In the Garden of Discontent

by Lily White

  I pushed to my feet after burying the jar and stared at Ensley’s house.

  It would be so easy to set the place on fire. I had the lighter in my pocket, could use her secrets as the kindling. The house was a mess of dry rot and lack of care. It wouldn’t take much for it to go up, the flames so high, Ens could see them from wherever she was. They could welcome her back and promise her freedom. She would no longer be bound or chained.

  But the kids...

  That was the hard part. I couldn’t hurt them. They hadn’t lived a great life either. I still heard their mother every day, would still hear those kids crying. I wondered how long it would take Tammy to begin abusing one of them when she didn’t have Ensley to torture anymore.

  I rounded the fence again to walk to the other side of my house where a burn barrel sat. We only used it during the spring and summer to get rid of yard waste, but it would work for destroying Ensley’s secrets. I looked forward to watching them burn.

  My fingers were dirty from burying the jar, but I shoved a hand inside my pocket anyway and pulled out the lighter to hold a flame to the edge of the crumpled notes.

  At the same second I flicked the flint wheel, I heard a familiar noise out front.

  I dropped the paper into the barrel, watching the flames for only a second before walking to the front of my house to peek around the corner.

  How long had it been since I’d heard that airbrake? I couldn’t remember the last time Ensley’s father had come home.

  He’d aged since I last saw him, had grown thicker in the middle while his hair thinned on top. I wasn’t sure what made him decide to pull that semi up to the front of the house, but he was storming out of it now, his hands in fists, and his feet stomping across weeds that hadn’t seen a mower in months and up those rickety ass stairs that should have crumbled into a mess of rusted nails, splinters and dust.

  For a second, I considered calling out to him and running over. I thought about telling him everything his daughter had gone through because he couldn’t be bothered to stop by every once in a while to see what her life was like. But I didn’t because I hated the man so much for his lack of concern that I wanted him to drop dead right there beside Tammy for what he’d done.

  He was as much at fault for Ensley’s problems as her mother.

  Fucker was pissed, though.

  As soon as he barged inside that house, he slammed the door so hard it was a crack of lightning that echoed down the empty street. Their shouting started a few seconds later, and I stood in the shadows to listen.

  What the fuck was going on?

  Hell if I knew. I couldn’t make out what they were saying from where I stood. I only knew they must have saved up their arguments over the time he’d been gone to have it all out here and now.

  From behind me, I heard the crackle of burning wood and turned to see those notes had caught the branches in the burn barrel on fire, the flames rising higher than my roof.

  It was the middle of December, only a week or so away from Christmas. It wasn’t yet cold enough for those flames to be any comfort, but the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, bending those flames to lick at my house.

  Grabbing the hose, I twisted the spigot when I heard Ensley’s brothers and sisters start screaming, their voices just a bare whisper beneath the shouting of their parents. I wondered if they were trying to stop the fight, but then the kids went silent, there and then gone.

  In a normal neighborhood that noise would have drawn all the neighbor’s attention, but we were used to the insanity of Ensley’s house.

  The water from the hose had reduced the flames to smoke when I heard Tammy scream again, Ensley’s dad’s voice booming over her voice just before the first gunshot cracked across the distance.

  My head snapped in the direction of the sound just before another gunshot forced me to drop the hose and start running.

  The only concern I had was that Ensley returned home and one of those shots had been at her.

  I’d never run so fast in my life.

  Breathless, I ran up the porch steps two at a time, not giving much of a shit if my feet punched through them. I slammed a hand against the front door to slow myself down, my other hand twisting the knob.

  Throwing the door open, I stopped dead in my tracks, unsure what horror hit me first.

  Was it the bodies that lay on the ground, their eyes frozen in terror while their blood pooled around them? Or was it the iron scent of their blood that slammed against me so hard my stomach revolted and bile coated my throat?

  Near the hallway, Ensley’s siblings lay dead, practically piled on top of one another, their throats slashed with such strength that they looked to be decapitated. A knife lay in the pool of blood beside them, just dropped there after they’d been killed.

  On the other side of the living room, Ensley’s father lay dead, his stomach tore open by a bullet that must have entered his back and exploded when it exited. My eyes crawled up to where he’d been shot again, a small hole in his forehead and the back of his head missing.

  “He killed them. He killed my babies.”

  My head turned right, the only part of my body I dared move because the sight of Tammy was the most disturbing.

  She stood in the center of the living room in that damn white robe she always wore. It was open in the center, the belt not in place, and she wore nothing underneath. I glanced down to see blood staining the bottom of her robe red, a slow crawl up as the fabric absorbed the blood of her children that had traveled in a slow flowing river over uneven floors.

  Tammy’s hands shook, one clenching at the fabric of her robe while the other was wrapped over the handle of a gun, her finger still precariously perched over the trigger.

  My eyes flicked up to her face to see a red splotch over her cheek and eye, a bruise taking shape from where she’d been hit.

