We climb down to the river walk and Sam stops at one of the picnic benches by the big stone bridge and lights up a cigarette. He takes a drag and hands it to me. I can taste his lips on the filter. My cheeks grow warm. Sam clears his throat. When he speaks, his voice is frail like cigarette smoke. Whatever I originally expected him to say, this isn’t it.
“When I kissed you that night,” he says. “Did you . . . did you want me to?”
I thought he’d want to talk about Christopher. That, I’m prepared for. This is a surprise. This is a whole new set of secrets.
“It’s just . . .” Sam says. “I didn’t want to become—” He stops, backs up, starts again. “I don’t want to be like Christopher.” His eyes are more haunted than the ghost house. When he holds out the cigarette to me again, both our hands are shaking so much I almost drop it.
I push past the cloud in my throat. I say, “Of course I wanted you to.” My voice is a shadow, but I know that Sam can hear me even over the river and the rain. “Of course I did. You’re nothing like him.” My voice gets stronger. “Nothing.” When I think about his kisses, my heart speeds up and fills out. I almost wish I could tell him that.
Sam says, “I’m just . . .” And he drops his hands to his sides. Between two of my fingers, the forgotten cigarette drips ash onto the riverbank. Sam looks like a lost boy, like he’s lost in the woods and he doesn’t know how to get home. He says: “I’m just so ridiculously in love with you.” The tear in my world is getting bigger. Soon it’ll blow the whole universe apart. “I try to hide it, I try to stop it, I try to bloody kill it, but it just won’t go away.”
I shake and shake my head. I stop thinking about his kisses. I don’t look at his freckles. I don’t look at the blue streak in his dark hair. “But I’m like your sister, Sam.” I think: Stop looking at his lips. Stop seeing his hands. Stop imagining his arms around you.
“You’re not my sister.”
I’m so confused and turned around by all this that I laugh out loud. “You say I am!” I throw my hands up. The cigarette flies out of my hand and lands in the grass beside the picnic table. The rain quenches it quick. “You say I am all the time! You call me little sister, I tell you I’m not your sister, you say, If you say so, petite soeur.” I dip my head and look at him in disbelief from under my eyelashes. “It’s this whole big thing.”
Sam doesn’t laugh along with me. My smile dies slow. He looks down at the ground and says, “That’s because I have to—I try to tell myself that as much as I can.” His voice is quiet. I drop my arms and take a step closer so I can hear him. “I know I shouldn’t feel like this,” he tells me. “I know that. So I say it to remind myself. Every time I feel—” Sam breaks off and shakes his head. “Every time I want to kiss you,” he says quickly, then he sort of laughs. “Which is all the time, by the way.” His voice is strange and strangled. “Every time I want to kiss you, I tell myself you’re my little sister and I shouldn’t want that because it’s fucked-up and wrong.”
The anger in his quiet voice surprises me. “Does it work?”
Sam looks right into my eyes like he’s testing himself. “No.”
Sam is like my brother—that’s what I’m supposed to think. His bedroom is across the hall from mine. We do our homework together. My mother takes care of him when he’s sick. His father was once my stepfather, but he turned out to be a monster. I want to take a step back, tell Sam to keep trying. I want to tell him that this is wrong, that he’s wrong, that no one’d ever accept it and that I shouldn’t either. Instead, I take his hands. Sam breathes in fast like the time I let him kiss me. Like the time I kissed him. All the secrets I’m frightened of are coming out tonight, so I unglue my lips and say it.
“I’m so ridiculously in love with you too.”
I reach out and touch him, lightly, my fingertips slipping through his hair and brushing it away from his face. It falls right back down over his forehead once I take my hand away. He takes a step toward me, carefully, like he’s afraid he’ll trip in the mud. The rain touches us as softly as Sam’s hands touch me. The side of my neck, my shoulders, the length of my arms. The scrapes and bruises underneath my coat sleeves beat with blood. I know my face is flushed. In front of me, Sam’s cheeks are reddening. He puts his hands on my waist, palms wide. I run my fingers through his hair again. When I step forward, it’s deliberate. I close my eyes and tilt my head.
When we kiss, the water crashes on the rocks and the wind howls. The rain swirls around us like petals and we don’t feel the cold. Sam’s lips are warm as swimming in summer and he tastes like forever, like fire, like wild wanting, like finally finding lost things after having waited too long. His arms pull me close and my hands grab on to him like I’ll never let go and he is pressing hard against me and he is there, and real, and beautiful. There is no way I could ever not love him.
I want the kiss to last forever, but we don’t have the breath for that. I feel like I’ll never breathe properly again, like my heart’ll never stop pounding. Still kissing, we back into the shadow of the bridge. We are hidden from the road by the slope of the ground and the stone is dark above us, and we move closer to it without letting go of each other, but suddenly I stumble on the uneven ground and fall, hard, on the riverbank just underneath the bridge.
