouth shut when you were with a patient; they couldn’t tell you what you needed to know if you were blathering on with advice and medical knowledge. Chris’s gaze went to the bookshelf, and Haley watched him scan the biographies. Finally he turned back to Haley and said, “That night we got together, your sister was so drunk, but the things she said were a little scary. I didn’t take advantage of her or anything, with her being that drunk. That’s not what I mean. I’m just telling you she was drunk so you understand she was telling me stuff she maybe wouldn’t have otherwise, and it was bleak.”

  “Like what?” Haley asked, but Chris just shrugged, clearly agitated.

  “I don’t remember all the specifics,” he said. “A lot of it was about how she couldn’t paint the same way at Yarrow, how her head wasn’t right. I remember she said she felt suffocated, but I didn’t really understand by what.”

  Tears started somewhere behind Haley’s eyes. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  The brochures fluttered as Chris clenched and unclenched his fist. “I’m just trying to figure out what the cops have,” he said, a twitch starting near his upper lip. “What they’re getting at with all these crazy questions ten years later.”

  Haley didn’t answer him. “What did you tell them?” she asked instead.

  “Nothing new,” Chris said. “I was at that party obviously, but so were a ton of kids. And everyone was messed up. Anything could have happened.”

  Anything could have happened to that girl. There it was again. But Chris didn’t sound judgmental of Emma; he sounded like someone who understood that college was a fragile, precarious time. Blackout binge drinking, drugs, sex: Haley didn’t understand how parents of college students could sleep at night.

  “Look, Chris,” Haley said. “I’ve never thought my sister killed herself. So you’re talking to the wrong person if you’re looking for reassurance that she wasn’t killed by one of your friends at the party.”

  Chris’s cheeks flushed. “It’s not that,” he said. “Those people weren’t even my friends, except Josie and Emma, I mean.”

  Haley thought back to Chris at Yarrow with his mop of black hair and dingy clothes. After Josie’s freshman year, Chris moved three hours east from their hometown to Waverly and worked in an auto body shop. He didn’t seem to have anyone else in his life but Josie. The problem, of course, was how he clashed with all the college guys Emma and Josie were friends with. Their lofty, academic egos fed his insecurities like a shot of sugar.

  “That night we hooked up, your sister told me how tired and anxious she’d been; she kept saying she just wanted to go to sleep,” Chris said, breaking through Haley’s thoughts. “And I already told the cops all of this back then when they questioned me, but on the night she disappeared in the woods, she told me she was scared. But not of someone specific. She said she was scared at how everything was about to change.
”

  Haley felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. “Surely you couldn’t have taken those words for some kind of goodbye,” she said.

  “In the moment I didn’t,” Chris said, his gaze still so far away, like he could still hear Emma telling him. “But in retrospect . . .”

  “I’m sure it was easier for everyone, including you, to believe she did it to herself,” Haley said. “The school, all her friends. But not my family.”

  “And maybe that’s why you’re so convinced she didn’t,” he said.

  “Are we done?” Haley asked.

  “I’m just saying, it’s normal to want to protect yourself.”

  “I’m not normal,” Haley said. “I’ve never been, even before my sister disappeared. And I’m not sure what you want me to say. That it’s all in the past, and the cops are getting at nothing? I don’t believe that, but I get why you might want to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Do the cops think I did something to her?”

  “Did you do something to her?”

  Chris’s eyes flickered to the floor. “No. Though I suppose you have no reason to believe me.”

  “I don’t,” Haley said. “Murderers usually lie.”

  “You’re cold,” Chris said, his gaze darkening, angry now.

  Haley shrugged. “Emma was the nice one,” she said. “Should I take those?” she asked, pointing to the brochures he still held.

  “Yeah, okay,” Chris said, flustered. He passed them into her waiting hands, and she was thankful. It made it easier, really, to pretend their meeting hadn’t been about something else entirely.

  TEN

  Emma

  Ten years ago

  I wake to darkness.

  I can still feel the pressure of Chris’s hands on me from the dream I just had, and I try hard to fully wake up. Sometimes after I get too drunk, the memories flood back with nebulous shapes and blurred edges, but after that night with Chris, there were no memories, only these dreams I keep having where he kisses me and tells me I should be with him, not Noah.

  I feel pain in my temples like I’m hungover, even though I’m not. I pull the covers tighter around me, and Josie shifts in the bunk bed below mine. I can tell she’s awake by the way she’s breathing. The only time she and I can really sleep is during these early evening naps. We climb into bed when it’s still light out, and then wake hours later from a syrupy sleep to a pitch-black sky. When I wake, I don’t know where I am or how I got there, or if something terrible happened while I was unconscious. But the feeling melts away quickly enough that I forget and sleep again the next day. It’s too easy to forget about the despair that follows something that feels so good in the moment.

  “Sister?” Josie whispers. We started calling ourselves sister because Josie doesn’t have a real one, and we like how it makes us feel when we say it, like we’re tied by something greater than ordinary friendship.

  “Yes, Sister?” I echo back. Of course, I’m careful not to call Josie that in front of Haley because she would probably take it as a diss.

  I lean my head over the side of my bunk, and my long, inky hair drapes like a curtain. Moonlight splashes across Josie’s pillow and silhouettes her like a halo. I’m pretty sure Josie lied back in August when we moved in together. Getting the top bunk sucks—everyone knows that—but Josie told me she fell out of the bed sometimes, which meant she really needed that bottom bunk to be hers. I’d shrugged and said, “Then let’s debunk the beds,” but instead of being easy—sure, fine, swell idea—Josie had said, “But then we won’t have room for a sofa and a mini fridge.”

