Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  i told her to get up. i said i had a present for her.

  that was the first lie i’ve ever told her.

  she was in her pajamas still. i have the same pair—mom got them for us both on our last birthday—but i’ve never worn mine. they were too big for her (so too big for us both) and she’d rolled up the cuffs of the pants and the sleeves both. i could see the skin of her stomach through the gaps between the buttons. i hated that.

  she asked me where the present was and i said it was outside and she trusted me. she followed me. we went downstairs and we went out onto the back porch and i could see the grove in the distance, a deeper dark than the sky. it was almost dawn.

  when we were kids we would stay on the porch and talk all night. i thought that could be the present i gave her. one little bit of our old lives for her to remember. but it was too close to the house and to the light mom left on under the stove hood. so i said we should go out to the grove.

  it used to be our place back when we were still young enough that i’d give people the wrong name. so it seemed like the right thing. all of it seemed like the right thing, is my point.

  the grove is about a mile from the house. we walked it together, barefoot down the access road that cuts through the crops. halfway there she reached over and held my hand so tightly, the insides of our wrists pressed together. she did it. i never want to forget that. my sister and i walked side by side in the night once, and her pulse beat against mine.

  but then we got there.

  the place we started, the way mom tells it.

  the grove has this smell to it that i don’t know how to describe. it’s like it’s always just rained there. fresh earth, and something sweet. that night it was so strong it lingered in my hair for hours, until finally i took a bath in the black-tiled guest bathroom and changed into some of mom’s clothes.

  katherine looked happy. we stepped through the first clutch of the apricot trees and she let out this sigh. like she’d been holding her breath since i don’t know when. since the last time we were there, maybe. and this i remember, this i cannot be wrong about: she said, “thank you.”

  that was the gift. bringing her there, that was my gift to her.

  if she hadn’t said it maybe i wouldn’t have been able to. but it felt like she was giving me permission. like this was the right way for it to be over for her.

  so i let her go deeper into the grove by herself. i let her get ahead of me. and i picked up a rock from between the roots of an apricot tree. i meant to hit her on the back of the head so maybe she’d die without realizing what this was.

  but i took too long, or she heard me, or something. i don’t know exactly. all i remember is the line of her profile as she looked over her shoulder. mine. her and me. my mini.

  i couldn’t. not like that. i still had to.

  i took her throat in my hands and she ended up on her back, me with my knees on either side of her. i was crying, and my hands kept slipping. but she was so weak that it barely mattered.

  here is where i have to stop. it is too much. i can tell you i remembered the burn on her finger. and i can tell you i snapped off the dead corn from the fields and piled it over her body, right there in the grove. i can tell you i got a lighter from the kitchen and burned her down.

  mom called the fire department. they came. they put it out. the police asked questions, and we told them it was all katherine, which wasn’t really a lie. we told them she disappeared, which wasn’t really a lie either.

  i don’t understand how, but when they looked for her body, there was nothing left to find.

  that’s the end of it. that has to be the end of it. but it’s been three weeks now, three weeks and seven hours since i did what i did, and something is wrong with my body. at first i thought it was her, getting what she wanted, making us the same all the way inside again. but it’s not. it’s not. i’ve already missed one period. already started feeling sick every morning.

  it’ll be a girl.

  i have no father and i have a mother i cannot bear to look at and this is the only place i can ask for help. please. i have sinned. that’s what you say when you’re confessing, and i have. but my daughter hasn’t.

  It happened to Mom. Just like Tess, pregnant with no idea how. I wanted so badly to keep it apart, but it’s all the same thing, isn’t it? The past and the present, happening at the same time.

  I stare at that last sentence, in my mother’s handwriting. Me. That was me. Me she wanted to do right by. Me she kept, even though it scared her, even though she never asked for it. Even though I was only the echo of her sister. Not a father in the world, not for either of us. Just a choice to be made.