Sam falls on top of me. I let out my breath in a whoosh. He looks concerned for a second, but when he sees that I’m okay, he smiles and kisses me lightly. Without really thinking about what I’m doing, I arch up toward him and kiss him back, a lot less lightly.
Sam leans down and our bodies press together and he kisses me, again and again, harder and deeper, and the warmth of his skin burns through my clothes and his lips on mine are like fire and soon we are a different kind of breathless. I run my hands up and down his back, his hips, back up to his shoulders. My fingers tangle in his hair, my heart beats against his. Sam rolls onto his side and pulls me with him and we lie glued together like secrets, facing each other, pressing our hands through each other’s clothes. The rain falls, but we barely notice. There are rocks underneath us, but they may as well be feather beds, or the mattresses on the floor in the ghost house. We are out in the wet and the wind, but we may as well be alone at the end of the world.
We kiss like wolves, like we’re ravenous, like we’ll eat each other up. We can’t press our bodies close enough, so we shrug out of our coats and our legs tangle like bedsheets in the morning. We move against each other until Sam takes his mouth away from mine and buries his face in my neck, his breathing ragged and raw. We build up a rhythm. Sam moans low. He reaches down below the waistband of my jeans and lower, very slowly. He matches the movement of his hand to his hips and we rock like that together, his mouth at my neck, my hands in his hair, my legs tangled with his. The stones underneath us cut in through our clothes and our breath comes harder and faster and everything builds and builds like butterflies in my tummy until my whole body is filled with it and I feel like I am going to break open like a tear in the world.
I never thought that having my world blown right open would feel so goddamn good.
When we break apart, I see something move out of the corner of my eye. A flash of light at the other side of the river. Sam turns his head and he sees it too.
“Elsie?” he says, his voice uncertain.
Our eyes meet briefly and we stand up quickly. The light flashes again, then disappears. As one we run across the bridge.
The light dips and flashes ahead of us, as if someone is holding a flashlight, and we chase it straight into the clearing where Elsie hung her dream catchers, the one with the flypaper trees and the tiny Elsie-shaped doll on the mousetrap. When we reach the clearing, I drop Sam’s hand. He turns around in a circle, staring up at all the trees, but I only have eyes for the trap on the rock in the middle of the clearing.
“Cara,” Sam says.
“I know.”
In the mi
ddle of every dream catcher on every tree around the clearing, and stuck to each sheet of flypaper tacked up on the branches, there is a tiny doll. Brown-haired, dressed in denim and wool, it is unmistakably Elsie, but unlike the doll in the mousetrap, these have no faces, only blank paper skin where the eyes and nose and mouth should be.
The doll in the trap is bigger. It is one of those old-fashioned porcelain dolls, the kind with red bow lips and real eyelashes over glass eyes, but the eyes have been gouged out, the nose and lips scraped away. She still has Elsie’s mousy braided hair, and wears a shapeless tartan skirt and a white blouse. But that’s where the resemblance ends. The doll’s body has been shattered by the hunter’s trap. Porcelain pieces litter the grass around the rock. When I run to the bushes at the edge of the clearing and part the branches, I see that the tiny Elsie doll on the mousetrap has suffered the same fate. The trap has snapped the doll right across her tiny chest. Little yellow dots swim in front of my eyes.
“Cara,” Sam says again, and there is worry in his voice. He comes over to me and touches my shoulders. “What’s happened?”
“She caught it.” I don’t know if I’ve said the words aloud or if I’ve only thought them. Sam wraps his arms around me. He doesn’t understand. “She caught it,” I say again. “She caught it.”
“Caught what?”
That’s when my phone rings. At first I don’t recognize the noise, but Sam puts his hand into my coat pocket and answers the call. I can’t believe my phone’s still working after everything it’s been through. I recognize Bea’s voice, tiny and muted on the other end of the line, but I don’t hear her words. As Bea talks, Sam’s face gets paler and paler. I realize that the tone of Bea’s voice is all wrong—I can tell that even from here. She doesn’t usually speak so quickly. There is a franticness to the beat of her words, but Sam isn’t saying anything.
“What?” I say. It comes out like a scream. “What?”
Sam takes my hand and we run. We run hell for leather and like the wind, and the rain doesn’t touch us and the mud doesn’t move under our pounding feet, and all we can hear are our footfalls and heartbeats sounding together, and the ragged, choking sound of our breath. I don’t ask where we’re going; I recognize the way well enough. I don’t ask why we’re going there. I decide I don’t want to know. I don’t want to ever reach the ghost house, but we’re running too fast and soon we’re around the corner. I want to slow down, but Sam pulls me after him.
When we are almost at the gates, the noises around us change. There is the rain and the wind whipping by our flying bodies, there is the beat of our hearts and our feet keeping time, there is our breath ripping out of our lungs—and behind it all, like the backdrop to a play, there is the fire.
