by Cole McCade
He groaned. “One of these days I’m going to set that bed on fire.”
“As long as you’re not in it when you do.”
“Tempted.” He snorted dryly. “Might actually hurt less.”
He leaned on her dutifully as she held him to his feet and fitted his arms back into the crutches. She’d have to try wrapping them, she thought dully. Wrapping them, padding them—maybe some old towels would do the trick, until she found another solution. And God, she was avoiding, deflecting, but she couldn’t think about this until her father was in bed and asleep. She had to call someone. Who, she didn’t know yet.
Anyone who would know what to do.
What she should have done, instead of running away.
She shadowed her father’s slow, laborious steps into the bedroom, moving by the light of the battery-operated Coleman spots placed throughout the house, and eased him onto the bed before helping him change into boxers and a shirt. They both hated this part: him stiff with pride and looking over her head, her always unfocusing her eyes and pretending she wasn’t humiliating her father by changing him like a little boy. She couldn’t stand having to treat him that way, but when something as simple as pulling off a shirt could make his rogue nerve endings catch fire, sometimes it was better to save him the pain than save his dignity.
She stood and counted his meds out into a little paper cup, the pills rattling together. A faint, echoing rattle came from outside, the thin shimmer-chime sound of the chain link fence. She froze—her pulse leaping into overdrive, the tips of her fingers tingling—and stared toward the bedroom window. No. No, it wouldn’t be him; someone like him wouldn’t make a sound, wouldn’t telegraph his arrival with warning sounds and careless movements. He wasn’t there. She’d gotten away in time. He wouldn’t know where to find her, hadn’t seen her go home.
She had to believe that, or she’d never sleep again.
“Willow.” Her father watched her, head tilted back against the pillows, his brows a cascade of furrows. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong? What happened to you today?”
She made herself move, tearing her gaze from the window, and offered her father a smile stretched like a mask ill-fitted over her face. “Nothing. I promise. Here.” She tipped the cup with his evening dose into his mouth, the pills whisper-chittering against the paper, then held a water bottle steady for him.
When he was done he pinned her with a frown. “Don’t ‘nothing’ me, and don’t deflect. What happened to your hands?”
“I fell. You know what a klutz I can be.” With an artificial smile she bent and kissed his forehead, then straightened and switched off the lantern propped on the dresser. “’Night, Dad. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She slipped out into the hall, and into her own room—barely larger than a walk-in closet, but it had been hers for so long she couldn’t imagine sleeping anywhere else. She’d painted the walls a deep teal and filled the room with all the little glass things her Uncle Wally had given her over the years: a wind chime of colored glass shards over the window, blue and green pebbles of beach glass and polished blown spheres and empty bottles in violets and pinks and blues and golds, joined now by the little green glass betta fish she plucked from her pocket. Delicately, she perched the betta on a wall shelf next to her favorite, a rounded, tapered teardrop in gradiated pinks and violets and golds, its well-worn contours suggesting a tiny little mouse. Her collection lined the windowsill, the wall-mounted bookshelves, even the headboard of the bed. When sunlight or moonlight caught the glass, it threw the colors back on the walls in dancing coins, blending and merging together in a kaleidoscope of sparkles on a deep teal sea.
By moonlight, now, those colors were as washed out as she felt. She kicked off her shoes, peeled out of her jeans, and dropped to sit on the edge of the bed in her tank top and panties. Her hands hung between her knees. She stared at them. Useless hands. Useless, ugly, scarred-up hands that hadn’t been able to do anything but come one step short of covering her ears, eyes, mouth. Hear no evil see no evil speak no evil, as if as long as she didn’t acknowledge it, evil wasn’t real.
As if she could make it go away by pretending, a little girl playing hide and seek and thinking, if she closed her eyes and scrunched down small, they couldn’t see her because she couldn’t see them.
I wish I still had your naïveté, Uncle Wally had said.
Yeah. Sure.
What if that man had survived that slash across his throat, that gaping open wound in his neck, that awful silent-screaming mouth? What if, if she’d called 911, she could have saved him?
