Chapter Thirteen

AT HALF PAST THREE IN THE morning, the door to my bedroom creaks, and I’m wide awake the same instant, blood coursing hard into my heart as fear floods my veins.

It was a nightmare. It wasn’t real. His gun isn’t out. The girls are safe. Mom is okay. I try to slow my breathing.

Light from the hallway filters in, casting beams across my carpet.

“Leighton?” The shape in my doorway is small and slight. Juniper.

“Yeah, babe?” I ask. My voice shakes, and I clear my throat to cover it. The rush of adrenaline has left me jittery.

“They’re fighting. Can I sleep with you?”

“Course,” I say, scooting over. With the door open, I can hear it, too. Not all-out yelling, but agitated voices. The foundation of a bad night is there.

Juniper runs through the dark room and dives into bed. I’m about to ask her where Campbell is when another shadow crosses my carpet. She closes the door behind her. The voices are subdued to a dull murmur, but now that I’m awake, the muffled sound irritates me, like having a song playing with the volume turned down low.

“Want to go back to sleep?” I ask.

“Too awake,” Juniper says. Her eyes always make her seem older than she is, but her detached voice in the dark reminds me that she is so little.

“Then let’s play a game instead,” I say.

“Anywhere But Here,” Juniper says.

Campbell sighs heavily and turns away from me. I elbow her, a little harder than I mean to.

“Play with us,” I tell her. I need her. She’s my partner in this—in keeping Juniper distracted.

A softer sigh this time, and she turns around.

“Okay,” I whisper. I run my fingers over the seams of the dragonfly quilt Nana made me, comforted by the texture. In the dark, their blue wings look black, and they remind me of the crows.

I wrap an arm around each of my sisters, one settling toward me, the other ever so slightly resistant. Juniper can still be little, and I have college to look forward to. But Campbell is trapped. And she’s old enough to know it and be angry.

“The Galápagos Islands,” I begin. “There are turtles a hundred and fifty years old. The sun dries their shells after it rains. Soft waves hit the pebbled beaches.”

I don’t actually know what the beaches of the Galápagos are like—rocky, sandy, pebbled? But that’s all right. Anywhere But Here is about escape, not accuracy. “Huge red flowers, bigger than your head, bloom in the forest.”

The house rumbles under us as he runs across the floor downstairs. My mind plays its favorite game: Worst-Case Scenario. What if he’s running toward her? What if he hurts her?

“London,” Campbell says. Her tone could cut a wire. “We pass Big Ben and the Tower of London. We see churches older than the United States of America. We drink tea, and then we take a ride on one of those double-decker buses.”

Something crashes downstairs. The girls jump in my arms, and a small sound catches in Juniper’s throat. Like for an instant she wanted to scream, before she remembered there’s no point. That it could even make things worse. Bring him upstairs.

“This isn’t working,” Campbell says.

“Shadows?” I ask. But they are already climbing out of bed, moving to our grandmother’s armoire. It was the only thing I wanted from their house when it sold. It’s absurdly big in this little room, but I love it.

Some nights we take our time before opening the doors, pretending that we will discover a pathway to Narnia. This isn’t one of those nights.

We squeeze inside, and I reach for the kerosene lantern that I have stashed behind an old box of books. I leave the door partially open to let clean air in and carbon monoxide out. The lantern was Grandpa’s and looks like it survived an actual war, but it works well, and it’s lasted us a lot of nights like this. My gestures in the dark have been rehearsed a dozen times before. My fingers close on a lighter that I keep hidden in a shoe. I turn the dial on the lantern to lower the wick into the vase of kerosene.

Tiny space, lots of books for kindling, small children, and flammable liquid.

I really do have all the great ideas.

But when I light the lantern, I’m greeted by two tired but eager pairs of eyes.

A warm, familiar glow fills the closet. Now it’s an adventure. There’s a twinkle in Juniper’s eyes. The smallest hint of a smile tugging the end of Campbell’s mouth. We are explorers camping on a mountain. We are astronauts, and we’ve just landed on another planet. Any sounds of the house are gone, masked by door after door we’ve put up to keep them out. Masked by our sheer, stark will to not listen to them any longer.

“All right,” I say as we crouch down in the armoire, folding limbs over each other until we find some semblance of comfort. “I’m ready. What’ve you got?”

“A horse,” Juniper says.

I think for a moment, then place my palms together with two fingers extended out to form a nose. My thumbs make ears, and the silhouette of a horse appears on the wall. Juniper giggles softly.

“That’s pretty good, Leighton,” Junie says.

“How about a cat?” Campbell asks. “But not just a head and ears. The whole animal.”

I sigh. Some people might say that midnight kerosene-lantern shadow puppets in a tiny space as we hide would be enough of a challenge, but not my sisters. They try to stump me with increasingly complicated requests.

I put my arms lengthwise against each other, one hand up and one down. I extend two fingers on top for ears and one on the bottom for a tail.

A black cat sits on the wall, twitching.

“Here,” Juniper says, reaching out. She gives the cat some whiskers, too.

“No helping,” Cammy says. “That’s against the rules.”

“There are no rules, Campbell; the game is made up,” I say.

“Just because they aren’t written down in a set of game instructions doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“I wasn’t helping,” Juniper says. “I was impressizing.”

“Improvising,” I say.

“Improvising,” Junie says.

Juniper and I give Campbell our saddest faces.

“Okay, okay, I like the whiskers,” Cam relents.

I play the game for nearly an hour, until finally my request for another shadow challenge is met with silence. They are asleep. I consider moving them, but I would wake them up untangling our arms and legs. Besides, my arms are tired from so many shadows.

Dad taught me this game, when Campbell was still a baby and Mom was busy with her at night. He’d use a flashlight propped on the table by my bed and show me how to twist my fingers until a picture formed on the ceiling above us.

But that was a long time ago.

Tonight I make one last shadow. The head of a crow, its sharp beak formed by the tips of my nails. Then I twist my hands together and make the shape of a bird flapping its wings, rising. Another bird joins the first, a second small shadow on the wall. And then a third shadow bird flies with the others. I lie there in the dimly lit space, too warm thanks to the hot lamp and hot bodies, waiting for another noise from downstairs.

I let my hands fall to my sides, but the birds go on. Flap, flap, soar. Flap, flap, soar. They cross the wall of the armoire, back and forth, pulling me toward sleep. Lulling me into forgetting why we are hiding. I turn the dial on the lantern, lifting the wick from the oil, and blow out the flame. I keep my eyes open in the pitch-black, fighting sleep, and losing fast. Now everything is one shadow, and this shadow takes the shape of a closet. This closet takes the shape of a sanctuary. This sanctuary takes the shape of three girls who are flapping their wings but going nowhere.