“That’s what my mom says.”
“You could really, you know, get quiet,” she says, wistful. “That’s what I always think when I look at Anisa’s posts. I’m so jealous—not of Parker, not of her success or happiness. Just that she’s found the space she needs to—I don’t know—be.”
“Hey,” I say, eager to give her something. “Anytime you want to come up here, you can.”
“Really?”
“Are you kidding? It’s empty most of the time. My parents would love it.”
Silence. This time when her words echo, I recite them out loud to her:
Why are they so afraid of you?
Boredom, why don’t they seek your hidden magic?
To sit and think.
To be.
All gone the way of the 8-track.
A silly, outdated thing.
“You memorized one of my poems?” she says, her hand at her chest, her smile wide.
“They’re very memorable. You really have a gift, if I haven’t told you before. I have, haven’t I?”
She blushes, looks down shyly. “Thank you.”
The house comes into view, small and dark. The sight of it never fails to fill me with this odd mingling of nostalgia and revulsion. There’s this feeling of thinking I’ve spotted a long-lost friend, only to realize with despair that it’s a stranger, someone not very nice at all.
Emily draws in a breath. “It’s beautiful here.”
It’s really not. Maybe it was once, when I was young and we were happy, but the house is in disrepair, the grounds neglected. Just on first glance, a shutter tilts, the porch sags. I know that doves roost in the gutter, clogging it. My parents always make it sound grand. Our place in the country. Designed by someone, built by someone else. Names no one knows but still nod about knowingly anyway. A mystery writer lived there, died there, wrote something in between—a book no one’s ever read.
Stories, stories, stories—reality narrated, packaged, disseminated. Why can’t anything just be what it is?
We climb out of the car and stand in the stillness. There’s rustling in the leaves, the call of a great horned owl. It’s a moonless, starless night.
“It’s so”—she stops, the poet searching for the perfect word—“apart.”
Yes. We could be on the moon.
I tried to give her this. Anisa. What she seems to have found with Parker. But what I offered, she didn’t want. I touch the scar on my arm, snaking a finger up the cuff.
“Hey, Will?” Emily is standing on the porch. “Is someone else here?”
She’s wearing that Piglet frown.
“No,” I say. “Why?”
“I hear music.”
“No.”
She points. “And there’s a light on inside.”
This house is haunted, I want to tell her but don’t.
I feel that rise of anger.
It’s haunted by the ghosts of all my parents’ expectations, their grief. By the perfect Claire, who was everywhere and everything—the shining light, the will-o’-the-wisp that you chase and never catch. And then, after she was gone, her presence only grew. She was made perfect in life by her untimely death. And all the lost possibilities ballooned. Your sister was a talented writer; I can only imagine what she would have done. A great beauty. A sterling intellect. An angel of kindness. Who might she have been—if only?
But that’s not the whole truth.
The truth is that my sister was mean. She tortured me—teasing, getting me in trouble for things I didn’t do. She slept around—there were any number of townie boys who might have done her in. She was a city cat, and they were her country mice. And you know what? She wasn’t that good looking. She developed early. She had a great body for a kid. A dangerously hot body. She evoked emotions she wasn’t prepared to handle.
No, no. It wasn’t me. Come on.
There were whispers, of course. Rumors abounded—that it was me, my father, a boy in town who everyone thought had violent tendencies. But the police ruled it an accident. A cramp, maybe. Or she got her foot tangled in some weeds. The only evidence that someone else might have been on the bank of the lake that night were some scattered boot prints, much larger than my size, even larger than my father’s. But that piece of evidence never led them anywhere, didn’t link back to any of her known friends in town.
No, I didn’t kill my sister. I was just a kid. And I loved her. And just like everyone else, I thought she was perfect. Because even though she pinched me hard under the table to make me yell, pulled the arm off my favorite bear, and told me that there really were monsters in my closet—she also lay on my bed when I had bad dreams, patiently helped me with my homework, and taught me how to do my hair so that I didn’t go through life looking like a “total dork.” It was only later, after my suicide attempt, my hours with Dr. Black, that I started to see the truth behind all the dream-weaving my parents did. She was just a girl who died too soon.
“Will?” says Emily, snapping me back. “Do you hear it?”
Yes, actually. Something tinny on the air. I come to stand beside her. There is a slight glow. As if there is a light burning somewhere in the house.
“There’s a cleaning crew that comes. Maybe they left a light on?”
“Or someone knows this place is empty? And they’re squatting?”
We stand a moment.
“Let’s go,” Emily says. “We can call the police and have them come check it out.”
But I’m already moving around back, jogging.
It’s her. Must be. It all makes sense now.
“Will!”
Emily’s voice is a whisper-yell in the dark, but I keep going—around the side of the house, past the trash cans.
My heart swells.
She’s here! All this time, she’s been hiding here. All of it—her life with Parker, the tiny house, Parker himself. It’s all a fiction. Such a clever girl.
I imagine coming around to the porch. I’ll see her, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop. She’ll be wearing one of those long-sleeve V-neck T-shirts she favors, her hair up. The infinity necklace will lie prettily against her collarbone. She’ll be shocked to see us. Amazed that Emily and I figured it out. Then she’ll be angry. Then relieved. Because it takes so much energy to live a lie. She fooled everyone, except the people who know and love her best.
It will be easy to back out of it, to save face. So easy. All we have to do is create another fiction. She and Parker broke up; he was a controlling jerk. But she’s still living the simple life, in a reasonably sized house in the country. Lessons learned.
But when I come around back, all the lights in the house are dark. It’s the porch light that burns. It’s on a timer—set to turn on at 9:00 p.m. and go off at 5:00 a.m. The music—it’s carrying from someplace across the lake, which happens. Hope leaves me, a lantern floating into the sky.
Emily knocks into me from behind.
“Are you crazy?” she wants to know. “What if there had been a break-in? Some meth head living in your house?”
I have to laugh a little—at her, at myself.
“What if it had been one of the Fiercer Animals?” I suggest.
She stares a moment, that worried face freezing in place, finally dissolving into an eye roll and an embarrassed smile. Then she smacks me hard on the arm.