Chapter 40
YOU SAVED ME.” I stare at my husband, the memory so real, so vibrantly alive, I feel as if I should be able to reach out and touch it.
“Did you just hear something?” he asks me sharply. Thomas turns, the beam of his flashlight bouncing along the ruins, but I can’t focus.
I’m breathing hard. My whole body is trembling, which I don’t understand. I’m safe. I’m out of the grave. Thomas pulled me out. Thomas saved me.
Twenty-two years ago, we found each other in the dark.
So why is my heart already constricting painfully in my chest?
“You told me to stay in the woods,” I murmur now. I’m talking to air. Thomas has left me, walking closer to the jumble of granite blocks. He still holds the shovel. Why did he bring a shovel? “You told me to stay out of sight. And that’s what I did.”
It comes to me. Slowly. Like a whisper. The wind against my cheek.
“Smoke.” I turn toward my husband. “There’s smoke in the air.”
The smell of smoke. The heat of fire.
Screams in the air.
Smoke.
I reach out my hand, but once again my husband isn’t there to take it. He stands too far away, the flashlight trembling in his grip.
“When I returned to the house, my mom was waiting for me in the foyer,” he says. His voice sounds funny. Strained. “She started with her usual snapping demands. Don’t track in mud. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Is the body taken care of? Well, is it?
“And . . . I saw her. I finally saw her. She wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t even a person. She was a monster. Like something out of an old horror movie. She would devour all of us. And it would mean nothing to her in the end.
“I told her I was done. I told her I was leaving, taking the car. That was it.
“She laughed at me. Where would I go? What would I do? I was just a kid. I knew nothing of the real world. Now, upstairs.
“But I didn’t. I stood there. I didn’t move a muscle. So she walked up and slapped me. ‘Go to your room!’ she screamed. Like I really was a little kid, and not the son she’d turned into a drug dealer and a gravedigger and God knows what else. I still didn’t move. She slapped me again, then again.
“‘Enough,’ I said, finally blocking her hand. ‘We’re done.’ I pushed past her, up the stairs to my third-floor room. I would grab my clothes and, of course, my stash of cash. Then I planned on doing exactly what I’d said. I’d throw everything in the car and take off down the drive. Then, once I was safely out of sight, I’d pull over and double-back through the woods to grab you. It would be perfect, I thought. She wouldn’t chase me; I was her son. And nor would she chase after you, as she couldn’t afford any more trouble, especially with Vero’s death to still handle.
“But she wouldn’t let me go. Instead, she followed me the whole way up the stairs. Enraged, shouting, screaming. The older two girls came out to see what was going on. On the second-story landing, Mother caught up with me. She smacked the side of my head; then when I still refused to stop, she threw herself at me. Literally tackled me. It was as if she’d gone crazy. Guess that’s what happens when nobody has ever told you no before. We struggled. And then . . .”
Thomas pauses. He stands six, seven feet away. Too far for me to see his face in the dark.
“She fell down the stairs,” he says flatly. “Landed on her neck. We all heard the crack. She was dead.”
I open my mouth. I close my mouth. I don’t know what to say.
“I told the girls to leave. They were the only people left in the house, and it’s not like they were sorry she was gone. I gave them the keys to the car. On their own, they ransacked the china, silver, crystal. Why not? It was the least they deserved.
“Then . . .” Thomas hesitates, seems to be composing himself. “If I just took off, left the body, of course there would be a major investigation. So I figured I needed to do something. It had been an accident; her neck was broken. Maybe if it looked like she’d been rushing out of the house. You know, because she was escaping from a fire.”
“No.” The second he says the words, my hands close over my ears again. I can’t hear this. My heart, rapid before, is now beating triple, quadruple time. The smell of smoke. The heat of fire. Her screams. “Please stop, please stop, please stop.”
The wind is blowing harder, feeding off my agitation. Battering both of us.
But Thomas doesn’t stop.
“I didn’t know, Nicky. Trust me. I never imagined . . . I grabbed the cans of gasoline from the garage. I poured them all over the second-floor bedrooms, landing, beginning with one of the fireplaces so it would look like, I don’t know, a log had rolled out, starting the fire. Four cans of gasoline I used, because it was raining out, and I needed the place to burn. You pulled yourself from a grave. Well, now I was helping us get a fresh start.
“When I was done, I returned the empty gas jugs to the garage. Then starting in the rear second-story bedroom and working backward toward the door, I tossed matches. Lots and lots of matches. Next thing I knew . . . whoosh! I had no idea. The exterior of the house might have been wet from the rain, but apparently, over the course of a hundred years, the wood on the inside had dried to kindling. I seared the hair off the back of my hands stumbling my way across the foyer and out the front door.
“It was magnificent. It was terrifying. Then I heard her scream.”
“No. No. Please, stop.” I doubled over, hands still covering my ears. Tears streaming down my face.
But Thomas doesn’t. He walks closer and closer. He won’t stop talking. And now, after all these years, I finally can’t stop remembering.
“She must not have been dead,” he whispers. “I mean, I was just a kid, checking a kid, and we’d never had an OD. Maybe she’d been unconscious, like in a coma. I don’t know. But the fire started and she woke up.”
