by Cote Smith
Emile pushed her from his chest, but held her by the shoulders. “Your husband. He works for Oskar Totem.”
“Who?”
“He sent you here. To watch me.”
Sue’s face soured. “I don’t know who that is.”
“You’re always watching me.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Your son. You have a son. But where is he? Where’s his stuff?”
“Emile.”
“Tell me. Please, just tell me.”
Sue’s eyes widened. The waves receded, in a rush. I’m not well, Sue thought. She continued to think, over and over. I’m not well. I’m not well.
Emile released her. It was possible, he supposed, for him to make a mistake. But after the Eldridge, after all these years being followed, he knew what Totem was capable of. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”
“Oh my god,” Sue said. “Lia.”
“I know. I thought that—”
“No. Look.”
She spun Emile around to face the window. On the other side, in the other window, stood little Lia. Her face was dark, her mouth open in a perfect, horrific circle. Emile jumped to the window, and when he lifted it open he unmuted the scream. A screech he had never heard before. He shouted her name but it was lost in Lia’s wail. Behind him Sue kept repeating herself. Oh my god, oh my god.
He could not get over there fast enough. But there he was, in the living room, Lia still screaming, still facing the window, the kitchen shears at her feet. When he said her name and she turned around, her chin was dripping. Blood. It started at the crown of her head. Emile ran to her, scooped her up, and carried her to the bathroom. He put her in the bathtub. He turned on the shower and held her screaming face to the cold water. The blood kept coming. He didn’t know what to do. Large chunks of hair were missing. He could see it now, the jagged lines where she cut herself.
“Apple, what did you do?”
He turned the water off. He pulled her soaking body from the tub and wrapped her head in towels, carried her to the kitchen, where he would call 911. How long would that take? How long could she continue to bleed?
“Oh my god,” someone said. Not Sue. Emile turned and saw Claire.
“It’s fine,” Emile said. “She’s fine.”
Claire took Lia from Emile’s arms. She didn’t say a word until she was at the front door. “Grab your keys,” she said. “Drive.”
* * *
There was plenty of time to argue afterward. After Emile raced Claire and Lia to the hospital, after Claire ran Lia into the emergency room, after she pushed ahead of the other patients, who said they didn’t mind, but thought differently. What kind of parents . . . Luckily, they didn’t have to wait long. “I remember you,” the nurse said to Lia, as she cleaned her up. “We met when you were just a baby. Do you remember that?”
Lia shook her head. She had stopped crying on the drive to the hospital, and sat in a strong silence as the nurse flushed and sterilized the wounds.
“I like your haircut,” the nurse said. “Did you do that yourself?” Lia nodded. “It’s so short. Were you trying to look like your daddy?” The nurse glanced at Emile. Lia shook her head again. “Then who?”
Lia raised her tiny hand and pointed a finger at Emile.
* * *
“What does that mean?” Claire said. “She wants to be like you.” They talked quietly on the drive home, Lia sleeping in the rearview mirror. She needed fifteen stitches, eight across one plate of her head, seven across another. Emile explained that he was just trying to help. He told her about the tree, about the clouds, Lia’s dreams.
“Her dreams?”
“They’re just nightmares,” Emile assured her.
“How do you know? Can you—?”
“No,” Emile said. “In that way, she’s like you.”
He glanced at Claire when he said this, but she’d turned away. Outside, streetlights glowed. They were almost home.
Claire said, “This isn’t fair.”
Emile parked on the side of the street in front of the house and cut the engine. “I know you don’t want to hear this now,” he said. “But your neighbors—”
“Stop, Emile. She’s just depressed. Robert told Jacob all about it. They’re still at the bar. She won’t take her pills or something. The doctors don’t know what to do. Robert’s been staying in a hotel, with their boy.”
“No. I heard—”
“Just stop, okay?”
Emile looked out at the street. All the bubble homes with their locked doors. The families hiding inside, thinking they were safe.
“I can’t believe you live here.”
“Me either,” Claire said.
“So,” Emile said, “you’re just going to pretend that nothing is happening?” Claire wouldn’t answer him. He felt a burning at the back of his throat. “You know, the old you, she would’ve hated this. She would’ve called Alison a tourist and laughed at her behind her back.”
Claire shrugged. “This isn’t about me.”
“Of course it is,” Emile said. “It’s always about you. It will always be about you.”
Claire breathed on the window and wiped the fog away. “Not if you leave.”
“Leave?” Emile said, as if he didn’t understand. But he knew exactly what she meant. She wanted him gone, because as long as Emile was there, living with them in their home, the family that Claire had created with Jacob could never be what she wanted it to be. A safe place, somewhere she could settle into.
She spoke calmly now, and Emile realized she had given this a lot of thought, maybe even rehearsed what she would say to him when the time finally came. “You’re not happy here, Emile. You’ll never be happy here. You’ve convinced yourself this is the life you want, but you don’t want me. You want what you’ve made me to be, in your mind.”
