Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  “Something happened to you,” I say, my voice growing louder. I dig, realizing that I’m getting to her. She never shares anything with us, she never hangs out with us, she’s always cool and detached. I suddenly realize I know very little about Zoe.

  She gazes wide-eyed at the wall as if she sees words written on it.

  I stare at her, stunned. It’s as if she’s an entirely different person. The girl in the corner with the needle, rather than the tall, willowy witch. I watch her silently in the dim light, and something in her eyes becomes heavy, weighing her down, an anchor of sadness. I see again those scars on the soft part of her forearm—the ones I noticed the first night we had dinner together. From heroin. I recall my impression that first night I was here. She told me she came from powerful people in Ireland. I thought she was some hoity-toity rich girl. Maybe she was a heroin addict, too.

  “You said you were from Ireland,” I say, challenging her. “That first night.”

  “I am,” she says. “I’m also from Chicago.”

  “You were a drug user, too.” Her eyebrows flicker with my words. “You never tell us anything about yourself, about how you came here,” I say. “Who you are.”

  “Maybe.” Her voice is distant, spacey, like she’s talking to the walls. I want to press on, ask her more questions, but in an instant, the opportunity—and that cracked shell—is gone. She stands up straight again. Poised. She speaks before I can. “Here in Trinity, you don’t have to remember anything, Ember. As you can see, I have something others do not. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  That Chicago Zoe has vanished. This Zoe definitely has a wickedness that we do not. A power. That’s for sure. She’s a strong river current that’s beautiful and enticing but powerful enough you shouldn’t get too close.

  She drags the index finger of her hand holding the cigarette along the cream wall next to her.

  My body stiffens, thinking she’s going to move toward me, emanating that powerful drug-like intoxication. But she doesn’t. I take the opportunity and turn away, walking toward the far end of the house. Away from her.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t make another unfavorable choice,” she calls to me.

  I cut my tour of the mansion short and find a back staircase leading up to my room. I will lock the door tonight.

  When I turn the corner in the hallway and shuffle in the dark toward my room, I bump directly into Zoe. Again. She’s everywhere.

  “Oh my God!” I whisper. “You scared me!” Like a beautiful vampire, she can disappear and appear in a flash. She’s swift, silent—and downright scary. My heart races.

  “I was just headed to my room,” she says softly. She spends so much time in her room—or at least, I think she does. I don’t really know where she goes or what she does when Lilly and Pete are jumping off the stairs and Tre and I are together. She touches my arm.

  She threatened you, I remind myself. She is not my friend. She’s a bad actress.

  “Things must be hard for you,” she purrs. “There’s no way for you to let it all go.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, inching away from her. Despite her phony tone, the smooth, silky sound of her voice digs deep inside me, inducing the mind-altering visions of blood-red and oily-black blobs.

  “We both know how you killed your parents, how you hated yourself so much you just gave up and numbed yourself. That kind of shame and guilt, you know, will never go away.”

  I’m floored. How can Zoe know this stuff? A supersized elephant camps out on my chest again. That crushing empty, dark way I felt the night my parents died returns to me again. I swallow and gaze wide-eyed at her in the dim light.

  “How could a girl like you ever forgive herself?”

  Who is Zoe? What is Zoe? She knows my heart. My mind. The realization falls over me like a heavy spider web, cutting off the light, cutting off the air, trapping me.

  Yet she emanates that same pulsing energy that makes me warm inside. I stand immobile and speechless in the dark hallway.

  “I will just get to the point here. You and I both know you are a broken girl. I mean, who are we kidding?”

  It’s the same speech she gave Pete. The same speech I said I wouldn’t buy into. Yet here I am. I’m putty. I’m numb. And I love the gooey way I feel standing next to her.

  “There is no escaping. It’s about time you admit the truth.” Zoe shakes her head slightly. A flash of light and silver moves across her waist. She takes my hand, and I watch impassively as a warm, wet drip moves across my palm. She has sliced into my hand with a knife.

