Dear Rae,
You lied to me every single day that we were friends.
It started that day in the gym. There was that assembly, the one where Principal Pittman told us all where to go in case of a natural disaster, even though Phoenix doesn’t get earthquakes or hurricanes, and the last tornado was in 1996, and there are tons of people who say that wasn’t even a tornado.
But Principal Pittman told us we needed to go to the locker rooms, and you leaned over and told me something I can’t even remember now, but it was hilarious enough to make my stomach hurt from laughing.
That was the first day we became friends, and I know that because you told me so. You said, “So you and I are friends now.” We’d hung out before that, and you’d called me or texted me practically every day since the first day we met, but you’d never called me your friend. And because no one ever says things like that, I believed instantly that you were right.
So when you came to get me the other day and said, “This is the perfect night for a drive,” and I knew it wasn’t because it was raining, and the roads were slick after ten months of draught and the gorges were high with rushing water, I still didn’t believe myself.
I believed you instead.
And when you drove up to that wash and said we could make it even though the water was up to the tops of the tires and your eyes got wide and you looked like the fear was what was keeping you whole, I wanted the same fear to fill in my gaps, too.
So how come all I feel now are big, drafty spaces?
That’s how I know now that you’ve been lying this whole time. Because if we were really friends, you’d be able to hear the wind whipping through those gaps in me, and you’d want to insulate me against it somehow.
I know you’ve been lying because you told me after we got through the wash that the car had lifted off the ground and almost rushed away with the water. You told me that even though I was in the car with you and felt no such thing. The wheels stayed on the ground. We weren’t almost carried away. But I agreed with you anyway. Because I knew how much you needed me to.
I’m making a story for you, Rae, but it’s actually a story for me. I’m building up the walls of what you called our friendship because you actually never built the walls yourself. I guess you figured I’d get around to that eventually. And these are only paper walls, and each one is pinioned to the ground with “Dear Rae,” but that’s all I really need them to be because they aren’t permanent anyway. They just need to stay up long enough for me to tear them down. Sometimes a story has to be ripped to shreds so you have pieces to build something new out of it.
And I think I’m just about ready to build something new. These pieces aren’t for you, Rae. They’re for me.
Love,
Penny
I don’t remember rescuing the notepad from the bonfire. I remember Rae throwing it in there after she unearthed it from her bag, a found artifact from the ruins of my life I hadn’t seen starting to form.
I can look at the notepad now, its singed edges still smelling of smoke, sitting there underneath a patiently waiting Linda, and know that I did indeed pry it from the hands of flames that night. I might have used a stick or my foot to kick it out of danger. I might have stomped the glow from the pages until it was nothing but desert scrub and shoe prints, although I see traces of neither as I look at the pages now.
All I know is that when I saw it tip from Rae’s fingertips to the edge of the rock-rimmed fire, I couldn’t bear the thought of it burning yet. I couldn’t comprehend that the notepad would perish at her hand instead of my own.
The notepad lived, and Rae died.
My phone buzzes again, nagging me to check the text that came in several minutes ago. I’ve ignored the last three, and it seems I won’t be able to get away with disregarding the fourth. I know it’s Rob checking on me again. He hasn’t let half a day go by without texting me since he went back to soccer clinic and Gwen Brzinski and a life much simpler than the one that faces his mom and me in the North Woods. We argued for at least another hour after we got back to the Carver House, sitting in April’s car while I watched the minutes tick away, becoming increasingly aware that she was mere seconds away from officially becoming a prisoner of war at the Registrar’s Office, Cynthia Doom the key master.
But really, we both knew that what he was arguing for—that we both leave with him that night—was a ridiculous proposition. Aside from Margie’s likely made up (or alcoholically imagined) story, nothing had changed. April was still in this house up to her eyeballs, I still had nothing of substance to tell her aside from ghost stories, and neither of us could point to any reason that she and I might be in any kind of actual danger.
So off Rob went, shaking his head as he backed out of the in-road to the house, but we both knew all that head-shaking that made me look so unreasonable was just so he could feel better about wanting to get the hell out of there and back to a happier place without people like Margie and with people like Gwen Brzinski. We bartered secrets: I promised not to tell anyone he’d escaped from soccer camp (borrowing his maybe-girlfriend’s car), and he promised not to tell my dad I was cracking up.
So now he texts me every several hours to make sure we’re still alive. Some of the texts make it through the black hole of cellular connectivity I’m quickly growing used to. I know when some haven’t because the ones I finally do receive show Rob’s increasing anxiety at my nonresponse.
“Yes,” I say to my phone. “Yes, okay? Still kicking.”
But when I see the screen light up with a fourth text, I’m surprised to find a 253 area code behind it.
I back up and read the first three.
I reread the texts three more times. Miller hasn’t so much as called since I left his house the other night, and now he’s suddenly sorry.
But that’s not all. He knows that I talked to Margie.
