I Am Grey

by Jane Washington

  “Well … don’t take off in the morning without saying goodbye, eh?” He moved back to the staircase. “There are clean clothes in the closet in there. You’re welcome to anything that fits. Breakfast is at six.”

  “Goodnight!” I called up the stairs as he hurried up them faster than he had moved since finding me outside. “Thank you!”

  He closed the door to the staircase and I set the key onto one of the side tables, moving back into the bedroom. The cupboards were half-stocked with clothing. Most of it packed away in cloth garment bags. There was a small set of drawers built into the closet, a few t-shirts and jeans folded into them. I took out one of the shirts and held it up by the sleeves. It belonged to a man—someone slightly bigger than Spencer himself, though the V-neck was a little too trendy for the ‘breakfast is at six’, raincoat-wielding man upstairs. I placed my bag on the sink in the bathroom, folded the shirt onto the other side of the sink, and then closed and locked the bathroom door.

  I turned the shower onto the hottest setting, got undressed, and stepped beneath the spray of water, remaining there even when it was too hot to comfortably bear. My mind wanted to wander back, to examine my day, to remind me of what had happened.

  I wouldn’t let it.

  I burned beneath the water until I was numb, and then I stepped out, dried myself, and pulled the clean shirt over my head. I pulled everything out of my bag, laying each item out on the bathroom floor to dry out overnight. I wandered back into the bedroom, a little lost, my hand resting on one of the ceramic candlesticks decorating the bedside table before I finally crawled into the bed, my eyes drifting automatically to the floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a minimalist dresser on the wall to the left of the bed, the bathroom on the right, and the window before me.

  Rain pelted it, splattering heavily against the glass. I could see the courtyard beyond—a section that wasn’t covered by the overhead wooden trellis. It was just open courtyard, a little sanctuary lit by the faintness of the moonlight. It was a bright night, I realised, as I examined the outlines of a small, cast-iron table and chair. Beyond, to the left of the table, the vines curtained off the main courtyard, making this one seem less busy, more peaceful. I stared into the courtyard, my head propped up on a pillow to see better, until the scene finally lulled me into sleep.

  23

  Reversal

  The door opened in an obnoxious way—as though the person behind it had every right to barge into the room I was sleeping in. I sat up suddenly, brandishing something in my hands. Familliar blue eyes collided with mine, the colour sharpening with shock, before clouding over in disbelief. Nicholai froze, and we stared at each other, before his eyes finally moved to the object in my hand.

  I was disoriented, my head dizzy, my hands shaking with the sudden rush of adrenaline. I also looked at my hands. I was holding a large, ceramic candlestick. It was heavy, and the way I had been apparently sleeping with it clutched in my hand left no room for misconception: I had been intending to use it as a weapon.

  I quickly set it down, my eyes flicking around the room in confusion before everything came flooding back to me. I remembered Spencer, and the drunk guy in the rain. I remembered the party. I remembered the bathroom. I remembered the video. I picked the candlestick up again, scrambling out of bed and holding it before me, my knuckles turning white.

  “What are you doing here—” I paused, and he paused.

  We had both spoken the same thing, at the same time.

  “This is my dad’s house.” He folded his arms over his chest, quickly recovering from his confusion.

  He seemed to grow bigger then, pulling his posture around himself in defence. His eyes flicked to the shirt I was wearing.

  Holy fuck.

  His shirt.

  I was shaking too much—the candlestick was wobbling in front of me. I tightened my grip on it, the whiteness of my knuckles spreading down to my fingertips.

  “I ... I was invited in,” I managed. “Spencer. I was in the rain. I ... like this house ...” I trailed off.

  There had always been something about this house, but was it possible that I already knew it to be Nicholai’s? The vines had reminded me of his father’s restaurant, and the day that Jen had called him to meet us at the cafe ... he had appeared only five or ten minutes later, meaning that he probably lived only five or ten minutes away.

