My mother crouched down to the floor, positioned herself at eye level, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“This is serious, honey, but just be careful. Be vigilant.”
“Don’t get into a car with strangers,” Cooper said, sighing. “Don’t walk down dark alleys alone. It’s all pretty obvious, Chlo. Just don’t be stupid.”
“Those girls weren’t stupid,” my mother snapped, her voice quiet but sharp. “They were unlucky. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I turn in to the CVS parking lot now and pull through the pharmacy drive-through. There’s a man standing behind the sliding glass window, busying himself with stapling various bottles into paper bags. He slides the window open and doesn’t bother to look up.
“Name?”
“Daniel Briggs.”
He glances at me, clearly not a Daniel. He taps a few keys on the computer before him and speaks again.
“Date of birth?”
“May 2, 1982.”
He turns around, shuffles through the B basket. I watch him grab a paper bag and walk toward me again, my hands gripped tightly on the wheel to stop them from fidgeting. He aims his scanner at the bar code and I hear a beep.
“Do you have any questions about the prescription?”
“Nope,” I say, smiling. “All good.”
He pushes the bag through his window and into mine; I snatch it, push it deep into my purse, and roll the window up again, pulling away without so much as a goodbye.
I drive for a few more minutes, my purse on the passenger seat radiating from the mere presence of the pills inside. It used to baffle me how easy it was to pick up prescriptions for other people; as long as you know the birthday that matches the name on file, most pharmacists never even ask for a driver’s license. And if they do, simple explanations usually work.
Oh, shoot, it’s in my other purse.
I’m actually his fiancée—do you need me to provide the address on file?
I turn in to my Garden District neighborhood and start the journey down a mile-long stretch of road that always leaves me disoriented, the way I imagine scuba divers feel when they find themselves completely enveloped in darkness, a darkness so dark even their own hand placed inches from their face would get lost.
All sense of direction—gone. All sense of control—gone.
Without any houses to illuminate the roadway or floodlights to reveal the twisting arms of the trees that line the street, when the sun goes down, this road gives the illusion of driving straight into a pool of ink, disappearing into a vast nothingness, falling endlessly into a bottomless hole.
I hold my breath, push my foot down on the gas just a little bit harder.
Finally, I can sense my turn approaching. I flick on my blinker, even though there’s nobody behind me, just more black, and veer right into our cul-de-sac, releasing my breath when I pass the first streetlight revealing the road toward home.
Home.
That, too, is a loaded phrase. A home isn’t just a house, a collection of bricks and boards held together by concrete and nails. It’s more emotional than that. A home is safety, security. The place you go back to when the curfew clock strikes nine.
But what if your home isn’t safe? Isn’t secure?
What if the outstretched arms you collapse into on your porch steps are the same arms you should be running from? The same arms that grabbed those girls, squeezed their necks, and buried their bodies before washing their own hands clean?
What if your home is where it all started: the epicenter of the earthquake that shook your town to the core? The eye of the hurricane that ripped apart families, lives, you? Everything you had ever known?
What then?
CHAPTER FOUR
My car idles in the driveway as I dig into my purse and fish out the pharmacy bag. I rip it open and pull the orange bottle from inside, twisting the cap and dumping a pill into my palm before crumpling the bag in a ball and shoving it, and the bottle, into my glove compartment.
I look at the Xanax in my hand, inspecting the little white tablet. I think back to that phone call in my office: Aaron Jansen. Twenty years. My chest constricts at the memory, and I pop the pill into my mouth before I can think twice, swallowing it dry. I exhale, close my eyes. Already, I feel the grip in my chest loosening, my airways opening wide. A calmness settles over me, the same sense of calm that follows every time my tongue touches a pill. I don’t really know how to describe it, this feeling, other than pure and simple relief. The same relief you would feel after flinging open your closet door to find nothing but clothes hiding inside—the slowing of the heart rate, the euphoric sense of giddiness that creeps into the brain when you realize that you’re safe. That nothing’s going to lunge at you from the shadows.
I open my eyes.
There’s a hint of spice in the air as I step out of my car and slam the door, clicking the lock button twice on my key fob. I turn my nose toward the sky and sniff, trying to place the scent. Seafood, maybe. Something fishy. Maybe the neighbors are having a barbecue, and for a second, I’m offended that I’m not invited.
I start the long walk up the cobblestones toward my front door, the darkness of the house looming before me. I make it halfway up the walkway before I stop and stare. Back when I bought this house, years ago, it was just that. A house. A shell of a thing ready to have life blown into it like a saggy balloon. It was a house prepared to become a home, all eager and excited like a kid on the first day of school. But I had no idea how to make a home. The only home I had ever known could hardly be called a home at all—not anymore, at least. Not in hindsight. I remember walking through the front door for the first time, keys in hand. My heels on the hardwood echoing through the vast emptiness, the bare white walls littered with nail marks from where pictures once hung, proof that it was possible. That memories could be formed here, a life could be made. I opened up my little tool kit, a tiny red Craftsman that Cooper had bought, walking me around Home Depot as I held the lips open while he dropped wrenches and hammers and pliers inside like he was filling up a bag of sweet-and-sour gummies at the local candy store. I didn’t have anything to hang—no pictures, no decorations—so I hammered a single nail into the wall and hung the metal ring that held my house key. A single key, and nothing more. It felt like progress.
Now I look all the things that I’ve done to it since to make it appear like I have my shit together from the outside, the superficial equivalent of slathering makeup over a marbling bruise or fastening a rosary on top of a scarred wrist. Why I care so much about the acceptance of my neighbors as they slink past my yard, leashes in hand, I don’t really know. There’s the swinging bench bolted to the porch ceiling, the always-present layer of buttery yellow pollen making it impossible to pretend that anybody ever actually sits there. The landscaping I had eagerly purchased and planted and then subsequently ignored to death, the skinny brown tendrils of my twin hanging ferns resembling the regurgitated bones of a small animal I once found while dissecting an owl in eighth grade biology. The scratchy brown welcome mat that says, Welcome! The bronze mailbox shaped like an oversized envelope bolted to the siding, maddeningly impractical, the slit too tiny to fit an entire hand, let alone more than a couple of postcards mailed to me by former classmates-turned-Realtors after the promise of their degrees turned out to be not-so-promising.