What if he’d bled out in that alley because of her cowardice, and his death was as much her fault? What if she was as much of a murderer as the fox-eyed man?
Stop it. Don’t think like that.
She needed to call someone. Now, before another minute passed and the fox-eyed man had a chance to dispose of the body or hunt her down. Her father was likely already unconscious; the meds knocked him out pretty fast, and he wouldn’t hear if she left to go down to the police station, met a group of officers at the door with sirens flashing, or stomped through the house slamming pot lids together. She dug her phone from her bag and swiped the screen lock, then thumbed through her address book. Not Wally. While Wally was full of secrets and knew more about everything than most people knew about anything, she couldn’t stand to bring him into this. Dev would try to throw money at the problem, and she didn’t think that would help this time.
Maxi.
She stared down at the Maxwell Manning listing, top of the Ms in her address book. Maxi was smart and canny and knew everyone; she might even know who the fox-eyed man was. Even if she didn’t, she’d know what to do. She saw everything rough and everything dangerous, in that pawn shop of hers—and she defended her own with nothing but a sharp tongue and a nail-studded baseball bat with Coraline engraved on the side in a swooping hand. Right now Willow wouldn’t mind having that baseball bat and Maxi’s earthy warmth at her side, stable and solid and safe.
Standing to look out the window, she tapped call and lifted her phone to her ear. The night was too quiet; she wasn’t sure when the car alarm had stopped, but now not a single sound broke the darkness. No alarm, no dogs, no loud music from neighbors who lived to finger city noise ordinances, not even the quiet roar-scrape of tires on pavement as cars passed.
Only that ring-ring-ring in her ear, trilling too loud and bringing with it a quiet tremor of fear each time that sound reached down inside her and Maxi didn’t pick up.
She searched the yard: the shadows under the gnarled sage tree that kept threatening to die but never did, the suddenly menacing shapes made by the rake propped against the tool shed, the benches arranged around flower pots that hadn’t been tended in ages, the fence. The fence she could’ve sworn she’d latched, but from here it was hard to see if it still was.
Of course it was.
It had to be.
The phone picked up with a rattle and a snort. “What?”
“Maxi?” The name came tumbling from her with a rush of relief—and everything pent up inside her, everything that had been trapped behind the numbing filter of shock and bottled up where it couldn’t prick her with its sharp and awful points, came exploding out in a half-sob. “Maxi, oh thank God. Please, please, oh God please you have to—you—I need you to, please—”
“Willow? I’m here. I’m here, what’s going on?” Alarm colored Maxi’s voice. Something clattered on the other end of the line. “Whoa. Whoa, hey. Calm down, girl. Calm down.”
“I can’t.” She pressed her fingers to the window’s cool glass, leaning forward until her nose bumped the pane and her breaths fogged the surface. She still didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean nothing was there. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I can’t calm down. I saw—I saw—”
“You gotta talk louder. Why you whispering?”
“Because I don’t want him to hear me.”
“Who? Your dad?�
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“No. I…I don’t know who he was, I just—”
She broke off at another rattle from outside. Her heart thumped, ungainly and too large, too heavy for her chest, a fist of iron clutching inside her. Holding her breath, she shrank back from the window, then peered carefully around. Nothing. It had to be the wind through the fence, but the night was sluggish and slow and heavy as tar, summer an odious, unmoving blanket of heat smothering the Nests.
“Willow?” Maxi asked.
“I’m here. I’m here. Sorry. I thought I heard something. I…I was walking home, and—Maxi, he killed him. He killed him right in front of me, and—and—”
“What?” Another clatter through the phone, then a crash. “Slow down. Who killed who? Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet.” She gulped back hard, her eyes swimming, and shook her head. “Won’t they interrogate me? I…I didn’t help him. I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t help him. I…I ran. I ran and I left him there.” Her voice broke. “Doesn’t that make it my fault?”
“Hell no. That’s the shock making you stupid. We got a sense of self-preservation for a reason. Goddamn girl always gotta be taking too much on yourself like a goddamn idiot—” Maxi broke off with a sigh. “Now look. You hang this damn phone up right now, act like you got the sense God gave little green apples, and you call 911. I’m on my way over, but they’ll get there a hell of a lot faster. You can tell me the whole story when I get there.”