Emile searched his thoughts, trying to grasp at a day, an hour, a moment, anything he could, anything that he could hold up to Claire and say, You’re wrong. This. This makes me happy. He found it in the rearview mirror before he found it in his mind. Sleeping heavily, her mouth slacked open. He thought of the tree, the clouds, her dreams. Her small hand in his. He tried to imagine leaving her. Saying good-bye. Would she understand? Or would she run around the house the next morning, searching for her uncle, calling his name?
Claire opened the passenger door and went around to grab Lia from the back seat, who was so big now, nearly too heavy to carry.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
Emile started the car. He lowered the window to say good-bye.
“Emile,” Claire said. “You don’t have to leave right now. What about your stuff?”
Emile looked at Claire. He looked at Lia. Part of him understood, had always understood. What it meant for him to be there. How it would end if he stayed. There was no escape from the coming tide. There was only walking into the unknown, head on.
He reached a hand out the window, grabbed Lia’s foot one last time. She was asleep, but he tried to talk to her anyway, to send her a message. That if she continued to feel the way she did, like something was wrong, like she was drowning inside, she should come find him. When she was older. When she was ready. And he would help her. Because he’d felt it too. He hoped she could hear him.
“But you need to be careful,” he said.
“I am,” Claire said, thinking Emile was talking to her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lia
Lia spent the next few days at the Eldridge draining her checking account and looking for leads to Max Finlayson’s whereabouts. She found nothing. Only second- and thirdhand stories about what he was like. Young and brash, they said, always with an eye on the horizon. But no one knew where he was presently. Or if he was presently. If he existed in the here and now, or if like the man in her mother’s dream, he’d gone up in smoke.
She headed north to find Max of Wyoming, the next Max on her list, and when she found no Max living at that addre
ss, she drove east to Max of Nebraska, another dead end. She was on her way to Max number four when her father finally called. Lia hadn’t spoken to him since leaving for Archer Park, but she had sent a text to her mother requesting some funds after her savings dipped to zero in Colorado. Her mother didn’t message her back, though the following morning, when Lia went to the ATM, cash spit out into her hand and the balance wasn’t printed in red.
She let the call go to voice mail. What was there to say? Yes, Dad, I dropped out of school. No, Dad, I don’t know where I’m going. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell you where or why. What would it do to him if he found out what she and her mother were up to?
The voice mail was short:
Lia, there’s something wrong with your mother. I . . . I don’t know what to do. Call me when you get this.
Lia didn’t call him back. She told herself it was because she was driving, and her father would have wanted her to be safe as she sped down the highway, cutting through the corner of Kansas on her way to Max of Missouri, next on the list. Yes, there is something wrong with my mother, she thought. She has been lying to you, to me, for my entire life. Lia tossed the phone facedown on the passenger seat, refusing to look at it until her next stop. It was dark. Soon she would need to find somewhere to stop for the night. Her headlights flashed across a sign for Kansas City. She was north of the river, about an hour away. She didn’t have the money for a hotel. While her head mulled over a few different options, her hands steered the wheel toward the next exit; some part of her mind knew what to do. It was only a little out of the way. And it would be nice to stay somewhere familiar for a change.
The cheapest motel was off Highway 40, across from a tiny airstrip. Growing up, Lia had driven by the motel countless times, and always thought it looked pretty shady. The shifty clientele smoking in the gravel lot, the neon sign that failed to light up all its letters, like a wide smile missing a prominent tooth. The price was right though, even if her room was airport themed, complete with a ceiling fan shaped like a propeller. She slept well that night, and in the morning she was pleasantly surprised when she found no bug bites welting her body.
She would drive into town. She deserved a day to revisit her past, even if her mother had proven that most of it was not as she remembered. All the places, the memories that made up her life—none of it was as she’d previously understood. She drove by her elementary school, where her mother had dropped her off on her first day, telling Lia to be strong and brave. Nearby was her childhood home, the house she didn’t remember, but was told she took her first steps in, said her first word—Mama. Here she gave herself a haircut when her mother wasn’t looking, a bloody affair that ended in a trip to the emergency room and two long scars that cowlicked her skull to this day. Here she thought she fell in love with the boy next door, who died without knowing how she thought she felt, which ended up being nothing at all.
She got out of the car and sat on the hood. She stared at the house, the small porch, the dark window in the attic, like a sleeping eye. She wondered how much of it was true, the history she was told but couldn’t remember. What was fact and what was otherwise, a fiction invented by her mother to disguise a hidden life? She might never know.
But here was her former neighbor, tiptoeing out of the house in her paint-stained dress shirt to snag the paper. She froze when she saw Lia. “You,” she said. She crossed the street. “I know you.”
“Hi, Mrs. Gilmore,” Lia said. “How are you?”
“I was doing yoga,” she said. She put her hands together and offered Lia half a bow. “I always do yoga before I read the paper. Helps get my head right. Then I read the news and it gets all scrambled again.” She laughed a strange laugh. “My goodness. Lia Haddock. You must be, what, a freshman in college by now?”
“I’m just passing through,” Lia said. “You know, visiting old places.” She looked across the street. “I used to live here, huh?”
Mrs. Gilmore smiled. “You were a funny little thing. Always giving your parents fits.”
“Yeah. I don’t really remember.”