  No ... it was all a coincidence. There was no way I could have known that this was Nicholai’s house. It had drawn me to it, the outside reminding me of his father’s restaurant. The lighthouse feature calling to me the same way the main lighthouse called to me.

  It was just a coincidence. A fucked-up, creepy coincidence.

  “The video—” he rushed out, causing me to flinch. “That’s what you meant, in your message? She sent it to you and deleted it, didn’t she?”

  The shake in my hands grew suddenly steady. “She?”

  “Jen. She was at the door to the bathroom, recording us. I’ve been over this so many times in my head. I couldn’t sleep. I just kept going over and over what you could have meant by that text ...” He moved forward. I moved back. He paused. “She must have sent the video to my phone right before I confronted her. She blackmailed me into handing over my phone before I noticed she’d sent me the video, and then when I handed it over, she forwarded it to you. She must have deleted both messages before she gave my phone back. Tell me that’s what happened.” He stepped forward again, and I stepped back again, but this time, the small of my back bumped into the bedside table. “Tell me you weren’t talking about what happened between us.”

  “I wasn’t talking about us—” The words were barely out of my mouth before he was closing the distance between us, shocking me into sudden quiet. He stopped, hovering an inch away. There was a barrier between us. Uncertainty. He had said that we wouldn’t happen, and somehow, he had still made something happen, while still barely touching me. Surely, that counted. We hadn’t had any time to figure out what it meant before everything had gone wrong. He took a deep breath, and I watched as his shoulders straightened out. He had been leaning into me, watching the thoughts pass over my face. Whatever he had seen had made him draw away.

  “How did you get here, Mika? What happened?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but the clock on the wall behind his shoulder caught my attention. It was five minutes past six. I was late for breakfast. I switched my attention back to Nicholai, examining him a little more closely this time. He was wearing a soft grey sweatshirt with dark jeans, his hair mussed. He looked younger that he had ever appeared to me. More comfortable. Of course he did—he was at his father’s house on a Sunday morning, ready for a stupidly early breakfast.

  “Shit, I’m going to be late,” I spluttered out, pushing past him and running to the bathroom. I closed the door and quickly swapped his shirt for my dress. It was still damp, so I pulled his shirt back on over the top.

  “What the fuck?” I heard him mutter from the other side of the door.

  I emerged from the bathroom and hurried past him, my head down. I had no idea what to say to him, or how to explain that me being at his house actually had nothing to do with him. He followed me out of the room, up the staircase, and into the kitchen.

  Spencer glanced up as I opened the door, his eyes immediately widening at the sight of Nicholai. He froze, his hand reaching into the fridge.

  “Nic.” He cleared his throat, and seemed to be at a momentary loss for words before he quickly forced out: “I didn’t know you were coming today.”

  “Morning to you too, dad. I didn’t know you’d gone into the business of kidnapping eighteen-year-olds.”

  Spencer pulled his hand out of the fridge, placing a container of butter on the counter before moving to the stove and lighting it. Nicholai and I both waited for a response. It didn’t come.

  “I was outside,” I finally said.

  “It was raining,” Spencer grumbled.

  “There was a guy.” I ad
ded, watching as Spencer turned from the stove, folding his arms over his chest.

  I also folded my arms over my chest. Nicholai looked from his father, to me, and back again.

  “A guy?” he prompted his father.

  “The unsavoury sort.” Spencer nodded.

  “The unsavoury sort of guy,” Nicholai repeated tonelessly.

  “What are you making for breakfast?” I asked, sitting at the stool on the other side of the counter.

  Spencer turned back to the stove. He was fully-dressed already, his dark blonde hair neatly combed, his broad face freshly shaved.

  “Pancakes,” he answered. “Did you sleep okay?”

  “Who was the unsavoury guy?” Nicholai interrupted, seeming to recover from his shock. There was a tone of anger underlying his words now.

  We both turned to look at him.

