by Shannon Kirk
I shake my head. I’m allowing conspiracies and horrors. Mom’s burner last pinged in New York City, the feds say. Here’s what had to have happened: Mom came back after I took the box—where was she?—figured her jig was up with me, grabbed her roller and burner and ran. That has to be what happened. She abandoned me. I need to accept this.
It’s time for my fifty-sixth Skype call to Gretchen Sabin to see if by some miracle she’s found Allen. I’m telescoping on my desperation to find Allen. Needing him is more acceptable than needing Mom—Laura Ingrace.
“Hi, Luce,” Gretchen answers as her moon face pops on my screen. She’s in her room, sitting on her bed, and her wall headboard of Grey’s Anatomy books is behind her. In last night’s call, she again reported no Allen. The fifty-fifth report of no Allen. I’m assuming there’s still no Allen, and tonight’s will be the fifty-sixth negative report.
“Hi, Gretchen. How’s things?” I ask.
“Oh, the same. Want to see the new skulls puzzle I’m working on in the dead room? I can walk down there with the computer.”
Do I miss this? Gretchen’s constant attempts to corral me, keep me, set me in a barricaded room, surrounded by puzzle mazes? Not really—I’ve never liked the unnatural creepiness of her need for me. But, in the very core of myself, which nobody could know, there is something about her naked—terrifying—need, which matches my need to be needed, and so, Gretchen remains a dangerous addiction. Truth be truth, I know these nightly Skype calls are a subterfuge, vain attempts to find Allen, for I think I must accept he’s gone. It’s been too long. I know what I need are doses of Gretchen’s wicked desperation, and this is not healthy. I’ve got to break this cycle. Accept that Allen is gone. And let Mom go. As I always do, I will refuse going to the dead room, even virtually.
Before I can answer, she twists her head to the left, which is toward her door, and she shudders, surprised by what she’s seeing, but then scrunches her forehead like she’s mad. She looks back at the screen.
“What’s going on? What’s that?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. What were we talking about?” She shifts her computer so her camera is angled away from the door, and now I can see the corner where the wall full of porcelain doll puzzles meets the Grey’s Anatomy wall.
“You asked if I wanted to see your new skulls puzzle in the dead room,” I say.
Again, Gretchen twists her head toward the door. Red blotches pulse on her neck and chest. She is, of course, in an apple-print dress. This time she stiffens her body, freezing her torso straight against the wall of anatomy books. A flash of orange and white jumps between her and the computer, and then it’s gone. Gretchen throws her computer on the bed. Now her camera faces the wall opposite her bed with all the Dante’s Inferno puzzles. I hear her wrestling and scrabbling around in the background and muttering. I can’t tell if she’s angry or in distress.
Then in a flash again—the orange and white is back. This time it freezes before the screen and blocks my view of the Inferno wall. The orange and white is fur. His face fills my screen.
“Allen!” I yell. “Allen!”
I must yell really loud because Mag barges in my room, which she’s never done before without knocking.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Allen! Mag, Allen is back!”
She swoops up to my bed, bends, and peers at the screen. Gretchen has grabbed Allen and is throwing him on the floor.
“Gretchen found Allen,” I yell. “She found Allen. Allen!”
“Hi, Gretchen,” Mag says.
“Hi,” Gretchen says, putting on a quick sunny tone and smile, which doesn’t match the scowl I know I caught on her face when she threw Allen on the ground.
“Why didn’t you tell me you found Allen?” I interrupt.
“Didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Oh, well, surprise! I found Allen!”
“Are you taking care of him?”
“Of course I’m taking care of him,” she says, sparkling her eyes toward Mag. With that, Mag moves away from the computer and to the door. In the doorway, she pumps her long arms in the air as if in victory, mouths, “Yeah, Allen,” and softly closes the door. I know she’s following the motley crew of counselors’ directives to give me space and then give me more space.
But I don’t want Mag to give me space. Things aren’t right. As soon as Mag leaves, Gretchen switches her cheery smile to her weird eerie stare down, the kind she used to give when I lived there as a way to make me flinch. But this time she has my cat, and I’m helpless, sitting on a bed clear across the country. So this time I do flinch.
