Better Left Buried

by Frisch, Belinda

  Oddly, the time to herself helped her form a clear plan.

  She had called Sylvie after leaving Lance’s. That part of her story wasn’t a lie. The faint buzz alleviated the panic she felt about her case worker finding out from the police what had happened at school, and it was a relief to get it off her chest. She confessed the knife incident and told Sylvie why she’d gone so far, about how afraid she was for Brea and what might have happened if the photos got out, but that she never intended to hurt anyone. She really only half-meant it. She’d have gone further to protect Brea if that’s what it came down to.

  She also told Sylvie about what had happened to her mother, about the pills and that she was spending a few days on observation. Sylvie already knew, but Harmony could tell that her manufactured side of the story, like with what had happened at school, evoked sympathy. Sylvie was the rare good person, the kind that had faith in everyone, often misplaced. Harmony felt a little bad manipulating her, but had learned early on that the system didn’t care about how you felt as much as it cared that you said the right things. She concocted a story to cast doubt that the pills were a suicide attempt as much as it was a case of alcohol-induced confusion, and apologized for not keeping her end of the bargain. The Wolcott women would take care of each other going forward, she promised, and explained her plan to make things better. She guaranteed her mother would be at the appointment with Bennett and had every intention of getting her there. She only had to keep her sober for three days, which shouldn’t be that hard. They’d been down this road before: her mother being newly released from the hospital, group therapy still in her brain, people rallying around her in a show of support before they disappeared, one-by-one. The outpatient program at Reston Memorial was overburdened. It was a short-term patch at best, but it was support when she needed it. Three days was enough and they would see them through. Her mother would go to Bennett bright-eyed, sober, and lucid, and between them, they’d make the wrong things look right.

  In seventeen years, she’d made a career out of it.

  A knock came at her trailer door and she hurried to answer it, expecting it to be Adam and to have to tell him to go away. She needed space and time to work out the thoughts in her head.

  “Hey.” Lance stood on the rickety porch wearing grungy work jeans, a stained white t-shirt, and a tool belt around his waist. He held a paint bucket in each hand. “Can I come in?” He chewed his lower lip, looking like a boy asking for a first date.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, noting the box of assorted supplies behind him.

  He set the buckets down and wiggled the dented front door. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me.” He smiled and went to work on the broken hinge.

  The faint sting of tears had Harmony having to pull herself together. All she’d made was a single comment about his place—that her life wouldn’t be so bad if she had a home of her own like his—and he came. No questions asked, no judgment passed, and he swept their time together earlier that day under the rug, as though their sleeping together was nothing to be ashamed of.

  “I had some extra stuff from fixing up my place and since I really didn’t have anything going on, I thought I’d see if you needed a hand.” He tightened the last screw and the door closed, for the first time in a long time, completely straight. A little work on the jamb and it locked again, too.

  She didn’t believe for a second that he had nothing else to do. A root canal would’ve been preferable to digging out from under five years of sludge, but she loved that he came.

  He surveyed the wreckage of their broken lives, the damage done by drugs and self-loathing, and sighed.

  The faucet in the kitchen had leaked since they moved in and the hard water left orange stains in the few places not covered by dishes. He unloaded the sink onto the cluttered counter as if the dishes weren’t full of mold, old food, and disgustingness she’d have wanted gloves to touch. She was embarrassed, for the first time, really, of the squalor she’d come from.

  He knelt on the cluttered floor and wrestled with the water shut-off.

  She kicked aside a pile of dirty laundry to get to the garbage can and took the overfull bag onto the porch. She put a new one in and started cleaning up the space around him. “You don’t have to do this.”

  He stood, put the wrench in his tool belt, and pulled her to him, not in a sexual way, but as friends. “I’m not doing it because I have to, but if you tell anyone else I moonlight as a handyman, we’re through, you hear me?” He smiled.

  “God forbid they find out you’re one of the good ones.”