  And it’s in my hands now. Gram gave it all to Mom, said someone had to take care of it. Mom did her best, but there was so much she couldn’t do. There was more than she could carry. So she passed the rest to me. Told me to keep a fire burning and locked herself away.

  I close my eyes. See myself back at the table in Gram’s kitchen. She built her family on sand and did nothing but watch as it fell apart. I won’t do that. I won’t be like that. There’s a way this all happened, and it’s there at Fairhaven, waiting for me to find it.

  Okay, Margot, I tell myself. It’s time to go home.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I make it back to the house right as the sunset fades, the photograph of Mom and Katherine in the pocket of my dress. The driveway’s empty, so I plant myself on the back porch and wait. Gram will be home soon. Every second stretching, endless, filled up with Jo and Katherine. With me, the girl with no father. The girl who grew in her mother’s body all on her own. To not have chosen it? More than that, to not know how it happened? I’d have gone to the clinic too. I’m not sure I’d have changed my mind.

  In the distance, the Miller house is well lit and shining, and my stomach tightens the longer I look at it. The same thing has happened to Tess. Whatever’s causing this, it’s not just our family. It’s not Nielsen business gone Nielsen wrong.

  A sputter, and the rattle of a truck coming in. Gram. But she’s not coming from the highway. Instead, her headlights hit me from the Miller driveway, running along the far side of Fairhaven. I frown, get to my feet. Maybe she brought Tess home from the fundraiser. Or maybe she went over to help her talk to her parents. Maybe she did a good thing, for once.

  I wait, listen as the truck swings around the front of the house before settling in its usual spot along the side. The engine cuts, headlights die. I hear the door slam, and Gram mutters something to herself I can’t quite make out.

  “Hey,” I call. Part of me hopes I scared her.

  A pause. Then Gram sweeps around the corner of the porch, her heels dangling from her hand. The pattern on her dress seems deeper in the twilight. I blink against the shadows.

  “What are you doing sitting out here?” she says.

  I shrug. “Nothing. Waiting for you.”

  She walks past me and pulls the screen door open so hard that it smacks against the wall. Steps into the kitchen and tosses her shoes in the corner. I watch, confused, as she ignores the light switch and bends over the sink, washing her hands in the dark. But I don’t dare touch the switch. If she’s left it like that, it’s because she meant to, and I need her loving me as much as possible when I ask her my questions.

  “We won’t even discuss the fact that you left the fundraiser to go God knows where” is what she starts with, voice raised over the water. She says it like I should be grateful. Putting me in her debt immediately. Even seeing it for what it is doesn’t stop the rush of gratitude I have to fend off.

  “Very generous of you,” I say.

  “Do not talk back to me, Margaret.”

  I ignore her. “Tess is pregnant. She’s pregnant just like Mom was with me. And you know that.”

  She dries her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven and turns to face me, her arms crossed over her chest. There’s something caught in her hair, dotted dark along her temples, but with th
e lights off I can’t make out what. “I don’t accept your premise.”

  I do laugh this time. This is ridiculous. This isn’t a debate. This is real, and it’s happening to me, to the dead girl, and to Tess, and I will not let it go.

  “What’s happening, Gram?” I step forward. Hands clenched into fists, every moment of the last few days boiling up. “And what happened back then? To Mom? To Katherine?”

  “That,” Gram says, a warning in her voice, “is not your concern.”

  “How? How is it not mine?” I am so tired of this. Shut out and pushed in at the same time. “I found Mom’s diary. I know what she did to Katherine. I know they had no father and I know there isn’t one with Tess, and that doesn’t just happen. That’s not how it works.”

  Gram goes back to the sink and starts washing her hands again, picking carefully at something under her nails. That familiar feeling takes hold of me. Look at me, it says. Look at me now.

  “Everything that’s happening comes back to here,” I say. “To you. Tess and Mom and that fucking girl, the one you said you didn’t know anything about.”

  She doesn’t even flinch. Just grabs the towel and wets it before dabbing at something on her skirt. “Best to leave all that alone,” she says.

