Mine was the only one that didn’t follow the trend. Cole and Emma used to call my place the House of Horrors when Jan would pick me up, and after, I couldn’t see it without looking at it the same way. The house was white and clean and boxy—an exterior that looked slightly industrial with its perfect, hard angles, like cement blocks. The windows were sleek and tinted, and it was set down a slope, so you couldn’t really see it from the road. There was nothing really scary about it, once you were inside. But the metal fence was high and spiked and covered in ivy—and that’s not even counting the wire running along the top—and you could see the bars over some of the windows, which was I guess how they got the Horrors part.
“Here’s fine,” I said at the turn for my road.
Ryan laughed. “Pretty sure you don’t have to be embarrassed about where you live.”
We weren’t rich, like he thought. My mother came into a lot of money, once upon a time, and she’d used up most of it to buy this place, set it up, set us up. She worked from home as a bookkeeper, and we got by just fine. But we lived there not because of the prestige of the houses or the property. We lived here because the houses themselves were all set far apart, and there was only one road in or out, funneled down a finger of land with steep, treacherous terrain on both sides. And people left us alone. Everyone here kept to themselves. It was safe.
“Okay,” I said. It was dark on the drive in, and the lights would’ve been off if Mom hadn’t been waiting up for me. “Turn right here,” I said. But now the front of the house was lit by big spotlights, exposing everything.
It was exactly as I feared. Spikes illuminated, the top of the house—the steep slopes and sharp angles of the roof—just visible from the street, making it look larger than it was. And the camera over the gate, the keypad awaiting my thumbprint.
Ryan looked from me to the house and back again. He unbuckled his seat belt and twisted in his seat, the engine still running.
“Well, thanks for the ride.” I raised my hand to wave, and his eyes narrowed.
He reached out and grabbed my wrist, his gaze searching my palm. No, he was staring at my fingers. I balled them up, but then he grabbed the other hand. “Jesus,” he said. I followed his line of sight to the deep red crease across my fingers. The indentation from the metal. The only thing that had kept us from falling. He ran his fingers just below the raw skin, and I shivered.
My hands started to shake again, and I replayed that moment, my elbows losing their grip, my fingers grasping for anything, and I pulled them back, balled them into fists. “See you in math,” I said, my voice shaking, along with my hands.
“Kelsey, wait—”
But I couldn’t wait. I needed to be inside, with my mother. Behind the gates, behind the walls.
“Thank you, Ryan,” I said as I stepped out of the car.
His eyes locked on mine as I stood before the gate, awaiting my fingerprint. I didn’t want him to see this part. I didn’t want him to know this part.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I called.
I waved goodbye, and eventually he caved. “Okay, tomorrow, then,” he said. I waited until he was around the first curve before letting myself inside the gate.
—
My mother was standing in the foyer, in front of the common area and between the hallways that snaked out into the two wings of the one-level house. She kept touching her shoulder through her loose shirt—an old habit—and she’d been crying. I’d barely had time to lock the door behind me, and she was pulling me to her, gripping me tight, and then holding me back by my shoulders. “Oh, thank God!” She took a quick breath, almost like she was gasping for air. Then pulled me to her again. “Imagine my surprise to turn on the news and see my daughter’s car over a cliff. Kelsey, God.” I felt her fingers pressing into my spine.
“It looks worse than it was, Mom.”
I waited until she slowly released me. Her long blond hair moved over her shoulders as she shook her head, her eyes closed. “I knew it was too soon. I shouldn’t have listened to Jan. You’re too young to drive.”
You’re too young to be living like this, I wanted to say. She was. So young. She looked young enough to be Jan’s daughter, even.
“Mom. Look at me. Mom, I’m fine. Nothing’s broken. Nothing hurts. See?” I needed to get out of this room before she had me walking her through it all. “I just want a shower,” I said. “And a nap.”
