The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  Useless. Everything in this house was useless.

  It couldn’t save us. Only we could do that now.

  My fingers shook as I entered the alarm code. Then silence…and something more. The sound of metal on metal—something happening in the backyard.

  I had this image in my mind of men sneaking through my bedroom window, taking my mother—but to do that, they’d have to get through the gate first.

  The alarm had been off. The alarm was never off. They could’ve disguised themselves as a delivery service, gotten buzzed in, snuck through the window, convincing her to disarm it, threatening her life, if they thought it could somehow trigger the police.

  Or.

  Or.

  She could’ve let them in.

  But no. She wouldn’t. She’d never.

  I remembered the day social services came for me. How she seemed to know, even before they rang the bell at the gate, what they were here for—so different from the first time they stopped by. She’d asked for their ID numbers, and she’d called the home station to double-check, to be sure of who they were first. And even then, there was a long moment when I thought she wouldn’t do it. A moment where she turned around and pulled the curtains shut, her back to the door, a deep, steady breath. A moment where she grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall—I’d said, “Mom?” because she was hurting me.

  She stopped. Dropped my arm. Put a hand out to steady herself against the wall. And she didn’t look at me when she said, “Kelsey, go let the nice people in.”

  Even then, she couldn’t do it herself. Everything in her body screamed no.

  I shook the thought. It didn’t matter. Ryan was in the dark kitchen, banging cabinets around. Right now there were men outside, and we were inside, and we needed help.

  Nothing about this house was set up to call for help. My mother had lied. We were not prepared for anything. We were not prepared for this.

  The House of Horrors, Cole and Emma called this place. Steel-reinforced walls and spike-topped gates. And for what? For what?

  It was as if we were an island. An island, cut off from the rest of the world.

  I walked to the back window, pushed the curtain aside, and stared out into the darkness.

  I felt the darkness staring back.

  Ryan was opening and closing kitchen drawers, rummaging through them with the flashlight gripped in his teeth, pulling out anything he could use. Knives, the fire extinguisher, an aerosol container that I thought probably only held olive oil.

  He paused to look up at me, removing the flashlight from this mouth. “Is there any way out of here, other than through the gates, Kelsey? Anything you can think of?”

  “No.”

  Think, Kelsey. We needed light. We couldn’t call, and we couldn’t run, but light could be seen for miles….

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  He placed his hands on the counter, and I could tell, even in the dark, they were pressing so hard into the marble that his knuckles were turning white. “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “I can make a smoke bomb. I can make it colored. It will be bright. People will see it over the trees. People will come.”

  “You can make a smoke bomb?” He almost smiled before remembering where we were, why we had to do it.

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple, actually. My mom taught me a few years ago, in science. She used to homeschool me.”

  “I thought you moved here last year.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’ve always been here.” I was just invisible. Trapped behind these walls without even realizing it. I could’ve disappeared and nobody would’ve noticed.

  I started shaking, opening the pantry door, looking for the baking soda and sugar. “Everything else is downstairs,” I said.

  I spun to leave and he reached for me, just like my mom had earlier today in this very room. “Kelsey, please stop for a second.”

  I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, I’d feel the momentum picking up, the air rushing by, like we were falling, and there was only one inevitable outcome. “What?” I asked, stripping the paper towels from the tube. I’d need that, too.

  His arms went to my shoulders. “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He started to say something, but stopped. He was still staring into my eyes.

  “I don’t know, Ryan,” I said. I thought my house was built out of paranoia. I thought it was because of what had happened, not what might happen.

  “What are they after?” he asked. “Is there something here?”

  I shook my head too fast. And Ryan kept staring, like there was something he wanted to say, but didn’t. “What?” I asked.

  I noticed his throat work as he swallowed. “Why do you live like this?”

  I had to tell him. I had to explain—we lived like this for a reason. And now that reason had found us.

  “My mother,” I said on impulse, even though I knew that wasn’t what he was asking. I blew out a slow breath, telling him the thing he was really asking. “My mother was taken years ago,” I said. “Kidnapped. When she was my age. She was taken from her home, and she doesn’t remember it.” I shook my head again, clearing the thought of the similarities. Men at the house. Again. “She escaped a year later, and then she had me, changed her name, and moved here. And nobody’s bothered us since.”

  He looked at me, like he was trying to work something out.

  Don’t ask, I thought.

  Don’t do it, I thought.

  “Where’s your dad?” he asked.

  A dad. Like the man who stood beside him at the ceremony, straightening his tie. Like the person who taught you to ride bikes, who protected you. “I don’t have one,” I said. And from the wince in his expression, I knew my tone told him everything he was asking. The way his eyes snapped closed in impulsive response, as if he saw too much suddenly in my face—like my mom sometimes did.

  His mouth opened, and I thought, Don’t say it. Don’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but I’d already turned away, shrugging as I did. I knew nothing of it. I did not exist without this horror of my mother’s life. Sometimes I thought she couldn’t move past it, couldn’t break free of the fear, because of me. Always here, always a reminder—look what happened. Look. Look.