  It was a secret he’d done his best to keep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Brea met Jaxon at the door. He didn’t look right. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was disheveled, and his swollen, hazel eyes were bloodshot. He looked up at her and his mouth bent into a frown.

  “I’m so sorry, Brea.” It was as if he didn’t even notice or care that her mother and uncle were staring. “I know this doesn’t make up for any of what happened, but—” He held out a fragrant bouquet of mixed flowers.

  “They’re beautiful.” She handed them to her mother.

  “Can we talk?” He had a guilty look about him, like he shouldered part of the blame for what Rachael had done.

  “Sure.” Brea looked over her shoulder at her mother cradling the bouquet like a pageant winner. “Do you mind if we go out for a while?”

  Joan smiled the genuine smile of someone content that things were going to be all right after all. “Go ahead. I’ll put these in water.”

  Brea steered Jaxon out the front door.

  “I don’t know what to say to get things back on-track,” he said, helping her into the Jeep. “Rachael took this thing so much farther than I would’ve expected. The paint was one thing, but this—”

  “Stop. Please, just stop apologizing for her. I can’t hear ‘I’m sorry’ again.” It was tiring being the victim, reassuring everyone that she was, in fact, fine, even if they didn’t believe her. “I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Anything. What is it?” He turned on the headlights and backed out of the driveway.

  “I need you to drive me to 6 Maple Avenue.”

  And like that, he deflated. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, why?” She wasn’t sure how to read his response.

  “It’s just that … I mean … I’ve only seen it from the outside, but—”

  “You said ‘anything’.”

  “It’s a dangerous place, Brea. It’s practically collapsing in on itself. What if one of us gets hurt?”

  “We’ll be careful.”

  “If you insist.” His awkward smile, meant to lighten the situation, made it heavier by being artificial. “Will you at least tell me why you want to go there? What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said and rode the rest of the way in silence.

  Six Maple Avenue was everything Jaxon had billed it to be and more. The house may have once been white, but was now so thick with construction dirt that it appeared a yellowish brown even in the dark.

  The half-acre lot surrounding it bore testament to a life once lived there, but the boarded up windows and shuddered doors said that the happier times were decades past. The adjacent lots were enclosed within a chain link fence bearing signs for Winslow Construction.

  Brea opened the flashlight app on her phone, shivering when the front porch swing creaked in the breeze.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Jaxon said.

  “Just stay close and keep an eye out, would you?” The rotting wood protested each step as Brea climbed the porch stairs and reached through the crisscrossed two-by-fours to open the front door.

  A cloud of dust materialized and swirled in the beam like a particle tornado. She sneezed and covered her mouth and nose with her sleeved hand, stepping over the lower part of the beam. Jaxon reached out to steady her.

  “You got it?”

  She was barely able to squeez
e through the narrow space and wondered how he, who was a good several inches taller, would make it through.

  “Yeah, I’m in.” She shined the light for him to see and took a couple of careful steps back. He looked like a contortionist trying to fit. His jacket sleeve caught on a nail and he yanked to pull himself free, hitting his head in the process. “You okay?”

  He huffed, red-faced and flustered. “Yep, I’m trespassing, but it’s not a problem.” He looked around the room and bounced up and down to test the strength of the disintegrating hardwood floor. “The wood’s rotten. Be careful. Stay close to the wall.”

  Brea panned the light across the space, which felt inexplicably familiar.

  The sofa and loveseat were coated in the same gray dust that she’d stirred up letting the breeze through the front door. There was a slight dip in the floor beneath a gaping hole in the roof that had been covered with a tarp at one point, but was now barely obscured by the weathered and shredded blue plastic.

  “Looks like they just left everything,” he said. “Why would they do that?”

  Brea gazed through the hole at the starry sky. “My guess, it was too painful to take with them.” Her mind couldn’t conjure a scenario where Charity, who had struggled her whole life to scrape by, wouldn’t have cashed in on the place otherwise.

