by Lane, Styna
One tiny section of the house stood out amongst the rest. It was well-organized, dust-free, and the floor was worn from ages of traffic. The entire wall in the kitchen was covered with photographs, beautifully framed and precisely hung. Perhaps it was how she managed to survive within her loneliness—she had the past to keep her company.
As Lily helped Abigail fiddle around with the ancient stove, Lakin and I examined the wall of photos. There’s something oddly comforting about looking at a stranger’s past. You begin to feel like you’ve made a new friend, even though you don’t really know them. The oldest pictures looked like something out of a high-school yearbook; a headshot of a young woman, posed to gaze longingly at something that was just out of frame. Next to that was a similar photo of a young man, obviously gazing at the same object, both in black-and-white. There was a sepia photo of the man and woman—dressed in a tuxedo, and a wedding gown—standing in front of Freedom Pond. A photo of the young man carrying the woman into a house that looked like a phantom of the decrepit dwelling in which we stood.
Further down the wall, there was a noticeable shift in era; both, the man and woman, had grown their hair long. In a picture of the couple picking up trash on a beach, crowds of people wore bellbottoms and paisley shirts, and played guitars around campfires. There were pictures of the couple building houses on foreign landscapes; handing out food and water; bathing waterfowl that were slick with oil. And then, the man was no longer in the photos. Only Abigail. She continued her kind and helpful endeavors, but with a sadness in her eyes—an emptiness.
And, there, towards the far end of the photos, when Abigail’s dark hair had started to streak with gray, and lines had begun to creep their way across her face—my mother. Not just my mom, but both of my parents. I had never seen my father, but I recognized him immediately, arm draped around my mother’s shoulder, and dark hair crawling toward his chin. On either sides of them, more recognizable strangers. It was a photo of my generation’s parents, kneeling down on the beach. Behind them, a second row of people I could only assume were humans they had befriended along the way, Abigail to the far-right. Then, I noticed something. Abigail’s eyes. Not just Abigail’s eyes, but those of the other humans in her row. They were all the same clear-gray of the defensive peepers that had tried to whack us with a cane. I glanced back to the older photos. Her eyes were, once, nearly as black as her hair had been.
I jumped at the hand on my shoulder, spinning to meet the curious gaze of the old woman. “Tea, dear?”
I nodded meekly, uttering a quiet ‘thank you’, and trembling as I took the cup. I reached down for Lakin’s hand, forcing his eyes to cloud over momentarily as I flashed this new, peculiar information into his mind. He lowered his brows, turning back toward the photographs to inspect for himself, after he had accepted his own cup.
“Your parents were lovely,” Abigail said, slurping on her tea as she gazed at the wall. “They had such a passion for helping.”
My stomach churned at the way she talked about our parents as if they were dead.
“How did you meet them?” Lakin questioned, eyes trained on the photos.
I heard Lily choke on her tea behind us, coughing to clear the liquid from her throat as she sat the cup on the dusty table.
“I really wish we could stay longer, Abigail, but we must be going. We have a long trip ahead of us, and very little time, I’m afraid.” The old woman squinted past Lily’s obvious ruse, but nodded with a displeased sigh.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting the car,” she said, hobbling herself across the kitchen to a rack that held one set of keys.
“Yes, thank you,” Lily said sincerely, embracing her in a warm hug as she took the key-ring. “We’ll get it back safely.”
“I’m sure you will.” There was something unsettling about Abigail’s tone.
“It was nice to meet you,” Lakin said, wrapping his arm around my shoulder to lead me out the door. I couldn’t stop staring at the old woman, and she stared back, those odd eyes feeling as if they were burning into my thoughts. I didn’t know how much danger such an old woman could have possibly been, but I didn’t trust her. And she knew it.
“This is what we’re driving?” Lakin mused, scrunching his face up in mild disgust.
“Do you have a better option?” Lily questioned, ripping the dirty blue tarp from the old van.
