I don’t know if this is real. I have nothing to compare it to.
The knife is no longer inside him, having scattered a few feet away. Caleb tries to extend his arm, stretching his fingers toward the blade, but it’s only a futile gesture, a waste of whatever energy he has left. The knife is out of reach, and his strength has long since left him. Blood pools around his torso, his back twisted at an angle I’ve only seen on a broken doll.
“We have to call 911,” I whisper.
“No, we don’t,” Cora says. She’s sitting on the floor next to Caleb, stroking his hair, as if simply petting a cat.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.” I can’t stop looking at Caleb. His face. His desperate face. “Please tell me what’s happening.”
“This is happening,” she answers. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
She pats his cheek as I hear the sound of the door from the garage to the kitchen open and close.
Dad.
My father walks into the foyer, briefcase in hand, his suit as razor-sharp as when he’d left the house in the morning. He stops when he sees the scene before him. The dying boy not even twenty feet away at the base of the steps. His older daughter, stroking the hair of the victim. His younger, paralyzed with fear, mouth hanging open, refusing to move beyond the third step.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. He drops the briefcase and sheds his jacket, letting it fall to the floor. He walks over, eyes fixed, jaw tight, arms swaying. My father reaches Caleb and grabs his face.
Caleb’s eyes widen just a touch and then he settles back into a dreamy state. He’s going fast, I think.
I plead with my father. “Help him.”
My father ignores me and speaks only to Cora.
“What happened?”
“He tried to rape me,” she says, her voice devoid of any emotion. “It was self-defense.”
“Look at me,” he says. Not to Caleb but to Cora.
She does.
He leans closer and whispers into her ear. There’s something shared between them I can’t know about. But whatever it is he says, at the end of it, Cora does nothing but offer a casual shrug, as if he asked her what she wanted for dinner.
I can’t do the math that solves any of what I’m seeing. Cora’s an unconvincing liar, my father doesn’t care, and a sixteen-year-old boy is dying in between them.
My brain snaps and I suddenly find volume to go along with my words. “HELP HIM!” My voice is shrill, piercing, scaring me.
This gets my father’s attention. He leaps toward me and seizes my arm.
“Keep your voice down,” he says. Then he takes a breath, tries to compose himself. “Rose, there is no helping him. He’s too far gone.”
“Call…call 911. He’s still breathing!”
The hand around my upper arm squeezes tighter. “You don’t understand. I said there’s no helping him.” He releases me, rolls up his shirtsleeves, then addresses us.
“It doesn’t matter if we love, hate, or are indifferent to each other,” he says. “We’re family. We’re the fucking Yates family, and that’s more meaningful than anything you’ll ever achieve in life. Your family name.”
I glance at Cora. She’s grinning.
“We aren’t perfect,” he continues. “And when we make mistakes…we make them together.” He points to Caleb. “This is a mistake, and we can’t change it. Cora didn’t do this. We all did it.”
My voice takes on a rasp. “What?”
“This is us,” he says. “This moment. This mistake. We are all part of this. And that’s why no one will ever know about this except us.”
Caleb releases a soft moan, and it sounds so feeble I’m convinced it’s his last.
“He’s alive,” I say. “He can be—”
“No, he can’t. He’s going to die. That’s a fact, Rose.”
“But we have to call the police. It was self-defense, like she said. We can’t just—”
“We can,” my father says, cutting me off. “And we will. No. One. Knows. That’s all that matters. One rule, the rest of your life. No. One. Knows. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but you protect your family. Above all else, family.”
This whole time, Cora has said nothing. But she loses her grin and nods her head at our father, an obedient student. He looks down at her and says, “I’ll deal with you later. What you’ve done. The jeopardy you put our family in.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Fuck you,” he says to her, jarring me even more. “You aren’t sorry, and that’s the problem. I’ve known it for years. You’ve known it. You are incapable of ‘sorry.’ And it’s led to here. To this.”
She returns his gaze, wild-eyed in muted defiance, saying nothing.
“You two…you will listen to me.” He’s pointing now, first to Cora, then me. “This night is going to be hard, and you’re going to do every goddamn thing I tell you to do. There will be no questions. There will be no refusals. You do exactly everything I say, and if we’re lucky, we might be able to move past this. Now I’m going to ask you if you have any questions. Here’s a clue to the answer: if you ask me a question, I’m going to have a big fucking problem.” He pauses, and in the silence, I hear nothing from Caleb. “So, girls, do you have any questions?”
This is the moment my bladder releases, and warm pee runs down the insides of my thighs. I can’t help it. My entire being is nothing more than a mix of horror, confusion, and shame. I say nothing, but I do allow myself one final look at Caleb. His neck craned, his eyes angled upward, his gaze both at and beyond me. I can’t even tell if he’s still alive or not, and I’m hoping he isn’t simply because I don’t want to watch it happen. Or, worse, witness what I think my father will do if Caleb labors on. Snap his neck like a bird that’s flown into our window.
