by Laura McHugh
After a couple of days cooped up indoors to avoid the worst part of the swarm, Ben, Lauren, and I had ventured out to Dairy Queen one evening and then trudged back home in the fading daylight, sapped by the suffocating humidity and the stench of dead flies. The mayflies that hadn’t yet died were dragging themselves through the languid air, bumping into us and clinging to our clothes and hair. Normally the streetlamps would be flickering on, but the city had shut them off to avoid attracting more of the insects, a move that hadn’t seemed to help.
Dr. and Mrs. Ferris were visiting friends in Quincy that night and wouldn’t be home until later, meaning that Ben, Lauren, and I could stay up late watching movies on the big screen in the family room without Mrs. Ferris glaring at us the entire time. Lauren kept insisting that she was old enough to watch House of 1000 Corpses, but we settled on a John Cusack flick instead. We clicked the window air conditioner to its highest setting, sprawled out on the stiff antique sofa, and covered ourselves with the cashmere throw Mrs. Ferris never wanted anyone to touch. About ten minutes into the movie, Lauren paused it.
“This is boring,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “Let’s do something else.”
“Like what?” Ben said.
Lauren sat up and picked at the fraying threads of a purple friendship bracelet that encircled her wrist. “We should go next door. To Arrowood.”
Ben and I exchanged looks over her head. We had often talked about sneaking into my former home, and sometimes, in the dark, or in daylight when no one else was around, we would try a door or a window to see if it might open. I hadn’t been brave enough then to smash a pane of glass.
“I’d like to,” I said. “But we can’t. It’s locked up tight.”
“Mom has a key,” she said. “It’s in her desk. I was digging through her stuff and found it. There’s a label on the key ring that says ‘Arrowood.’ ”
I felt a twinge, the beginning of a headache. “Are you sure?”
“It’s probably old,” Ben interjected. “Your parents had a key to our house, too, and we have one for the Niedermeyers’ next door, in case something happens when they’re out of town. It’s a neighbor thing.”
“Let’s see it,” I said to Lauren.
Her expression brightened and she got to her feet. We heard her trotting up the stairs to retrieve the key.
“Do you really think…?” Ben said.
I twisted my head to the side until I felt a pop in my neck, ligament sliding over bone. “I don’t know. Maybe the back door. The front one has a new lock.”
Lauren returned with the key ring. A rectangular box was wedged under her arm, some kind of game or puzzle. I looked closer and saw that it was her Ouija board.
“Lauren.” Ben’s tone was stern, and she looked up at him guiltily, clutching the box tighter.
“I think we should try it,” she said. “It didn’t work over here, but maybe it will at Arrowood. I thought Arden would want to. You do, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Sure. If we can get in.” Lauren and I had used the Ouija board together many times, and the pointer never did anything more than jitter, refusing to spell out the answers we so desperately sought. Would her parents get divorced? Would I move back to Keokuk? Were my sisters still alive?
“All right.” Ben took the key ring from Lauren and handed it to me. “Ready?”
I nodded, my fingertips tracing the bumps and notches of the key and hoping for a match. We slipped out the kitchen door and crossed the Ferrises’ dark lawn, crunching mayflies underfoot. I wasn’t terribly worried that we would get caught. It was just past ten o’clock, and I figured most people were likely indoors with their air conditioners blasting, cursing the plague of flies and the crippling humidity. When I tried the key, it slid into the lock without hesitation and the door opened into the laundry room.
It was completely quiet inside, all the night sounds silenced as soon as we closed the door. I inhaled the familiar scent of the old house, the enduring smell of polished wood and antiquity, and for one dizzying moment I was eight years old again, my body wanting instinctually to run up the back stairs to my sisters’ room. I latched on to Ben’s arm to anchor myself and looked around. The stairwell was dark, the laundry room colorless in the moonlight that filtered through the voile curtains. My heart pulled in two panicked directions. This is my house. This is not my house.
“What do you think?” Ben said.
“I need to see the rest.” Lauren grabbed the back of my T-shirt, and together the three of us crossed the room.
“Can’t we turn on the lights?” Lauren asked.
“No,” Ben said. “Somebody might notice.”
He handed me the tiny penlight he’d brought along, and I shined it into the hallway ahead of us. It was slightly brighter when we reached the main hall, the stained-glass window on the second floor landing allowing moonlight to bleed in. Drapes covered most of the windows on the first floor, something I knew from years of trying to peek in from the outside.
We moved stealthily from room to room. It was somehow more disconcerting to discover that everything had remained exactly where my family had left it, giving the impression that the house had frozen in time the moment we’d stepped out the door. The one difference was that each piece of furniture was covered with thick white sheets or drop cloths to prevent fading and keep dust at bay, though there was hardly any dust to be seen. The house was regularly cleaned and maintained, lending to the feel that Arrowood was not abandoned but merely waiting for us to return.
I paused at the foot of the grand staircase, my hand resting on the glossy banister. Sweat ran down inside my shirt, seeping into the waistband of my shorts. Ben and Lauren stood on either side of me, waiting for me to take the first step, and when I did, they followed.