I choked, half on dust and half in fear that the thing would explode before we could make it out of the driveway. I couldn’t have cared less about what the car looked like, but I would have preferred to not die inside of something straight out of the seventies.
“It’ll get us where we need to go. Now, get in.” Lily had taken on an exceptionally bossy demeanor, checking her watch as she hoisted herself into the driver’s seat.
Lakin opened the passenger door for me, before climbing himself into the back.
“Uh… Where are the rest of the seats?” he asked.
From the outside, the van looked plenty big enough to fit all the people we were planning to collect by the end of the day. How silly of us to assume all the pieces were still in the box. Where one might reasonably expect a third row of seats to be, there was nothing but orange shag carpet and old guitars.
For a moment, Lily stared into the rearview mirror—at least that was still intact.
“Someone might have to sit on a lap.”
Chapter Seventeen
Blood
I stared out the window in awe, gripping the door tightly as I watched the trees whip by in blurs of green and brown. It felt uncomfortable to be moving so quickly while sitting perfectly still, like the smallest thing could launch the entire van to its fiery demise. With every bump of the road, my stomach flipped, and my grip tightened just a bit more. Lakin’s hand warmed my shoulder from the back seat. It must have seemed ridiculous for me to be nervous about something as common as riding in a car, but the closest thing I had ever known was riding in the elevator at The Facility. At least, in the elevator, you wouldn’t be able to see the floor leaping toward you as you plummeted to your doom.
As if driving a bagilliondy miles an hour—it may have only been sixty-five, but it certainly felt like a bagilliondy—wasn’t bad enough, we had only spent a few minutes on the road when red and blue lights began to bounce off the interior of the van, followed closely by a screeching siren. Lily sighed as she pulled to the side of the road, mumbling something about Abigail not renewing tags.
I sat rigidly in my seat, imagining our faces on old ‘wanted’ posters, straight out of a Western film. ‘Cool-Hand Angie,’ they’d name me, ‘wanted for murder, exceptional and unforgivable strangeness, and being an accessory to driving a dilapidated rust-bucket too quickly.’
In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed Lily’s eyes fading from their ethereal white just as the officer reached her window. I instantly recognized her from the ruins of the store, as Lily struggled to roll down her window, which had been stuck from dirt and time.
“License and registration, please.” The policewoman said, lowering her iridescent sunglasses to stare us down with clear-gray eyes.
Lily didn’t seem at all concerned, removing a glove to hand the officer a bundle of papers from the console. As their hands touched, my jaw went slack. The officer’s eyes flashed purple, just for a moment, just long enough to wonder if it had even happened.
“Where you all headin’?” she asked, handing the papers back without really looking them over.
“Down south,” Lily said casually, as if she were talking to a random bystander at a grocery store. “New Hampshire.”
“Well, I hope you aren’t takin’ the main roads. They’ve got checkpoints all along ‘em. Traffic’s backed up wicked bad.” Her words sounded so strange, like a combination of a bunch of different accents I had heard in movies, but not really like any of them at all.
“Checkpoints?” Lily questioned, eyeing the woman curiously. “Are they looking for anything specific?”
“Fr
om what I hear,” she said, eyes lingering on me for a second as she studied the inside of the van, “a high-risk patient escaped from Waterville Psychiatric. You’re probably best stickin’ to the back roads if you’re in a hurry.”
Lily nodded, eyes shifting with thought. The policewoman slid her glasses back up her nose and patted the top of the van.
“You folks have a safe trip.”
“Thanks for your help, officer,” Lily said, rolling her window back up as the woman walked away.
“Well, that wasn’t strange,” Lakin called from the backseat as we began moving again.
“We have a few friends in town,” Lily explained quietly, eyes trained ahead as she turned off from Belfast Road onto a bumpy, unmarked back lane.
“And they all just happen to have creepy, light-up eyes,” I mumbled under my breath.
“They have a couple things in common,” Lily said, voice full of restraint.
