Doug stopped again as he turned the next card. He lifted his eyes to mine. “The Moon. You have so much healing to do, Lizzie. You’re afraid, and you’re broken. You will heal.”
I listened, trying to remember everything he’d said. As though he could read my mind, he said, “hey, you can take a picture of the spread when we’re done. Anything you need.”
I smiled thankfully.
“Lizzie, what’s your ex-husband’s name?”
“Cal,” I replied softly.
Doug nodded. He looked up, speaking rapidly. “I have visions. I have since I was a kid. My mom used to take me to church to chase the visions away, but they’ve always been there. I see you’re not afraid of them and you have no doubts. It makes it easier for me to tell you what I see without feeling self-conscious, so thank you.” He kept speaking. “These visions aren’t literal, I should tell you. They’re like metaphors when I see them. I see Cal. He climbed to the highest floor in the tallest building and he jumped. After he jumped, he regretted it,” he added. “He probably called you and tried to get back together.”
I remembered the cold day in the woods, nodding.
“And down he falls. So slowly. Every window he passes, he has more and more regrets. And there are so many windows, Lizzie. He could crawl into any of the open windows, but he just keeps falling. When he lands- and what goes up, must come down, as you know- he will land alone. All alone.”
I thought about Lana then, who was simply the girl he’d left me for back then. She wasn’t yet his wife. Doug continued.
“You’re thinking about her. She won’t be there in the end,” he said. “I see her with long fingernails. Very long and very red. That represents her claws. She has her claws so deep in him, Lizzie. And she’s tapping those claws on a cash register. That’s not literal, remember. She doesn’t work in retail. It means she’s staying for the money. She’s going to stay with him as long as he’s willing to provide for her. Eventually she will stop working and just live off of him.”
I cringed.
“But here is your focus. You and Jake and your children. You’re moving methodically in the right direction. The card at the top of your spread is the Knight of Pentacles. One step at a time. Here, you become the Queen of Swords,” he said, tapping a card. “You learn so much and you grow tremendously. Get your phone out, Lizzie, take a picture. Keep this path in mind. Always remember where you’re going. Look ahead, and only glance back when you need to heal from something new.”
All my cards were right-side-up.
But Lilly was upside-down. I was upside-down.
Upside down in Lilly’s teal dress.
Virginia regarded me as though I were her prize pupil, and she made me think of Doug. Doug had read my future four years ago, and Virginia was my guide.
Virginia walked me from card to card like they were life-sized stepping stones.
She pinched her pink lips together, shaking her head with a proud grin. “Oh, Lizzie. I couldn’t be more proud of you right now. You’ve come so far. And you came to your own conclusion. It’s time, Lizzie. Time to kill Cal. Finish this.”
I met Cal’s eyes.
“I can’t kill him,” I whispered.
The silence in the cellar was deafening.
Cal’s expression washed with relief, but anger quickly turned his eyes black again.
“I’m here for you, Lizzie. Not only to support you,” Virginia said, “But to move you forward. I cannot accept your denial anymore. I give you no choice. You must kill Cal. You must end his life. If you do not, I will have to end yours.”
My head whipped to hers, and she lifted a gun and aimed.
I’d never had a gun aimed at me in my life. A real gun. Plenty of foam shooters and toy rifles and alien blasters, but never an actual weapon.
I shook my head quickly, backing away.
“Virginia,” I managed, my voice shaking. “Please. You don’t want to do this. Leah and Clay need me. They’ve already lost-” I gasped, forcing the words to my throat. “They’ve already lost their sister. And their father walked out on them. Please don’t do this.”
“I have no intention of killing you, Lizzie. I know full well that you’re strong enough now. You’re strong enough to finally rid yourself of this bloodsucker. This leech on your soul. This sorry excuse for a man and pathetic example of a father.” Virginia spoke evenly, her gaze shifting to Cal and then back to me.
