54

Harriet drank some whiskey and closed her eyes. She seemed almost to pray, her face tensing and then relaxing before she opened her eyes again, and within them was pure determined calm, as if her very survival depended on not giving in to the emotions she felt. I had to guess it was something she’d had a lot of practice with.

“Savanna wasn’t like me,” she said. “I understood that from the beginning, and by the beginning, I mean the very beginning. Even as a small child, I understood she was a different kind of creature from me. She knew how to make the world work in her favor. We were twins, but you would never have known it. I was ugly and meek. She was beautiful and strong.”

As she spoke, I glanced at the bottle of whiskey on the table, now half empty between us. Zachariah still hadn’t partaken, and I envied his self-control. Somehow I envied Harriet too, a ridiculous emotion for me to feel toward a woman who was condemned to a wheelchair, but it didn’t matter. That was just one limitation, and it seemed incongruous to the rest of her, which was anything but broken. She was self-assured, smart, kind. She was a woman who needed very little in her life, and that seemed the highest compliment I could think of.

“I remember vividly when we were nine years old. We were outside, playing in the backyard. There was a cellar door there. Stone steps dug into the ground led to the base of the house and to the door that in all of my later memories remained locked. But not on that summer day. Savanna dared me to go open it. She was always daring me to do things, and even at that early age I’d developed a sort of sixth sense about her dares. They never worked out well for me. Somehow she always managed to make me feel like a loser if I didn’t do them, and if I did … well, that was sometimes even worse.

“‘We’re not supposed to open the cellar door,’ I told her.

“‘That’s because it’s where they keep the other kids,’ she said. I swear, she could be so convincing. She had this way of always making her lies sound like the other things she said. There was no way to tell the difference. And if you questioned her, she’d get so angry. Maybe it was her being my twin, but I loved her. I needed her to love me back, and sometimes she gave me just enough of that love to make me think she was normal, that we were normal.

“I asked her what she meant by the ‘other kids.’ Her answer still haunts me.”

Harriet picked up the bottle, studying it, before handing it to me. I took a sip and put it back on the table. Zachariah cleared his throat. A quick glance told me he knew what was coming, that he’d heard this story before.

“She said the other kids were the ones our mother and father had murdered. She said they kept their bodies in the cellar.

“Of course, I immediately said she was wrong, that she was lying to me.

“‘Go see for yourself,’ she said.

“‘I don’t want to,’ I told her.

“‘You have to. If you don’t, you’ll never go with me.’

“I asked her what she was talking about, and she said they were going to kill us when we turned ten too, and that I had to see if for myself. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the courage to leave with her, to run away.” Harriet shook her head and laughed ruefully. “I was nine. I was gullible. I went to the cellar and opened the door.”

“What happened?” I said.

“I felt her push me and slam the door behind me. It was so dark inside that cellar, I panicked. I’d never been down there before, and I didn’t know where anything was. I knocked over a tool cabinet almost as soon as I tried to move. It fell, blocking my path back to the door. Outside, I heard something else fall. It sounded like an avalanche. I worked my way over to the cabinet, cutting open my heel on a screwdriver. I tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Something on the other side was stopping it. I pushed and pushed, but I couldn’t move it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What was the sound?”

“That’s what I find most chilling now. Sometime or another, she’d discovered that the heavy cinder blocks that lined the steps were loose. She just gave them a good shove and down they went, essentially locking me in. All told, I was there for four days. My parents grilled her on my whereabouts, but she never told them anything. Search parties looked for me day and night. All the while, Savanna knew exactly where I was. I yelled and screamed and pounded on the stone walls, but no one ever heard me. If it hadn’t been for my father going down to the cellar to find another flashlight, I would have died there.”

“But you told your parents what happened when you got out, right?”

She nodded. “I did.”

“And?”

“They refused to believe she’d done it on purpose.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me either. Well, I do because I know her. She was more believable when she lied than when she told the truth. And she could cry on demand. When I told my father what had happened, he called her into the room, and she immediately fell onto the floor and began to cry. She confessed it all, except the part that she’d done it on purpose. Instead, she made up a story about me begging her to stand guard outside the door while I went inside to see what was there. She said she stood on the rocks and knocked them loose by accident. She tried to move them to help me, but they were too heavy. She said she was too scared to tell anyone because she thought I was dead and it was her fault.”

“They bought that?”

“Every bit of it. That’s not all. A few days later, she elaborated on her original story, telling my parents I’d wanted to go in there to do ‘dirty things’ to myself. I didn’t even know what masturbation was. But she did. I think I might know why.”

“Was she abused?” It would, perhaps, be the only thing that could explain such vile behavior. Maybe she was simply acting out on her own victimhood at the hands of a monster.

“I think it’s a possibility, but I’m not sure. I am sure she knew things I didn’t. And she was sadistic. A few months later, after a period in which she’d been nicer to me than she had been in a long time, she quietly took me aside, my hand in hers, and told me she was actually glad I was still alive. Her exact words were, ‘It’s more fun to have you around, because once you’re dead, you can’t suffer anymore.’”

