by Kim Savage
A choking noise escaped Ben’s throat. He wondered how many missed chances there had been, when Mira would have spoken to him, but didn’t. Had he done other things, too, that made Mira distrust him enough not to tell him what her father was doing until after he could do nothing about it?
He gazed at Mira’s bed through watery eyes. He wondered if Mr. Cillo had touched Mira in that bed, which was so close to the other bed. It was hard to imagine things could happen to one sister without the other knowing. His brain flashed to the girls protecting each other from the monster by sacrificing themselves. It was so easy to envision the sick beast moving from one girl to the other. Starting with Francesca, then—
Ben paused his thoughts and stared at Mira’s bed. He banished the thought of Mr. Cillo’s sweaty visage looming over Mira. Ben felt certain that was how it had gone down, why Francesca had taken such pains (and he felt sure Francesca had led the charge) to cleanse the room of their personal selves, which they took with them to the quarry. Their bodies, finally, their own.
Ben wished he could get out of his own head.
He felt for his phone in his back pocket and found it black. He pressed hard on the power button, but nothing came. He swore, then cursed himself for cursing. Downstairs, upbeat music from the television floated to meet him.
Ben felt the sense of ice tongs squeezing the sides of his brain. His vision narrowed.
As his panic grew, he ticked off the things the dead phone meant he could not do. He couldn’t text his parents a lie that he’d gone somewhere after practice. He couldn’t send a panicked message to Kyle for help.
Kyle. He needed Kyle.
The ice tongs squeezed harder. The closet got darker. Ben squeezed his fingers into the spaces behind his temples.
Worst of all, and he wasn’t sure why this was the worst, but he couldn’t tell the time. This was how a blindfolded hostage felt. He guessed an hour, maybe more, had passed. If the best way to torture someone was to force them to lose sense of time, Mr. Cillo was torturing him.
Keep talking to yourself, Ben. Keep talking.
Ben reached down blindly and felt the outline of the pills in his lacrosse shorts. Wasn’t this what the stupid pills were for? Taking the edge off? Because this might be a good moment for that. Ben heard Kyle’s voice in his head: You hear me, Ben? Don’t do it.
Ben yanked the bottle from his pocket. He squinted at the bottle: Take two tablets with a full glass of water. If two was good, three was better. He wrenched off the cap, popping three dry pills and swallowing hard, the bitter taste burning his tongue.
He leaned into the clothes and sighed. The clothes embraced him. He listened for signs that Mr. Cillo had discovered some overturned item, some misplaced shoe that revealed someone had broken into his house, and at some point he stopped listening at all. Thick golden warmth flooded him. Ben eased the closet door wider and was surprised when it made no noise. He tested his footstep for creaks. Finding none, he stepped out of the closet and stood in the middle of the girls’ room. The warmth stayed with Ben, and seemed to transfer to an affection for the bed, the bureaus, the tiny violets on the old-fashioned wallpaper. Every object called to him to be touched, lifted, gazed at. Held. Even Mira’s bed was inviting, and he knew it shouldn’t be. He ought to be thinking of her there, helpless, seeing things happening to Francesca, or shutting herself off to things happening to her.
No, he had to get his head right. Stay on his toes. Because despite the danger that lay below, he was, in fact, getting sleepy.
Ben rubbed his eyes. What time was it? Mr. Cillo had been out drinking hard, probably at Piggy’s father’s club, and no one came home from Big Steven’s early. The sounds from downstairs were the news, and not the six-o’clock news, since he’d rung the doorbell well after six, and the earliest the news came on was ten. And those same sounds had been going for a while. Was it past ten? It was the kind of time-suck that happened at the quarry, only he was in a different place illegally, and he was going to get caught.
Unless the beast was asleep.
He inched his way across the room, walking in slow motion, heel, pad, toe, his arms akimbo, as if balancing on a wire. He made it as far as the square patch of landing before the stairs when he realized he’d left his backpack in the closet. He turned to repeat his heel, pad, toe pattern back to Francesca and Mira’s bedroom when the telephone rang loud. The ring came from every direction: the living room, kitchen, and from Mr. Cillo’s bedroom, next to where Ben froze. Nerves rose from Ben’s bare arms like static electricity. As it rang a second time, Ben heard the alien, female voice echo through the house, flat, with inhuman beats and pauses.
