Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  I do a quick assessment of my body, and my heart isn’t racing and I’m not perspiring more than is normal for someone on the brink of puberty. There are no goosebumps on my skin, which is a sign of fear and our sympathetic nervous system shifting into fight or flight. I even have the time to think that goosebumps are called piloerections, and to consider how strange and kind of funny that is.

  So it’s all the more unexpected that, when I watch Mom’s face shift from terror into understanding that it’s only the nurse and the horse tamer outside, I manage to get distracted from keeping an eye on Mum. I’m not overwhelmed by anything. I don’t have any excuse, except that I saw something move and I glanced away to try to catch it.

  It was only Dad, shifting around in his bed and throwing his sheets out and over, like some sort of signal. Mom must have taken off the restraints for him before she called over the intercom. Dad doesn’t look scared. He looks focused, like I do when I’m working a math problem and trying to find the solution that’s written at the back of the textbook.

  Mom says that the two of us look a lot alike, but I don’t really see it. Not yet, at least. I keep hoping I’ll grow into being like my father.

  His mouth moves in the shape of words. Some days he can’t talk as well as others. It’s like something gets inside his body and shuts his voice and other parts of him down for a little while.

  I go over to Dad for a small moment, listen to what he’s trying to say and put my hand on his for a couple of seconds, like I’ve seen Mom and Margot do, and when I turn back to them, Mom and Daphne are in the other room with the outer door, and it’s happened already.

  The shouting from outside the door has stopped. Daphne must have come around, because Mom is holding on to her like she’s never held anything more precious in her entire life.

  Mom looks up and her eyes meet mine, and the relief I see in her face finally triggers something inside my chest. I run to her and let her pull me into a tense embrace. My mouth is pressed into Daphne’s hair, which is kind of gross, but I don’t complain. I just shut my mouth.

  Mom’s nails dig a little into my shoulder as she grips on to us, and then she lets go and walks over to the door. She swipes the key card. The soft thrush of the locks sifts through the air and she pulls the door open. Standing outside is Tobias, looking sweaty and upset, but otherwise fine. Next to him is Margot, leaning on his shoulder like someone’s crumpled her up and tried to stretch her out again.

  Daphne jumps in before anyone else can talk. “Why do you look so messy?” She eyes Margot.

  “She had a fall out on one of the horses,” Tobias tells my mom, ignoring Daphne.

  I think about what my father whispered to me, a moment ago.

  And it’s not until then that I notice.

  Mom’s hands are free. She’s not holding the gun anymore.

  I scan the room, trying to track where she must have put it down when she reached out to hug Daphne, but I don’t see it anywhere.

  “I’ll be fine,” Margot says, but her voice is huskier than usual and there’s a rasp to her breathing.

  “She needs to rest.” Tobias motions for me to come over and help him move Margot onto the couch where my mother sleeps sometimes.

  My mother hasn’t said a word. She blinks at Margot as she cringes and then spreads out on the couch.

  “Where are the bandages?” Tobias asks, and Mom gives a small motion with her hand towards the entrance to the other room.

  “I’ll get them,” Daphne offers, and runs over to my father’s room. She’s back a moment later with a huge roll of gauze, which means she must have remembered the drawer they’re kept in in Dad’s room. “Is this what you needed?”

  Tobias takes the bandages, helps to unbutton Margot’s shirt (I try not to look at anything besides her collarbone) and tells Margot to walk him through wrapping her broken ribs. That’s why she’s been having so much trouble breathing, I think.

  It takes a few minutes, Tobias working quietly and my mother standing back, looking out into the middle distance, but eventually Margot’s chest is wrapped and Tobias buttons her shirt back up.

  A loud growl rumbles through the room. It’s Daphne’s stomach, and a hot flash of annoyance shoots through me. “When’s dinner?” Daphne asks.

  “Dinner’s at seven,” my mom says, her voice coming as though she’s somewhere far in the distance, stirring a pot roast.