With a tremble in my voice, I say, “Gretchen, please tell me you’ll take care of Allen until I figure out how to come get him. Please.”
“Silly, I’m very busy, you know. So I guess I can try to feed him between puzzles and computer school when I can and all. You shouldn’t have left what you love behind. It’s sort of a breach of the lease. You should come get him ASAP.” Her tone is a clear warning, completely disconnected from the—I know now, phony—sympathetic tones she gave over the last eight weeks when she’d report she’d looked everywhere again, called for him, left food for him outdoors, but just couldn’t find Allen.
My heart is clogging my throat in beats that ricochet all the way up to my brain.
“Please, Gretchen, don’t hurt Allen.”
“Ope!” she yelps, smashing her hand against her chest. “Me? You think I’d hurt Allen? Lucy, you’re being paranoid.” She loses the smile and winks in her wicked way. “You know I want to see you again, Lucy. And, remember, I always get what I want.” Gretchen stares another beat with no smile and then shuts the lid of her computer to close me out.
I’m frozen. I can’t move. I can’t believe she said that. I can’t believe she did that.
How long has she had Allen? When was she going to tell me? What is this game?
My iPhone beeps. An incoming text:
Can’t wait for you to come get Allen! Don’t worry, he can snuggle with Old Mr. Snoof in the lab until you get here. Xoxoxoxo —G
My fingers pop straight and grow ice-cold. I drop my phone. A chill runs up my spine and causes a brain freeze. An instinct tells me to send nobody but myself to get Allen. Something about Gretchen’s awful, eerie face and words and tone were a warning, a ransom message, unspoken but blaringly loud: Lucy, only you may come to get Allen, or Allen disappears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MOTHER
Lucy steps out of her room with a face so ghost white and scared, Mag’s not sure she’s prepared to do whatever she’s supposed to do. That creepy-awkward girl Gretchen in New Hampshire found Lucy’s cat, Allen, so Mag is confused as to why Lucy looks scared out of her mind.
Mag’s at her computer, sitting at one end of their two-top table in the kitchen. Green curtains flutter around her from a breeze through an open window. She’d already made an instant decision after leaving Lucy’s room. She hopes she’s right. She hopes this will knock the fright out of her girl.
“Lucy, I’m booking us tickets to leave in the morning to go get Allen. We’ll get your fur-love tomorrow, lickety-split. Okay?”
Lucy collapses on the floor, wailing, “Thank you, thank you, Mag. Thank you.”
Hovering over her fifteen-year-old daughter, Lucy is her baby girl again. Her infant she failed to protect. And now, Mag folds over her as an impenetrable tent. She hopes Lucy feels all her motherly intentions seeping into her, her unwavering commitment to never, not ever, allow another fiber of her being to hurt. Not on her body and not in her mind. Mag will give everything of herself to her girl, every last minute she’s on this earth. If Lucy needs her cat, they’ll fly to get him tomorrow. If she needs counselors, she’ll buy her twenty. If she needs food, water, shelter when she’s fifty and grown and long married, Mag will give her hers and sleep under a bridge.
Whatever Lucy needs, Mag will give double. Mag is irrelevant as a separate
being. She’s only on this planet as a sentry to her child.
“Hush, Lucy. Hush. I’m here. I will get you whatever you need. Always. You are safe.”
And in her mind, she bites back a hatred brewing so fierce, she’s afraid she might explode. Laura Ingrace, if I ever face you again, I fear for you. I fear for what will become of you for doing this to this beautiful child. For raining your wreckage upon her and reducing her to fear and crying and hives and terror, you will pay. I promise you that.
CHAPTER THIRTY
LUCY
I’m knocking on Gretchen’s brick fortress door with the weird metal shields around the frame. Mag is taking a call with my aunt Carly down in her beast camper, which we parked at the rental ranch. She’s giving me space to handle the collection of Allen on my own. I must have made her think I need “agency” and to “advocate for myself” and “more space” because I wasn’t talking the whole flight here. But she’s 100 percent wrong. I want her with me. Maybe I’ll advocate for myself by telling her outright I’ve grown to like, could see myself love, her being around. And her strength is something I aim to have. Like she’s that missing wedge of me that would complete my own almost-strength.
