The dog looked up at her, his watery eyes limpid and subservient, his whole posture pathetic. Wagging his tail carefully, he came closer and licked her hand. She yanked it away. “I’m not really a dog person,” she said, and closed the trunk.
She got into the car and drove. About halfway to where she was going, she turned off the AC and rolled down her window. Warm, scented air whirled through the car. This time of year always reminded her of David.
Izzy rested her elbow on the edge of the open window and sped down the highway, trying her best to think of good things. But it was too hard, even for Izzy. All she could smell was dog.
That day she came home late to the house, empty except for the old woman, her grandmother was standing at the door as if waiting for her.
He’s back she said cryptically. It sounded like bek. Her face was animated, not with pleasure but with excitement. She hooked her finger at Izzy.
Come in here she said. Her gaze bore into Izzy’s with such confidence there was almost a transfer between the two of them.
The old woman said, Do you know that house where the man killed them?
As the last word dropped, she knew which house the old woman meant. Yes, Izzy had said. I know the house.
Good. You know this house.
Everyone does, Izzy said.
The old woman grinned at her. She pulled open the top drawer of her bureau, and even though she was barely tall enough to see inside, she reached in and pulled out something wrapped in cloth. Come here girl, and I’ll open you up. And you’ll go. A stupid woman settles. You’re not a stupid woman.
And when Izzy came close, she cut her with the knife, underneath her left breast. A small slit that hardly even bled at first.
“This,” her grandmother said, “will let him in. And then you’ll have everything you’ve ever wanted.”
It wasn’t late when Izzy got back to Haven Woods. And it was odd, and funny at the same time, that she was happy to leave the city behind, happy to be back with just one more odious task in front of her, and then home.
Just one more thing. Ritual sacrifice. Necessary—like dishes, tidying, laundry. All odious in their own way.
THIRTEEN
ROWAN HAD FALLEN ASLEEP on the couch. She woke up with a sore tummy. It hurt really low down, sort of like when you have to go to the bathroom, but different. Tighter. It felt hot. She wanted her mom.
Paula was having a nap. She’d been acting tired and weird ever since they got back from her friend’s house. She’d made Rowan something to eat and then lain down on the bed. Rowan checked the clock. Her mom had been sleeping ever since and it was almost seven.
Rowan watched TV and tried to eat, but her stomach was aching too much. The PB&J sandwich and glass of milk were still in front of her on the coffee table, half eaten. She needed a Bromo.
When they were living in the crappy house before the crappy apartment, her mom had a job at Walgreens, the overnight shift. It was the scariest of her jobs because she didn’t get home until just before Rowan had to get up for school, so Rowan had to spend all night by herself in that creaky house. She got a lot of stomach aches that year. Her mom would bring home Bromo from the drugstore. Whenever she got a stomach ache, her mom would tell her to take half a cup of Bromo and burp it up.
As far as she knew, Bromo was a popular product. She’d seen a bottle of it in the janitor’s room at school once. Maybe her grandmother had some. Her mom was still sleeping and Ro didn’t want to wake her, so she turned off the television and went snooping.
The bathroom was enormous, not at all like the bathrooms Rowan was used to. The tub was oversized, sloped at one end and had feet, like something out of a magazine. The medicine chest was just as old-fashioned, with a tiny latch midway up the mirrored door.
She wasn’t supposed to go into someone else’s medicine cabinet, of course. That much she understood. She knew all about taking medicines and how if you took the wrong thing you could end up thinking you could fly and jump off a building or something. Her mom had told her lots of times never to take a pill someone else gave her or to go into someone else’s private things. But this was her grandmother’s house. Surely the medicine cabinet wasn’t off limits …
The cramping feeling in her stomach was worse, if anything. Rowan undid the latch and opened the door. There were five shallow shelves, each lined with pretty blue paper. And there were all kinds of pill bottles in different colours: brown, green, blue. It was hard to see what was in them. She took down one of the bigger jars, blue, like the Bromo at home. It was capped with a piece of cork that looked hand-cut. She shook it. Something clunked inside.
She wiggled the cork out and peered inside. The smell hit her first. It wasn’t unpleasant; in fact it smelled a little like a holiday or something. Christmas. Ro brought the bottle closer to her nose and breathed in the nutty smell. It was much stronger up close, and for just a moment Rowan sort of … swooned.
She closed her eyes and lowered the bottle. Her nose and eyes stung and then her head got light and her limbs went kind of loose, as if she was about to fall asleep. She sat down hard on the toilet, which jolted her into alertness.
But just before she went down, she thought she had heard voices, maybe singing
just me and you
I love you
then they were gone. But the voices had shot through her head like bullets from a gun.
Rowan put the jar back. She twisted more bottles around, looking for labels. A few of them were prescription drugs with long, unintelligible names, some of the labels so old they were faded. Her grandmother had obviously reused the bottles. Others had no labels at all or the labels had been peeled off, sticky grey glue remaining. Most of the bottles were half filled and the contents looked like … grass or something.
She turned another little bottle so she could read what it said.