“Well, you were young. God, so was I.” She laughed at a memory. “How are they? Your mom and dad.”
“They’re good,” Lia said. She thought of the call from her dad she missed last night. “I’ll tell them hello.”
“Oh, good. That’s wonderful.” She turned to head inside before freezing in the street. “Say, how’s that uncle of yours doing?”
“My uncle?”
Mrs. Gilmore slapped her knee with the paper. “Emile! Gosh, you used to give him so much trouble too. Do you remember—” She started to laugh. “The time . . . the scissors . . . your hair.” Her laugh grew uncomfortably loud. “I thought your mother was going to kill him.” She put a hand to her chest, as if to make herself stop.
“I thought I did that to myself,” Lia said.
“You did,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “But you did it for him, after he cut his hair short. You always wanted to be like him.”
“I did?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “You two were peas in a pod. Didn’t your parents tell you any of this?”
“No,” Lia said. “They didn’t tell me anything.” She slid off the hood. “So you knew my uncle well?”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “I was a very big fan. He was so . . . special.”
“Special.” Lia didn’t like Mrs. Gilmore’s use of the word, its vagueness, or the way she said it. As if Lia should know exactly what she meant.
“Well, yes. You understand.”
“No,” Lia said again. “Actually I don’t.” She realized none of this was Mrs. Gilmore’s fault, but no one else was here for Lia to be mad at. “He left when I was little,” she said. “And my parents won’t talk about him.” She stared at Mrs. Gilmore, until Mrs. Gilmore looked down at her paper.
“I’m sure they have their reasons.”
“Do they?” Lia asked, and that familiar burning feeling welled up inside her. “He’s gone, you know. My uncle. Emile. He disappeared at Limetown. You know about Limetown? He was one of them. The citizens. My mom went looking for him but she stopped when my dad found out and now here I am, and no one really knows what happened to any of them.” A car roared by, as fast as Lia felt she was talking. “You know what—never mind. I’m sorry. This is—I should go.”
But Mrs. Gilmore wasn’t fazed. She waited for the sound of the car’s obnoxious engine to die down the block. When everything was quiet again, she said, “Lia. Little Lia. Why don’t you come inside?”
* * *
Lia pretended that she hadn’t been in Mrs. Gilmore’s house before. Mrs. Gilmore brought out some green tea, which Lia didn’t like, but drank politely as the two sat in the living room and chatted. They talked about small things at first, the weather (it was so cold), school (going fine, Lia lied), all a prelude to the only subject really worth discussing—Emile.
“So they never told you what he was really like,” Mrs. Gilmore said.
Lia shook her head over her tea.
“I was troubled too, or so they kept saying. But there’s something I could take.” She poured herself another cup of tea. “Do you know Patsy Cline? That’s my medicine.”
“Not really.”
“Well, I paint too, and that’s good enough most days. But your uncle, he didn’t have anything. He had no one, except your mother.”
“I know about that.”
“You know he loved her.”
Lia nodded. She hadn’t thought about it in such a simple way, but of course it was true.
“Good,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “That’s good.” She sipped her tea and cleared her throat. She stood up. “Would you like to see something strange?” She left the living room before Lia could answer, disappearing down the hall. Lia was unsure whether she was supposed to follow. It felt weird to sit there alone, in this odd woman’s house. But she was an odd woman who knew Emile. So Lia went down the hall and into the master bedroom, whe
re Mrs. Gilmore stood in front of the bedroom window, which looked directly at Lia’s old house.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Mrs. Gilmore asked. “My husband. Sorry, my ex-husband—he wasn’t very good to me. He had one of those jobs where he pretended to be one thing but really was another. He pretended so much that he forgot what was real and what wasn’t. When someone pretends that much, you start to wonder.”
Mrs. Gilmore moved to the bed, but Lia stayed at the window, waiting for someone to appear in her old house. “What did your husband do?”
“He pretended to be a professor. But really he worked for the government. That’s all he would tell me.”
Lia turned from the window. She didn’t know why Mrs. Gilmore was telling her this. What this had to do with Emile. She opened her mouth to ask those questions, but others came out. “Where is he now? Was he at Limetown?”
“Limetown?”
Lia’s pocket buzzed. She pulled her phone out and stared at the screen. It was her dad again.
“Take it,” Mrs. Gilmore said. “I’ll make more tea.”
Lia let her phone ring as long as possible before answering. Her father was shouting, over the wind, it sounded like, which roared around him.
“Lia? Are you there? Say something.”
“I’m here,” Lia said.
“Did you hear? Your mother! Honey, they found her in somebody’s cellar. A restaurant or something. I’m on my way now.”
“Is she okay?”
“What? Where are you?”
“What restaurant?”
“She broke in. The manager found her when they opened. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Hold on. I can’t hear you.”
The wind beat his phone and there was a long pause as her father tried to find a quieter spot. Lia returned to the window. She stared at her old house and waited for her father’s voice to come back. She heard a door slam—she imagined he was in his car. “She’s not well, honey. Do you understand me? They called the police. She refused to leave. Kept saying something about a dream. About a clock ticking away. She had to find you. That’s what she kept saying. ‘I have to find Lia.’ ”