  “Do you know each other?” Spencer asked, before refocussing on his task of pouring mixture into the heated pan.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m a student at the school he was working at. And I slept well. Thank you again. Can I help with breakfast?”

  “There’s some fruit in the fridge to cut up. Was he a good counsellor? He never talks about his work.”

  I slid off the stool, moving to the fridge. Spencer pointed out the fruit to me with his spatula before returning to his pan. Nicholai was still standing in the same place.

  “All the girls thought he was the best thing to happen to the school, apparently.” I moved back to the counter, accepting the cutting board and the bowl that Spencer handed me.

  “I’ll bet,” Spencer scoffed.

  “What unsavoury guy?” Nicholai had stepped further into the kitchen, his frame vibrating with some kind of emotion. Frustration, possibly—or anger.

  We paused again, looking at him.

  “I’m going to give you two a moment,” Spencer muttered. “Don’t let my pancakes burn.”

  He stepped back from the stove, passed Nicholai the spatula, and walked to the staircase beyond the dining room, climbing up to the attic.

  “You ran out of the party.” Nicholai paused, set down the spatula, took a deep breath, and continued. “Ran all the way here. In a storm. Correct?”

  I nodded, cutting a strawberry in half.

  “So you haven’t been staying with your aunt,” he surmised.

  I shook my head, quartering the strawberry.

  “And you haven’t been staying with the Morenos, either.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I’ve been staying here,” I told him, reaching for the next strawberry.

  “Stop.” He was beside me again, taking the knife out of my hand, turning me by the shoulders to face him.

  I leaned into his touch immediately, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I still had no idea what the night before meant for us.

  “You only stayed here last night,” he corrected me. “I spent most of Thanksgiving morning here, and the night before. You weren’t here. He didn’t mention you.”

  “I didn’t mean here.” I glanced toward the window. “I meant out there.”

  He groaned, his eyes closing, his fingers digging in a little. “Fucking hell, Mika.”

  His phone rang then, as Spencer appeared at the bottom of the staircase again. Nicholai dropped my arms, pulling his phone from his pocket as Spencer returned to the kitchen. His pancake was a little blackened. He frowned at it, picking up the spatula again.

  “Hello?” Nicholai walked to the other side of the counter, holding the phone to his ear. “Yes, speaking. Yes, I do. She’s ... an acquaintance. Yes, I did. Yes—what?”

  He was silent for a moment, the sharp tone of his voice forcing tension into the already-rigid cast of Spencer’s posture.

  Nicholai was silent for a long time, listening to whatever was being told to him on the phone. I took up the task of slicing fruit again, until it was finished, and then I re-claimed my stool.

  “I didn’t realise you were still in school.” Spencer finally spoke as Nicholai left the room, his phone still pressed to his ear.

  “I got kept back a year,” I replied.

  Spencer turned his back on the pancakes, his expression searching. “You obviously spent a lot of time with my son. Why did they keep you back a year? What happened?”

  I swallowed, the lump in my throat suddenly too big to swallow around. This felt like a pivotal moment of some kind. A pin on the board of my human existence. Alicia had been another pin, Jean another, Duke another. Nicholai was all over it—pins scattered to the very edges. I had reached the ‘Spencer’ pin: the upright, grumbling man in the raincoat who somehow meant something.

  Maybe it was because he was Nicholai’s father, or because the house I felt drawn to was his, or even just because he had helped me out of the storm and away from a bad situation, gaining nothing at all from the action.

  “My parents died,” I forced myself to say.

  I sounded casual, but my hands were clammy. The thought of him kicking me out before I had even had a chance to properly thank him for letting me sleep there was relentlessly pounding at my head. I could picture it clearly: how he would tell me that his house had seen enough trauma already, how he would ask me to hand back the little antique key before the gate slammed in my face and the cold clifftop welcomed me back into exile.

  “Where were you?” he asked, his eyes narrowed on my face. He didn’t look suspicious, only … worried. Fearful, somehow, of what I might say.