“Psychopath?” I said. I was no expert but had dealt with one or two people over my career as a private investigator who I thought might fit the bill. Neither of them held a candle to what Harriet was telling me about Savanna. And Rufus had been in love with her? Jesus.

“I’ve read a little on the topic.” She gestured to her books again. “If you put a gun to my head and asked what’s wrong with Savanna, that would be my answer.” She shrugged. “It hardly matters what you call it. Her actions were evil. They didn’t get better with age, either.”

Harriet went on to tell me about their teen years, during which Savanna discovered a compelling power over boys at their school.

“They’d do anything for her, including break the law. In return, she’d have sex with them. She used it as a bargaining chip, or to get close enough to someone so she could hurt them. I watched as she went through boy after boy, literally tearing them down, reducing them to nothing more than rubble.

“I was sixteen when I had my first sexual encounter. It wouldn’t be until years later that I would understand she’d orchestrated it. She’d long suspected—probably even before I did—that I was gay. Turned out, she found another girl at our school who was gay too. She paid her to come on to me in our barn. Then she spied on us while we …”

Harriet shook her head, and I saw how painful these memories were to her.

“My sexuality became a new toy for her. She tortured me over it endlessly. Anytime I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, she threatened to tell our father. It was the only thing I dreaded more than her torture. If that doesn’t tell you the agony gay teens go through, I don’t know what will. I was literally more willing to be tortured by a psychopath than let my father know I was a lesbian.”

“But eventually he found out, right?” I asked.

“Sure. When she tried to make me kill the neighbor’s dog.”

“What?”

“Every day it was something new. ‘Do this, or I’ll tell Dad.’ Sometimes it was just stealing something. Sometimes she asked me to take pictures of her. Inappropriate pictures. She would send them in the mail to random men she looked up in the phone book. But I couldn’t kill the neighbor’s dog. So she told Dad. After a few months of Dad not speaking to me, she offered a solution.”

Harriet drummed her fingers on the table and looked at me as if she couldn’t quite decide where I’d come from, what strange wind had blown me into her life.

“You already know the solution, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Harden is my uncle. I’d known about his school for as long as I could remember. It was honestly the one place I thought I’d never end up. Turns out both he and my father thought me being gay was about the most troubling thing either one of them could imagine. That’s where I met Rufus, of course.”

“I hope he at least treated you right,” I said. I felt confident he had. Rufus was one of the most vocal supporters of equal rights I knew. He actually attended meetings at a local progressive church to discuss how to combat issues of hate and violence against members of the LGBTQ community. Despite this, I felt less confident about my assumption when I saw the look on Harriet’s face.

It was a sad look, not so different from the one she’d worn in the Polaroid from so many years ago. Except this look was less hopeful, more resigned. It seemed to suggest a kind of forbearance or miserable tolerance for a past that could never change.

“Go on,” I said.

“There’s not much more to tell. I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for Rufus. He was the only person who was decent to me, who treated me as if I didn’t have a disease.” She shook her head. “In the end, they got to him, of course, but maybe I shouldn’t be angry. They get to everybody. The nets are strong. It’s so easy to get tangled up in them, to fall without even realizing it.”

“But you didn’t fall,” I said. “You jumped over.”

“Are you familiar with the term hyperstition?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Is it anything like superstition?”

“Maybe a little. It’s the idea that something from art or from the imagination can become real, can manifest itself in the world in powerful ways.”

“Okay …” I had no idea where this was going.

“I found an old book, hidden in the little one-room library at the school. Well, maybe not hidden, but it was on the very bottom shelf. I think it was where the legend about the Indians started. Have you heard it?”

“Yeah. Two Indian Falls?”

“That’s it. It’s a novel, and it’s actually set somewhere in Illinois or something, but it hardly mattered. The two boys in the book, they wanted out. The only way out was across the gorge, just like our gorge. The boys waited on the wind and jumped. One made it, one didn’t. A tragedy that stayed with me a long time after reading it, but something else stayed with me too. One made it, but he wouldn’t have made it if he hadn’t tried. It all came together for me then. I’d been contemplating suicide, but the real suicide was not living as myself. That was my choice. I figured that out almost as soon as I arrived. Harden wasn’t going to let me go if I didn’t change, if I didn’t betray who I was. So I planned it out. I even told Rufus what I was planning. He helped me survey the gorge, looking for a way across. When we spotted the ledge, it felt like salvation.”

“So, he knows you’re alive?”

“I’m not sure if he does or not. It was dark when I left. He went to the waterfall with me, but after the first ledge, I purposefully didn’t answer any of his calls. I wanted him to think I’d died.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t trust him. As much as I wanted to, I’d learned not to trust anyone.” She glanced at Zachariah and reached over to pat his hand. “It took me a long time to learn to trust people again.”

Zachariah cleared his throat. “You done what you had to do, lived the way you had to live.” Zachariah’s eyes were tearing up, and he laughed as the tears began to fall. “And you done more. You made your life your own.”

A title of a Flannery O’Connor short story I’d read a long time ago came back to me. It was called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” I’d read the story and liked it, but the title hadn’t held much resonance for me until this very moment. We were all obligated to save ourselves, I decided. If you didn’t, then who would?