“We should try their room,” Lauren murmured as we approached the twins’ door. I could feel the shape of the faceted glass knob in my hand without touching it.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Instead I opened the door to my childhood bedroom, savoring the familiar creak as it swung in. I grabbed the curtains and swept them back, the metal rings scraping along the rod. There was the river, down below, as it had always been.
Ben checked his watch. “Mom and Dad said they’d be home by midnight, so we’ve got maybe an hour on the safe side.”
Lauren, who hadn’t spoken a word since we entered the room, knelt on the bare wood floor and removed the Ouija board from its box. Ben sat across from her, and I sat facing the door. We scooted into a tight circle so that the board could balance on our knees. Lauren set down the planchette, a heart-shaped piece of plastic with a hole in the middle, and the three of us leaned forward to rest our fingertips on it.
“Hello,” Lauren whispered to the board. We were close enough in the darkness that I could see the sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip. “We’re going to ask some questions. Please answer if you can.” My hands shook, and I concentrated on holding them still. The house was silent.
“Is anyone here?” she continued. We watched the board, waiting. The planchette remained motionless. Lauren glanced up at me. “Do you want to ask?”
I started to speak, but my voice came out gravelly and I had to clear my throat and try again. “I’m looking for Violet and Tabitha Arrowood. My sisters.” I waited for a moment. My headache was growing more intense, like a drill slowly burrowing into my skull. “Can you tell me if they’re alive or dead?”
I could feel Ben’s and Lauren’s knees pressed against mine, our legs slippery with sweat beneath the board. The planchette twitched, so slightly that I looked over at Ben to see if he had noticed, too, or if I’d only imagined it. Then I felt a tug beneath my fingers, and Lauren gasped. The plastic heart dragged itself across the alphabet from right to left and stopped. The hole in the heart framed the letter A.
“Alive,” Lauren murmured. “They’re alive.”
Lauren and I had never gotten the board to work on our ow
n, and I knew she wasn’t pushing the pointer. This was the first time Ben had joined us, and I wondered if he was the reason it was working now, if there was a certain kind of energy that flowed between us. Ben and I had been closest to the scene of the kidnapping, the only ones to see the gold car.
The heart jerked again, moving to the right. It wasn’t done. It slid past the L and instead halted over the R. It wasn’t spelling alive. It kept moving, to the D and the E, before stopping at the N. Arden. It was spelling my name.
Lauren looked up at me, her eyes wide, the planchette pulling our fingers along as it began tracing increasingly energetic figure eights across the board.
“Arden,” Ben said, his voice cutting through the syrupy air. “Do we let go?”
“You have to say goodbye,” Lauren whispered.
I watched our hands swoop back and forth in the dark. I strained my senses for any sign of my sisters’ presence—the scent of their hair, the rhythm of their breath. I waited for the smallest sensation, a vague hint of awareness in my heart. A hushed static filled my ears, the false sound of ocean waves when you listen to a shell.
“Goodbye,” I said. The sharp creak of hinges filled the room as my bedroom door opened wider.
“On the board!” Lauren cried, shoving the planchette to GOODBYE and yanking her hands away. The piece stopped moving, and Ben and I let go, our fingers hovering above it. Tears spilled down Lauren’s cheeks, and she clambered to her feet.
“The door’s done that before,” I said, unable to get enough air into my lungs. We all knew how old houses settled, the noises they made. “I don’t think it was them.”
“It spelled out your name.” Lauren’s voice trembled.
I wanted to believe that it had been the twins reaching out to me, though with each passing moment, doubt spiraled deeper. There were three other Arden Arrowoods who had died in the house. It was just as likely that one of them was announcing her presence as it was that a spirit had called me by name, and it was even more likely that no spirits had been involved at all. How could I be sure that our hands hadn’t guided the pointer, not consciously, but out of our own fierce desire for it to move?
“I want to go home,” Lauren said. Ben returned the board to its box, and Lauren grabbed his arm, dragging him to the door. He turned back and held his other hand out to me.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I watched them disappear through the doorway, and then I was alone, the thin blade of fear that knifed into me not enough to drive me out of my room. I’d always thought if I snuck into Arrowood that I would take something back with me, something with good memories attached, like the string of bells that had hung on the mantel every Christmas. Now I couldn’t summon the strength or the courage to climb up to the third floor and search through the boxes. I didn’t want to be reminded of what was missing or what had changed, so I stepped over to the window, to look out on the river, the one constant thing. Mayflies had collected on the sill outside and on the terrace down below.
“Arden.” Ben called to me softly from the door and I whipped around, jumpy despite his familiar voice. “I got Lauren home. I didn’t want to leave you without a light.”
He brought the penlight to me, and when I took it, his hand lingered on mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. His breathing was labored from rushing up the stairs.
“It’s okay.” I wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for—the light, or the lack of answers, or the long list of things that weren’t as they should have been. None of it was his fault.
“You don’t have to say that,” he said. “Not to me.”