“Yes! Yes, he is all those things. But he was also my first love,” I said, the words tasting false as they crossed my lips.
“You don’t even believe that yourself, I can hear it in your tone. Jake was your first love, Lizzie. Your first real and true love. Cal was your first manipulator. Your first torturer. Life would be easier without him and without Lana. You’re halfway there, Lizzie. One more murder, like you said. What’s one more once you’ve committed the first?”
“But you couldn’t kill Martin!” I protested, backing against the stone wall behind me. “You couldn’t bring yourself to kill Martin. You had the opportunity and the motive, but you didn’t do it. Why?”
Virginia scoffed. “I never said I let him live,” she replied.
“Then he’s alive?” I demanded.
“He escaped,” Virginia said, lifting one hand to delicately pat her hair with her fingers. “He escaped after I explained to him, in great detail, how he murdered our daughter. I kept him down here for some time. In this root cellar. Torturing him. Breaking him. When he finally admitted to how, ultimately, he was the one who killed our Molly, he couldn’t bear to go on with his life any longer. I convinced him that the only way he could seek absolution, the only way he could ever earn my forgiveness, was to end his own life. Find our daughter in the afterlife and plead for her forgiveness. Stay with her so she wasn’t alone.”
I realized both Cal and I were holding our breath.
“Martin drove back to the city one last time. He took the stairs up to the rooftop of the building he worked in. Fifty-three floors. Security footage showed that he climbed each and every step. I imagined that he was thinking about me. About what I’d told him. About how I convinced him that Molly would still be alive if he’d never had an affair. Each step.”
I thought of Doug’s vision of Cal, and how he climbed to the top and jumped. I knew what was coming, but I still shuddered as she clapped her foot against the ground.
“Smack. His body was nothing when it landed on the concrete. Each step he climbed he thought about what I’d said. Each window he passed, he must have regretted his choice. It took a lot of effort to break him, you see, but the fall had to have sobered him. He was a smart man. A business man. He took calculated risks, so to know that Martin acted on pure emotion told me that I’d really destroyed him. I’d dug into his brain. I bore a hole. I thought about him as I used the auger on the ice for Lana. I turned the screw, over and over. I got him to the top and to jump. I laughed at his regret on the way down.”
Cal groaned.
“Just like what Cal did to Lilly. He turned the screw. He turned it again and again. Twisting her little heart and mind. Tangling her emotions and her feelings until she was left with absolutely nothing. Nothing but sorrow. Sorrow that her own father manifested within her. Sorrow that left her feeling so desperately unloved and unwanted by the one person she admired the most. And when her world was shaken, and she was at her lowest, she made a choice, Lizzie. You know this. There was more in her letter,” Virginia said.
I saw Lilly’s letter in my mind.
I squeezed my eyes shut, reading the words in my memory.
It’s all about her, Mom.
About her.
About her.
All about Lana. Dad’s so obsessed with Lana and she’s the devil, Mom. She’s this horrid person who has taken Daddy’s heart and crushed it in her ugly hands. Is Dad even capable of love? Dad was better with you and now he’s the worst he’s ever been. And he will keep hurting Lana and soon Gabrielle. And I have to do s
omething about it. I’ve got Dad’s gun. I’m going to keep it in my backpack. The next time I go over there, I’m going to break up their fight. And if I have to shoot one of them or both of them, I will.
I remembered then.
The coroner had ruled Lilly’s death accidental.
Lilly had no intention of killing herself, but she’d taken the gun out after she’d vented to me in a letter in her journal. She took Cal’s gun and tried to rack it backwards, but she wasn’t strong enough.
Except she was, and it was aimed at her when she tried again, her little finger wrapped around the trigger.
“She didn’t kill herself,” I whispered, facing Cal. “She was going to protect you from each other. She was going to use your gun to break up your next fight. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to live, Cal, she wanted to live.”
Virginia tugged the tape off Cal’s mouth again, and he cried out pathetically. “It was an accident,” he said again.