“A-all right.”
“Did you know either of the men?”
Willow shook her head, then remembered Maxi couldn’t see her and whispered, “No. The…the first one, he was dressed in a nice suit like he was out of the Rooks or Blackwing Downs…he wasn’t from the Nests. The other one…I…I’ve never seen him before, but I’ll never forget him.” She pressed her hand to her aching chest, closing her eyes. “He had eyes like acid. Gold like a hunting fox, and this long, pale hair—”
“Oh.” Something in Maxi’s voice sounded wrong. Choked and glottal. “Oh, fuck.”
“What?” A cold sensation like a ball of ice gathered at the base of her spine. “What is it? Do you know who he is?”
Maxi waited too long to answer. So long Willow wanted to scream, before Maxi said, “No. But I heard things about people going missing ’round your way. You close up them windows, lock all the doors. I’m coming.”
“Okay.” Willow leaned hard against the window frame and told herself to breathe. “Okay. But Maxi…he saw me. The man with the knife. I’m scared. I’m scared.”
“I know, honey. I know.” Maxi’s drawling voice warmed, soothing and low. “But it’s okay. We gonna take care of you like we always taken care of you. We look after our own.”
Willow smiled faintly, tremulously. “But I’m not even hinóno’éí.”
“No, that you ain’t. But you my Willow, and that’s enough. I’ll be there soon.” There was something fierce in Maxi’s voice. “And I’m bringing Coraline.”
She choked on a laugh. “Okay.” She made herself pull the phone away. “Okay.”
She hung up the call and stared at the screen for a moment, her face hot with shame. She felt so stupid, sometimes. So young, like a girl of fourteen or fifteen instead of a grown woman at twenty-four. She’d never felt like a grown woman. Not when she’d never lived outside her father’s house, never graduated college, never dated or lost her virginity or gotten blackout drunk with the friends she didn’t have—all these things that were supposed to be some kind of rite of passage into adulthood but instead felt like failures when she didn’t have the time. Somehow she’d skipped right from childhood into the adult responsibilities of a caretaker, the sole breadwinner, the decision-maker of the house. She’d never had the chance to make all the stupid teenage mistakes that taught her how to be smart and cynical and calm, when life threw terrible things her way. Sheltered and wise all at once.
Wasn’t that just putting a pretty gloss on it so she wouldn’t feel like an idiot for dissolving into hysterics?
You’re too hard on yourself, Uncle Wally would have said. Had said, many times.
But maybe she wasn’t hard enough.
Because she kept giving herself permission to close her eyes, stick her head in the sand…and never, ever grow up.
She was calling the police. Facing this down, head firmly somewhere other than in the sand or up her own ass.
Pressing her lips together, she dialed 9, 1—then froze as the house spoke to her. It spoke in the creak of her bedroom door, a sound that used to terrify her as a child, when it had been the querulous call of crawling monsters with spidery thin stick-fingers; later it became the groaning sigh of an old grandmother, a comforting bit of familiarity that told her she was home.
But now that sound was the monster again, creeping and slow and ominous and dark, a shadow bristling at her back. She held perfectly still, trying not to breathe but she couldn’t stop, each shallow rush filling her ears in little rapid back-and-forth sounds that made it impossible to hear what she was listening for:
Footsteps.
Turn around and look.
Her legs wouldn’t move.
There’s no one there. Just turn around. Look.
Her blood crystallized, frost riming her veins and cutting through her with a terrible chill. She closed her eyes, trembling, and waited. Nothing. No sound. Not one step, not one creak of a sole against weathered floorboards. Her fingers tightened on the phone, and she started to tap that last 1.
“You ruined my kill, little one,” a rough, accented voice purred against her ear, breaths curling against the sensitive place behind and below her jaw.