“Lucy!” Gretchen yells as she opens the door by pushing outward. I know enough now to step to the side.
“Where’s Allen?” My tone is back to steel, showing I’m not flinching anymore, and she’s crossed too many lines, broken too many rules, for this friendship to lift and fly. We, as a we, are dead. She’s in her apple-print dress. I grind my teeth. Her hair is frizzed out free, forming a halo of thin hair around her face, a cloud of wispy, frayed hay.
“Oh, Lucy, is that a way to greet an old friend?” She lifts her eyes so the pupils are at the top of her eye sockets, and the whites of her eyes show the below-lid veins. She has the darkest bags under her eyes I’ve seen on her yet. Another late-puzzle night, I suppose.
I inhale through my nose, close my eyes. “Where is Allen, Gretchen?”
She pops her lips. “Guess you’ll have to come in and find him. I’m busy.”
I open my mouth to stammer out a protest, but she turns and runs up the staircase, leaving the front door open to the fossil foyer. I can’t leave Allen in this horror house. I have to find him. Dammit. I should turn. For sure turn around and run and leave a man behind. But I can’t leave Allen. The thought of Gretchen brutalizing him, leaving him alone, possibly starving him, throwing him on the floor, not lavishing him with hugs and pets and combing his fur and giving him treats and treating him like Prince Allen kills me. I can’t leave my entire past behind. I step inside and pull shut the door so Allen can’t scoot out and get lost all over again. Was he ever lost? Did she have him all along?
As soon as I step inside, I note the box tower of Crock-Pots is gone. I jump when I hear metal swinging and clanking outside the door. A swoosh and a clink. Another swoosh and clink. And another swoosh and clink. I swirl back around and grab the knob. While it does turn and is not locked, when I push, the door opens only a half inch and jams. I slam into it with my shoulder, and I’m met by a solid wall.
Did she lock me in?
What?
How?
What was that metal swinging? Those weird metal shields?
“Gretchen!” I scream.
She pokes her head over the railing of the top landing.
“Shh, you’ll wake Daddy, Lucy! Don’t be so rude. It’s time for you to find Allen. Isn’t that the game we’re playing today? Or do you want to do a puzzle in the dead room?”
Wake Daddy? It’s noon.
“Where is Allen? And did you lock me in? What the fuck, you bitch!”
Gretchen is howling laughing. Her frizzed-out hair scratches the air around her moon-bright face. Red pulses pop on her exposed arms. Her eye sockets merge with the bags underneath and appear like two black bruises.
“Oh ho.” She tapers the laugh. “Actually, let’s do something else first. I wanted to wait to show you. But now’s the time. Head on down the hall toward the bathroom, open that ivory door you tried to nose into the first night you came.”
“Is Allen in there?” I ask, staring, not flinching.
“Maybe.”
She steps slow down the stairs like she’s Pepé Le Pew and I’m her unwilling cat lover. She slides her left arm with the Apple Watch along the railing, making her own limb a trailing veil. Because I can’t stand the thought of her being close to me, I walk toward the ivory door.
As I do, I hear that metal swing and click outside the front door again. Swing click, swing click, swing click.
I turn around in the normal hall to see Gretchen in the foyer. She opens the front door and pushes outward, easy and fine.
“Maybe you’re having a spell, Lucy? Are you stressed about finding out you’re not who you thought you were and losing your cat? Look, honey, the door is not locked.”
I tilt my head and raise an eye to her. I do not flinch. I flip her off.
I place my hand on the gold doorknob, push, and find a blackened room.
“Allen,” I call into the darkness.
She pulls the front door shut.
“Reach in. Wall switch is on the side,” Gretchen calls down to me.
As I do, I hear running behind me, and before I can turn, hands push hard on my back and I’m shoved inside. I stumble forward and fall to the floor. The door is pulled shut, and I hear the turn of the lock. I’m screaming.
It is pitch-black in here. I continue screaming and feeling for the door. Palm over palm, I climb myself up, and finally when standing, brush my hands on each side until I feel a plastic plate and switch.