  From the vacancy in her stare, I could tell that the evil bitch had finally lost her fucking mind.

  One wrong move or one wrong word and I knew I would become one of the bodies on the ground. Yet my only thought was worry for how Ensley would shatter apart to find that the kids she’d destroyed herself to protect all her life had suffered a horrible death.

  “I didn’t want to shoot him. You have to believe me. I didn’t want to do it. But he wouldn’t stop, Noah. He wouldn’t stop.”

  Her hand shook more and clenched around that gun.

  “He never loved my kids. Not once. He didn’t care. So who the fuck was he to come to my house and bitch about the way I raised them? He wasn’t here to help. He didn’t give a damn that I had to whore myself out just to feed their faces. He didn’t give a fuck.”

  While I didn’t really care that Ensley’s dad was dead, I still wasn’t sure he deserved what he got. If anybody deserved to be lying in a pool of blood, it was the bitch standing in front of me.

  Raising my hands to my sides to show her I had no part in this, I moved slowly to take a step back just before she pointed the gun at me.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I stopped, my mind working out the odds of whether I could move fast enough to knock the gun from her hand.

  She smiled, almost as if she could tell what I was thinking.

  “You should have stayed outside. Why are you trying to leave? Are you going to call the cops? They need to know that he killed my babies. That he tried to kill me and I shot him.”

  My brows tugged together.

  “I wasn’t planning on calling anybody.”

  “Liar!” she screamed, her hand shaking while the barrel of the gun was pointed at me. “You’re hoping they’ll arrest me just so you can have Ensley all to yourself.”

  Laughter shook her body, and her robe opened to reveal more skin. I had to train my eyes on her face to keep from noticing the nastiness of the bitch’s naked body. It was not an image any person would want to see.

  Tammy took a step forward and waved that gun at me again, her finger dangerously stro
king the trigger.

  “You like fucking her. Don’t you, Noah? You’ve been sticking it in my daughter for years, and I haven’t said a thing about it. How dare you come in here and judge me?”

  “I’m not judging anything,” I lied. “I’m just trying to walk away and pretend I didn’t see any of this.”

  It was hard to swallow down the knot of fear in my throat, hard to silence the thought that kept whispering in my mind that Ensley could return home any second.

  Would her mother pull that trigger if she came walking through the door?

  And if so, would she kill Ensley after killing me?

  “Tammy-“

  “No! Don’t you Tammy me, you little shit. You’re probably happy that this happened. You’re the one that called that son of a bitch, aren’t you? You’re the reason he came back and this happened.”

  “I didn’t call anyone,” I promised, my body completely still while hers continued to shake where she stood.

  Tears burst from her eyes, and she dropped the gun to her side, her head turning to look at her children’s bodies.

  “My babies,” she keened as if the kids had ever mattered to her, which I was sure they hadn’t.

  Tammy padded barefoot over to them, her feet stained by the pooling blood. I should have used that moment to turn from the house and run, but I couldn’t stop staring at a woman who deserved the fate her kids had suffered.

  How was it fair that she was the only one left alive?

  Her empty hand reached out as if to touch Lena’s face, a tear sliding from Tammy’s eye to crawl down her skin and run along her jaw.

  Tammy turned to me then, lifted the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

  My body jerked back like I’d been the one shot, my jaw falling open and my eyes rounding to watch her body fall down into the pool of blood.

  But she wasn’t dead yet.

  See, there’s a thing about shooting yourself that most people don’t know. The only reason I knew was because of Ensley’s weird obsession with death and the documentaries we would watch.

  You have to hold the gun at the proper angle for a quick death, but if you fail to do so, you can blow off half your face and maybe part of your frontal lobe but still be alive and kicking.

  That was Tammy’s fate, her body twitching with half her face gone, her robe now stained from bottom to top in the pool of her children’s blood.

  I didn’t feel sorry for her, and I stood there for a minute or two just watching the bitch suffer because she couldn’t even do that right. But then I thought about Ensley and how she would react if she walked into the house to see the gruesome truth of what happened to her family.

  The deaths alone would fracture her mind more than it already was, but to see her mother flopping around in that condition would be too fucking much.

  It was an absolute horror show, and I won’t lie, I wanted to see the bitch dead and gone for what she’d done to our lives.

  That need to see her dead tugged at me a little too hard, it dragged me into that house without thinking about what I was doing, it led me to the knife that I shouldn’t have touched and forced my hand to wrap around it.

  Tammy’s one good eye was staring at me as if I was doing her a favor, but the truth was so much worse than that.

  I wanted the bitch dead, and I wanted to be the one to do it. If it made me a murderer, so be it. But there was no way in hell I’d let Ensley see this.

  Kneeling down beside her, I stared at her one good eye and shook my head. I wasn’t sure if she could see me. Wasn’t sure she could hear me. All she did was twitch where she lay, slowly dying.

