“Let’s go.” Ava limps straight through the grass, deliberately stomping every flower bed on her way. The back door is unlocked. She checks for an alarm system, but there doesn’t seem to be any.
“It’s a good town.” Mack drifts into the house, remembering the bus driver who wouldn’t meet her eyes. “A safe town.”
“Look for car keys.” Ava tracks dirt across the spotless tile. If Mack is afraid of leaving a trace, Ava is determined to muddy the whole fucking place. But it’s hard to tell, since the kitchen is all browns and oranges, a relic of another decade, meticulously kept up but woefully dated. The fridge has several children’s drawings displayed with magnets. Mack trails her fingers along them; they’re brittle with age. One falls, dislodged, drifting to the floor like a leaf. Where the magnet held it is a single pristine circle, untouched by the sun, protected from time. Mack leaves it where it lies.
Ava opens the door from the kitchen to the garage. Inside, there’s only a four-wheeler and the empty space where a car doubtless goes. “Dammit.” She retreats inside and careens through a fussy dining room, the large, polished table dominating the space, unsoftened by yellowing lace doily place mats. Unlike Mack and LeGrand, Ava has references for what a nice house is, and this definitely was one, but hasn’t been updated in decades. It’s a time capsule of expensive poor taste.
Mack and LeGrand trail after her, unsure what to do. Ava finds the family room—though it lacks any of the warmth or chaos of an actual family—and collapses onto a floral couch, the fabric shiny in a way meant to look elegant but that makes it slick and uncomfortable. She eases her leg in front of her with a hiss. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she can’t do much more. She’s at the limits of her pain tolerance, genuinely afraid she’s doing further permanent damage.
“Two choices,” she says. “We keep going, look for another house, another car. Increases our odds of being found. Or we wait. Doesn’t seem like someone young lives here, and old people don’t stay out late, right? Plus the four-wheeler makes me think the owner is in on everything. So we wait, and when they come back, we take their car.”
LeGrand wants to keep going, is almost as uncomfortable as Mack in this house, but he can see how much pain Ava’s in. He doesn’t want to ask her to walk any more. He looks to Mack to make the call, but Mack isn’t listening. She’s examining a china hutch filled with porcelain figurines.
Imagine having enough money for the things you need, and deciding what you want next is a collection of little boys and girls with garishly cherubic faces in a variety of poses and outfits. The exaggerated innocence of the little girls in pink, frilly dresses, gazing over their shoulders with o-shaped lips, feels almost obscene.
Mack looks over her own shoulder. Ava and LeGrand are watching her, waiting for her decision. No one should make her decide anything. She still feels sure she’s forgotten something, left something crucial behind. The park tugs on her, like she’s a compass and it’s true north. The idea of driving away from it all, just…leaving? Seems more surreal and impossible than the monster waiting for them in the maze.
But Ava is in pain. She gave more details for the option that involved staying here, which makes Mack suspect it’s the plan Ava prefers. “We wait,” Mack says, then walks into the kitchen to look in the fridge. She lost her bag with all her carefully hoarded protein bars. Left it behind in the park. Maybe that’s what’s drawing her back. She laughs quietly to herself at the thought of going back in to retrieve it and literally entering the belly of the beast for her troubles.
Ava doesn’t know if they’re making the right decision, but she wants to cry with relief that she doesn’t have to stand up again yet. She has to do something about the pain. The pain is distracting her. It’s going to make her a bad leader, and it’s going to get someone hurt or killed.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” she asks LeGrand, who nods in response. He sets down the bag of rubber duckies. She didn’t notice he kept them. Useless now, but of course LeGrand would carry them until instructed otherwise, in case she needed them. In case he could help.
Ava passes him the rifle and leans back, wishing she could go to sleep, knowing she won’t sleep again until they’re the hell away from this nightmare. She’s seen a lot of weird shit in her life, but invisible monsters eating women will probably take the top spot forever.
God, she hopes it does. What else is there out in the world that she doesn’t know about, hasn’t seen? Though technically she also hasn’t seen this. Why could LeGrand and Mack when she couldn’t?
* * *
—
Mack licks the spoon clean, quickly finishing a pudding cup. She grabs a second one and wanders into the dining room. Another massive hutch, filled this time not with figurines but delicate dishes that look like they’re never used, only displayed. Baffling. But a hand-embroidered napkin—handkerchief?—folded on the bottom of the display case catches her eye. Nicely is delicately stitched onto the edge of the cloth. Nicely was her father’s middle name, given to him to carry on his mother’s maiden name. What is it doing here?
Mack sets her half-eaten pudding on the table and opens the hutch. She picks up the handkerchief, and that’s when she notices there’s a little compartment beneath it. Tucking the handkerchief into her pocket, she eases the board off the compartment and pulls out a large leather-bound tome.
The name NICELY is engraved on the front. For once, she has found something in a house that makes her feel like she belongs.
She doesn’t like it.
She takes the book into the family room, sits next to Ava, and opens it.
JULY 1, 1946
I, Lillian Nicely, begin this record of my time in charge of the season.
I have studied the records—both Tommy Callas’s and that old dirty drunk Hobart Keck’s. (We do not know if he is dead or merely wandered away. Either is fine by me. Why we ever let him have a hand in overseeing the season is beyond me. Hobart’s bleak and negative views of our parents and their sacrifice for us—their divine endowment of both prosperity and the responsibility thereof—are not shared by the rest of us. We view our inheritance not as a burden or a curse, but a great gift and a solemn duty. Good riddance to him.)