Torie finds me the next morning as I’m brushing my teeth at the row of three sinks in the girls’ bathroom. Kendall is next to me, washing her face. Ruthanna is just putting her toothbrush away.
“Hey,” Torie says. “I saw you. Last night.”
I shrug, brush, and spit. I’m leaning over the sink when she puts her hand on the back of my head and grabs my hair. She pushes me down hard. My teeth clunk against the faucet. I feel the impact shudder into the root.
“Oh, good,” she says. “I have your attention.”
Kendall backs up quickly, but hovers in the doorway. Ruthanna just vanishes.
Torie keeps my head against the faucet. She is amazingly strong. I have a feeling that if I try to resist, I’ll lose my front teeth.
She leans over, close to my ear. “I was the first,” she says, her words like bullets. Occasionally, for emphasis, she pushes me against the sink faucet. Not hard, just a bump, but it’s enough. My lip is still healing from falling down the stairs on the boat, and every time it hits the chrome I wince.
“He found me first. I’m closest to him. I’m the one he depends on. So don’t think you can come here and work it.”
“Hey, list—”
Bang. My face hits the faucet.
“Because I’m drawing the line.”
Torie’s words overlap with someone else’s. I flash suddenly to a blond woman, tan and thin, well muscled, perfectly groomed. I hear a voice echo. “I know your tricks. I’ve never drawn the line enough with you. Now I’m drawing the line.”
Torie leans in. “Let me remind you of something, Lizbet. You’ve already disappeared. Nobody’s going to know if you do it again.”
But I can’t avoid him. Something has changed between us. He watches Emily, but he talks to me. He singles me out. He directs remarks to me. He asks me how I like the macaroni and cheese. He offers to order new DVDs.
He likes me.
I can feel Torie’s and Jeff’s eyes on me. I know they are wondering how to handle me. I know that they will not handle me with kid gloves. I am heading to a cliff and I don’t know who’s going to push me off.
He comes and gets me now, in the middle of the night. I follow him like a ghost in my T-shirt and Gap sweatpants, what we all sleep in. We are both barefoot. His feet are long and white and feminine-looking. It makes him seem fragile, even though I know he’s not. He sits on the couch with his head in his hands. Sometimes he cries.
“I can’t sleep,” he says.
I get flashes, but they are confusing. I see him as a boy, running, breathing hard, barefoot on the oyster shells on the beach. I know someone is chasing him.
I see Nell, lying on the bed. I know she is dead. She is wet with rain. The wetness pools out on the sheets.
I’m tired during the day, from the nights spent with Jonah. And I’m holding on to what I can see and what I can touch, because I keep sliding into places that the kids hide deep inside their minds, places they don’t want to go.
But they go all the time.
Eli. His older foster brother tied him up and flicked matches at him. For fun.
Maudie. Is clumsy. That’s what her mother tells the doctor.
Ruthanna. Her mother died, and it was her fault. Her father told her so.
Dan. His father left him at his grandmother’s to play one day. Never came back.
Hank. His father drinks. His mother works two shifts. His brother died last year. He spends all his time alone.
Tate…
I am afraid of what’s in Tate’s head.
There is just too much pain in this house.
I can feel it. I can see it.
Everything parents can do, the world can do, to mess up a kid—it’s all here. It lives in their heads.
They feel safe here because they don’t know what safe is. This, they figure, is as close as they’ll get.
He tells me about Nell. That from the first, she was the one they protected. That there was something special about her. Out of all of them, she was the one they all loved.
When she got sick, the fragile bonds fell apart. The family disintegrated. The panic was a string that vibrated at a pitch they could all hear. The children walked around with dread, fearing the inevitable. Fearing that what they knew would happen would happen: Their father would not give in.
“I can remember better when you’re around,” he says. “You help me remember.” It’s two o’clock in the morning. He is lying on one couch; I am lying on another.
“That’s good,” I say, trying not to yawn.
“I don’t want to remember,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” A trickle of fear begins inside me. I feel him trying to push something away in his mind, something huge.
This is the thing he’s blocked from me.
This is the thing he’s blocked from himself.
“Her birthday is on Friday, you know. The birthday she never had. That’s when it has to happen.”
“What has to happen?”
“He was afraid it would all fall apart, that they would think he wasn’t fit.”
I smell burning. I smell the fire.
“He was afraid they’d take us away. He tried to save us.”
I see the glass shatter, fall into blackness. I hear someone pounding on a door.
“I don’t want to do it,” Jonah says. “But I have to save us, too.”
Friday. I try to remember what day it is.
I look out into the darkness. He is just a shape across the room. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense to me, but it doesn’t have to. It makes sense to him.
There is urgency in his mind now. He is racing toward a goal. He has given up controlling this. He has given up analyzing it. He has given up changing it.
Whatever he is heading for, in his mind, he will have saved us. In his mind, he’ll be able to rest.
Tomorrow is Thursday. I have to gather all the hazy ideas, the things I know, the things I guess, the things I’m thinking, and make a plan.
I only have one day to set it up.
One day to make it work.