Terror raked its nasty sticky skittering fingers down her spine. She screamed—but the moment her mouth opened something shoved against her lips and stuffed the sound back inside. Her voice rattled around inside her chest, muffled and afraid. A terrible, chemical smell filled her nostrils and choked in her mouth, her tongue pressing against the cloth clamped over her face by an iron hand, the taste foul and bitter, gagging her. She thrashed; an arm locked around her, pinning her arms against her sides, and she managed to squeeze the phone one more time. Her thumb jammed against the 1.
Then the phone fell from her twitching fingers, and thudded to the floor.
Somewhere distant the phone rang, the faint, tinny sound burbling up through the smartphone’s mouthpiece. But a strange cloud had descended, one that slowed everything to a crawl, and she stared at the glass-colored moonlight dancing in slow spangles over the walls as her thoughts retreated to a quiet and awful place where her own screams were muffled in cotton and her senses dulled to nothing but the sense of a tall, hard body against her back, trapping her within arms of banded steel, and every time she tried to suck in a breath it tasted like the color of hospitals and cold, sterile things.
“911, what’s your emergency?” floated up from the floor. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? If you don’t feel safe and can’t speak, please stay on the line and—”
The voice faded into static, as if the woman spoke in crackles. Willow tried to answer her, but she didn’t know where the woman was. She couldn’t see anyone in the room and she was all alone, except the monster who had crawled from the blackness of her every childhood nightmare to creep down the hall and into her room.
Help me, she tried to say, but her mouth wouldn’t move and her eyes were heavy, so heavy. I think…he’s going to kill me.
Then she slid away down a long, narrow tunnel, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER FOUR
HER EARLIEST MEMORY OF HER mother was the swingset in the yard.
Willow remembered sitting on the porch of the house, clutching a grubby, chubby-cheeked doll made of that kind of plastic that absorbed all dirt and never let it go. There’d been a perfect fingerprint, she recalled—right in the center of the forehead, and below a mangled spray of blonde hair she’d chopped off with her play scissors within a week of getting the grinning, hideous thing.
The doll had been a Christmas present from her mother, wrapped up in newspaper and given to her like an afterthought. She’d gotten newsprint ink smeared on her fingers, and the ink had left a permanent mark like a sacrilegious bindi in the middle of the doll’s forehead. Erin, Willow had named her. Because there was a girl at school named Erin. Erin who was five; Erin who pinched and spat on Willow; Erin who flipped her blonde hair in Willow’s face.
She didn’t like Erin the girl very much.
She didn’t like Erin the doll much, either.
Erin-the-Doll’s eyes were lopsided from how many times Willow had stuck her thumbs in them. She did it again right now, digging into the socket of one eye and rolling it around until the plastic eyelid scraped her finger. It wasn’t something she even thought about, a habit she could do blind while she watched her mother.
“Look, honey!” her mother called. “Watch your Mama, now!”
Like their roles were reversed, and Miriam Armitage was a little girl showing her mother the neat little tricks she could do.
Mama pulled herself up onto the top bar of the swingset like a gymnast. It was a small swingset, little girl-sized, with two little plastic-strap seats the right size for a four-year-old but far too big for a grown woman—even if Mama was tiny and thin and compact and built like a pixie, full of animated bright energy and crowned by ever-burning fire. The swingset rocked back and forth as she balanced herself sitting on the top bar, fingers curled to either side of her bare thighs. She’d stolen one of Willow’s little tiny lace-edged skirts, and when Mama spread her knees to balance Willow could see the dirty spot she wasn’t supposed to touch or talk about, all red like it was bleeding. Like Mama had fire between her legs.
Willow looked down quickly. She didn’t want to get in trouble, so she stared at Erin-the-Doll’s puffy cheeks.
“Look, Willow!” Mama called again. “Watch!”
She cringed. She wasn’t supposed to say no when Mama said do something, but there was a thing she wasn’t supposed to look at and she didn’t know what to do. Carefully, she peeked up. She couldn’t see Mama’s dirty thing anymore; Mama was lying on her back on the bar like it was flat earth, with her head pointed toward Willow and her legs pointed toward the sky, spread open wide and showing herself off to the fence, the street, the empty house next door. She spread her arms, but not once did her balance waver.