Just as I flick the light on, my body pressed against the locked door and me still screaming, a voice comes over an intercom. “Lucy, nobody can hear you. The walls are soundproofed. I left you a note.”
I turn around to a whirl of horror: blue pools, bones, and the brightest lights.
There’s no furniture. No windows. The walls are white white. The lights are huge industrial halogens you might find over a factory floor, so bright my eyes sting. And in two rows of five are ten blue kiddie pools on the wood floors. Beside each pool is a rectangular gray mat. In each pool is an assortment of human skeletal bones. In the closest pool, a human skull, which is missing some teeth, sits atop a pyramid stack of longer bones, possibly leg, possibly arm, I don’t know. A rib cage is set to the left, several other smaller bones, and flat ear-shaped pieces—I think hip bones—fill all the other spaces. In a nook on one wall is a piss-yellow toilet.
On the floor closest to me and at the start of the two rows of bone pools is a printed page, I think from a book, and a note on top of that.
Dearest Lucy,
These are human bones and they are puzzles! Each pool is a puzzle of a real dead human! You can use the page I ripped from Grey’s as a guide to put them back together. Use one gray mat for each one. When you have correctly assembled all of them, then you can go find Allen. Hint: he might be playing with Old Mr. Snoof in the lab.
I feel like I created a really great game, and I even gave you a guide and the best of my latest specimens! Be careful with them! Don’t you think the pressure of being locked away makes it more challenging?
Toot-a-loo! This will be fun!
—Gretchen
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MOTHER
They told Mag to give Lucy space and then give her more space and to make sure she was allowed to advocate for herself so she had agency and self-confidence. Fine. But something is wrong, and Mag’s instincts are blaring a four-alarm fire. If one thing is ingrained in Mag so deep, it’s that she will follow her instincts.
Mag had secretly trailed Lucy up the driveway to the Sabin house, and she stood at the bend in the road, listening. When the door opened, she heard Lucy demand Allen, and while she smiled proud at her daughter’s agency, she also detected that this was all wrong. A girl shouldn’t have to pound on someone’s front door and demand her own cat. To have t
his level of anger. To sound as if she were fighting for what belonged to her. Wasn’t this Gretchen girl watching Allen until Lucy came for him?
Still standing at the bend in the road, Mag hears the door on the brick house shut. She stalls and listens, and within a few seconds, hears a metal swishing and clicking sound. She creeps out of the bend to see the door being pushed out a half inch and banging into three metal rounds that have dropped into place around the door. Lucy is yelling behind that door.
Mag sprints up the hill but is stopped at the start of the circular parking area by a man in khakis. He’s wearing white gloves. To her side is a small excavator under a green metal roof on four poles. She notes how as soon as she got within twenty feet of the house, floodlights shot on, which is apparent, even though it’s noon, given the dark shading of the tall pines. And now, as she steps backward away from the man, and out of the twenty-foot perimeter, and he walks toward her and out as well, they switch off.
“No farther,” he says.
“What the hell is going on?” She steps toward him; he backs up within twenty feet of the house. The lights flood back on.
“What is going to happen is very simple,” he says in the calmest tone. “My daughter is going to play with your daughter for a few days.” He turns to the front door when the metal plates grind and roll and click into spots around the doorframe, no longer blocking ingress and egress. The door opens for a second, a girl speaks, and then the door is pulled shut fast.
“It’s all a game, see. I’m Jerry, by the way.”
“I want Lucy out here right now,” Mag says, trying to push past him.
Jerry extracts a tiny silver gun from his pants pocket, and Mag jumps back. Jerry walks to her, and the lights are off again. Mag notes that each time the lights turn on or off, a flash appears on his Apple Watch.
“This life,” Jerry says, scraping his house slippers on the tar of the circular drive, “has gotten away from me. I can’t control Gretchen anymore. I can’t keep her happy. She is not well. And I am tired. My girl has bags under her eyes so dark, she looks dead. So here is what we are going to do, Ms. Bianchi. Here is what we are going to do. This watch—” He lifts his right arm and bounces his wrist toward her.