“Call from”
“Paul”
“Lattanzi”
APRIL 2016
“We’ll use the EpiPen,” Connie told Mira. “It’s a foolproof plan.”
Mira turned to Francesca. “Do we know how to use it?”
“Don’t question.” Francesca collapsed on the edge of the bed. Her shirt gaped as she leaned over her knees to tie her sneakers. Mira stared at the sharp ridge of her clavicle and the hollows above. She knew Francesca’s body as well as she knew her own. Her sleeping and eating noises, shapes and shadows. Mira could close her eyes and see Francesca turn away in her strappy tanks, her rounded scapula like wings rising as she breathed. Her pale wrists flexing at the breakfast table as she twisted sleep from her bones. Francesca had always been strong, and proud of it, using her muscles, taking over jobs a boy might do, if a boy lived in the house. Lately, though, she was all sharp angles. Her shoulders ended in points, with recently emerged knobs and hollows. Francesca’s body was changing, as though something was carving away her soft parts.
Francesca blew hair from her eyes and rose. “Stay or go, your choice.”
Mira’s mouth grew dry. “Of course I’m going.”
Francesca slipped inside the moth-eaten A-line coat she’d taken to wearing and stared at Mira’s feet. “You’ll need sneakers, not boots.” Francesca searched her face for a moment, then touched two fingers to Mira’s brow, smoothing the cleft between her eyes. “Have courage, sister. We’re all blood here. No one’s hurting anyone.”
Connie wavered in the doorway. “Can we go? It’s getting dark soon.”
Francesca moved to Connie and draped her hands over her shoulders. “Concetta Marie. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Connie smiled gamely and looked only at Francesca. “I’m sure. Mio sangue.”
Mira’s eye fixed on the slip of green sequined T-shirt that dragged past the hem of Connie’s short purple parka. She’d worked her hair into a beachy, wavy style that Mira knew took hours of coaxing with salt spray and a clip-less curling iron. Her glossy lips were the color of cotton candy. On her feet were trendy boots with chunky heels not made for running. Francesca had let the mouse in her experiment wear whatever she’d wanted, because she knew something about this nightmare experiment fed into Connie’s desire to be the center of a drama in which she was the main character, or as close to it as she’d ever get. Even if Connie died, she knew she’d look good doing it.
“Mio sangue.” Francesca gazed over her shoulder at Mira. “You’ve got the phone to record?”
Mira nodded.
“Let’s roll.”
Francesca flew down the stairs. Mira grabbed Connie by the elbow.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Mira whispered harshly, over Francesca’s footsteps echoing heavy on the stairs.
“It’s what I want.” Connie’s eyes darted over Mira’s face. “You heard me.”
“What if Francesca’s miracle doesn’t work right away?”
“Then she’ll use the pen.” Connie winced. “Why are you questioning me?”
“I want to make sure you understand what we’re doing.”
“I know the plan.”
Mira knew she was talking about the official story that they had rehearsed, one that involved overexertion, a faulty EpiPen, and a divine miracle.
“I meant the risk.”
Connie’s eyes went dark. “Who are you to talk about risk? You, who makes Francesca hide the antifreeze in the cellar so you won’t drink it? Who can’t take her temperature with a glass thermometer because she’ll bite it? Who stays back from the edge of the altar so she doesn’t hurl herself into the quarry?”
Mira swallowed hard. Connie had never spoken so harshly to her. Yet everything she said was true: she was a hypocrite.
“It could go wrong,” Mira said.
“You don’t get it,” Connie said. “I live a padded life. I can’t play sports. I don’t do gym. I can’t swim at the quarry. I’m not even supposed to have strenuous sex!”
“Connie…,” Mira murmured.
Connie touched Mira’s forehead with one polish-chipped fingernail. “Have courage, sister.”
Have courage, sister! Mira blew out a breath that shook her lips. Connie was prone to repeating anything. They’d made a cruel game of it when they were younger, one sister dropping a preposterous fact to see how long it would take Connie to repeat it to the other sister. Did you hear Louis Gentry’s mother was a former underwear model? That gypsy moth caterpillars were a plague from God that meant the world was ending? That Coach Freck was falsely accused? Who knew? Connie did! But this wasn’t simply Connie parroting Francesca. She had bought into her plan utterly. Mira had been (conveniently, now that she thought about it) doing odd jobs at Daddy’s office when Francesca had convinced Connie to allow her to test her powers by risking her life. She wondered how that conversation had gone down, and almost laughed thinking about it, it was so preposterous. She knew Francesca only had to say she needed it, and that they were blood, and that was enough.