  “Why?” I’m shaking, my whole body seized with anger. “She lived here, Gram. She must have.”

  “I said, leave it alone.”

  But I have lost the last of my patience. The question tears out of me, blunt and desperate, near to screaming. “Did you set the fire? Did you kill her?”

  Gram sighs, deep and exhausted. Turns and sags against the counter, the water still running. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. Is it really killing when she wasn’t . . .” She trails off, shrugs.

  “Wasn’t what?” Not a daughter. Not a sister. But she came from here, and I saw the report at the morgue. Her mirrored heart, just like Katherine. And something else, too. The chemical in her blood. “Gram, what’s ridicine?”

  Her face falls, goes clear enough that even in the dark I can see everything—the surprise, the fear.

  “Where did you hear about that?” she says. If I thought panic would turn her fragile, the way it can with Mom, with me, I was wrong. “Answer me right now, Margot. Where?”

  I lift my chin, set my shoulders. “Connors. He said it’s some banned chemical. Were you using it here?” I throw my arm out, gesturing to the fields beyond the porch, to the crops bearing stillborn fruit. “Is that what made them this way?”

  It’s too big a question, and I don’t even know quite what I mean. But I’m not wrong. I know that.

  Gram looks at me for a long time. And it isn’t pain in her eyes. It’s something else, something older and deeper. I think I’m always two people to her and Mom. Myself, and the ghost of the girl before me.

  “I have lived with my mistakes,” she says softly, finally. “So has Jo. We’ve both done what we could. And it hasn’t mattered at all.” I watch, confused, as she pulls a bobby pin from her bra, gathers her curled hair into a knot and pins it at the back of her head. “Some things just get worse and worse, don’t they, Mini?”

  The nickname rips through me. “Stop,” I say. “I’m not them.”

  “Oh, no?” She’s mocking me, but there’s no energy to it. “You’re here, aren’t you? You sent your mother away. You made yourself my girl.”

  I did. I tried so hard to be hers. To be anyone’s, if Mom wouldn’t have me.

  “I sent her away because I know what she did,” I say instead. It’s not true at all—

  I didn’t then. But I do now.

  “And what’s that?” Gram asks.

  “She killed Katherine.” It comes out easy. What a relief, to say it out loud, to let Mom be what she is. To stop pretending she could ever love me the way mothers are meant to love children. Mom’s spent seventeen years hiding from what she did, and the whole time she had me right in front of her. Me with a face just like hers. Like Katherine’s. How do you love the worst thing you ever did?

  “Yes,” Gram says with a strange sort of pride. “She did. That’s where you come from. That’s your Nielsen blood.”

  “No. No, I won’t be like her. I won’t be like you.”

  “You already are.” She gestures to me, the wave of her hand encompassing me from head to toe. “You’ve done exactly what we have. You’ve put this family first, as you should.”

  She’s right. I have decided that protecting this place is worth more than anything else. I have let Fairhaven wrap its arms around me, because nothing ever has before. But something isn’t good just because it wants me, is it? Gram’s not better than Mom. Her, kneeling in front of me, calling me her own—that’s just the other side of the coin.

  One day, I told myself, one day you’ll have to let go. Maybe that’s now.

  “You’re right. I have,” I say. Gram raises her eyebrows. “But I won’t do it again.” And I start walking. Out the back door. Off the porch and onto the grass. A glance around the corner at Gram’s truck, a shovel and a shotgun in the flatbed. I could take it to grab Tess and bolt, but Gram probably has the keys, and I can’t drive stick. It doesn’t matter; I’m gone anyway.

  I am leaving. I am getting Tess and we’ll go to the police and we’ll say this is how it is, and something will change. The driveway a stretch of dust ahead of me, the Miller house up ahead, and it feels so far but I’ll walk as far as I have to, as long as Fairhaven’s behind me.

  “Margot!”

  Don’t. Don’t turn around. I feel the urge to go back tugging at my feet, but I keep walking. You don’t have to stay somewhere just because someone wants you to, I tell myself.