  “There’s something else,” Tobias says. He’s standing up now, so that Margot can have the entire couch to herself.

  Margot turns her head slightly, and when her eyes meet my mother’s I feel something electric flick through the room. My mother gives a shudder, like she’s a computer screen waking from sleep. Finally, her eyes focus again.

  “Something else?” she says.

  I think of what my father said.

  He has moments where he’s paranoid. I know that. That’s why I patted his hand.

  “I saw someone, out in the woods,” Margot tells us.

  Daphne whines. “I’m so hungry.”

  I watch my mother reach behind her, and her fingers fumble at the waistband of her pants. The realization that washes over her as she grips for the gun and doesn’t find it drains the blood from her face. She brings her hands up and links them in front of her, like she’s saying a silent prayer. But she isn’t.

  “Where is it, Daphne?” she asks.

  Daphne stares at her feet. “I said I wanted peanut butter.”

  There’s that clench in my chest again.

  They’re coming. That’s what my father mouthed to me. They’re coming.

  24

  Brenna

  I am stirring a pot like some deranged housewife. I am actually wearing an apron, although it’s utilitarian and all straight lines. I found it in the bottom of the drawer where Greta keeps her aprons, which were otherwise all sunshine and daisies with frills at the straps. I may not be sure of many things these days, but I can say with absolute certainty that I am not the kind of woman who wears frills on an apron.

  Outside of that, who am I?

  A woman who takes the gun her husband bought against her will and waves it around with her children in the same room.

  A mother who raised a daughter mean enough to pretend to hide it because she didn’t get what she wanted for lunch.

  A wife who cheats on her husband.

  An entrepreneur who ignores the urgent messages from her company and instead decides to make a happy family dinner out of stringy frozen beef and the last of the fresh vegetables for her two children, lover, invalid husband, and horse whisperer / replacement gardener.

  I think I might be losing my mind.

  “I’m hungry,” Daphne says again.

  “Dinner will be ready soon.”

  I’ve instructed her to sit at the kitchen counter and wait. She is in time-out, which I know is an effective parenting technique because I read about it in a parenting magazine once and I saw Greta use it with Felix to great effect. I’m not in the habit of disciplining my children in trendy fashion, granted, since I’m not home as often as I’d like—or I wasn’t before all this. Hah, to be not home. Wouldn’t that be a delicious gift, like someone making you a home-cooked dinner and then, after you’ve had your fill, saying there’s not just one dessert, but two!

  I’d kill for a slice of real chocolate cake.

  I’d kill for a lot of things, truth be told.

  A murderer. That’s what I am.

  And there’s that flash of Darren’s face. The one I see when I close my eyes at night. His pupils dilated, strings of hair plastered to his forehead. I see him when I wake in the morning too, but then his face is different. It’s smooth and soft, and when I reach out to touch him and say that I’m sorry, all the flesh falls away and his skull stares back at me with two dark holes for his eyes. Scorch marks crawl up the sides of his skull like tattoos.

  Nobody else is sick.

  Of course it was worth it.

  It turn
s out the gun had fallen underneath the couch and was covered by the little flap of fabric that brushes against the carpet. Tobias and I did a quick search and found it in a few minutes. I wouldn’t let Felix or Daphne move, because I couldn’t remember if I’d put the safety on it after we figured out who was shouting. I’d never actually held it, except for the one lesson Mark gave me when he first bought it.

  He was still sore and bruised, but he’d insisted on standing behind me and helping me see how to place my hands around the handle and the pressure needed to pull the trigger fully. We’d shot into a bale of hay that Darren set up for us near the machinery barn, far away from the house and the children and the stables. I remember Mark didn’t want to scare the horses with the popping of the shots, which annoyed me at the time because the sound made me shake inside my chest even though I was the one making it. I wanted him to worry about me, which I suppose he was in a way.