“You’re there, Lizzie. You’re at the end,” Virginia said, a beaming smile brightening her face. “You know all of it. And you know what’s left to be done. Lilly never wanted to die. She died because of Cal. Because of his abuse and neglect. She died because she was trying to protect a stepmother she despised from a father who hurt her. In the end, it was Cal. Cal murdered your daughter.”
“Fuck you, you stupid cunt,” Cal seethed, yanking on his chains, his wrists covered in blood and bruises.
Virginia held out the gun, and I accepted it.
“Lizzie, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. Think of the kids. Think of-”
I pressed the gun between his eyes and pulled the trigger.
LIZZIE
“Mom. Mom!”
Lilly’s voice shook me out of my thoughts.
I stood in her bedroom, gripping her backpack in one hand and Cal’s gun in the other.
“Lilly?”
“What are you doing in my room?” she demanded, snatching her backpack out of my hand. “Why are you going through my stuff?”
I looked down at her bed. The pages of her journal were still opened, the same pages I’d just finished reading.
I’d been cleaning the house, blasting my playlists on shuffle and enjoying the first coveted spring day of the year. All the windows were open in the house, and the sunshine streamed through the screens. The air was still crisp, just cold enough to help me pretend like I was giving the rooms a good, sterile cleaning.
“You took this from Dad’s house?” I asked her.
I could still hear my phone blaring my playlist through the house. It had shuffled through all my genres, ending on my dad’s sixties and seventies garage band collection.
“You’re reading my journal? Oh my God what is wrong with you?” she shrieked, turning and running from the bedroom.
I followed her, shouting after her. “Lilly! Stop, please?”
She turned in the living room, her ponytail swinging in a dramatic circle. “You invaded my privacy! You act like you can just-”
“Do you realize what could have happened? This is a weapon, Lilly. A weapon.”
“I know what a weapon is, Mom,” she fired sarcastically, making a face. “I’m giving it back to Dad. I wasn’t actually going to do anything with it. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I never said you were stupid. And it’s my job to make sure you’re safe. I was putting your clothes away and I saw your sweatshirt sticking out of your bag. And your journal was open.”
“Yeah but it doesn’t say HEY MOM READ ME!” she snapped.
LIZZIE
I had gotten home from work and heard the music coming from Lilly’s room. It was old music, the same music that my parents listened to. I knew she’d gotten into the classic sixties and seventies rock, but I thought she only listened to that genre when she was in the car with her father. Boston, Journey... but this was even older.
The Beatles.
The Zombies.
“Lilly!” I called, as cheerfully as possible. I knew that if I made my presence known well before I knocked on her bedroom door, she’d have more time to transition into mom-time-mode. If I bombarded her with questions like how was your day? Did you do your math homework? You know you can’t miss any more school, right? she’d burst into frustrated rage. So, I took it easy. “Lilly, I’m home, and I brought pizza!”
Silence. Music.
I sighed, edging the pizza box onto the counter and setting my laptop bag against the wall. The dog was begging to go out and be fed, and I tried not to be irritated that Lilly had clearly ignored the animal’s needs all day.
She’s going through a lot. Her father is an asshole.
I finished the few quick chores, finally calling her one last time. “Lilly, I’m coming in, okay?”
I knocked twice before opening her bedroom door.
The first thing I saw was her bed.
I registered all the blood, but in my mind, it was a pile of dirty laundry. I couldn’t compute. Nothing computed. The music blared from her phone and poured through her desk speaker, and I reached for her phone.
I got blood on my hand. Her phone was covered in blood.
Her bath towel, still wet from her shower that morning, lay across her hamper. I grabbed it, and blood stained the white linen. I knew the mark would turn old and brown, no matter how many times I bleached the fabric.
The wall was covered in blood.
My life was covered in blood.
LIZZIE
Jake was holding me.
Police cars everywhere.