But witnessing his death is exactly what happens, because just as I’m about to avert my eyes, Caleb smiles. Not a wide smile, hardly even a little one. Almost imperceptible. A gentle pull of the mouth, a look of satisfaction, as if he just realized everything in the world is going to be okay. That look is followed seconds later by his death, which I realize only because there is a sudden, indescribable absence of energy in the room. He doesn’t change, his gaze still fixed in my direction, but there is no more life in those eyes. I don’t know how I can tell this. I just know.
I turn my head and look at the wall on the staircase behind, to the exact spot where Caleb had his final view of anything in his ephemeral world.
There’s a painting wrapped in an ornate golden frame. The painting depicts a cornfield, and the sunlight from behind lights up the stalks in transcendent shades of green and yellow. In the distance, the sky is black, the color of a deep and painful bruise. A thunderstorm that’s just passed by, leaving the field wet and fresh, alive. And in the middle of the painting, a rainbow. It looks close but just out of reach. A thing to touch, if one could ever manage such a thing. It looks solid enough to be real. I picture it soft, spongy, like a long piece of taffy stretched out for miles.
The rainbow is the last thing Caleb Benner saw.
I like to think it made him smile.
“Cora,” my father says, breaking the silence. “Go to the garage and get a tarp.”
Fifty-Three
November 16
Present Day, 7:43 p.m.
I wake in a jolt, slick with sweat. Disoriented, with a sickening pit in my stomach, like I’m coming down with the flu. I blink. Two, three times. Push myself up.
My world comes back after a moment, and I regret it does. Early evening. I’m on the couch in the living room, where I’d lain down to rest my eyes after getting home from Alec’s house. I must’ve fallen asleep. What once was a threat of night is now a reality. One lamp shines on a side table, but everything else is dark.
I get up, stumbling in the hangover of a
too-long late-afternoon nap. Head to the window. The gleaming, sublime view of the white morning snow is replaced by the sight of swirls of flakes streaming in the orange haze of the streetlamp, like a swarm of locusts delivering plague.
I shake my head, as if that will dispatch the sticky remnants of the dream. This time, it took me all the way to the end. The horrible, suffocating end.
And that picture. The cornfield and the rainbow. That part was new, and as far as I can recall, the only bit of the dream I’ve ever had that wasn’t true to life. We never had a picture like that growing up. It was just inserted there by my subconscious, a safety valve to relieve the pressure on my brain. To convince me that maybe Caleb really was happy at the very end.
“It’s nearly eight.”
I spin, almost falling over. My father stands at the entrance to the living room, his figure silhouetted by light coming from the hallway behind him. He flicks on the overhead lights.
“You look like shit,” he says.
He’s in a suit. It’s eight at night and he worked from home all day, and my father is still wearing a suit. The knot of his bloodred tie is still tight and cinched to the neck.
“I fell asleep.”
“I noticed. Your sister will be here soon.”
I’d nearly forgotten. The family meeting. A whole new wave of unpleasant washes over me.
“Can…can she even drive in this? I had a hard time getting home several hours ago.”
He shrugs. “We’ll find out.”
I rub my eyes. “I need to eat something.”
“Or you can just head straight to drinking. I’ll fix you something.”
It’s both a horrible and great idea. Wine will give me a headache. Whiskey will wreck me.
“Vodka,” I say. “Something with vodka. Not too strong.”
“Okay.”
I move into the kitchen, aware I’m barefoot. Open the refrigerator door and look at everything in there. The only reason it’s even stocked is because of Abril, and I scour the offerings of leftovers. What would be appealing on most days creates zero desire in me now. I shut the door, knowing I’ll be drinking my dinner.
The jolting shrill of Cora stiffens my spine.
“It’s a fucking nightmare out there,” she yells from the foyer.
In the diffused reflection of the refrigerator’s stainless steel I see none of my features, just a faint glowing outline. A ghost.
I turn and leave the kitchen.
Time for the family meeting.
Fifty-Four
5:18 p.m.
Colin forwent the shitty motel on the outskirts of town for a bed-and-breakfast in the center of Bury. The Oak Street Inn was charging him one-seventy-five a night, and he couldn’t care less. He’d been comfortable enough at the seventy-dollar place where he’d stayed on the department’s budget, but Colin wanted to spend money. Not on comfort. Just for the sake of spending money. Maybe that was what happened when you lost everything. You got the urge to keep it going. Spend every last penny in frivolity, wipe the slate clean. Start all over again. Or maybe not.
The storm saved its biggest punch until after Colin arrived in the afternoon. He pulled into a six-space parking lot that had been shoveled from a previous round of snow but was filling up again. Just one other car sat in the lot, several inches blanketing it.
The proprietors of the inn were a middle-aged couple, Franklin and Keith, who said they’d bought the four-room B and B eight years ago and invested considerable time and money into renovations and upkeep. It looked it, Colin thought. The Queen Anne Victorian was colorful, ornate, and detailed enough to let Colin imagine he’d walked into a gingerbread house. That’d been a pleasant thought for a few seconds, until the idea of gingerbread houses made him think of Hansel and Gretel, which in turn got him in the mindset of dead children. That was the moment Colin realized he could never escape his own mind.