  “Margot, you can’t go.” Gram is close behind me now. We must look ridiculous, marching through the evening in our party dresses, anger crackling like static between us.

  “Why the hell not?” Another step. Just one after another, Margot.

  “Please,” Gram says.

  That. That’s what stops me in my tracks. I can hear the effort it takes her to say it. I can hear how much she doesn’t want to.

  “You don’t have to look at me,” she says after a moment. “Just listen.”

  I do, and I hear her skirt rustle as she comes closer.

  “If it’s spread to the Millers,” Gram says when I don’t move, “that means it’s getting worse. I started this—you understand? So I had to stop it.”

  “It” what? I want to press her, but I know if I turn around, I’m giving up. Instead I take the smallest look over my shoulder. All I can see of her is the swing of her skirt, her hand slightly reaching toward me.

  “What are you talking about?” I say finally. “Stop what? How?”

  “I’m tying up loose ends,” Gram says. Not really an answer, but there’s a hoarseness to her voice I don’t like. I frown.

  “Loose ends like what?”

  “Tess,” Gram says. “Me.” She takes a shuddering breath. “You.”

  The rush of air, the white of the stars and the black spread of pain as Gram swings the shovel and brings it down hard on the side of my head.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I come back to nothing. To the sky dark and blurry through a layer of dirt. It’s everywhere, under my fingernails and in my mouth and I gasp, choking on my own hair. This is a grave. I’m in a grave.

  Gram’s going to bury me.

  A rush of terror takes hold of me. She must think I’m dead, or she wouldn’t have left me half-buried. And she’s not here—she’d have seen me moving. I have to get myself out, have to run, and it has to be now, while she’s gone. Before she comes back to finish the job.

  The ground is still loose, and it tumbles away from me as I claw my way free, until I can breathe without swallowing a mouthful of grit. I push myself up, feel something give underneath me. It’s too soft, too spongy to be the earth. It’s something else. My stomach lurches, but I force it down. Keep going, I think. You have to get out.

  Finally I crawl from
the dirt and tip over onto my hands and knees, feel a breeze brush my cheeks. My head is aching from the hit to my temple, the pain fresh. I’m alive. I’m still alive.

  This is not how Gram wanted it. I can picture her with the shovel balanced in her hands, can picture the grim resolve on her face before she lifted it and swung it, hard. A loose end, she said. That’s what I am.

  I blink, wait for the world to clear in front of me, but it’s blurry. I touch the side of my face, just under where the shovel cracked against my temple, and my fingers come away bloody. It’s everywhere. Down my neck, in my hair, all coated in dirt. I’m dizzy too, nearly sick to my stomach with it. But I can’t just stay here and wait to feel better.

  Come on, Margot. Get up. You have to get up.

  I take as deep a breath as I can and sit back on my heels. Long, slow breaths, my hands over my eyes until I get used to the throbbing behind them. I open them to heavy evening, to the winding green curve of trees. The apricot grove.

  Gram never brought me here, but I feel like I know it from the way Mom wrote about it in her Bible. Here, where they were just the two of them. Here, where Katherine died. Here, where Mom burned her body.

  I can see the remnants of the burned grove in the distance. The trees around me are young, bearing fruit, but as the grove reaches away from Fairhaven, they turn strange, broken and stained dark with ash. Trunks hollowed out, branches too short. The earth there is covered with grass, thick and bright, but that can’t hide what happened here.

  That’s in the past, though. And I’m alive. It takes everything I have, but I climb to my feet, steadying myself on the nearest apricot tree, this one living and new. But then I look down at the grave Gram tried to bury me in. Reaching from beneath, pale and rotting, an arm, a hand.

  A cry bursts out of me as I scramble back. That’s what I felt under me. A body.

  I shut my eyes. Hope it’s not real if I don’t look at it. But haven’t I learned? I have to face this. I tried walking away and look where it got me.