DANG GUI HUA GOA
1985 take with
The one next to it was so worn she couldn’t read the date, but the rest of the label said
GRACIE KIMBOL
for blood disorder
100 c to be taken after dark
and the next said
JUDY KEEL
may cause bleeding
take with 1988
Bromo looked like salt or sugar. You put it in a glass of water. It fizzed. She wished her mom would wake up.
There was no Bromo in the medicine cabinet. Or anything like it. She crouched down in front of the vanity and opened the door. Typical under-the-sink things, the same stuff they had in their bathroom at home: a package of TP, some toilet-bowl cleaner, a bottle of glass cleaner. There were also some zippered bags, like makeup bags. A couple of them were pretty big and could hold all manner of
(secret treasure)
Bromos and potions and things to make her feel better.
She opened the one closest to her, a pretty bag with circles inside circles of blue and white and lighter blue. Inside was a collection of scissors and files and little tools that she guessed were for manicures. She zippered it and put it back. Behind it was a paper bag with the logo of a drugstore. She reached for that.
Hair. It was a bag of hair.
“Ew,” she said, but she was actually intrigued. A smaller plastic bag rested on top of the hair. She gingerly fished it out. It took her a moment to figure out what it was, then she dropped it back in disgust.
Fingernail clippings. Why was her grandma saving them? She rolled the bag up and stuck it back in the vanity, deeper than it had been. Disgusting. Gross.
She touched one of the bigger cosmetic bags—even more curious now—intending to see what could possibly be in that one. But when she picked it up, something moved inside.
Startled, she dropped it, falling backwards. She hit her shoulder on the side of the tub, but hardly noticed. She jumped up and slammed the cupboard shut with her foot. There was nothing like Bromo in there.
In the hallway she heard the dog’s nails clicking on the wood floor. He
stopped just outside the bathroom door, whining low in his throat. Grmmmm.
“It’s okay,” she said to Old Tex. “I hardly touched it. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Rowan slammed the medicine chest door shut and stood up. Old lady stuff, she told herself. Weird old lady stuff.
As she was leaving the bathroom, bending to give Tex a pat, the phone rang in the kitchen. And then her mother was up, running for it.
Paula picked up and listened for a moment without really hearing the voice on the other end. Her head was foggy with unspent sleep, but when the word doctor penetrated her haze, she came wide awake.
“You’re my mother’s doctor? I’m so glad you’ve called.” She could barely keep the annoyance out of her voice. At least he’d called. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with her?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “I can tell you that we are doing some … tests. Your mother is suffering from … exhaustion. And she’s stiff in the joints. There’s also evidence of some … deficiencies.”
Paula frowned. “What kind of deficiencies? Like vitamins? Is her joint pain arthritis, something like that? What’s wrong with her exactly?”
There was an odd cadence to his speech, and she wondered if he stuttered. It was disconcerting. “I won’t know very much until the tests are done. We’re doing them … soon.”
“Right. What kind of tests? Are they painful or difficult? Should I be there?”
“Um,” he said. There was a long pause before he spoke again, and Paula felt her anger rising. Then he said, “I think it’s best that you let us do the tests before you visit again. Okay?”
Okay? “How long?” she asked.
There was another long pause and she half expected to hear papers shuffling on the other end, as though he were checking schedules, finding dates, times, but there was nothing, just dead air.
“After Friday. You can visit after again on Saturday morning.”
That seemed a long time for tests. But whatever had to be done had to be done. It was just a couple of days. “All right,” she said. “If it’s necessary, I’ll wait. Can you tell her that you spoke to me and that I send my love?”
“Sure,” the doctor said and hung up. It was so abrupt that Paula stood there holding the phone, waiting for something else to happen, until the dial tone sounded. She replaced the handset on the cradle and stood there thinking.
Paula didn’t have a lot of experience with hospitals or doctors, but it felt to her as if the whole conversation had been off somehow, and she was unsatisfied. But it was only a couple of days.
Then she realized that she hadn’t even got his name. She’d missed it. If he’d said it at all.
Doug Moore hung up the phone and looked to his wife for approval. Marla was smiling. “Very good, dear. Thank you.”
He nodded, his expression flat.
“You can go back to work now. Do you have to go back to work?”
He nodded again.
She put her hand on his cheek. “Good. You go back to work and you can forget all about this. Forget all about this …” As she said it she stroked her hand across his face. He closed his eyes and she took her hand away.
“Are you going back to work, honey?” she asked again, her tone suddenly bright.
“Yeah,” he said. “I still have a couple of contracts to go over. I just came home to get my—my—” He frowned.
“—file folder in the den,” she finished for him. “Should I get that for you?”
“Thanks, Marl. And jeez, I wouldn’t mind a sandwich or something. Do you mind?” He opened the fridge and peeked inside.
“You can pick something up on the way back to work,” she said and went and got a file for him. Any file would do.
After Doug left, Marla went into Amy’s bedroom to check on her. She was lying on top of the bedcovers, stiff as a board, staring at the ceiling.
“Amy?”
The child didn’t move. Her little chest rose and fell with her breath, but she was otherwise still.