He told the couple it was his first time in Bury, and he was visiting some family friends. He didn’t have his badge, gun, or anything else that might indicate he was PD. Neither his own nor Bury’s police department knew he was here. As far as his sergeant was concerned, Colin was on leave until he could figure out how to put his life back together.
Is that what I’m doing here? he thought. Putting my life back together?
He didn’t have an answer for that. He had nothing. No plan, no idea of his next move. No sense of a way to heal. All Colin had was a profound urge to know the truth about the Yates family, and he thought the best way to start that was by looking Rose Yates in the eyes again, this time with his own fresh perspective on death and suffering. Colin didn’t know what came after that, but that would be a start. An expensive trip for a solitary, fleeting moment, but everything began somewhere.
Eight o’clock, and after a pot-roast dinner that was surely better than his diminished appetite allowed for, Colin found himself sitting in the octagonal living room with his hosts. He was the only guest that night, another couple having canceled their plans due to the storm.
Colin sipped a glass of port, a drink he’d never tasted before. It was sickly sweet. He managed a weak smile and toasted his new friends, thanking them for their hospitality. One last sip, then Colin knew he’d hit his wall. Sleep was coming at last, whether he was ready for it or not. Beautiful sleep.
He said good night to Franklin and Keith, then lumbered to his room on the second floor. Inside, he collapsed onto a puffy queen-size bed that had two quilt blankets and at least a half-dozen pillows. After a few seconds of stillness, he summoned enough energy to take off his clothes, get under the covers, and plug in his phone.
The last thing he did was set his alarm. Eight in the morning. Twelve hours away. Colin had no idea of what he didn’t want to be late for, but something was going to happen tomorrow.
It just had to.
Fifty-Five
7:55 p.m.
I walk into the foyer and Cora’s standing there, snow melting on the arms of her black fleece jacket. She’s disheveled, a look she doesn’t wear often.
“Where’s Dad?” she says.
“Here,” he says, appearing from the hallway. His jacket is off, hands in pockets. No drinks anywhere to be seen.
She looks to him. “I don’t like being summoned, especially when I have to drive in this shit. I nearly lost control of the car.”
“Calm down,” my father says. “You made it, didn’t you?”
“Barely.”
I’m hardly able to process it was just this morning I asked my father if he molested her. I scan back and forth between the two of them, searching for some kind of link, some kind of indication of damage. How do you find evidence of more damage in things long broken?
“In the study,” he says. “We’ll talk there.”
“Why there?” Cora asks, just to argue.
“Because that’s where the booze is. We’ll be needing it.”
“I can’t drink and drive back out in this.”
“No,” he says. “You can’t. I want you staying here tonight.”
“What?” She releases her purse and lets it fall to the floor. “I can’t just stay here. Peter’s waiting for me. I don’t have any of my things with me. You can’t just expect—”
“Cora.” My father sighs. “Just shut up, will you? Now, get into the study.”
He turns and heads down the hallway and I follow. I enter the study after him, and he hands me an already-poured drink.
“Vodka tonic,” he says. “Twist of lime. Simple. Classic.”
“Thanks,” I say. The crystal is ice-cold; the chill needles my forearm.
Cora hasn’t joined us, and my father and I sit in the two chairs we used this morning. A couple of minutes pass before I say, “Where is she?”
“She’s coming,” he replies. “In her own time. She doesn’t like to
be told what to do.”
Sure enough, not thirty seconds later, she appears in the doorway, purse back in hand.
“Where the fuck am I supposed to sit?”
My father narrows his eyes. “You have a hell of a mouth on you.”
“Wonder where I got that from?”
“Take the desk chair and bring it over here.”
“I don’t like that chair. It’s too hard.”
She’s a child, I think. She’s a volatile and dangerous child trapped in a woman’s body.
“Take my seat,” I say, getting up. “I don’t mind the desk chair.”
Cora immediately slides into the leather chair without saying a word. I bring the desk chair and position it facing the two of them so we form a triangle in the center of the study.
My father stands and walks over to the wet bar. “What can I get you, Cora?”
“Cab sauv.”
“I have a merlot here.”
“Whatever.”
He returns, hands her the glass, and takes his seat again.
“Well, then,” he says. “Here we are. Just like old times.”
The second he says this, I remember I wanted to record this conversation. Ever since I recorded Cora at the trailhead, I told myself to do the same thing with every subsequent conversation. It could be the only thing that saves me.
“Hang on,” I say. “I need my phone.”
“Why?”
I think fast. “Max is having a sleepover. He’s supposed to call at some point.”
My father waves his hand at me, gesturing me to hurry. I head out of the study and back to the living room. My phone is on the table next to the couch where I slept, and I grab it and swipe it open. No calls, no texts, twenty-eight percent battery. I select the audio recorder and turn it on, then shut off the display.
Back in the study, I place the phone faceup on the small table between our chairs. Trying to appear as casual as possible, I turn it so the phone’s microphone faces Cora’s direction.
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