I stared out the window as we drove in silence, thinking over the information—and lack-thereof—that I had been bombarded with in the last few days. My cheeks grew warm as my temper rose, realizing how selective Lily and Al had been with their explanations. My generation may have grown up without even knowing there were more like us in the world, but we were a part of everything, now. We deserved to know what we would have known, had we not been ripped away from our families.
‘You do deserve to know. But there is a lifetime of knowledge you’ve been kept far away from, Angie. We grow up with all of these things. It’s difficult to figure out how to explain everything to someone who’s so new to our world. It may feel like we’ve been plotting against you, but it’s honestly just as hard for us as it is for you. Your answers will come with time,’ Lily’s voice echoed in my mind. How presumptuous of me to assume my thoughts were private.
I was too angry to remember that I was afraid of riding in the car. The rest of the three-hour-drive was spent in uncomfortable silence, made slightly more irritating by Lakin thumping his foot against the back of my seat for the first hour, which finally ceased at my snippy ‘Could you not?’ Apparently, even the strongest bond is not enough to overlook someone’s annoying habits.
“What’s the address, again?” Lily asked, after passing a washed-out sign that read, ‘Welcome to Derry.’
“Fifteen Collette Grove,” I said, recalling our conversation with Bryant from the previous night.
I wouldn’t say we were lost, necessarily, but we didn’t quite know where, exactly, we were. Derry wasn’t the smallest place, and even Lily seemed a bit disoriented by the signs and traffic. After all, we’d spent the last three hours on the back roads of Maine. It had been a while since we passed another living thing that wasn’t covered in fur or feathers. Or both... There was some unusual wildlife in the Maine forests.
Finally, after passing the road we were looking for one or two—or seven—times, we turned onto Collette Grove. I shifted anxiously in my seat, suddenly very nervous about meeting my brother, in person, for the first time. Thick shrubbery lined either side of the long road, letting in just a few stray beams of sunlight to cast reflections off the bits of rusted metal that littered the ground. We pulled into the drive that was marked by a bright yellow ‘15’ spray-painted onto a tree. My lungs went on protest, outraged that they were expected to do so much more work for the same amount of pay.
A sandy-haired boy sat on the crumbling porch of a mobile home, book in hand, and duffle-bag at his feet. He carefully dog-eared a page before looking up, squinting at the creeper-van that was coming up his driveway. My heart went into overdrive.
I found myself fiddling with the door handle. Before the van had even come to a complete stop, I ripped off my seatbelt, jumped out the door, stumbling a bit to catch my balance, and stared at the boy who was standing just a few feet in front of me. My brother. My brother, there, in front of my very eyes. Just a few days ago, I didn’t even know I had a brother, though I had known Bryant my entire life. And now, I was within an arm’s reach of my kin, my blood… my family. One more piece of the life that I was denied as a child. One more step toward leaving The Facility behind, for good.
My mind was no longer in control of my body. Before I was even aware that my feet were moving, I was wrapping Bryant in a type of embrace that I had never shared with anyone. A sense of safety swept over my body, warming me from head to toe, like a void I’d never realized existed inside of me had suddenly been filled. He wasn’t a particularly emotional person, but I felt my hair dampen as he returned the embrace, my own tears having a similar effect on his shoulder.
“You’re leaking,” I chuckled, brushing the rivers from my cheeks as we backed away from each other. “You might want to have that checked out.”
Bryant grinned, drying his own face on his sleeves. “I guess we’re both defective, then. It must be hereditary.”
I couldn’t stop smiling as Lakin and Bryant gripped each other’s palms and went in for the most awkwardly-macho hug I had ever seen. It wasn’t long before all of our faces were glistening with tears of happiness, and it was only a few moments after that when Lily stepped up beside me. In the brief moment of our content, the weight of our mission had lifted, and I had forgotten that all was not well in the world. I suddenly felt encumbered by the journey ahead of us.
“Bryant,” Lily said sweetly, reaching one of her gloved-hands toward him, “It’s lovely to finally meet you.”
“You, too.” Bryant nodded, shaking her hand with a sincere smile, before reaching down for his bag.