  The gun’s in my locked bedside drawer now. I had to fight the urge to keep it tucked underneath my shirt in the waistband of my pants, with the smooth steel sitting against my spine like a talisman. You can’t live in fear, I tell myself. As though telling myself this will change a lifelong habit.

  “Why did you hide it?” I ask my daughter. I can’t look at her, so I stare into the pot of gradually mushing potatoes and green beans and stringy meat. It looks disgusting.

  Daphne presses her lips together. “I didn’t hide it.”

  I hold my breath for a second. For two seconds. Pushing down the scream in my throat.

  “Yes, you did. Margot and Tobias weren’t in the room, and Felix was too far away from me to touch it. It had to be you.”

  I think back to that moment of pure panic, where I thought I wasn’t ready as intruders came for my family again.

  “Mommy, I swear I didn’t do it.”

  She never calls me Mommy.

  I feel myself soften. I have to remember how hard this is for everyone, but especially for the kids. How scary it must be, having a weapon waved around. Being stuck inside a house with this invisible microscopic enemy burning the outside world while inside there are people disappearing and a dying father and a mother who is doing things she’s never done in front of them before.

  I need to stay strong, I remind myself for the millionth time.

  Felix looked petrified back in Mark’s room. He’s with Tobias, helping to get Margot settled back in her own bed in order to rest, but before he set off with them down to the other end of the house, I tried to catch his eye and give him something of a reassuring look. Not a smile, but a quick nod that would help him believe that everything is okay. But as I tried to set my face into something resembling calm, I saw his eyes staring back at me as though I weren’t even there. It was like he was watching something unfold inside his head. Something nobody else could see.

  Maybe I’m assuming Daphne was trying to cause trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d projected some sort of grown-up intention onto her. The counselor we worked with to help with Daphne’s tantrums said as much. Part of Daphne’s issue was my issue, thinking that things she said or did, like ignoring me when I told her it was bedtime or forgetting to pick up her dirty pajamas from the floor, were personal attacks against me. “She’s just a child”, the counselor would say, and I’d bite my tongue.

  “I understand if you were scared of it,” I tell Daphne now.

  She bristles at this, as I should have known she would.

  The mixture in the pot has come to a boil and I turn down the heat to let it simmer. No one will want to eat this.

  I’ve wasted all the ingredients.

  “I wasn’t scared.” Her bottom lip sticks out in a way that would be adorable. She looks so much like me when I was little. And yet, there are parts of her that seem to have grown from some other place, outside of Mark and me. I don’t believe in magic or changelings, of course, but there are days where I wonder if I really know who my daughter is.

  She tips her head down and mumbles something into the table.

  “What did you say?” I’m trying to be patient. I’m thinking this is her way of confessing. Even still, as I wait for her to repeat what she said, I try to picture my lovely sensitive daughter reaching out impulsively and grabbing the metal handle of the gun, and thinking quickly enough to shove it under the couch.

  It’s not hard to do, but maybe that says more about me than her.

  My daughter looks up from the table. “Mom, I think it was Darren.”

  “What?” A burning smell fills my nose. I bend over as I gag from the stench of fire scorching muscle and bone.

  “It’s burning,” Daphne says calmly.

  I heave in a clean breath of air. The stove is off. Nothing is burning.

  “Dinner time,” I call out into the silent house, because what else can I do?

  25

  Mark

  Whatever they’ve given to me has worn off a little. My mind feels crisper, like a shard of glass in the sun.

  Everything around me is enhanced and sharpened.

  There are voices downstairs. They’ve decided to leave me up here, but not after a heartfelt visit from every able member of this house. The children, and Tobias, and my doting wife.

  The friendly nurse who holds my hand sometimes wasn’t there though. Margot.

  I was guilty of it too, you know. Back when I was around other people. Assuming that someone who wasn’t able to talk much, or correctly, was somehow also hard of hearing. I remember there was a secretary who worked for an exec friend of mine—some guy whose name I can’t even remember now—and she had a terrible stutter. I’d waltz into the entranceway from the elevator and she’d manage to eke out a “Hello, Mm…Mm…Mister S…S…Stone.” And then she’d smile.

