by Ruth Ware
He didn’t come back until late, and when he did, Jacob and I made sure to be in bed. Jacob had pulled his mattress into the room with me and May, and I heard his sharp intake of breath as the door of the cottage slammed back against the wall. Beside me May flinched.
“Is Father angry with us, Leah?” she whispered.
I shook my head. “Not with us, May. With Cain.”
“What did he do?”
The truth, the unsayable truth, swelled inside me like something evil. He has left us. He has left us to deal with whatever is coming by ourselves. He is never coming back.
I could not bring myself to tell her.
“He took the boat out,” I said at last. “After Father said not to.”
“Oh.” I felt her relax beside me, because that was not something she had ever done or would ever do. “Will Father whip him?”
“Maybe,” I said. My throat felt dry and tight because I knew in my heart that it was not true. Cain would not be back. Not ever. And now we could not leave either.
Father did not mention Cain the next day. It was as if we woke to a world in which he had never existed. Instead Father let me and Jacob do our chores, and then he told us it was time to work on the wall.
“But the crops,” Jacob said, and I knew that he was thinking, as I was, of Cain’s unplowed fields, and the potatoes and turnips we would be relying on for the long, hungry winter. Without Cain to plow and weed and harvest, what would we eat when our supplies came to an end? But Father just glared at him.
“There’s things more important than your stomach, boy,” he said. “Now hop to it.”
That day we hauled rocks until our backs screamed and our hands bled, and when at last Father let us inside for rabbit stew, cooked to mush in the embers of the breakfast fire, we were too tired to eat much.
But Father—Father did not come inside at all. And long after Jacob and I had crawled up the stairs to bed, we heard him hauling the cart up the rutted lane in the darkness and the crack and tumble of rocks being heaved into position, higher and higher.
When we woke the next day, Father was already up and building, and the wall was higher than our heads. Father had to stand on the cart to put the rocks on top of the wall. When would he stop? The only way in and out of the house now was through the barn, which acted as part of the wall and which had a thick wooden door with a peephole in it.
“What are you trying to keep out, Father?” I asked, and my throat was tight and full of fear as I said it.
“They’re coming” was all he said.
Was it true? Was that why Cain had left? Did he know something we didn’t?
I wanted so badly to say, Who? But I didn’t know if I could stand to hear the truth from Father’s lips.
Because in my heart, I thought I knew who.
The men. The soldiers who had shot Mother.
“Get to work,” Father said, and I looked down at my hands. They had always been calloused, ever since we came to the island and I first picked up a hoe and drew a line in the thin, rocky soil. Calloused fingers, blisters on my palms, and dirt beneath my nails—they weren’t the soft hands of a prewar child.
But now they were unrecognizable. They were cracked and bloody, with splinters I couldn’t even feel, and so rough that when I braided May’s hair, she winced and pulled away.
“Get. To. Work,” Father repeated, and there was a dangerous note in his voice, a note I hadn’t heard since those nightmarish first days on the island after Mother’s death.
For a minute I thought about saying no. I thought about walking down to the sea and wading into the waves to follow Cain.
But I could not do it.
Father raised his hand in a threat.
I dropped my head in a nod, and I picked up the cart.
It was May who saw them first. I woke in the predawn, and she was not beside me. When I turned, I saw her standing at the window, looking out through the morning mist to something far across the ocean. Woof was beside her.
“Birds,” she said and pointed. But the noise was like no bird I had ever heard.
I got out of bed and stood beside her, shivering with cold, and that’s when I saw them.
Not birds.
Planes.
“Jacob,” I whispered, pushing him with my foot, and he stirred on the floor and flung out an arm, but he did not wake. “Jacob.”
I shook him, and this time he blinked and raised his head. My heart hurt, he looked so tired, and there were shadows beneath his cheekbones that had not been there a month ago.
“Wha?” he said, yawning.
“Planes.”
He sat up.
“Going to the mainland? Bombing?”
“No, coming here. Two of them. Little ones.”
He was out of bed before I had finished the words, peering out across the silvery sea.
“Fuck,” he said, and May laughed and put her hand over her mouth.
“Go tell Father,” I whispered to Jacob, and he nodded and pulled on his shirt and trousers, then ran silently next door.
When he came back, it was with Father. He stood for a long time at the window, staring out, and then he turned without a word and clattered down the wooden stairs. I looked at Jacob, and then we followed, Woof shadowing anxiously at our heels.
Down in the kitchen, Father pulled back the rug in front of the fire and lifted an iron ring that I had never really noticed before. The ring was stiff and crusted with dirt, but it came up, and with it a section of the boarded floor, dust and crumbs falling into a dark hole beneath.
Father swung himself down into the hole. It wasn’t much of a cellar, only a waist-deep pit with an earthen floor, but it was stacked full of crates and cardboard boxes, gone soft with damp. He passed out the first box, and as Jacob lifted it onto the kitchen table, the bottom gave way. The contents tumbled out, clattering onto the table and from there to the floor. The big box was full of smaller ones, brightly colored and heavy—9mm, it said on the side of each one, 100 rounds.