  I did not look like her.

  But I could be like her.

  I needed to be like her. Because if I was not, if I was the other half of me, what was I then? The half of me that could destroy her? I was either scared most of the time, or I was a monster. Those were my options.

  “Ryan, I can make the smoke bomb, but it’s going to take time, and we’re running out of it. I need to keep moving.” I needed to, before the fear caught up and worked the other way around, paralyzing me instead.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  —

  Down in the basement, I dragged two battery-powered lights into the corners, illuminating the room in a faint, uneven glow. I pointed to the boxes against the wall. “The chemicals we need are somewhere in the boxes for school stuff. Somewhere in that pile.”

  Ryan stood near the entrance to the safe room, eyes glued to the screen, his jaw moving slightly side to side, like he was having a conversation with himself.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “They’re still out there.” He turned back to me, watching me like I was going to save us.

  I could do this. I could get help for us.

  There would be deliveries—Mom had scheduled the groceries for tomorrow. The mailman would come tomorrow. Help would eventually arrive.

  But those things wouldn’t happen in time.

  We lived in the middle of nowhere. The entire night stretched in front of us, in empty silence, like the expanse of cliff below us. I felt us hanging once more—

  “Won’t your parents worry?” I asked.

  “Eventually,” Ryan said. “But maybe not.”

  “Is this something you do of
ten?” I asked, and I felt a sting of jealousy, though I had no right.

  “I spend a lot of time down at the station. They’ll probably think I’m there—and like I said, they’re practically family. The other firefighters will think I’m home. I’m eighteen. I kinda…fought my parents for some freedom. As long as I get my work done and I don’t get into trouble…I’m an adult.”

  “Don’t you live with them?”

  “That was their argument, too,” he mumbled.

  But he won. I couldn’t imagine trying that argument with my own mother. What she would say. What she would think. I couldn’t even get her permission to go to Ryan’s award ceremony.

  The downside to independence—nobody came looking for you.

  I grew frantic, trying to find the right box. But so far the boxes were mostly old school supplies, trinkets from my childhood, and pictures in albums, printed from the digital copies she stored on her computer, in case of a virus that wiped it clean. She didn’t trust the Internet, didn’t want our pictures anywhere that could be traced. I think she’d read an article about that once, too. How nothing was truly untraceable online. All this print was cluttering our lives. Like living with our own past, boxed up and waiting.

  “Can I help?” he asked, just as I let out a breath of relief, finding the stack of boxes I’d been looking for.

  “Here,” I said, gesturing toward the collection of boxes in front of me, the ones we’d used for school experiments.

  Ryan came closer as I pulled out the different chemicals—simple things, my mom had told me. Everyday things, from when she taught me. Textbooks and printed-from-the-Internet how-tos. She’d clear off the table upstairs and we’d cook at the kitchen stove, like we were making breakfast. Science was just a list of ingredients, she’d said. Science creates. I remembered dancing around purple smoke in the backyard, thrilled that we’d created this ourselves, watching until it fizzled and burned itself out.

  I found my old notebooks, the recipes written in my own handwriting as I watched my mother.

  “Kelsey? What the hell is all this stuff?” He was holding a container of one of the chemicals in his hand, frowning at the warning label.

  “Chemicals,” I said. “From when my mom taught me science.”

  He put it down, opened the box beside it, pulled out some wires. “And this?”

  “Electronics. That was physics.”

  I started making a pile of everything I needed while keeping an eye on the security screens, searching for signs of movement.

  “See if you can find something called potassium nitrate,” I said. “That’s the only thing I’m missing.”

  “Kelsey. This isn’t normal. You get that, right?”

  I shook my head. “I used to be homeschooled. We needed all this.”

  He shook his head again. “This isn’t like making homemade play-dough. I didn’t learn any of this in chemistry. Or physics.”

  “I know. That’s why I tutor.”

  “Kelsey, stop. Look at me. This isn’t normal.”

  None of my life was normal, that was nothing new. I heard my mother’s voice, standing over the kitchen table, materials spread over top. You’re trapped in a basement, and this is what you find. How do you get out?

  This was my education.

  “This stuff isn’t safe,” Ryan said. He backed away from the boxes. “Your entire basement is combustible.”

  “What?” I stepped back from the boxes I’d been rummaging through so haphazardly just moments before.

  “Flammable. Combustible. Take your pick. All of the above.”

  Like all it would need was a single spark and the whole house would go up in flames.

  The lock at the top of the staircase made more sense now.

  “Kelsey, they make us take hazardous materials courses as part of our training. This. Isn’t. Safe. This shouldn’t be in your basement.”

  This isn’t safe. Surely my mother would’ve known that. Surely she wouldn’t have let me play with this as a child if I was truly in danger.

  “Well, right now it’s our chance.”

  There were fire extinguishers throughout the house. A precaution. A fear. But maybe something more. How safe was I really, sleeping above this?