  It would come, though. The suspicion. We were in a small town, and small towns loved to gossip more than most. He would figure it out, eventually.

  “I was at the house,” I told him, forcing myself to say more. To say all of it. To say the words that I hadn’t yet had the strength to repeat to anyone. “That’s where they found me. At the house, the gun in my hands. I wouldn’t speak. Didn’t even cry as they checked the bodies. When they tried to take the gun off me, I flipped out. Almost shot one of them—”

  “It sounds like you were scared—”

  “I was covered in my parents’ blood, holding onto that gun like it was my sole purpose in life.” I cut across his sympathy mercilessly, and then hunched over on the stool, trying to fight back the horrible feeling that was creeping up the back of my neck, the hint of mania and memory that had shadowed my every step for the past year.

  Spencer turned back to the stove. He flipped the pancake, and then waited. Finally, after a minute, he spoke again.

  “You’re her. The girl from a while back—over a year ago now, I think.”

  There it was.

  He had paused, possibly waiting for me to say something more. I didn’t. “It was in the papers,” he sighed out. “I still remember it—thought it wasn’t right, the things they wrote. Accusing every person, left and right. Including you. It was the worst thing to happen to this town in … years.” He shot me a look, his blue eyes sharp. “I don’t remember all the details. They took you out of school—the police?”

  “It was mandatory, that’s what the courts said. I needed to be locked up. Supervised. Medicated.” My jaw was so tight that forming the words to voice my reply had become almost impossible.

  Spencer nodded, flipping the last pancake onto the stack and transferring it to the counter.

  “Did you do it?” he asked, placing a plate in front of me. “Did you kill your parents?”

  “In a way.”

  “How so?”

  “I should have fired the gun, but I didn’t. I could have saved him. But I didn’t. I couldn’t kill her.”

  “It was your mother.” He moved to the dining table, placing his plate onto the surface a little too heavily. I realised that his hand was shaking. He sat, clasping his hands in his lap, his knee jiggling slightly. “That’s …”

  “I know.” I ran my finger along the edge of the plate in front of me. “Nobody knew about her. Nobody could have guessed.”

  “Was she ... crazy?” He seemed hesitant to ask the question, his eyes flicking to the
door Nicholai had disappeared behind.

  “I guess.” I shrugged. “She would do crazy things. Say crazy things. She would hurt dad, threaten him.”

  “Did she ever hurt you?”

  “No. Just him. She was really angry at him—all the time. She spent most of her time working, always out of the house. When she came home, she mostly just did coke. She’d walk in the door, hang up her coat, pull out her tray, and set up in the living room to get high. Said she had a really stressful job, that she needed the release.” I was talking without thinking, memories popping into the dark space of my mind like bright fireworks, frying my nerve endings and making my voice tremble with aftershocks.

  Spencer listened, his eyes on me, his posture bent a few inches forward.

  “I woke up that night and she was screaming,” I told him. “Screaming my name.”

  “Jesus, kid. I’m sorry.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments. I had no idea what Spencer was thinking, but I was reeling. I felt sick, unable to believe that I’d just told him all of that.

  I could see it all clearly, suddenly.

  “Get the gun, Mika.”

  My father’s voice was calm, but loud, trying to speak over my mother’s screaming. She was slumped on the couch, her tray had been thrown against the wall. Maybe she was angry about that—she was very particular about her tray.

  “My dad must have known that something bad would happen, eventually,” I muttered, standing and walking to the window, the glass blurring with my memory of the incident.

  I walked back to my bedroom, bidden by my own fear. I should have known better, but my dad always knew what to do. He always had a plan. There had to be a reason.

  I should have known better.

  “I should have known better.” I was choked-up now, trying to fight back tears. I refused to cry, though. I had cried enough, just as I had been silent enough. Now it was time to finally tell someone my story. “He trained me how to shoot a gun. Told me how important it was. As I got older, we practised scenarios. He said that mom knew some bad people—that they might come to the house looking for her.”