  It should burn or pierce me. It should hurt. But it feels good.

  Zoe swiftly scoops up some of the blood into a small silver tube from her pocket, closes the lid. She leaves the hallway. I am alone in the dark. The heater from the house hums, conjuring up jagged brown lines in my mind.

  44

  The sun shines in my eyes as I limp quickly down the hill to go sit by the lake, thinking about what happened last night. When I first woke up, I figured it was another bad dream. But one look at my right hand and I knew the truth. A long, thin cut extends from my pointer finger to the inside edge of my palm.

  My head, however, hurts worse than the cut on my hand. All night, my brain spun like a giant hamster wheel, trying to figure out what Zoe had done and why.

  Midway through the meadow, the sound of breathing and crunching footsteps tells me someone is approaching from behind.

  “Hey, wait up,” Lilly says, breathless.

  Just the sight of her, with her ponytail on top of her head and her bright, oversized hot-pink T-shirt makes me want to walk away faster. But with my weak ankle, I’m crippled and I cannot run. I glance back at her and keep up my current pace. “Yeah, what?”

  “Where are you going? Want to go to Canary?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Canary. You know, the zip-lining spot. Flying like a bird? Want to go with us?”

  “No,” I say, pointing again to the ankle. I look straight ahead at the garden of flowers in the meadow, ignoring her now, hoping she’ll go away. I really don’t want any of their stupid thrill rides right now.

  “Okay… you’re missing out. But anyway, it’s great you’re back here. I guess this was destiny.”

  “Destiny?”

  “Yeah, Zoe told me you were coming into the forest that first time. No idea how she knew, but she was pretty happy to have found you.”

  Zoe was happy she found me. The revelation feels as if someone shattered a glass on a marble floor and plunged its sharp, jagged edges deep into my skin. My vision blurs, recalling the coin and the redheaded woman, and the way I felt such a need to come here—like I needed some sort of fix. I was pulled here. Lured.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  I don’t respond to her.

  “Because um, I guess it must be hard to worry about people on the outside like you do with Leadville.”

  “Yeah,” I say, zeroing in on my destination. The lake. I’m going to the lake. I have nothing to say to her. After my incident with Zoe last night, I’m angrier at Lilly than before. She trapped me here because she never wants to go home. Case closed on Certifiable ’80s Freakshow Girl.

  “I mean, it’s different for me. When I came here, I left everything I hated. All the people I hated, you know? And I brought what I liked here with me,” she says. Her voice climbs an octave at the end of the sentence, as if she’s asking a question.

  “What do you mean, ‘what you liked’? What, you brought your hair crimper?” I can’t help it. She’s so annoying. Outside of Tre, this whole place is annoying.

  She laughs a high-pitched giggle, which again elicits those dark gray raindrops that give way to a wave of emotion in my body: despair. Am I somehow tapping into what she’s feeling deep down?

  “No, I brought Tre.”

  The oxygen leaves the air.

  The memory comes rushing back to the TV show Mom watched way back when. It did talk about how L
illy the actress came to Trinity with some guy. But she was the famous one, so they talked about her. He was some guy.

  My mind is dashing. She must have been dating him. Did she love him? Does she still love him? And did he love her? She tricked him. She brought him here.

  “Why would you do that?” My voice slices the air.

  “He tried to be adventurous, I guess, and do a Colorado road trip with me,” she says. “Yeah, I was depressed and he wanted to cheer me up, so he convinced me to jump on his motorcycle to come to Colorado for some fresh mountain air. Isn’t that so sweet?”

  I nod. Jealousy eats at my skin, and my tongue presses against my teeth. “Well, you got Colorado mountain air. Forever. And ever and ever.” My feet stumble over a clump of dirt. Lilly reaches out a hand to help me stand back up, but I kind of shake her off.