  He nodded, “Okay. But careful. We have to be careful.” And I heard an echo in the basement, my mother’s words, warning me. Ryan started moving with purpose again, tearing open the tops of all the boxes in this section, taking things out, putting them back.

  Finally, I pulled out a familiar container. “Potassium nitrate,” I said, heading back toward the steps. “Come on.”

  Ryan followed me out, but paused at the bottom of the steps to look behind him.

  I didn’t like the way Ryan was looking around the basement, like it was something to fear. This was my mother. My mother.

  But now I was thinking about that hidden compartment under the floor of the safe room. The passports.

  Her, but not her. Me, but not me. Both had felt like strangers.

  —

  Ryan checked the windows once again as I set the stove in the darkened kitchen. I heard the click of the gas, took out a pan, and started mixing the ingredients. Ryan watched me from across the room, looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of me—the way Annika sometimes did, like our worlds were so far apart they almost circled all the way back around again.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted.

  “For what?”

  “You shouldn’t even be here. I’m so sorry.”

  He shook his head. Took a step closer. “I’m not.”

  I choked on tears. “You should be. I’ll get you out, I promise.”

  “Us,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “You held us up with nothing but your fingers,” he mumbled. “I have no doubt.”

  I looked up at him, at the way the light from the stove shone in his eyes, like a flame, and wondered what he saw in my own.

  “I’m going to watch the monitors in the office,” Ryan said. He backed away, the smallest smile on his face. “I can’t believe your mother taught you to make a bomb,” he said, like he was impressed.

  “A smoke bomb,” I corrected. A little lie. A white lie. The safest lie.

  I willed my hands to be still as I poured the contents into paper towel rolls and inserted the fuses—a length of my shoelace for each—my hands hot against the cooling mixture.

  I moved on instinct. Muscle memory. Everything she taught me, second nature.

  My mother taught me many things that I knew she didn’t want me talking about. Careful, she’d tell me whenever I left the house—and I knew she wasn’t just talking about staying safe. But it was all a symptom of her paranoia. See it on the news, teach me to evade it.

  Know the exits, she’d instruct after a news report of a fire death. She’d have me stand in each room of our house, eyes closed, and she’d ask, “Where’s the closest exit?” And I’d list them off—which window, which door. “Most deaths happen because you’re still trying to get out the way you’ve always gotten out,” she said, which was probably some warning fact she’d read on a website.

  A news report of an armed intruder, and then came the lessons on how to disarm someone. Which joints to bend so that, muscle or no muscle, the wrist would cave, the weapon would fall. I wondered if things would’ve gone differently for her if she’d known this herself. If this was her way of making up for it.

  Fear cannot hurt you, she’d promised. I learned from her fear, so I would not become a victim, as she had been.

  If you are trapped inside a car trunk.

  If you are kept in a basement.

  If you are lost in the middle of the woods.

  I grew up understanding all the horrible things that might happen to me. The things we could plan for and the things we could not.

  I could be hurt.

  I could be taken.

  There were a thousand things that could kill me.

  There were a m
illion places I could be hidden.

  But I thought I understood her biggest fear: I could leave one day as she had, disappear, and finally return—completely unrecognizable.

  So. I never built anything more than a smoke bomb. But I did know how to create an explosion.

  I was trying to remember the if that got us there, to trace it back. My mother sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, the materials spread out in front of her. “This is where the chemicals would go, and then all you need is a fuse….And voilà!” Secrets passed down from mother to daughter, like the perfect way to apply liquid eyeliner.

  —

  “Kelsey!” A shout from my mother’s office as I tested the material in the holder.

  Ryan’s face glowed a pale white from the glare of the monitors he was staring at.

  He turned to face me, his eyes wide, like the moment we fell. “They’re inside the gates,” he said.

  Something tightened around my throat, like a noose, and I gulped twice before I could get any air, my hand at the base of my throat.

  “Where?” I finally said, moving to stand beside him. The screens were too grainy—I couldn’t see anything. But then the clouds shifted outside, the moon shone, and a nondescript shadow passed in front of the camera—up against the house now. And then all the shadows felt too close, like spiders across my skin. I could feel them, just on the other side of the wall, searching for cracks. An involuntary noise escaped my throat.

  My hand found Ryan’s, and his fingers laced between mine, and I started moving us backward, until we were out of that room, in the open area in the middle of the house. He slowly turned to face me, and I held a finger to my lips, wondering if he could see me. I moved his hand to mine so he’d feel what I was doing.

  His were trembling, along with mine.

  I listened for any sounds in the stillness. In the dark, behind the walls, the shadows could be anywhere.

  And then I heard it, my head whipping around to the front of the house. Someone pressed on the front door, tried to turn the handle, testing for weak spots. I felt the resistance of metal on metal all the way down to my bones as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  If someone gets in…It was so outside of the realm of possibility to me growing up. Not this house. Not with the three layers of protection and the locks and the bars over the windows. Not with alarms and cell phones and landlines. Not with my mother always here, who would know exactly what to do.