I handed her my hospital forms, knew she’d spend an hour looking over everything, researching the hospital coding on her own, reading up on potential head injuries—an outlet for the fear. But she didn’t, at first. She stared at me, picking me apart, her hand brushing over the chemical burn scars on the back of her shoulder again. I grabbed her hand to get her to stop.
She has no memory of her abduction, just the fear that came with her when she left. Taken from her home just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of her junior year of high school, she escaped from wherever she was held more than a year later, with no memory of her time there.
An entire year. Gone.
Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me, like she was trying to see something more. Pick me apart, like she could read the fabric of my existence.
Nobody knew anything about the man who had held her. Well, that’s not entirely true. We knew some things. We knew he was most likely white, with brown eyes, and taller than average.
This was what I could deduce from the fact that my mother had blue eyes and I did not. And from the fact that I was paler than her, even though I spent a lot of time out in the sun in the backyard. And I already towered over her. Maybe he had freckles, too.
So. There were some things we knew.
Subtract the half of me that was her, and what was left?
“Don’t tell me it’s not that bad,” she said. She put her hand to her mouth, shook her head, pulled me toward her. “I don’t know what I’d do,” she said, hugging me for eternity. “The car is gone. It could’ve been—”
“I’m safe,” I said, my chest constricting.
—
Back in my room, down the opposite hall, I tried to take comfort in the four walls, and the bed, neatly made. The mountains out the window, which used to keep us safe.
The car was gone, my mother said—it fell. It fell, and it was gone, like I would have fallen, like I would’ve been gone, had Ryan not pulled me out.
I peeled off my clothes, and I stood in the shower, bracing myself against the wall, and I began to cry.
I remembered how peaceful it had been, the emptiness. The quiet of the unthinking mind, at rest. Listening to someone else’s words, and believing them, before I became myself again. Before my mind started working overtime, beginning the vicious cycle. I latched on to fears, the beautiful familiarity of them. And they crawled like spiders across my skin, until the only solution was to give myself over to them, in stillness.
And now here I was, revisiting the fall, as I would be all night, relentless and unstoppable.
Maybe it was ingrained in my DNA, and I had no hope of overcoming these moments, and everything Jan said was pointless. Maybe I learned it from my mother, the way we locked our doors, remained behind walls, constantly demanding confirmation of our safety. Maybe it was her fault I’d be up all night, staring at this wall.
Not like Ryan, who I imagined going out with friends, celebrating his daring survival with underage drinking, and Holly and other girls draping themselves over him, calling him a hero, and him being all It was nothing. Just some trigonometry. A little muscle, that’s all.
And me, staring at the empty wall, like it was the darkness over the edge of the cliff. Just me and my breathing, replaying it over and over, seeing how close we’d come—one missed grip, one second of slipped concentration. The crease across the skin of my fingers, throbbing and raw.
The thought would circle and dig and circle some more, until I felt empty without it.
How close we’d come.
How close to go
ne.
I stayed home from school the next day, which wasn’t my mom’s idea, exactly, but I didn’t get out of bed Thursday morning, and she didn’t ask me to. We had to wait for the insurance money before replacing the car, and Jan was looking into the bus situation—but in the meantime, nobody mentioned anything about me and school. It seemed to be an agreed-upon decision, especially since I didn’t have a new phone yet, which meant Mom couldn’t track me if she wanted to.
I wondered if anyone had recovered my phone, my bag, my key ring with the purple clip that I’d hook through my belt loop for safekeeping. If it was all still at the bottom of the cliff, inside the car, wedged between crushed metal and deflated air bags.
I dreamed the same thing whether I was sleeping or awake—an endless fall, with no bottom. The car too slick, or my fingers too slow, and the air rushing up as I plummeted into darkness.
I’d just read a short story for English about a man sentenced to death by hanging over a bridge, and as he fell, the rope broke, and he escaped—falling into the river, swimming to evade capture, making his way home—only to feel the noose tighten when he finally arrived. The whole escape a fabrication of his mind. A slow and inevitable demise. That whole time, he’d just been falling in slow motion.
I sat in the dim light of my room and stared at my fingers, at the red line and the swollen skin, like proof.