  I would then, without hesitation, shout back to her as if she were standing across a busy street, “Good morning, Nancy!” It was so loud that she’d noticeably flinch. One time, I was apparently so exuberant that a blush rose all the way up her neck and into her cheeks while she opened the door and silently gestured with a hand that I could go in. At this point the redness had spread up her neck and into her cheeks, and I remember thinking that it must have been hell for her growing up. Children can be monsters.

  Serves me right, now that my thoughts keep getting caught inside my mind, that even my own wife talks to me as if I have the vocabulary of a two-year-old paired with the hearing of a retired rock star.

  “Darling, we can’t move you into the kitchen.” She’d said this as though I were being told I was dying, which apparently I am too, but that doesn’t matter right now. Slow, halting, and loud. Brenna has the most beautiful eyes—blue with a ring of green like a hidden jewel at the center of the iris. I’ve stared into those eyes more times than I can remember, naked and calm after our lovemaking, clinking champagne to celebrate another merger of our brilliant minds, locking onto each other after Felix, and then Daphne, were born.

  But now, all I see when I look at my wife is disappointment.

  And pain.

  “Sorry you can’t make it to dinner.” Tobias emphasized each word with a nod. “I’ll bring some up for you later.”

  Brenna put her arm in front of Tobias—all four of them were circled around my bed, Brenna and Tobias on one side, Felix and Daphne on the other. “I’ll take care of it.”

  If looks could kill, then Tobias would have been flailing on the floor.

  I’ll admit. I play along sometimes with it.

  I barely said a word while they were there, and I pretended to stare off into the distance for most of their visit. It’s easier than fighting the muscles in my body that are trying to convince everyone around me that I’m an invalid, and that my mind and body are both metaphorically crawling off somewhere into that good night.

  Plus, people pay attention less to me then.

  Only Felix looked at me differently. I’m sure he was thinking about what I’d told him earlier, when Brenna thought we were under attack and she got the gun
from the safe. I watched everything unfold with a certain bit of triumph surging through my body, because she’d fought me hard on getting that gun. Even after we’d been invaded, and I’d ended up in the hospital for a longer stay than usual. Even after the security system and keypads, the bars on some of the ground floor windows and the flood lights that can be set to be motion triggered, she still didn’t want to have a gun in the house.

  “It’s a weapon, Mark,” she kept telling me, as though that were a valid argument.

  And I’d told her that was exactly the point.

  But I can’t keep waiting here, taking it literally lying down as my body eats away at itself. Death is coming for me. It’s coming for all of us, if I don’t do something about it. Caring for others has never come naturally for Brenna. My family needs me.

  That’s why I called over to Felix, while Brenna was distracted by thinking some outsider was getting in and about to kidnap her ailing husband. Again.

  I knew it was only Tobias and Margot. That’s the other irony of my situation. Everyone treats you like you’re going deaf—in fact, like all your senses are degrading at once—but lying here in this bed, without a view of anything really but the ceiling of this well-appointed room, has honed my ability to hear to a fine edge. I can hear glasses clink in the kitchen, and know that it’s Felix pouring himself the last of the milk.

  I can hear Margot, walking outside my children’s bedroom doors at night.

  I can hear my wife, moving towards a bedroom that isn’t her own.

  And I can totally fucking tell when the voices streaming up the stairs and into my suite of medicalized, double-security lockdown rooms are only Tobias and the nurse.

  I told Felix that someone was coming because he’s a smart kid, and if he thinks that our family is in danger, then he will figure out a way to fix it. I went to all his science fairs and signed the checks on the science tutors. Brenna and I bought him that telescope together, and before I was chained to this bed I’d catch him staring out, not at the sky but at the ground, watching the people who kept Granfield running.