  She continues to follow me like a bothersome golden retriever, a sloppy drooling dog bouncing next to me. She sighs deeply. “He was madly in love with me.” She wears a content little smile, and her eyebrows raise in a somewhat puppy-dog look. Perhaps she intends for me to be jealous. And whether I like it or not, she succeeds.

  “Naturally. I was this actress, all beautiful and dramatic.”

  Holding back an enormous eye roll, I laugh at her vanity in my head. She doesn’t notice my microscopic sliver of a smile as I keep my eyes trained on the grass ahead of me.

  “We met at a restaurant in LA. He brought me pie from across the room. And then, well, then we were inseparable.” She offers a glittery high-pitched sigh. “I remember making out in the back of his dad’s helicopter for, like, hours.”

  It disappoints me to know Tre’s standards are so dubious. Yet I, too, was taken in by Lilly’s enthusiastic charm. Now I see how that cheer hides remarkable sadness. Just like Mom—until the end, when she crumpled from depression.

  “You sure you don’t want to zip-line?” She stops walking and points her thumb in the other direction.

  She’s always been so sweet to me, and now I wonder if any of it is real—or if it is all for her own gain. The afternoon on the trash bag sledding hill, she wanted to really hurt me.

  “No, um…” I hesitate before blurting the real question on my mind. “Hey, I have a question for you… why did you want me to sled with a trash bag so badly?”

  She bites her bottom lip and her eyes skip a blink, staying wide open. “That’s what Zoe wanted me to do.” She shrugs with one shoulder. “Something about distracting you until a certain amount of time had passed, making you love it here, and then ensuring your heart rate got to a certain point.”

  “My heart rate?”

  “Yeah,” she says. Her brow flickers slightly as she gazes at the grass beyond us. “You know, all that stuff about the energy field and you.” She looks back at me and returns to her bouncy self, nodding quickly. “You sure you don’t want to come with me?”

  “No, but I still don’t understand—you succeeded in raising my heart rate with the first sledding run. Why did you want so badly for me to go a second time?”

  She stares again at me, frozen almost, her mouth gaping open before taking a swallow. After another beat, she looks at her feet, clad in orange flip-flops. Her right foot lightly kicks a clump of dirt on the ground. “I didn’t like the way Tre was looking at you,” she says softly.

  I stand there for a moment, squeezing my fingernails tightly into the cut on my hand, my eyes darting around the field, trying to avoid eye contact, trying to keep a tiny bit of excitement and hope from showing on my face. “Well… that’s stupid,” I say, shaking my head.

  Her eyes lock onto mine, and the corners of her closed lips turn up slightly. I can’t tell what her expression means.

  “I’m gonna zip-line now. I hope you feel better.” She turns away and waves her hand over her shoulder. “Bye-bye, chickadee.” Her voice returns to its perky self—a happy, shiny neon mask to hide her pain.

  45

  I find Tre sitting by the lake, carving some wood. He pulls the knife forward over the wood with even, steady swipes. Thwap, thwap, thwap.

  “What are you making now?” I ask, craning my neck to see.

  He looks up and our eyes meet, and I’m replaying our kisses again in my mind. He stops and lifts up the tiny piece of wood no taller than my first finger. “Chess piece. This one’s a bishop.” It’s jagged, but I recognize the shape, thin in the middle with a rounded top.

  He points to a pile of nearly two dozen pieces on the ground. The two queens have little jagged tops. The knights are twisting horse heads. Not too bad.

  “I’ve been here so long I almost have enough for an entire set.”

  The idea of being here so long gives rise to that sick feeling in my stomach again.

  I sit down next to him and he tackles me with a kiss. I smile and kiss him back, but after the conversation with Lilly and what happened last night with Zoe, I feel tense. I pull away slowly and look at my hand with the cut on my palm. It’s a clean line with a sliver of dark-brown dried blood.

  His cheerful demeanor disappears. “Where did you get that?”