I wasn’t falling. I’d held on. I’d made it home.
I was in my bed, surrounded by my four walls, with the sound of my mom banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, which was yet another stress-relief strategy via Jan. And one of my least favorites. She’d serve up casseroles big enough for eight people, and we’d have to eat them for an entire week, and she’d apologize, knowing it was terrible, but eating it anyway.
To be fair, cooking did tend to relax her—keeping her hands busy, her mind occupied with a list of ingredients, a simple task to focus on. If it worked, if she broke free of whatever was haunting her, she’d eventually cave and let me order pizza or Chinese for delivery.
This was not one of those times.
For two days, she called me out for meals—the casserole crisp where it should be soft, soggy where it should be crisp—and I slunk back to my room after. She didn’t argue. I wondered, if I went to her office, if I’d find the pictures from the accident up on the computer screen. Or if this time it would be something worse.
She had a bad habit of seeking them out, robberies and kidnappings, missing children and acts of violence. Even before her kidnapping, her life had been a struggle. It must’ve been so easy for her to only see the dangers. This was something I didn’t tell Jan about. I didn’t know if it was making her worse—more fearful of the world beyond our walls—or whether it might help. If it reminded her: she had escaped, when so many did not.
I stared at my fingers again. I had lived. And so had she.
—
Mom knocked on the bedroom door as I was waking on what I thought was Saturday morning, but when I checked the clock, it was already after noon. “Jan’s here,” she said. Code: Get out of bed. Look alive.
It was a big deal if Jan was here for a session on a weekend. Her husband worked as some sort of consultant and traveled during the week, so they tried to keep weekends free, for family time. If Jan was here on a weekend, there must’ve been a reason, and that made me nervous.
The last few days had blurred together—I’d been in the same pajamas for at least a day and a half. I opened the windows to air out the room, but left the outside metal window grate closed. I had a key so I could swing the bars open, also for safety reasons (in the event of a fire), but for now the locked bars were what I needed. I changed out of my pajamas and splashed water on my face.
Jan had brownish-gray hair cut in a mom-bob, and she was dressed in her work slacks and blouse, even though it was the weekend. “Kelsey, my dear,” she said when I emerged from the room—hair in a bun to hide the fact it hadn’t been washed, foundation to hide the dark circles, smile to hide the fact that I still hadn’t shaken the moment, the one that circled and dug and made itself at home: one second, one muscle cramp, between here and gone.
“Hi, Jan,” I said, taking the package from her outstretched hand. The new phone my mom had requested, in a box that must’ve been sitting outside the gate since yesterday—I hoped Jan hadn’t noticed. “Oh, I didn’t know it had arrived yet,” I said.
“Same number,” my mom said. “Just need to program it again.”
“Kelsey,” Jan said, taking her normal seat in the living room, in the loveseat across from the couch. “Sit, please. Let’s talk.” Beside her on the floor was a brown box with no lid, filled with my missing things. My backpack, dirty and singed, my purse, the strap dangling from a single side, the red umbrella that used to be in the backseat, the spokes bent at unnatural angles, the handle either crushed or melted.
It all smelled faintly chemical, like gasoline. I pressed my lips together, tasting it in the air, and wondered if Mom could sense it, too. But she was looking beyond Jan, through the large windows at the back of the living room, her head tilted slightly to the side. I followed her gaze and saw a girl sitting on the stone wall past the gate, kicking her legs.
An exit, thank God. “It’s Annika,” I said. “I was just on my way out,” I added.
My mom raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
Jan twisted around on the couch, squinting. “How can you even see that far?”
Annika was an easily identifiable blur, even from the distance: her hair exceeded normal volume by at least three hundred percent, she was always wearing colors that would somehow catch the eye, and she had the inability to sit still. Besides, this was where she’d always wait for me. It was as close as she ever got.