I’m in the woods. I smell the smoke. It makes me crinkle my nose. Who would light a fire in a rainstorm?
Then I hear the first scream. Vero’s scream.
“She couldn’t go down. The second-floor landing was already completely engulfed. So she must’ve headed up. To escape the flames.”
I’m running now. Through the woods, wet branches smacking against my face. I don’t care anymore about Madame Sade’s wrath or Thomas’s pretty promise. I have to get to Vero. She’s screaming my name.
“I could see her,” Thomas says, the flashlight shaking uncontrollably in one hand, the shovel in the other. “Up in the tower bedroom, beating one of the windows with her fists. I tried, Nicky. I rushed back toward the front door, but already the heat was too much. Then I bolted for the garage, to where we kept the work ladder.”
From a distance, I spot her. Vero in the princess bedroom. She’s looking down at me. Already I can see orange flames dancing behind her head.
Vero doesn’t scream anymore. Vero presses her hand against the glass. Vero reaches out to me, as surely as I reach my hand toward her. Running still. So hard, so fast. Trying to . . . I don’t know what to do.
I simply race my way toward her, calling her name.
Now I’m the one screaming her name.
She disappears. The next instant, glass shatters. A chair comes flying through. One of the small ones from the child-size table. The fire roars its approval, inhaling fresh air, reaching hungrily for it.
Another chair; now both panes are broken. Then Vero is back, standing in the opening of jagged glass. She is bleeding. Her hands, her feet, her face.
She doesn’t care.
The smell of smoke. The heat of fire.
As she raises her arms above her head. Closes her eyes. Lifts her face to the night sky.
Vero wants to fly.
I scream once.
She makes no sound at all.
As she launches herself into the air. Away from the heat. Away from the flames.
Her dark hair ripples behind her. Her flowery nightgown sprouts like wings.
Vero wants to fly.
Another shout. Thomas, running up behind me. But it’s too late. Nothing either of us can do.
It’s the landing that’s the hard part.
As Vero comes down, down, down. Plowing into the earth. A pale, crumpled heap that moves no more.
“By the time I returned, it was too late. I didn’t know a house could go up like that,” Thomas murmurs. “I didn’t . . . We were just kids, Nicky. There were so many things we didn’t know.”
I can’t look at him. My heart is breaking. Like it broke that day. Because he’s right. It was all our fault. It wasn’t our fault at all. We were just trying to survive what we never should’ve had to survive in the first place.
Thomas took me away that day. He loaded me in his mother’s personal car, where I curled into a wet, shivering ball in the passenger’s seat. The house burned. Vero died. Thomas drove us to New Orleans.
In the days and weeks that followed, I could barely function. If I slept, I woke up screaming. If I was awake, I spent it crying.
Thomas found a place. Thomas purchased food. Thomas got a job on a movie set during the day, then held me in his arms at night. As I tried to put myself back together, but failed over and over again.
Until, four weeks later, attempting to do laundry, I found a picture in Thomas’s pocket. One he must’ve taken when no one was looking. Of a ten-year-old girl in a flowered dress. Of me.
And I broke. I know of no other way of saying it. I looked at myself, I saw Vero. I remembered Vero, I saw myself, and I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t.
Thomas came home. I greeted him with the news that I was gone, leaving, out of there. I had died, and now it was time to be dead. No more Chelsea. No more Vero. I would move, new name, new town, new experience. It was the only way for me.
And he said yes.
I didn’t even understand at first. Then he walked to the dresser, tossed his few items of clothing in a bag, and declared he was ready. If I needed to leave, then we would go. If I needed a new name, he’d get one, too. If I needed a fresh start, he’d take it with me.
He loved me. He would go wherever, do whatever, be whomever, as long as he was with me.
And that’s what we did. Have been doing for twenty-two years.
“How did you do it?” I ask him now. Because this is what I don’t understand. How that night could break me completely, while making my husband so strong.
“You were what I wanted, Nicky. I’d been watching you, waiting for you, I don’t even know for how long. I failed Vero. I know that. I failed all of us by not acting sooner, by not turning on my own mother. Trust me, in the beginning I replayed it in my mind over and over again. All the coulda, woulda, shouldas. But in the end, I couldn’t go back. So I resolved to move forward. I vowed to make you happy if it took the rest of my life. And that’s what I’ve been doing. Loving you. If only for you, that was enough.”
“I miss her.”
“I know.”
“I should’ve gotten us both out,” I exclaim in a rush. “I should’ve been smarter. She was lost by then, so sad. She wouldn’t even tell her stories anymore. But maybe, if I could’ve gotten her out. Returned her to the secret realm, the magical queen. She was just a little girl who missed her mother.”
“It wouldn’t have worked.”
“It might have—”
“No. It wouldn’t have. Nicky, turn around.”
The tone of his voice is sharp. It catches me off guard, like a slap to the face.
The wind is not blowing anymore, I realize. The night has gone totally still. Totally quiet.
I turn. Very slowly. To discover Marlene Bilek standing in the beam of Thomas’s flashlight.
Her hard-worn face is stamped with a grim expression I’ve never seen before. And she is holding a gun.