“Honey, Mommy’s right here. I’m right here.”
Outside there was the steady foom-pf of the basketball through the hoop.
It was all about her babies now. She had to protect her babies. But a persistent thought kept popping into her head. What have we done?
What have we done?
FOURTEEN
IZZY WAS PARKED OUTSIDE the Chapman house, waiting for dark. She ached for darkness, wanted only to hide under black skies. She had ill work ahead of her and no desire to see it performed.
The foliage, once scrubby and sparse, had grown thick and wild around the house. The drive had grown over too, and a broad patch of brown grass ran up the middle, mixed with thistles and stinkweed. Twenty years of tire marks had compressed the earth, turned it grey. In spite of the (mostly abandoned) farmland around her, there was no greenery here, just blank, empty fields.
At the foot of the drive was the fading post that bore the house number: 362. Someone had long ago scratched over it with a key or a knife. It could barely be made out now. The house stood alone at the edge of Haven Woods.
It would be dark soon.
The thumping from the trunk had stopped. The car was still. Since the house was close to the river, she should have been able to hear spring peepers and crickets, but the yard was silent, as though nothing living could possibly stay for long.
It didn’t matter how often she came here or how fated her connection, every time she was filled with fear. Izzy, who inspired her own kind of fear in her women, sat in the car with the windows rolled up and watched fretfully, knowing that the random, uncontrolled evil that permeated the very boards of the house, and the earth around it, could turn on her as easily as it gave. Even with her gift of flesh today, she was in arrears, and it could all turn.
The house looked different now. The yellow crime-scene tape was long gone. The windows were broken, rocks thrown by teenagers on a dare.
But a girl never forgets her first time.
Do you know that house? her grandmother had asked her. She had taken a knife from her drawer in the bedroom and pressed it to Izzy’s side, under her left breast. The slice was fast and clean. Izzy had gasped and stumbled back with the impact, placing her hand there, covering it. The wound began to bleed through her fingers.
I was there her grandmother said, beaming at her. Before this. Long time ago, your mother dragged me away. The old woman’s mind was wandering, her expression faraway for a minute. Things fell apart. We weren’t strong.
She pushed the bedroom door closed behind Izzy. The room was illuminated only by the brown light coming from a dirty bulb under a dirty lampshade in the corner. Izzy pressed back against the door.
Her grandmother raised the knife, not as a threat but to emphasize. You must have thirteen. At all times.
women
find them yourself
She put the knife back into the bureau and took out a photograph, held it out to Izzy. My sisters. She pointed a frail finger at a smiling woman with dark hair. This is Aggie. Find Aggie. She’s still there, waiting. Find her, and she’ll be your first.
You’ll have everything you ever wanted the old woman said again. Then she reached out and put her finger to the bloody wound in Izzy’s side. She held it up.
He will want flesh. Do everything He asks and you’ll have everything. You hear?
After that she’d been sent to the Chapman house, dragging a heavy bag that made a wet sound when it banged against her leg. What was inside the bag was unthinkable, killed by her grandmother as an offering to Him. Next time Izzy would have to do her own killing.
everything you’ve ever wanted
The wound under her breast ached, burned, where the knife had penetrated. At first it hadn’t hurt at all. When the old woman sliced between her ribs, she’d been afraid that she had cried out and her mother would come rushing in.
you crazy stupid old woman get back get away from her
But her parents and the kids
hadn’t come back yet. When Izzy left the bedroom, the rest of the house was still empty, dark, the television off.
Once she’d seen her mother wale on her grandmother with the cord from the iron. Because the old woman had struggled her way into the kitchen and blown something ground up and fragrant towards her mother’s tea.
don’t you dare pull that bullshit
If Izzy’s mother had come home at that moment … But she hadn’t, and Izzy had left her parent’s home that night to do dark things.
The wound, she was sure, had seeped blood through her blouse. Soon it would work its way through her coat. She’d driven like that through the city, all the way to Haven Woods, to the house, the dead thing in the bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She went up the walk to knock on the door, the bag in her hand heavy, awful. She was terrified but
everything you’ve ever wanted
she was doing as she’d been told.
The door opened as she was climbing the front steps. A perfectly ordinary but very large hand, fingers spread, pushed it wide. She stopped on the middle step and looked up, her heart pounding so loudly under her coat she was sure he could hear it.
In the doorway of the Chapman house stood a large, large man, with hands like catcher’s mitts. His jaw was square and shaded with the beginning of a beard. She could hardly see his eyes; his overhanging brow shaded them.
This is a threshold he said to her sternly. You have to ask your way in.
May I come in? she asked. She hadn’t said, as her brothers might have, I’m coming in, eh? or Whatta ya want? I’m coming in. It was polite, the way she said it. And saying it that way made what she carried in the bag seem that much more of an offering. Made her feel brave.
The big man grinned broadly. She saw that his teeth were very white, and that two at either side, just inside the cheek, were sharp, like a wolf’s.
He stepped back and, with loaded gallantry, threw his arm open to gesture her inside. Mi casa es su casa he said. She didn’t know what he meant, and he’d laughed.
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