  So we did what she said. She’s sort of the boss of us. I wish I could be stoic and matter-of-fact the way she is, but there are so many little decisions with their potential for big outcomes, and it’s paralyzing, really: to think that any one choice could be the thing that does you in. You could die based on a whim, or some flippant choice you make, or careless thought said out loud to the wrong person. Last year I tried to be good and volunteer at a homeless shelter, but one of the homeless women followed me back to my dorm and started screaming nonsense stuff about Prada bags. (I wasn’t carrying one or anything like that. I don’t even own one, and even if I did, I would never be rude enough to carry it to a homeless shelter.) You have to watch your back, Josie said to me as the woman was carted off by campus security. Josie was the one who had the common sense to call them—she’s an expert at taking care of unpleasantness.

  Now she sits up so her eyes are even with my upside-down ones.

  “You’re not sleeping anymore, Sister,” she says, and her blinking lashes are still so black with mascara I can make them out even in the moonlight. “So let’s go out. Yes?”

  “Let’s go out,” I echo back. Our bunk creaks as I kick off my sheets.

  We’re juniors, and about half of our class still lives on campus, but the other half moved off. Josie and I stayed on campus because we thought it would be a surprising move, and we liked to be surprising. Not that we really had that many friends asking us to live with them. We’re a packaged duo, everyone knows that, and other girls mostly shy away from Josie because she’s that beautiful and intimidating. Plus, staying on campus was cheaper, and we were broke.

  “Noah’s place?” I ask, descending the ladder, thinking once again about how Josie’s never fallen out of her lower bunk.

  “Do you have money?” she asks.

  I turn on my desk lamp and dig in my top drawer. We probably won’t need money tonight, but my mom taught me to carry an emergency twenty dollars, so I open my wallet and stuff a ten into my back pocket and another into Josie’s sweaty hand. The only time she gets hot is when she sleeps. She also has nightmares and screams out stuff like He’s right there!

  I flip the switch, and light floods our room, illuminating my canvas propped against the door of our closet. I feel sick seeing it there, but I can’t take my eyes off it: the small dog next to the immaculate hunting pony, which I thought was ironic, now looks flat and boring and too classic in the worst way.

  “The shadows are all wrong,” I say, my voice wavering.

  “The light’s terrible in here,” Josie says. She knows I’m not talking about something the light in the room can fix, but she doesn’t want me to get upset. You’re so emotional, she’s always saying, like it’s a curse. Getting depressed seems to be a grave fault of mine, at least according to my mom and Josie. Last year my mother took me to a psychiatrist and said, “He’ll know what to do with you,” but he didn’t. Or maybe I didn’t say the right things. I wanted him to give me medication to stop everything that felt so very sad, but he recommended therapy first, and somehow the idea of that exhausted me so much I told my mom he said I was fine. She believed me.

  The hunting pony stares back at us, too perfect for his own good.

  Josie’s a better artist than me. It’s something I think she knows but would never speak of. Her work is textured and deconstructed. She tears materials to threads, and then reassembles them into color patterns birthed from her fingertips, making something no one else saw possible. Every professor we have drools over her except for Priya Khatri, our watercolor teacher, which is one of many reasons I like Priya’s class the best. Josie’s talent makes me jealous, but it also makes me love her even more, and not in the way anyone would think: I don’t want her to be my girlfriend or something like that. I just want to be close to her.

  “I need to shower,” I say.

  Josie makes a face like Really? but then she shrugs and goes to our sink. She turns the faucet on, and the sound of water fills our tiny room. I wait until she starts splashing her face, knowing her back will be turned long enough for me to dig in my bottom drawer and get what I need.

  “Are you sure Noah’s home?” Josie asks, her voice muffled in her hands. “Did you talk to him?”

  I rifle inside the plastic bag. “They’re having people over, not just us,” I say, trying to sound casual.

  “You think you’
re gonna get me into the woods, don’t you?” Josie asks.

  I whip around to face her. Noah and I had been talking about going to a party in the woods tonight because the temperature’s finally in the forties and a bunch of his lacrosse friends are going. I didn’t tell Josie that, because she’s scared of the woods, and we thought we’d have a better chance of convincing her if we were all together at Noah’s apartment and she was already drinking. The guys have food, drinks, and a tent packed in Noah’s Jeep in case we decide to sleep there, and my job is making sure Josie wears her long puffer coat.

  “Maybe,” I say, trying not to smile. It’s funny seeing something that makes Josie nervous, and it’s so random: she grew up in the country, for God’s sake. How is she so afraid of the outdoors?

  She rolls her eyes. “You and Noah aren’t as sneaky as you think you are,” she says, but there’s no menace in her voice because she’s so sure she’s right. When she turns back to the sink, I stuff the pregnancy test into my purse. There’s a chance she asks why I’m bringing my bag into the bathroom, but she probably won’t, and I need to do it tonight because I need to know if it’s real; I need to know if that’s why I’ve been feeling so off these past weeks, and I need to know before I see either of them. If it’s real, if there’s a baby in there, I know whose it is without a doubt, because my cycle is like clockwork, and obviously I know the days to avoid having sex.

  I can’t even imagine how upset my parents will be.

  Josie turns from the sink and stares at me like she can read my thoughts. Water beads all over her face. “I’ll go to the woods,” she says. “I’ll invite Chris. He knows those woods like the back of his hand.” She says it a little too proudly, like it’s an important feat, and then adds, “I’ll feel safer with him there.”

  “Okay,” I say, nervous. Does she know I kissed him? “It’ll be a good night,” I say, but it doesn’t feel like the truth.

  We stare at each other, and I force a smile. Then I turn and leave her standing alone at the sink. My legs are trembling as I head down the long hallway to the girls’ room, and before I get there my phone buzzes with a text from Haley.