I leaned against him, his arms circling my waist as though to keep me from falling to the floor. His T-shirt was wet, and his breath wheezed in my ear. I clamped my arms around his neck. As we stood pressed against each other in the stagnant heat, our bodies slick with sweat, I became acutely aware of the feel of his skin against mine. It was innocent—my wrist at the nape of his neck, fingertips grazing a shoulder blade—yet tinged with a flicker of anticipation I’d only felt in certain dreams. Never in life. Never before with Ben.
We should go back, he whispered. Neither of us moved.
—
I took a few deep breaths, which didn’t help at all, and cut across the lawn, just as I had done a thousand times in my former life, to knock on the Ferrises’ front door. After a minute or two of wondering if Mrs. Ferris had seen me through the window and decided not to answer, I heard movement in the house and the door pitched open. Lauren barreled out onto the porch and wrapped me up in a hug. She had been thirteen when I last saw her ten years ago. Twenty-three-year-old Lauren was a head taller than me, and all curves. Her hair was long and loose and tipped with magenta, and a thorny row of earrings pressed into my cheek as she hugged me.
She pulled back to look at me, smiling. “Damn!” she said. “You haven’t changed. Come on in.”
“It’s so good to see you,” I said, following her into the house.
“Ben says you might actually be sticking around?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I don’t really have any other plans.”
“Plans are overrated,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Wanna come upstairs and hang out, like old times?”
“Is your mom home?”
“No.” She snorted. “She’s in St. Louis on a shopping bender.”
I glanced around the foyer and into the adjoining rooms. “It looks completely different,” I said. “I know it’s been a while, but I barely recognize it.”
“Mom’s redone every room in the house probably three times since you saw it last. She gets bored. Wallpaper’s her latest thing. Dad loves to point out how much money we spent getting rid of the old wallpaper, just to get new wallpaper that looks old.”
I followed Lauren upstairs to her slope-ceilinged bedroom, which had been papered in pink and white roses, with matching window treatments, upholstered headboard, and dust ruffle. I assumed the bedding matched, too, but the bed was unmade and covered with piles of laundry. Lauren kicked some books out of the way and we sat on the floor.
“Does this room give you a headache?” I asked, smiling.
“Isn’t this so Mom?” she asked. “She turned it into a guest room the minute I left for college. Like we didn’t have enough guest rooms already.”
“What about Ben’s old room?”
“Exact same wallpaper, in yellow. No joke. I think she was hoping it would keep us from moving back home.”
“Ben said you’re in dental school. Was he serious? Do you like it?”
“Do I like it? Not really. Do I think I’ll flunk out? Possibly. It’s too soon to tell.” Lauren pushed up her sleeves, revealing a small bird tattooed on the inside of her wrist. “I only applied because I thought I wouldn’t get accepted. Then Mom made Dad pledge a bunch of money to the dental school—probably my whole inheritance—and voilà, I’m in. Lucky me. It could be worse, though, I could be living here.”
“I never would have guessed either one of you would end up working with your dad.”
“Well, Ben started drinking Mom’s Kool-Aid a while ago, around the time I stopped. She’s got him squished right down inside the mold she carved out for him, and I think he likes it there. Or at least he doesn’t complain anymore.”
“He’s happy?”
“Yeah, he is. He was going on about you when he called this morning.” A slight blush warmed my face, and I hoped Lauren wouldn’t notice. “Maybe now that you’re back he’ll break things off with Courtney. She’s all right, but I’m pretty sure Mom had something to do with setting them up. I don’t know how serious they are. I always thought you and Ben belonged together.”
My throat tightened. Ben hadn’t mentioned that he was dating anyone at dinner, but the subject hadn’t come up. I hadn’t talked about Dr. Endicott, either. “Ben and I weren’t like that,” I said. “We were just friends.”
Lauren rolled her eyes. “Come on
. It was embarrassingly obvious. If you guys were trying to keep anybody from finding out, you did a terrible job.”
I shrugged. “That was a long time ago. Everything’s different now.”
“Whatever you say,” she said. She picked at her fingernail polish, purple glitter flaking onto the floor. “You know, I’m sorry I stopped writing to you, Arden. I wish we would have kept in touch.”
“It’s okay,” I said. We’d remained pen pals for quite a while after Ben and I stopped writing to each other, but I’d never been very good at maintaining long-distance friendships. When Lauren stopped responding to my letters, I stopped sending them.
“Something happened,” she said. “I wanted to tell you about it, but I didn’t. Then it didn’t feel right, writing to you and talking about other things. I don’t even know if it’s worth mentioning now. You probably already know.” She wedged her thumbnail between her teeth and bit down, a childish habit she had not outgrown.
“What was it?”
“It’s about your dad. And my mom. She’d probably die if she knew I was talking about it.” Lauren examined the jagged edge of her nail. “Did you ever think there was something going on between them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I had never told anyone about seeing my dad kiss Mrs. Ferris at the Christmas party.
“There was a point where Mom was on the phone a lot, and she was going into her room and closing the door so I couldn’t hear her. You know how she usually is on the phone, it’s like she’s yelling into a bullhorn. I wanted to know why she was being all secretive, so I picked up the phone downstairs, and she was talking to your dad. She heard the line click when I hung up, and figured out I’d been listening. She was all freaked out, asking what I’d heard, but I hadn’t really heard anything.