Cade paced in the game room, his phone pressed to his ear. The doors were locked, but it was a precaution he hadn’t needed to take. No one ever used the game room. They hadn’t for a long time. The room had died when his mother and sister left. Even the maids didn’t come in here often, and a fine layer of dust lay over the pool table and the vintage pinball machines. A massive television hulked in the corner. An old one. The kind of monster that had been popular before flat screens had been invented, that took four men to even lift.
The line continued to ring.
They used landlines, overseas. At least they did where his sister lived. They didn’t abide cell phones. There were rules. Rules and rules and rules, and that was the price she had paid.
Freedom was a funny, funny thing.
The landline crackled and buzzed, and for a moment Cade was afraid the call had been cut, but then the static cleared, and there was someone at the other end of the phone.
A female voice answered the call politely.
“Hello?”
It was a voice used to getting messages from strangers. It was not primed for familiarity.
“Hey, Mom.”
There was a long pause. “Cade?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He wasn’t sure who else she might think was on the other end of the line; she’d only had two children.
That he knew of. There were plenty of secrets hiding between all of the dollar signs. Secrets that no one dared even whisper about.
“Does your father know we’re talking?” she asked, her voice hushed, as if he might be listening in somehow.
“No. I just hadn’t talked to you in a while. Or Jeni.” He paused, suddenly nervous. “How is Jeni? I got her letter.”
There was a long, thick pause that told Cade everything. “Great. Jeni is . . . she’s great. She’s happy here, I think.”
His mother should have been a better liar. But she wasn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah.” Cade sat down in one of the theater-style recliners his father had installed back when they were a real family. A puff of dust rose from the chair. “I’m taking a class. Psychology. I’m going tonight, actually. I think I’m going to get an A.”
“Good for you, sweetheart.” He could hear his mother trying to smile. But it was as if the air had gone out of her, like a week-old birthday balloon with only enough helium left to keep it bouncing along the floor.
“Can I talk to Jeni?” Cade tried to sound less hopeful than he was.
“She’s not having a good day, Cade.”
“Please, Mom. I miss her.”
His mother sighed heavily. “Just a minute.” He heard shuffling on the other end of the phone, and his mother’s voice, gentle and low, like she was soothing a hurt animal.
A moment later, a voice that was familiar and strange all at once was on the line.
“Hello?”
“Jeni? It’s me, Cade.”
“Cade?” She sounded far away. Lost. He was reminded of the time they’d been separated in a Nordstrom, and she’d fallen asleep inside a clothing rack.
Their father had been furious. But he’d almost upended the entire store, just looking for her.
“Yeah. Cade. Your brother.” Was he reminding her? It hadn’t been that long. It wasn’t as if people just forgot they had siblings.
“Hi,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Cade cleared his throat. “Uh. I got your letter.”
“My letter . . .” She trailed off. “Oh. My letter. Right.”
“You said you were working in a restaurant?”
“Not today.” She was matter-of-fact about this.
“Why not today?” he asked.
“I don’t work when they give me . . . It’s a shot. It’s a special shot. Special medicine. It keeps me.”
“It keeps you?” Cade repeated. His heart sunk. His mother was right. She wasn’t well today.
“It keeps me calm. It’s Zen medicine.” She giggled, but the sound was loose and strange, like whatever had been holding her together was undone.
“Do they have to put you on so much medicine, Jeni?” Cade asked.
She stopped laughing. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he repeated. He sister wasn’t his sister anymore. It was just like the last time they’d spoken. And the time before. And the time before that. She was an echo. An empty shell with the same name and the same voice.
But it wasn’t her.
“Cade?” Her voice was mouse-tiny.
“Yeah, Jeni?”
She sounded muffled and tight, and he realized she was crying. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Cade swallowed hard. “I still love you, Jens.”
“I love you too.”
But then there was some shuffling, and his mother was on the line again. “Cade, you know you can’t upset her like that! The doctors say emotional trauma is what triggers her episodes. Now she’ll have to miss her shift tomorrow in the kitchens. We have to go.”
“Okay, um, can you tell her that—”
But it was too late.
The line was already dead.
Cade stood up and threw his phone angrily into the couch cushions. It bounced off and hit the floorboards, but he didn’t move to pick it up. He crossed to the opposite side of the game room, where there were two large dartboards. A few rogue darts lay along the bottom of the baseboard. He picked them up, collecting seven before returning to a thin blue line painted neatly onto the floorboards.
He threw one. It stuck in the outer edge of the board.
It hadn’t just been a phone call.
He threw another. It bounced off and hit the floor.
The third got the slightest bit closer. It stuck, precariously, along the very edge, and then fell to the floor.
He was looking at his future.
Cade had been there when it happened. He had been there when his sister killed their cousin. He had tried to stop her, but she had a knife and there was blood. A vast, incredible amount of blood that was spilling out of Andrew’s chest, and his sister, screaming and screaming and screaming while his cousin convulsed on the floor.
And died.
Just like Stratford.
Angrily, he threw another dart. It hit the target near the center.
The next two were even closer.
Money was his family’s legacy. But now so was this. The rage. The insanity.
And the murders.
One minute his sister was fine, and then she was odd, looking at movements in the air, taking pills from plastic prescription bottles, and then she was a killer.
That was why she was gone. The choice had been prison or a hospital for the criminally insane, and Jeni was in no shape for prison. She was manic, wild with happiness one moment, weeping the next, and practically shivering with rage in the space of an hour. And then she would have days where she was happy. Kind.
Normal.
And now Cade was her. She was the reason why his father was so harsh with him. Why he had been sent back to the psychiatrist. She was the reason his family had split into two separate units of perpetual disrepair.
And now he was doing the same thing.
He had killed someone.
He was a murderer. And he had been a prisoner in his own family for some time.
For the first time, guilt seeped through the walls he had erected and found its way into his brain. It seeped slowly through his blood until it found his heart and made a nest there.
For the first time, Cade wanted to tell someone.
He threw the last dart.
It didn’t make it to the board. It bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor.
Cade didn’t pick it up.