There was nothing in the boxes.
Eileen had reached the last of them and come up empty.
Nothing.
No life-altering document.
No answer to her question.
Nothing earth-shattering disguised as innocuous junk. This really was innocuous junk.
And what was she looking for, anyway? A letter from Mark Enright, laying it on the line, confessing everything in explicit detail?
I am guilty of parricide.
I did have an affair with Leslie Clark, who later married my brother in a severely twisted way.
I am the father of Eileen.
I am a psychopath, and she’s got all my traits—ask anyone who’s seen her art.
Nothing like that, though.
Bills, newspaper clippings, expired coupons, tax forms, and partially filled-out Nielsen rating surveys.
No answers.
“Goddamn you, Mark,” Eileen growled, pushing away the final box and sprawling on the ground, sapped of will.
What the hell was she doing? Following a vague hunch that there was a reason Uncle Patrick had left her this house, and a reason why William J. Knutsen had told her there were “documents”?
She’d grown so reckless, she hadn’t even cared about sifting through contents in front of Murphy, telling her sister precisely what she was looking for. She’d felt she was so close, and she had to make up for the time she’d lost when she’d fallen asleep last night. The storm had been a gift. This was her chance. She had to seize it.
Only there was nothing to be seized.
Her heart beat slower, each thump a sad defeat—ch-change, ch-change, until the word had faded altogether.
Nothing had changed.
Now Eileen was stuck in this house on Christmas Eve with no electricity, rained and sleeted into captivity. All along, the storm hadn’t been a blessing, but a curse.
God, she needed a drink.
She didn’t have one, though. She didn’t even have Dubble Bubble left.
She’d drained the last of her Jack Daniel’s the night before, during her search, and for a few hours she’d been numb. Removed.
A headache was forming, angrily pulsing under her temples in erratic red bursts. Eileen knew the cycle. She’d been in it for a long time.
Sometimes, Eileen tried to remember what it had been like to enjoy life. She had once, and then one day she hadn’t. There wasn’t a definable breaking point—not even the night of her junior art exhibit, or the day she’d found the infamous letters. The loss of liking life had happened gradually. A fade from Technicolor to gray scale, pixel by pixel, over months, until the color was gone completely.
She’d looked around and found no friends. She’d checked her calendar, and the arts program deadlines had passed—which was just as well, because she hadn’t drawn or painted anything worth a damn since the exhibit.
She still had the drinks, though, and those could be easily bribed out of Asher. For a while she’d lived her life in black and white, no feeling. A drink. A shift at Safeway. A drink. A shift. A drink. The drinking replaced art, friends, even TV.
She’d made money in the meantime. She’d used it to buy a van, and she’d equipped that van’s glove compartment with additional drinks. It had been a nice routine, until it wasn’t anymore. Until it got harder to wake up, pointless to draw on eyeliner, draining to work another shift of scanning and bagging and taking coupons. Until the drinking itself got dull.
Then one night, filled with more whiskey than she’d ever contained, Eileen had gotten real with herself: She was no artist, as she’d thought at fourteen. She was an illegitimate kid, with a murderer for a dad, two sisters who’d become strangers, and a mom as distant as the moon.
And it all seemed suddenly, suffocatingly heavy.
The heaviness pushed down hard—so hard that Eileen didn’t have the energy to feel sad. In that blank space she’d been free from feeling anything. And feeling nothing, she’d almost felt fine.
Why didn’t she feel fine anymore?
Patrick Enright, and the law offices of Knutsen and Crowley, and Murphy with her freckles, and Claire with her god-awful heartfelt confession—they’d upset the order of things, and the stabbing sensation beneath Eileen’s ribs wasn’t going away, no matter how hard she dug her teeth into sugary gum.
She really, really needed a drink.
There was none to be found in this house though, Eileen knew. She’d already surveyed every inch of it on what Murphy had called their reconnaissance mission, making careful note of hiding places for life-changing documents and whiskey bottles alike. No drop of liquor in the pantry, no worthy documents in any of these forty-seven boxes. She’d exhausted her options, on both counts.
From her shut-eyed sprawl, Eileen listened to the sounds of the winter storm. The squall had been going on for so long, it had become white noise—slatting rain, pressing wind, occasional bursts of sleet.
Eileen didn’t believe in omens, but she did believe in ebbs and flows. The tide of life drew back, surged forward. Time was as cyclical as her drinking routine. Once, three siblings had lived in this house. Three brothers, each with their own unique tale of woe. And here, three siblings lived again. Three Sullivan sisters, alone in their separate corners. Just as they’d been in Emmet.