And though I should be happy that there’s more to the horrible story than what she left me with, I had been trying to convince myself ever since hearing it that I didn’t need to know any more. That so long as April could get this stupid house fixed up well enough to sell it and get us out of here without me having to see anything else in the middle of the night, whatever happened or didn’t happen in these woods could remain the business of the trees and weird little coffee shops and shadowy dive bars in this closed-up town.
And even though April didn’t learn much about the house itself in all those papers that Cynthia Doom gave her, she did learn that it’d had only a few owners in all its years, with decades passing between ownership that never lasted more than a year or so, all the remaining years taken up by bank ownership. She surmised that the cost of tearing the house down was too much for anyone to actually take on, especially since nobody really came to these woods anyway, and most seemed to rather just pretend the house didn’t exist at all.
Then she erased voice mails from the sixth plumber who refused to come and take a look at the toilet and the at least apologetic lady from the cable company who basically told us we should give up on ever getting decent Internet access out here.
In the meantime, I’d spent the last couple of days convincing myself I could go the rest of my life not hearing from that guy with the burnt red hair and evergreen eyes and be perfectly fine with it.
Now I stand with my cell cradled in my hand, staring at the texts that somehow managed to get through while I pace the upstairs hallway back and forth and contemplate my response. If I respond at all.
I’m almost to the end of the hall when I hear the faintest groan of a door on a hinge.
I look up, squinting to hear better, a habit I’ll never be able to break myself of. As though seeing what I can’t see will help me hear better.
After another several seconds of silence, I hear it again, this time more pronounced. And this time, I’m positive it came from the room at the end of the hall, the one with the boy Jack on the wall.
I enter the room with new caution, my experiences in this corner officially making me wary.
Jack’s eyes are on the closet across the room, the mattress tunnel still destroyed, the random furniture and blankets and papers that were once strewn everywhere now piled in semi-organized columns in corners and against the walls.
April must have been doing a little cleaning up in lieu of the real work she can’t have done. I heard her moving around again last night. Even though all my stuff is still upstairs, I only sleep in her room now, which means I’m acutely aware of when she sleeps. Or when she doesn’t sleep, which I’m finding is often. I wonder how long she’s been an insomniac. Not ever having lived with her before March, I don’t know if she goes through spells like this, but thinking back to the spring, I never remembered hearing her shuffling around in my dad’s house in the middle of the night.
Now as I watch the boy on the wall for clues, I hear the creak of the door up close, turning abruptly to see the closet door sway slowly on a breeze that can’t possibly exist in this room with all the windows upstairs shut tight.
But there it is, plain as day, groaning open with such patience, I swear it’s waiting for a reaction from me. I shift my gaze cautiously to Jack, but his stare is as fixed as ever.
So I try something new.
“What else is there? What are you trying to say?” I ask him. I cram my heart back into my chest before it can creep up in my throat. “What?”
I hear a creak of floorboards behind me and spin, releasing a tiny shriek before I can catch it.
“Don’t shoot!” April jokes, but I know she’s not kidding exactly. Her eyes are bouncing between me and the mural.
“April! Seriously, your new name is Creeper.”
“Who were you just talking to?”
I hold up my phone, the lies coming more easily now.
“Boys. Cryptic messages. I’m sure you don’t miss those days.” I laugh what totally doesn’t sound like a nervous laugh.
“No, no I don’t,” she says, still looking at the boy in the wall. “So you weren’t just, you know, talking to . . .” She looks more nervous than I do.
Great. I’ve officially made her afraid of me.
“The wall? Wow, what is that, the third symptom of cabin fever?” I say, turning from the mural and April to text Miller back.
“Can I borrow your car?” I ask.
“Hmm?” April is nibbling at the dry flakes of skin that have begun to form on her normally glossed lips.
“I need to run out to the store,” I say, not entirely lying this time.
“Uh-huh,” April says, and it appears I’ve finally grasped her distracted attention. “The store. Got it. Need to go buy a little clarity then, I take it?” she says, and suddenly I’m embarrassed for us both. Guy talk isn’t exactly an area we’ve ventured into yet.
“Right,” I say. “Are your keys . . . ?”
“On the table downstairs,” she says, rolling her eyes. But she looks worried, and I wonder if she really is concerned for my sanity. I might actually find that comforting if not for the fact that I’m a little worried about it myself.
“You okay?” I ask. Suddenly I’m the one embarrassing us. What would I know about the kind of stress she’s under with the hefty weight of this expensive mistake?
“Oh, sure,” she says. “Nothing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and two hundred thousand dollars won’t fix,” she says, and we swirl in the wake of her massive admission for a second before I pull myself from the water.
I slide her keys from the table and leave the Carver House with April in it, wishing the woods would leave me a little more breathing room than the house does, even though I know they won’t. I wonder if April’s slept more than one full night total since we moved in.