“I want everything to turn out right,” Mira said weakly.
Connie grabbed her hand. She smelled fruity from what she’d washed her hair with, slicked on her lips, or chewed. She squeezed Mira’s hand.
“Mio sangue,” Connie said, pulling away.
Mira listened to Connie’s feet hammer, the slam of the back door followed by complete stillness, and Mira suddenly couldn’t remember if she had ever been alone in that room. She closed her eyes and inhaled Connie’s lingering scent, which now smelled of decay.
Mira snatched her coat off the bed and flew down the stairs.
* * *
It was the first week in April and the ground was hard under Mira’s bald bicycle tires. Connie, who wasn’t allowed to own a bike, clung hard to Francesca’s back, knees squeezing her waist. Though in her mind, Mira was there to protect Connie, it was Francesca she stayed close to, riding to the left of her shadow, forcing cars to pull around her first. She jumped as a pickup truck barreled past and honked. Mira had started noticing the looks when they rode their bikes, and they weren’t the looks she was used to. Only girls under the age of ten rode bikes, never mind to actually get somewhere. Mira saw them through the eyes of the drivers who passed: Francesca in her bag-lady jacket, with Connie on her back. Mira on the rickety, oldest, hand-me-down bike, the gearshift forever stuck on one. She suspected that the rules their father set—not riding in hardly anybody’s car, for one—were starting to peg the Cillo sisters as plain weird. Now with Francesca determined to prove herself a modern-day saint, Mira wondered if it wasn’t true.
Francesca braked at the blinking light where the two-lane highway spun into a rotary that contained the exit to Johnny’s Foodmaster. It was nearly rush hour, and a badly timed merge could take out all three at once. The wind was punishing, and the day’s warmth sank fast as the sun fell. They waited. Mira squeezed her arms close to her sides to keep warm as she rested her foot on the ground. Francesca tore out in a flash, and Mira hitched back up on her bike and flew into the rotary, pedaling fast to catch up. They coasted off the exit and rode around to the back lot of Johnny’s Foodmaster, chaining their bikes to the metal stand. A boy in stained white pants nodded to them as he hauled a bag to the nearby Dumpster, bringing a waft of ocean and rot. When Mira had trouble keeping her bike upright in the slats, Francesca didn’t seem to notice, staring out toward the quarry, wind whipping her hair. After she was done, Mira stepped into Francesca’s view, but found that her eyes were closed, and she was murmuring a prayer.
Francesca’s eyes flashed open. “I’m ready.”
Connie rose and fell on her toes, hands jammed into her parka. Mira looked toward the boy, and considered calling to him as the supermarket door slammed shut.
Francesca held out her palm. “The pen, please.”
Connie’s eyes flashed fear, though she made a sloppy half smile.
“We won’t need it. Mio sangue,” Connie said, swallowing hard. She dug into the small bag strapped across her body and handed the plastic bullet-shaped case filled with adrenaline to Francesca.
Francesca threw her arms around Connie’s neck. “Blood.”
Francesca let her arms fall. She pointed the EpiPen in the air, then at Mira. It glowed orange against the slate sky like a flare.
Mira frowned at the pen. “You want me to hold it?”
“You should be in charge of it, since you’re the only one who thinks we’ll need it.”
Mira turned away, her face flushed dark red, as she shoved the EpiPen into the back pocket of her jeans. She had never felt so separate from Francesca, and it hurt her, somewhere vague in her chest, an ache that she realized had been there for weeks. When she turned, they were already small, running up the steep hill that led to the scabby woods encircling the quarry. Francesca led, then Connie, her dark head bobbing as she tried to keep pace with Francesca, her scarf flapping behind like a misaligned rudder.
PART 7
Heart
NOVEMBER 2016
Below Ben, a mechanical lounger wheezed, followed by drunken fumbling noises.
“Hello?” Mr. Cillo growled, his voice thick with mucus and sleep. He cleared his throat with a hack.
