Uncle Gavin drove a black Lincoln Navigator, which, while upscale and tricked out in leather and wood trim, left me disappointed. I’d imagined Uncle Gavin driving some sort of bad-boy car, like a Shelby Mustang or maybe a Ferrari. Instead, he was driving the kind of SUV that Buckhead mommies dropped off at the valet at Phipps Plaza. I got into the passenger seat, Uncle Gavin closing my door with a heavy whunk.
“Where are we going?” I asked once Uncle Gavin got in the driver’s seat. I wanted so badly to go home, except my home no longer existed. Now it was only a house with bloodstains.
Uncle Gavin looked at me with those dark eyes. “You’re coming home with me,” he said.
* * *
UNCLE GAVIN LIVED in Grant Park, a gentrified neighborhood in southeast Atlanta near the zoo. The northern suburbs, seated on the gentle heights of tree-topped hills, gazed down on the glass and steel towers of Atlanta from a distance. Grant Park was older, grittier, a stone’s throw from downtown. It was also a neighborhood getting a facelift. Every third block or so revealed a boarded-up house, a weedy lot strewn with rubble, or brand-new construction.
Uncle Gavin’s house was a remodeled Victorian bungalow that sat up from the sidewalk, stacked-stone walls flanking stairs up to a gate in a wooden fence that surrounded the property. An oak tree shaded the tiny yard, which had more boxwoods than grass, but everything looked tidy.
As we pulled up to the curb by the front steps, I saw a woman standing on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. She wore a pink tank top and painted-on jeans, and her chestnut hair was piled in a messy updo. When we got out of the Lincoln, the woman dropped her cigarette and stepped on it to put it out, then chewed her thumbnail.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I don’t have any clothes or anything,” I said.
Uncle Gavin held up a duffel bag. “I got you some things from your house,” he said.
We looked at each other. I imagined Uncle Gavin walking into my house, where his sister had been killed, and going down the hall to my room to get me jeans and shirts and underwear. The scene hurt so much, so quickly, that I mentally pulled a garage door down, closing it off.
“You okay?” Uncle Gavin asked, and when I nodded he led the way up the stairs, holding the gate open for me. We climbed the wooden steps to the porch, where the woman was waiting. “Supper?” Uncle Gavin asked her.
“On the stove,” the woman said. She had the kind of Southern accent I associated with NASCAR and country music stations. “Oh, honey, how’s your arm? Bless your heart.” It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me, but before I could say anything, the woman had enveloped me in a hug, careful not to jostle my slinged arm. Two things registered simultaneously: her hair smelled like coconuts, and she had enormous boobs.
“Fay, this is my nephew Ethan,” Uncle Gavin said. “Ethan, this is Fay.” He offered no other information, although very soon I realized Fay was my uncle’s girlfriend.
Fay released me and bent down a bit to look me in the eye—she was taller than me, almost a whole head taller than Uncle Gavin. She was younger than him, too. I tried not to look at her impressive cleavage. Fay was tanned and her face was striking, but there was something slightly off about her, a rabbity nervousness about her eyes and nose. “You have been through an awful thing,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
I’d about lost it right there, blubbering all over the front of Fay’s tank top, when Uncle Gavin stepped forward. “All right, let the boy alone, now. Ethan, I’ll show you to your room, and then we’ll have supper.” I don’t know if he wanted to save me from any further grief for the moment, or if he wanted to avoid having an emotional teenage boy on his front porch, or if he just wanted to eat. But Uncle Gavin’s comment gave me time to pull myself together and walk into his house.
CHAPTER THREE
On Saturday morning, yawning and not a little hungover, I walk into my den and stop dead. Susannah is in purple leotards and a blue exercise top, doing a downward-facing dog pose, her butt facing me. Wilson is lying on his pillow, staring at Susannah in adoration. He gives me a tail wag but then returns his attention to Susannah.
“That’s not how I like to wake up in the morning,” I say.
Susannah, her head pointed to the floor, looks back between her legs at me. “A cute girl in spandex? Perish the thought.”
“My sister exercising in my den is what I meant.”
Susannah walks her hands back toward her own feet, bent almost in half, and then stands straight up, the movement graceful and fluid. “You should try it,” she says. “All that sitting around will kill you.”
I move toward the kitchen and coffee. “I take Pilates,” I say.
She raises her eyebrows. “Oh, Pilates,” she says, holding one hand to her chest in mock surprise. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware I was speaking to a Pilates student.”
I flip her off without turning to look at her.
“What do you call yourselves, anyway?” she calls after me. “Pilatites? Pilatizens?”
I ignore her, and it’s not just that I’m hungover or that her perkiness is especially annoying. Susannah has dislodged some memories that I had carefully packed away. Not Ponytail—he’s a regular visitor in the dead of the night, stalking my dreams in his black vest and white T-shirt. No. This is something I tied to a concrete block and dropped in the depths of my memory, but now it’s rising to the surface, slimy and mottled and smelling of rotten fish. It’s a nightmare of fragmented images: kudzu in the night, plywood over a hole in the wall, screaming in a pitch-black house. I want to banish it, force it away, but it’s a memory, a biochemical encoding in my brain, and it’s not a single remembered event tucked in a file that theoretically I could delete but a series of smaller memories distributed across my brain, like strands that form a web, a web that has now trapped me. I am again in Frankie’s car—God, Frankie—as he drives down the darkened streets, both of us peering through the windshield, looking for Susannah, riding to her rescue, ha, good one, rescue, like we’d ever had a hope of rescuing her, like my sister hadn’t been lost to us from the start—
“Ethan,” Susannah says now. She’s in my kitchen doorway, looking at me.
I realize I am standing at my sink, the water running, empty coffeepot in my hand. “Yeah,” I say, turning off the water. “I’m fine. What?”
“You okay? You just … zoned out for a minute.”
I blink at her, then look at the coffeepot in my hand. Coffee. Right. I turn the water back on and fill up the pot. “Just tired,” I say, and I offer her a smile. “And maybe hungover. Can’t hang with my little sister anymore.”
Susannah looks at me for another moment, then smiles back. “Getting old, big brother. You have enough coffee for two? I’m going for a run.”
I raise the pot. “On it.” I put the pot in the coffeemaker, then start looking for a filter and grounds. When I glance up at the doorway, Susannah is gone. I pause and place my hands on the counter, closing my eyes for a moment’s peace, trying to visualize that mental vault, the place where I keep the past locked away. But it’s as if the vault door is open and leads to a dark cave at the back of my brain, full of twisting tunnels and passages where I’ve tried to lose all those memories, and there are things in there that I’ve kept hidden for a long time, that I cannot allow to come out into the light. So I reach back into that cave and take out a different set of memories, still painful but less raw, in an effort to keep the truly dark ones at bay.