A cold feeling started in the pit of my stomach, and as Father passed out another box, it began to spread until the whole of my upper body felt numb. Where had he got all this from? It was not the same ammunition he used for the old shotgun hanging above the door. I knew by sight the shells for that and where Father kept them, locked in a tin in the dresser drawer.
We had learned to shoot with that old shotgun, aiming first at empty tins and then at rabbits that we skinned and stewed over the fire.
But these bullets were different. And something told me they were not meant for animals.
At last the table was covered with boxes, and Father opened up the smallest, which was a plastic crate with blue clips on each side. Inside were three handguns and two rifles.
“I’ve kept the war from you as long as I could,” Father said as he took out the guns and laid them on the table, side by side. He turned and looked at us—first Jacob, then me. “Do you understand? I’ve run from it as long as I could. But now the war has come to us. Now we have to fight.”
“What do they want?” I whispered.
“They want to win,” Father said. “They want our land. And they want our lives. So let’s make them pay for them.”
And he held out a handgun to me, butt first. When I took it, it was colder and heavier than I could ever have imagined. And the numbness spread over my whole body.
We did not go out for the rest of the day. We sat in the bedroom in silence, listening to the lowing of the cows, bellowing to be milked, and watching as the helicopters touched down and the men came scurrying out in camouflage gear to hide behind rocks and trees and bushes. When I closed my eyes, the gun felt hard and heavy in my hand. I could hear again the cracking roar and see Mother’s lifeless body falling on our doorstep.
Could I do it? Could I kill someone in cold blood as they had killed Mother?
I did not know. But the war had gone from being something remote and far away, the distant nightmare of a child,
to something terrifyingly close. The only thing between us and the soldiers now was Father’s wall. It protected us—as real and solid as Father himself. But it hindered us too. For now I realized we could not see the soldiers on the other side. The ones farther away, encamped behind the trees—those we could see. But as the day wore on and afternoon became dusk and then night, I could see shadows flitting across the meadow and I knew that they were getting closer.
It was full dark when May said, “Woof?” in a little, scared voice. Turning, I realized that Woof was no longer in the room. For some hours now he had been pacing around the house, whining to be let out, but now there was no sound of his padding feet or his claws scrabbling against the back door.
“Woof!” I called as loudly as I dared, but there was no answering bark or sound of paws on wood.
Just then a voice came from outside. It was distorted by a megaphone so that I could not hear all the words, but some of them came through plain.
“Mr. Reynolds, Paul Reynolds . . . under arrest . . . surrender your weapons . . . come out.”
I looked at Father. His face was set and white in the thin moonlight, and he opened the window and leaned out, making me want to whimper with fear for him.
“I’ll go to hell first,” he shouted across the yard, into the darkness, but there was no immediate answer, only the far-off movement of shadows scurrying. Father dropped back down, his back to the wall, and he slotted a cartridge of ammunition into his gun. I heard voices, not amplified through a speaker this time but low and far away, as if they were readying themselves for something.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a loud, shocking click and a white, blinding light, like someone had ripped a hole in the heavens to let the daylight in. Only this was no daylight. Shading my eyes against the glare, I could see a square bank of floodlights had been fixed above the barn wall, battering us with its illumination. Now the soldiers could see us—but we could no longer see them. We could see nothing beyond the floodlights. Nothing but the wall.
My heart began to beat in my ears.
“Last chance,” I heard, in the tinny electronic boom of the megaphone, over the singing of my own blood. “. . . officers coming in . . . resist . . .”
Resist.
It sounded like a command.
Resist.
“You mind what I told you,” Father whispered. He took the safety catch off his gun. “You make them pay.”
I nodded.
And then a head came up above the wall.
What happened next was far quicker than it takes to tell.
Father stood up. He took aim. He fired, and the man on top of the wall dropped like a stone.
There was a volley of shots, Father fell back into the room, there was the sound of breaking glass, and a bullet zinged across the open room and struck the plaster of the wall behind May’s bed, opening a great white wound in the wall.
And that was when I saw—May was not there.
“May!” I cried hoarsely. Jacob stood up, looking wildly around, and there was another crack and he fell, hand to his shoulder, a great spreading stain coming out from under his hand. Father gave a cry of fury and let loose another dozen shots at the soldiers outside before dropping onto his knees and pressing a balled-up blanket to Jacob’s shoulder. Jacob was gasping and swearing with the pain, but he was alive.
For a moment I stood in terrible indecision, wondering whether to stay or go after May. But Jacob had Father. And who knew what May might do, downstairs, alone and panicked?
Making up my mind, I ran out of the room, ignoring Father’s urgent shout to stay put, and down the stairs, the gun heavy with foreboding in my hands. I knew before I got to the ground floor what had happened. I knew from the wind and the sound of the door banging against the wall.
May had gone.
She had gone after Woof.
From outside I heard a staccato exchange of fire.
“You shot my fucking son!” Father screamed, and he fired into the darkness.