  “Zoe cut my hand last night. She took blood from my hand and I just let her,” I say, exasperated once again. “I seriously just stood there and let her take my blood. Why in the world did she want my blood?”

  His chest fills as he inhales deeply. He shakes his head and then turns up the palm of his hand to reveal the lines of a similar but older cut.

  “You too? But why? Why would she do that?”

  He rubs the back of his neck with his hand. “I don’t know, Ember.”

  “So what’s the deal with Zoe? Asking people to do that weird Bath House, talking about shedding our skin, cutting my hand.” My voice cracks. I don’t tell him about my vision.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I know. We’re all putty with her.”

  Maybe she’s some sort of unearthly being. Maybe she’s not human.

  Maybe there is no way out. Maybe we’re here to be guinea pigs, big science experiments.

  For a few minutes, we sit there silently, side by side, watching the shadows of the aspen leaves dance on the ground. I once loved watching them outside our trailer, the way they would shimmy and wiggle like hula dancers.

  “I saw Lilly on my way down,” I say. “Did she ask you to go to Canary, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She told me your dad has a helicopter.”

  He nods and squints in the sun, unenthusiastic. That must mean Tre was rich. I can’t picture it. He’s from a totally different world than me, and he never even mentioned it. I remember how when I was in the third grade, my parents couldn’t pay for heat and all four of us slept in the same bed, huddled up together to keep warm. When Tre was a kid, he rode around in helicopters.

  My jagged sarcasm makes another appearance. “She also said you were madly in love.” I throw my hands over my heart, throw my head to the side, and do my best Lilly impersonation.

  He laughs. “I don’t know about that, but we were together, yeah. We had only been together for a few months when some lady gave Lilly a coin, and then she became obsessed with checking it out.”

  Coyote Lilly lured him in. She had a coin, too.

  “It had a funky pyramid thing on it—and she threw it up in the air. She looked at me and said, ‘Pyramid we go to Trinity. Blank side, we don’t.’ And it landed on the pyramid.”

  “It was going to either way.”

  “Why do you say that?” His brow knits together.

  “Because I had the same pyramid coin. And there are pyramids on both sides.” She totally screwed him. She just railroaded him. What a bitch.

  His eyes drift off to the cottonwood tree, and he nods. Bitterness meanders across his face.

  He rocks slightly and seems to swallow his anger. We all came here on our own, but she brought him here. She stole his life.

  After a minute, Tre’s face softens as if he’s decided that anger won’t serve him in this place. “Lilly didn’t exactly d
rag me here.” He shrugs. “I guess I was curious because of the stuff I saw in Europe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One night, I snuck out to this killer club, and on the way home, I’m all by myself on the cobblestone street when I hear all this chanting coming from one of the narrow alleyways, right? I followed the sound to this old building with an arch-shaped door. Must’ve been built in maybe the 1500s. And seriously, I see this small pyramid engraved into the stone above the door.” He uses his hands to paint me a picture. I love how he talks with his hands.

  I nod.

  “I got down real low and started peeking through some open windows by the street.” He moves his head down low. “Inside, all these people with long hooded robes were milling around. I figured maybe it was like some sort of monastery cause, you know, the room had these big stone walls and tons of candles lit—hundreds of them. It was a ceremony, and they were chanting something over and over.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “Hell if I know. I didn’t get to watch long because this guy came out and saw me, and I bolted. When I asked my mom if she’d ever seen anything like that there, she freaked.”

  “How so?”

  “She just kind of clammed up. The next day, she sent me on a plane back to the United States.”

  “Wow, that’s crazy. Why?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. She just kept shushing me every time I brought it up on the phone later. She mumbled something about not losing another kid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He nods. “I have a half sister, but I never met her. My mom said she disappeared. It pretty much screwed my mom up. She had nightmares and was always doing research online trying to find her. She became kind of smothering with me, too.”