  She kept the light directed in front of them as they made their way to the kitchen. The air smelled sour, like vinegar, and several canning jars full of what looked like fermented apples lined the counters. A few of the seals had busted and a thick liquid dripped down the textured glass, pooling in a ring on the counter. A bag from Hawthorne’s Orchard, a place Brea’s mother had taken her as a kid, but had closed a decade earlier, sat on the kitchen table as if someone had left mid-task. Six vinyl, flower-patterned chairs sat around a cluttered kitchen table covered in yellowed paper and a pack of open crayons.

  The back door hung crooked and creaked on its hinges in time with the swaying porch swing.

  A side door led out to the attached garage where Jaxon went to escape the smell.

  Brea heard a whoosh sound, like someone tossing up a blanket.

  “Whoa.”

  She hurried to see what he’d found.

  “Whoa is right.” Brea, who had been piecing things together, just found a hiccup in her timeline. The red IROC-Z with a smashed front end sat under a thick painter’s drop cloth doubling as a car cover. The car proved Charity had been back to the house after the accident.

  “Too bad about that, huh? I bet Dad lets me fix it up when he gets this place.”

  “If he gets this place,” Brea said. “Don’t be such a brat.”

  “What’s your deal?”

  “Nothing, okay? This all means something to someone. It’s not just stuff for the taking.”

  “If it wasn’t just stuff,” he mimicked her tone, “you’d think they’d have taken better care of it.”

  Charity wasn’t the “taking care of things” type.

  Brea went back through the kitchen, avoiding the living room because even at the edges of the waterlogged wood, there was the sense it might give.

  The house had to be at least a hundred years old.

  “Where are you?” Jaxon’s voice echoed and a bat flew through the hole in the roof.

  “Back here.” Brea stood in the doorway of a pink-washed bedroom that must have belonged to Harmony. A neatly made twin metal bed sat in the center of the room, its princess bedding cemented in place by dust and sadness. A teddy bear rested against the pillows.

  “Not as cool as the car,” Jaxon said. “Hey, take a look at this.” He lifted a framed picture off the nightstand and cleaned the glass with his sleeve. “This kid kind of looks like you.”

  “Let me see.” Brea shined her light on the picture, furrowing her brow at the image of two families gathered around a picnic table full of food. The red, white, and blue theme indicated the Fourth of July, but she couldn’t remember the day. “That is me.”

  It was also her mother, father, Harmony, Charity, Tom, and her Uncle Jim.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The trailer smelled of fresh paint and citrus-scented cleaner and looked brand new. Harmony cracked opened the window to vent the fumes and smiled, amazed at how much two people could accomplish when they set their minds to it.

  Lance had made all the minor plumbing repairs—fixing leaky sinks and the running toilet—while she painted and cleaned. He even went to the store when they ran out of trash bags and stayed until after 1:00 AM, taking much less home than he had brought with him.

  She couldn’t thank him enough.

  For once in her life, she had the feeling everything was going to be okay.

  This was her fresh start.

  She opened the empty refrigerator, admiring the bright white shelves, and took a couple of crackers from the cupboard, adding groceries to the shrinking list of things to do. Adam wouldn’t stop leaving her messages so she shut off her phone. He had become a crutch. She’d moved in with him out of desperation and the natural progression of the relationship had been something like a marriage. She was the oldest seventeen-year-old she knew, scheduling appointments, cooking meals, and answering to a man who she imagined had his own reasons for holding on to her so tightly. Life had dealt them both hard hands, leaving them with no one to turn to before either of them was ready. Harmony would never admit it to Brea, but she wished her mother was more like Joan. At least she’d know she cared.

  Harmony had never been grounded. She never went to school functions, never had a birthday party, and never attended one. There was no such thing as back-to-school shopping and more often than not, doctor appointments were mandated by the state when her social worker caught wind that she was sick enough to need one. She’d spent her share of feverish nights without medicine or food, never mind chicken soup, and if she was being honest, she resented the little things everyone else seemed to have had but her.