Then, out of nowhere, a dog barking and barking and barking and May’s high voice calling, “Woof! Woof!”
A shot rang out, and then there was a sudden, horrific silence.
“Little girl,” I heard shouted from outside, not through the loud-hailer, but one soldier to another. “It’s a little girl!”
I heard feet on the stairs, and Father came running past me. He did not stop, even though they were coming now. Swarming over the wall, ten, twenty, forty of them, with helmets and masks. The house filled with a choking gas.
Father put his gun to his shoulder, and he walked out into the choking mist firing, firing, firing at the wall of soldiers. His shape was a black blur against the wall of light, and the bullets kept coming, but somehow Father kept walking—walking toward where May had been. And then he fell.
“Noooooo!” I heard a voice screaming through a throat made hoarse by the stinging gas—and I realized it was Jacob.
The soldiers were coming. And it was all over. But I didn’t care anymore.
I didn’t care because May was gone.
Because the soldiers had killed her, like they killed Mother.
Mother was gone.
Cain was gone.
May was gone.
Woof was gone.
And now Father had gone too.
The soldiers were closing in. And it was just Jacob and me left.
Make them pay, Father had said.
I held the gun out in front of me, and I walked into the yard with my eyes shut against the blinding glare of the floodlights and my finger shaking against the trigger.
I heard Jacob’s voice behind me, screaming, “Leah, Leah no!” the staccato bangs and the shriek of bullets.
I felt the weight of the gun in my hands and the white heat of the floodlights on my closed eyelids.
I held the gun out in front of me like a chalice. I pressed my finger to the trigger.
“For May,” I whispered, though I could not hear my own voice above the cacophony. “For Woof, for Mother.”
A life for a life.
Footsteps, thumping against the ground, heading toward me, coming to take me down.
I pressed the trigger. The gun kicked in my hands.
Everything went black.
When I woke, I was dead, but at least I was in heaven. My eyes were closed, but I knew because I was floating on a pleasant sea of calm, and I could hear Mother’s voice. There was pain, but it was a far-off pain that belonged to someone else, and someone was singing, high and silvery. A dancing stream, strong and sweet . . .
May. Maybe Woof would be here too.
I tried to open my eyes, but the weight of tiredness was too much, and I let myself slip back into the dark.
When I woke again, I knew I was not in heaven. For one thing it hurt. The pain I had felt before was back, and this time it very definitely belonged to me and was in my right arm. There was no singing, only an unfamiliar beep, beep, like a robot.
I tried to move, but there were sheets over me and something on my arm.
And then I heard a voice.
“Leah, darling,” the voice said. “Don’t try to move. You’re in the hospital. But you’re okay.”
Mother.
I did not want to open my eyes. I had dreamed of her many times, and I did not want the illusion to fade as it had so often before.
But when I opened my eyes, she was there. And she was not the Mother I remembered, but a woman ten years older, with short graying hair and earrings I did not recognize. But she was still Mother. And her hand, when she put it to my cheek, was real and warm and solid.
And behind her was Jacob, with eyes red from crying and that stinging gas.
And from another room I heard the voice begin again.
“Mamma mia. Hello again. Mamma mia, you were in the mist there.”
I began to cry.
It was Cain who explained what had happened. Who put together the pieces of the puzzle that I had always had but h
ad been too young to recognize for what they were.
Father’s diatribes against the police, his meetings in the back rooms of bars with men who shared his view that the world was going to the dogs and that they needed to fight for their rights, his growing conviction that a reckoning was coming, and the guns he had begun to stockpile against that day.
And then at last Mother’s phone call to the police that final night, whispering under her breath while Father rocked May to sleep and sang to me and Jacob. “Yes, I’m worried about my husband . . . worried that he might do something stupid.”
Because there had never been a war, except in Father’s head. Or . . . perhaps that’s not quite true. There was a war, but it was between Father and the rest of the world.
It was Mother who opened the door that night to the police—the final betrayal, in Father’s eyes. And so he grabbed his children, and while Mother explained the situation in low, urgent tones, Father hurried us out a back window and over the fence into the waiting car—its engine backfiring like gunshots as it drove into the night.
If Cain suspected the truth, that Mother had not died that night, then he never said. For this Father, the one who rowed wild-eyed into the dark seas, toward an island Cain never knew existed, this Father was a stranger to him—a dangerous person with a boatful of guns. A Father who whipped and cuffed and beat his children when they disobeyed him.
And besides, Mother was dead to Father. And Father’s reality was the only one that mattered now.
Even Cain did not know what happened that day when Father came back from the mainland covered with blood. His best guess was that someone in the little port town had recognized Father, the man who had stolen his own children more than ten years before, and had perhaps tried to call the police. Father must have punched him and then beaten a hasty retreat. But after that, it was just a matter of time. There were only so many places that he could have gone, only so many islands where a fugitive with four children could hide out for ten years.
And so, after that, Father started building the wall.
It took me a long time to believe, even with Mother sitting beside me, her arm around me, firm and real as the nose on my face.