  “You are a worthless bitch,” I said, “and you deserve the slow death you’re getting. It’s too bad I can’t just leave you here to suffer and rot.”

  It felt good driving the knife into what was left of her head, felt good twisting it to finally end the bitch that had destroyed everything around her. It felt good when her blood sprayed up to dot my skin, and it felt good to pull the knife out to drive it in over and over again.

  I lost my shit in that moment. My anger. My rage. It was coming out as I stabbed her so many times I lost count.

  Only when I could barely breathe did I push to my feet to stand above her.

  She was gone.

  Ensley was free.

  But I worried that the sight of what happened would be the final blow.

  I’d take care of her. It didn’t matter how long it took to find all the broken pieces and put them back together, I would do whatever it took to help Ensley through this.

  In the distance, police sirens blared, and I knew I had to leave. I wanted to kick the bitch some more. Crush the bones of her body. Stomp her into a dust so fine, her existence was wiped from memory.

  There was no time, not with those sirens fast approaching.

  Just as I turned to walk away from a mess that wasn’t mine, the front door flew open, Ensley’s voice calling out for her father before she stopped in place and dragged her gaze across the horror of what happened.

  Tears sprang from her eyes as she lifted them to me.

  “What have you done?”

  My eyes locked to hers.

  Our hearts stopped in tandem, the moment drawing out so slowly that time stopped as we stared.

  “Ensley…”

  I didn’t have time to explain, not with the cop cars that pulled up out front on screeching tires.

  Ensley stepped back a step, her head shaking in refusal of what she saw.

  And just before those cops ran in, she looked at me one more time.

  Her mouth opened on a scream.

  “What the fuck have you done?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Ensley

  Present

  The elevator dinged on the third floor, a quiet swoosh as the doors pulled open to a hallway that was deserted and quiet. Only the sound of my steps across the threshold could be heard within the echo of late afternoon emptiness.

  I tried thinking back to the mornings when I came for counseling. My last appointment was only a little over a week ago, but it felt like it had been an eternity after everything that happened with Noah.

  What were the sounds back then?

  A woman typing?

  A child crying?

  A mother whispering to her child in an effort to silence the problem?

  None of it was coming back to me, and I wondered if my head was unable to hold onto the memories for very long, or if I had just been in such a fog that I’d never processed what was occurring around me.

  Taking a left, I walked to the door leading to Peter’s office. His name and hours were listed on a carved wooden sign that hung at eye level.

  I pushed the lever, half expecting it to be locked, so when it gave immediately and the door popped open, I was taken by surprise.

  Inside, I could hear someone shuffling through papers, the sound dying off to transition into fingers running across a keyboard.

  Neglecting to announce myself as I strode into the small waiting room, I glanced around at the muted grey colored walls and the off white furniture, my eyes drifting to a small area in a corner fitted with toys of all kinds.

  I’d never seen those toys before, and I wasn’t sure why.

  How was it I’d failed to notice anything around me in the twenty-two years since my family died?

  My head snapped left to the door that was partially open, to the man sitting behind his desk entering notes into his computer. He hadn’t seen me yet, and it would be so easy to just walk away and let it all go. So easy to do what Noah wanted and run away to start a new life. But I had to know the truth.

  When I pushed his door open and stepped inside, Peter glanced up from his computer, his eyes rounding with surprise, his body pushing up from his seat.

  “Ensley?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I stared across the room at him and tried to remember all the details of the first week we met and the years of counseling that fo
llowed.

  Peter rounded the corner of his desk and approached me, but stopped in the center of the room.

  “Where have you been? Are you okay? I thought something happened to you when I learned that Noah escaped.”

  He turned to glance at the phone on his desk. “I should call the police. Let them know you’re safe.”

  “No,” I answered, my voice a whip crack of sound before he had the chance to take the first step.

  “There’s no need to call anybody.”

  His stare returned to me, his mouth held in a tight line that showcased the way the years had aged his face.

  “Where have you been? Do you know that Noah is out there? They’re looking for him, and we all thought he’d found you.”

  Shaking my head, I refused to say a thing. I couldn’t trust myself not to accidentally give something away that would hurt Noah in the process.

  “I took some time to myself,” I lied. “Focused on the past because you never let me.”

  Peter’s posture went rigid.

  “We’ve talked about that, Ensley. It’s not good for you-“

  “No, you’ve talked about it.”

  I took a step forward and didn’t miss the concern written across his expression.

  “I just went along with everything you had to say. But then something occurred to me. Something we never talked about after my family died. And I made some calls.”

  He took another step back, his eyes unblinking where they were locked on me. I wondered what thoughts were running through his head, wondered how far I could push this to discover the truth of what I suspected.

  It was a long shot, I knew that.

  But maybe...

  “I bet you didn’t think I remembered much. Certainly not that week or the names of my neighbors. I also bet you didn’t know I eventually figured out my father was living with another woman up north.”

  Tilting my head, I smiled.