“Don’t you want to say goodbye to your family?” Lily asked, surprised by Bryant’s hasty steps toward the van.
The look on my brother’s face slapped a grin on my own, as he glanced from Lily to the mobile home. I had never noticed it in the Energy Room, but we shared the same expression when someone asked a question we thought they should have already known the answer to.
“I’m not leaving my family,” Bryant said, sliding open the back door of the van and tossing in his bag, “I’m going with them.”
Chapter Eighteen
Choices
The entire drive to Joseph’s, I caught myself craning my neck around to glance at Bryant and Lakin. Every night of my entire life, I had spent my dreams with these people. I’d never expected to spend my reality with them, to look at them with conscious eyes. I wanted to reach out and touch them to make sure they were real, but constantly glancing back was probably weird enough.
A tinge of guilt crept up in my stomach as we passed the ‘Welcome to Walpole’ sign. It’d only taken about an hour to get there. Everyone had grown up so close to each other, but they kept their distance because of me. Because I was afraid they would make for a big, bright target if they were together. ‘Here we are, William! Come and get us! We’ll have tea and biscuits ready when you get here. Fancy a game of Scrabble?’ Maybe, if I hadn’t been so fearful, Lyla wouldn’t have been technically homeless. Bryant wouldn’t have been so alone. Lakin wouldn’t have grown up with a wardrobe of bruises.
We all knew Joseph had the best life of the bunch, but it didn’t quite sink in until we turned onto his road. He lived at the back of a cul-de-sac, with huge, identical houses leading the way. With perfectly-tended lawns, white-picket-fences, and massive rose-bushes lining the porches, it was exactly like The Village. But bigger. And fancier. And superior in every way.
I didn’t have a very good understanding of the concept of money—I wouldn’t have known if apples cost one dollar or one-hundred dollars… though one dollar did seem slightly more likely—but I knew Joseph’s family was considered to be incredibly well-off, so it stood to reason that this little neighborhood was just a big old pile of rich people. I assumed that was why all the houses were dark in the middle of the day. Everyone was probably out, doing whatever they did to make more money, so they could buy more things they didn’t really need. I returned to my thoughts of life inside The Facility, and quickly reevaluated my definition of ‘excess’. Sure, compare
d to some, we’d lived extravagant lives, but compared to others, it hadn’t been much. And it may not have been much, but it was enough, and enough was plenty. I couldn’t imagine living a true life of excess. How would you ever know when to stop wanting?
“What are you doing?” I asked, as Lily slowed the van to a near-stop before we reached the largest brick-house at the end of the road.
“Something is wrong.”
Lily squinted at the door with an elegant, brass ‘72’ above it, and I followed her line of vision; the door was ajar, hanging from its hinges at a painful angle.
“Stay in the van,” Lily commanded, leaving the keys dangling in the ignition as she opened her door with a rusty creak.
My jaw tensed as I lowered my brows at Lakin and Bryant in the backseat. They shook their heads at me, and within two seconds, I had caught up with Lily. She glanced at me, but made no attempt to send me back to the safety of the van.
The neighborhood felt odd, and stuffy. Even though nobody seemed to be watching, I felt judged and out-of-place, like a caterpillar in the middle of an escargot platter, trying to pass itself off as a fancy, gross hors d’oeuvre. I suddenly found myself wondering about the diets of the wealthy. Escargot, caviar, calamari... Apparently, the balance of your bank account directly corresponded with how slimy and disgusting your food was.
On the porch, Lily grasped my arm, holding me back as she quickly retrieved a lighter from one of her pockets. The house was completely dark, but in the afternoon-light leaking through the open door, a trail of blood gleamed from the terracotta tile. My heart thudded violently against my sternum, protesting the steps my feet continued to take, leading me into the foyer. In a morbid heap at the bottom of the steps, a body I recognized as one of Joseph’s adoptive fathers lay still, a puddle of red seeping out all around him. I knelt next to him, desperately checking for any signs of remaining life.