  She went into her bedroom where she buried years of angst-ridden scribbles under two coats of paint and sat on the edge of her mattress covered in clean matched sheets and a blanket. She picked up the picture Lance had framed and set on her nightstand—the one she said was her favorite—of her, her mother, and father huddled together on the porch swing she’d come to believe was her father’s preferred place to sit. She was wearing a pink, blue, and yellow dress that mirrored her mother’s and her hair was tied back with ribbons. Her father looked handsome, clean-shaven, wearing a pair of light dress pants and a pale blue shirt, and his arm was around her mother. They were all smiling. A real family. The way Harmony preferred to imagine them.

  She switched off the overhead light and turned on the lava lamp, finding it strange to have to sleep alone then remembering that it was how most people her age slept. She tucked herself in, hugging a pillow, and set the picture back on the nightstand.

  “Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad.”

  She was nearly asleep when she heard the reply.

  “Goodnight.”

  Her eyes sprang open and there was a weight, like something pressing down on her chest.

  A shadow appeared in the corner, gray on black and barely visible. She had thrown out the alarm clock she couldn’t get to reset, but didn’t need it to know what time it was.

  Fear cemented her in place. A white light shimmered in her periphery, moving across the picture frame glass, and she watched, helpless, as her favorite photo started to change.

  The blue sky turned gray. Storm clouds eclipsed the sunlight. Sadness overtook her mother’s joyful expression and bruises emerged on her cheek and chin. Her eye blackened and swelled shut, the way it had looked in the worst of the pictures. Blood spattered her own face and the front of the pale Easter dress she’d been wearing. Her cheeks glistened with tears.

  Harmony opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Her breath hung as a white cloud in a room that had turned to ice. Frost gathered on the windows and the glass crackled as it was consumed. The s
hadowed form in the corner crept up the walls and across the ceiling, its jagged edges crawling like fingers against the fresh white paint, reaching for her.

  Goodnight.

  Goodnight.

  Goodnight.

  The menacing voice whispered the word over and over.

  Harmony covered her ears, but the sound found its way through.

  Her eyes refused to close.

  Whatever she was supposed to see hadn’t yet become clear. The image of her father grew thin, starving. Blood filled his shirt collar and his blue lips receded, exposing tobacco-stained teeth and a bloody maw that twisted with what looked like a cry for help. He was rotting, decomposing on paper, and forcing her to watch. His skin stretched, melting like putty then slipping from his bones. He was a skeleton, a shell of a man.

  Bloody fingerprints appeared on the freshly white walls, forming the words: “Help me”.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Harmony awoke on the first day of her fresh start vowing not to let anything take it from her. She sat on the front porch, a lit cigarette between her fingers, convinced that what she’d seen the night before had been another nightmare. There wasn’t a shred of proof otherwise. She woke up, warm and safe, to a picture as perfect as when Lance had framed it. Nothing was out of place. There were no cryptic messages spelled out on the wall, no shadows for anything to hide in.

  Whatever help the entity needed, her mother needed it more.

  She checked the time on her phone and called Lance one last time, hoping he’d answer because there was no easy way to explain to Adam how her trailer became renovated overnight. Lance was too sore a subject to mention.

  “Hey, it’s me, again,” she said, leaving another message. “I know you’re busy, but I was wondering if I could catch a ride with you to pick my mom up at the hospital. Give me a call back if you get this is the next five minutes or so. Thanks.”

  For as jealous as Adam was about the attention she got from other men, which he claimed was because she was ‘flirty’, it wasn’t jealously that made him hate Lance. It was the fact that he dealt pot. Adam, for all his common sense otherwise, saw no difference between a joint, a pill, and a needle. Though he’d opened up about several of the more traumatic scenes from his life, whatever had him so adamantly against drugs remained a closely guarded secret.