A new sound reached Eileen’s pricked ears: creaking wood.
She opened her eyes to see Claire on the grand staircase. Her makeup was, for once, imperfect, exposing a reddened nose and dark-circled eyes. She’d been crying, of course. Moping around in one of those upstairs rooms.
A few days back, Eileen might have said something cutting: Feeling sorry for yourself, huh? Today, she didn’t have the energy. Or maybe she didn’t have the heart.
“Hey,” Claire said, soft and flat.
She descended the remaining stairs, stopping feet from Eileen and, after seemingly thinking it through, sitting crisscross on the floor.
“Didn’t find what you were looking for in those boxes?” she asked Eileen.
“Nope.”
If only Claire knew the half of it. Eileen wondered, if she’d found the letters five, not two years ago—would she have shared them with Claire? Or had the letters been part of the problem, a reason why she’d pulled away?
“You, uh … cool?” Eileen asked.
What kind of question was that? No, Claire clearly wasn’t cool.
“I guess I’m in shock,” Claire said, idly tapping the soles of her glitter Keds. “I was sure, you know? I’d never been so sure of something in my life.”
“I mean,” said Eileen, “if we were placing bets on college admission, I’d put my money on you.”
Their eyes caught—blue on brown. Claire parted her lips, widened her eyes, looking almost … grateful? A way she hadn’t looked in a long time. Maybe not since the day Eileen had given her that old iPhone.
The knifing sensation sharpened at Eileen’s ribs.
“My counselor told me not to get my hopes up,” Claire said. “That it was a long shot. A ton of people get good test scores and GPAs, and I needed something that made me stand out. If I’m honest? I wrote about being gay in my admissions essays because of that. Like, you know, take pity on a gay girl growing up in a tiny town.”
Eileen’s eyes widened. “Jesus, Claire.”
“I feel gross about it now. Not about being honest, just—I opened myself up, you know? To strangers. I undressed for those admissions officers. Like I was, I don’t know, pimping myself out. And it wasn’t even worth it. Like, of course not. It’s Yale. As if they don’t have enough small-town gay kids.”
Claire produced a self-deprecating smile.
“Why the hell didn’t you apply to Oregon schools?” Eileen asked. “U of O is queer friendly as hell. You’re acting like it’s goddamn Westboro Baptist Church.”
Claire shook her head severely. “That’s not why I didn’t apply there. I wanted to go to … a prestigious school. One that’s hard to get into. One where it rains less and is close to an actually glamorous city, where life happens all the time. I don’t know, I got Yale lodged in my head. Like it was the perfect solution. Yale, or bust.”
“Don’t plan for failure,” Eileen muttered.
Claire looked to her sharply. “How do you know that?”
“It’s on one of your fucking coffee mugs, Claire.”
“Oh. Right.”
“You think I escaped that Harper Everly bullshit? I practically got half her pep talks through osmosis.”
Eileen wasn’t being kind, she knew, but Claire wasn’t being defensive, either. They were almost having an actual conversation.
“Claire?” she said.
“Hm.”
“I’m sorry. That seriously blows. Like I said, they’re idiots.”
“Yeah, Yale. A bunch of idiots.”
Eileen pushed up from her sprawl, fixing Claire with an unflinching stare. “Fuck national rankings, Claire. You know who makes those? Elitist assholes. People who didn’t grow up like us, in a shit town, in a shit house, working shit jobs. Fuck rankings, period. Only rich, pretty people make those. And you’re better than that. Better than them. The Harper Everlys. Don’t waste good tears on them.”
The knifing—the feeling—was excruciating. Eileen was mad at Claire for making her care, but she was madder at every vapid YouTuber who’d ever made her sister feel less than.
“You’re not a loser,” she said, forcefully. “You’re not a Settler, or whatever dumb-ass term you use. You’re just a person, Claire. Someone who does good stuff and bad stuff too. Someone who’s complicated. Who’s really goddamn smart and started her own business and didn’t let life’s shittiness drain the hope out. So apply to U of O next year. Or don’t. Keep making your jewelry and move away on your own. You’re not doomed. It’s college. It’s an overrated, overpriced school.”
Claire was looking at Eileen intently, a critic taking in a piece of art—absorbing the lines and colors before forming her opinion.
Then she said, “I’m the one who needs to say sorry.”
Eileen made a nasty face on instinct. What was this, a trick?
“For what?” she asked, dubiously.
Claire looked askance, to the burned-out fire.
Without meeting Eileen’s eyes, she said, “I didn’t get into my program, but … you did.”