Blood everywhere.
“Lizzie,” Jake whispered, brushing my hair out of my eyes. I tasted copper and smelled salt. The red and blue lights swirled over the snow like an emergency disco. “Baby, can you hear me? Lizzie?”
“I can hear you,” I managed, shivering. He tugged the blanket tighter over my shoulders.
“They found Virginia and Cal. They can’t find Lana,” he said, eyeing an officer as he approached.
“We have a female officer. Would she be more comfortable?” the man said.
“No,” I managed. “Lana is dead. Lana is in the lake.”
The officer no sooner registered my words before he ran for the car. More police, all in various locations in front of the Victorian mansion, crunching through the snow. We were a macabre Norman Rockwell painting, complete with candlelight in every window.
“Thank God you got away from her. Thank God,” Jake repeated, over and over, rocking me against his chest. “I never should have left you behind.”
“Jake,” I whispered, pulling away long enough to lift my eyes to his.
He used his thumbs to wipe away blood from my cheeks. “What, Lizzie?”
“I killed them,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes. “What? Baby, what?”
“I killed Lana first,” I said, my tone going flat. “I pushed her through the hole in the ice and watched her drown. Then, I killed Cal.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. A chunk of something came away from my tooth and went down my throat. “I pressed the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Then I turned to Virginia and shot her too. I killed them all.”
“What?” he asked again, and I could hear the fear and disbelief in his tone. “No. No Lizzie, you’re upset. You-”
“I killed them Jake. I killed them all.”
ABOUT HER
Lizzie kept a collection of classic novels on the bookshelf in her living room. She loved the colors of the spines and had a penchant for buying the classics based on the colors of their binding. She preferred earth tones.
The Scarlet Letter. Red.
Moby Dick. Blue.
The Great Gatsby. Green.
She’d decorated her entire living room to match the books on the bookshelf, something Jake found endearing.
As the snow began to fall softly outside, she considered choosing a novel to read by the fire. But building a fire in the wood-burning fireplace would take energy. Choosing a
book would take energy. And once she finally opened the book, she was sure she’d read the same sentence again and again before giving up.
Lizzie was running out of energy, so she rested her head on the back of the couch and poured through her phone instead.
The social media post caught her attention as she scrolled through the newsfeed.
A picture of a bed with an elegant quilt.
Rose petals strewn in a heart shape. A bottle of wine resting against the pillow.
Lana’s caption.
Cal treated me to a surprise getaway! A romantic B&B. Could I have a better husband?
#besthusbandever #infinity #letsgetiton
Lizzie read each hashtag again, slower this time. She should have laughed at Cal’s inability to be original. She should have cringed at his psychotic reuse of their own relationship tropes. She should have shuddered at Lana’s “best husband ever” who had, only a week ago, referred to his wife as a “lazy, unemployed, financial suck” to Lizzie as he dropped off Lilly’s remaining personal effects that he’d had at his house.
She should have.
Instead, Leah walked out of her room just then. She carried something in her hands, and without her coming closer, Lizzie could tell what the teal-colored object was.
Lilly’s butterfly.
It was tattered after years of love and comfort, and Lizzie knew the edge of the right wing was crispy. Lilly had chewed there as her bottom two teeth were fighting to break through. The antennas had long been removed by scissors; she was an overprotective mother and had been afraid her daughter would tear the antennas loose and choke on one.
“She’s not a puppy, Lizzie,” Cal had scolded.
“I’m not taking any chances,” Lizzie replied, snipping each coral antenna from the head.
Leah sat next to Lizzie on the couch, curling her long legs under her body. She rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, holding the butterfly in her palms.
“I picked this out for her, do you remember?” Leah asked, brushing her thumbs over the soft, velvety material. “You and I were shopping for something for the nursery. I saw it and wanted it for my baby sister. You let me get it, and I wrapped it myself and gave it to her in the hospital after she was born.”
ABOUT HER Page 17