The stone wall at the edge of the property was our first line of defense, though it was more of a deterrent than an official barrier. There was an open gap in the front of the wall, a makeshift driveway where I used to park my car. Then came the high metal fence, with a discreet electrical cable lining the top and a locked gate toward the back, and another in the front, encircling the yard. There was a small stand-alone booth with a door and a window just inside the gated entrance, to the left, I guess in case someone actually hired a security guard to man the gate.
But between the fence and the outer wall the weeds ran wild, vegetation climbing up the stone, thick and unruly. “It looks like the perfect place for snakes,” Annika had complained, and I had to agree. She never came any closer. Her side of the wall was all mowed and landscaped with shrubbery and a pond with a constantly running fountain.
“It’s her,” I said, with one more glance to the box at Jan’s feet. “I have to go. Can we talk later?” Because I couldn’t completely brush Jan off. There were lines to walk, after all.
“All right,” Jan said. “Listen, I’ve spoken to the school. It’s too late to add on to the bus route, so Cole and Emma will be picking you up Monday morning. At least until you get the car situation taken care of.”
I considered it one of my greater accomplishments that I kept my face passive and my thoughts unvoiced. “That would be great,” I said, because of all the things I’d either inherited or learned from my mother, the art of the lie was the most useful.
—
Annika swung her legs like a little kid, the heels of her shoes bouncing against the wall. She wore gray tights and black Mary Janes and a purple skirt so short it was a good thing the tights were opaque.
“I’ve been calling you all day,” she said once I got close enough to hear.
“I’m sorry, I lost my phone.” I leaned against the wall beside her.
“Oh, I was starting to wonder,” she said, leaning closer, her eyes roaming over me from head to toe. She scrunched up her nose at my bun. “I heard.”
The scream of metal, the rush of air, the scent of burning rubber, and my nails skimming metal—
I placed my hands flat against the stone wall, trying to ground
myself. You made it. You’re here.
She patted the spot beside her on the ledge, and I used the grooves between the uneven stones for footing.
To me, Annika always seemed like she came from a different world. She layered her clothes, unmatching: bright tights under plaid skirts, or the other way around, boho tops and jewelry that chimed like music when she walked, and long, wavy hair she’d coil around ribbons or push back from her face with a scarf or bandanna.
She also had this vaguely unplaceable accent, not quite European, but something deliberate and alluring.
“It’s from all the travel,” she’d told me once. A year of school in France as a child, another in England, before her mom divorced her State Department husband and settled here with Annika and her older brother, who was off at college now.
“I cannot believe,” she was saying as I hauled myself up beside her, “that I had to hear about this from my mother, of all people. Normal people tend to call their friends when they nearly die, you know.” Annika looked at me the way I imagined I must look at her: like she was caught between being captivated and confused. I thought it was probably why we remained good friends, despite the long stretches of silence, the distance, and the differences. She was foreign, and interesting, and unplaceable, like her accent. And I was the same to her. Our worlds were so far from each other that they circled back around and almost touched again.
“I didn’t nearly die,” I said. I felt her gaze on the side of my face, wondered if she could read the lie in my expression. Wondered what normal people tended to say, or not say, to their friends. “I had a car crash. And I wasn’t really in the mood to relive it.”
“That’s not what the papers say,” she said, the corners of her lips tipping down. They were shiny, covered in a pink gloss that might’ve even had sparkles, and it was hard to take anything she said too seriously.
“The papers?”
“Mm,” she said, turning sideways, her hands on the stone between us, her nails painted electric blue. “According to Thursday’s paper,” she began, using some faux-official voice, “thanks to classmate and volunteer firefighter Ryan Something-or-other, Kelsey Thomas, the young woman miraculously pulled from the car over Benjamin’s Cliff, walks away without a scratch.” Her fingers circled my wrist, warm in the autumn chill. “Someone took a picture of your car after it fell. Quite the sight, Kels.” She paused, and in that gap, I pictured it—the car, falling. Me, still clinging to the edge. “So don’t tell me you didn’t nearly die. A reporter showed up last night, hoping us neighbors might have a status update for them. Nosy bastards.”
The Safest Lies Page 4