From the hall, Ben couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but he could measure out the beats of his father’s greeting, laced with apologies for having woken Mr. Cillo, and Ben cringed, for he imagined they sounded wimpy. Ben’s mind flashed on every reason for his father to call his hated former boss, and none of them made any sense … unless. Unless they had somehow discovered his intention to lie about lacrosse practice and enter their neighbor’s home.
Why would his father—or mother—call Mr. Cillo?
“Well, this is a surprise.” Mr. Cillo’s voice was smoother now, alert.
Ben’s gut flinched.
“Slow down, Paul. I’ll see what I can do. No, it’s fine to ask a favor, and anyway, this is an emergency. That business: it’s not relevant. Let me call my guy at the station and I’ll see what I can do. But it’s only been four hours, you say?” Ben heard Mr. Cillo scratching around, for a notepad, perhaps. “Five feet, eleven inches? One hundred fifty pounds? He’s not seventeen yet, right? Sixteen you say? That’s good. Last seen walking alone from the indoor turf field complex place toward the Neck, around 6:35 p.m. Any idea why he might’ve left practice? Sick, okay. Listen, Paul. I’ve got to ask you this, because they’re gonna ask me. Is there any chance your boy may have run away? Because if there’s any chance, you’ve got to tell me now. Number one, this is sooner—way sooner—than they usually do these kinds of things. Number two, if they find out the kid is a runaway, and they posted an alert, there’ll be hell to pay. Not tonight or tomorrow, but later, if you ever have any problem at all: crickets. You got me? It becomes a boy-crying-wolf kind of thing…”
Ben’s knees went weak. His parents thought he’d been abducted? Suddenly it wasn’t sappy respect he imagined in his father’s voice, but terror. His chest caved in shame. He’d been so single-minded in his mission to extract the truth from Mr. Cillo that he hadn’t considered the full-on terror his parents lived in: that he was losing his marbles. They thought he’d run away, and the only way, the most efficient way they thought they would get him back was by using this man they hated.
Ben smiled.
Downstairs, thunderous steps moved across the living room into the room off the den. Exposed in the hall, Ben felt sure Mr. Cillo could hear his ragged breaths. If he ran across the living room, past the den and out the front door, Mr. Cillo would see him, plain as day. But there was no other way. He couldn’t be certain the back door off the kitchen wasn’t locked, and a struggle with a locked door wasn’t something he had time for. Ben’s heart sped as Mr. Cillo read aloud from the scrap of paper, the Facts of Ben: his height, his weight, the circumstances of his disappearance. “Color of his hair? Heck, I’m not sure. Light, blondish, like my Mira.”
(Chokes here. Faker, Ben thought)
“Parents said brown eyes. Skinny build”—
(When was the last time he even looked at me? Ben thought)
—“kind of kid a pedophile might like.”
(Takes one to know one, Ben nearly spat)
“Computer-savvy, supposedly. Could have been led by some guy online. He was one of those list kids—forget it, I’m muddling matters. Listen, the boy’s my next-door neighbor, and I know the parents. St. Theresa’s people. Good people. I know it’s early and doesn’t follow protocol, but do it, okay? As a favor for me.”
Ben’s face burned. “Good people.” That was rich. What a phony. Suddenly, Ben’s reason for being there came to him, clear and true. He would surprise the monster, confront him with his accusation, make him sweat. Because now that he was missing, he was like a ghost himself. Mr. Cillo would have no time to adopt his big-man persona, his nice-guy posing. Ben would get clear, unadulterated shock and guilt: that flicker of recognition he’d been imagining and savoring for weeks. Ben let the drug do its job, and his muscles relaxed. He walked down the stairs, slowly, staring into the den. Mr. Cillo was turned to the wall, a sweat stain pressed into his back, a bald spiral mashed into the back of his hair by the chair. He was silent, on hold while his crony on the other end did his bureaucratic missing-child thing to get the AMBER Alert started. Ben opened his mouth to speak—the phrase I know what you did on the edge of his tongue—yet Mr. Cillo remained unmoving, his back to Ben, face inches from the wall. It was an unnatural pose, and Ben cocked his head, wondering, briefly, if he’d had some sort of standing stroke, if those kinds of things existed. Then he saw the barely perceptible shake of his shoulders glued to his inelegant hump of back, made of old manly injuries. The phone stood upright in its charger. Ben placed his hand on the cold doorknob, easing it to the right with a soft click. As he stepped into the night, the note held aloft between two fingers, he was followed by a wracking sob.