Bea meets us at the iron gates. In front of us, the ghost house is up in flames. Sam and I stop still, and over our ragged breathing and the sound of the fire (and who would have thought that fire could be so loud?), Bea screams that she came back to get our costumes when she smelled the smoke.
“It went up so quickly,” she cries. “I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t—” The house gives a giant shudder. One of the upstairs windows shatters. Glass rains down into the garden. I look up at the master bedroom and my heart stops beating completely. There is a face behind the drapes.
Bea says, “Alice.” We run up to the porch.
The front door is open, its hinges glowing red like devil eyes looking into nothingness and smoke. We stand as close to the house as we dare, but the flames are hip-height and flashing, and neck-height and choking, and they are everywhere and the heat is hotter than our bodies, hotter than the sun, and Alice is there in the middle of it.
“Alice!” I scream into the house. The smoke swallows my voice.
“Goddammit, Alice!” Sam yells, and he kicks the wall of the porch and a rain of sparks falls on us from above. We cover our heads with our arms and cry out.
“Alice, get out of there!” Bea screams. She is crying. All of us are crying and screaming and yelling, but we just sound like the house burning down around us.
“She probably can’t even hear us,” Sam says, and his face is ashen.
“We have to do something,” Bea whispers. “I’ve already called the fire department, but—” She breaks off and looks at me. We both know they’ll be too late. Without a word, Bea and Sam and I go into the burning house.
The walls are made of fire. The wallpaper curls and furls down like wings. Everywhere, the wood is breaking. The air is all smoke rising up into the master bedroom and we follow it like a signal that’ll lead us to Alice. The whole house is creaking and groaning, so we step carefully, like we’re trying not to walk on a loose stair, like we’re trying to be silent so no one upstairs will hear us. Like we’re afraid Alice might frighten like a fawn.
Step by step, like someone learning how to walk, we climb, and on one stair the wood gives way and my foot falls through into empty space and my heart jumps into my mouth and I screw my eyes shut and wait to fall, and Bea, who is below me, grabs the waistband of my jeans and pulls me back toward her in the tightest of hugs. Sam stops and turns and looks down through the stairs where I would’ve fallen and his eyes are wide with fear. I don’t say anything because I know we all have to continue climbing.
Bea and I step over the missing stair, holding on to Sam and each other for balance, and we make it to the landing where the smoke is thick and black. I pull the neck of my sweater up to my nose and mouth like I’ve seen people do in films. It helps make things feel more unreal, and less dangerous. The three of us inch across the burning landing and stand outside the empty doorway to the master bedroom and try to breathe.
Alice is inside. She’s still wearing her changeling dress and she’s standing before the bonfire pit, which is the only place in the house not alight. I don’t know how she’s still standing, the smoke is so thick. It has me doubled over with coughing.
“Alice!” we scream. “Alice!” But she doesn’t move. The house is moaning like it did when we danced, but this isn’t our feet on the floor, this isn’t our bodies against the walls, this isn’t our hearts thumping time. This is pain music, this is heat music, this is don’t-care music that wants to eat us up.
“Alice!” I croak the word out. “Alice, come here.” But she doesn’t hear me. Her eyes are closed and she starts swaying and stamping, and her boots set off sparks wherever she stands. Each spark lights up like paintings on the walls. They pulse with orange light in the flickering, flaming darkness like they’re alive. I can’t tear my eyes away. A wolf reaches out to Alice and I almost scream, but the fire licking up the wall shoots out and burns it to a crisp. I can hear it wail as it falls. Bea breathes hard behind me and Sam takes my hand. The fire is killing our demons, but it isn’t doing it properly. It’s doing it in a way that’ll kill us too.
I look over at the old bonfire pit and my whole body hurts with this incredible wash of sadness. I feel like it could almost quench the flames. I cough again and call her name, and Alice opens her eyes and looks straight at me, and she’s crying so hard the soot on her face has streaks down it from the tears.
I step over the threshold and go into the room. Sam and Bea move to follow me, but like in a film, a beam falls blazing across the doorway and I’m trapped inside the bedroom with Alice and the flames. Sam and Bea scream themselves hoarse behind the doorway, but they are far away, underwater, or I am. I step carefully on the heated floorboards, toward Alice.
“Cara,” she whispers. I hardly hear her over the breaking and groaning, the cracking and crackling and moaning of the dying building. I hold out my hand to help her get away, but instead of following, she pulls me deeper into the room.
From somewhere by the window there comes a great whooshing noise and a whole chunk of wall thunders to the floor. The fire sounds like the wind. It wails and screams and I can’t hear Alice when she says it, but her mouth makes the movemen
t and I understand: “Dance with me.”
I pull hard on her wrists back toward the door. “Alice, come on!” I try to shout, but my words are choked. Alice sways like she’s about to faint or maybe get away, so I grab her around the waist and pull her so she is facing the door and walk with her like that, in faltering, stumbling steps that make it feel like we are dancing to the sound of the flames, to the song of the screaming house caving in around us.
In the doorway Sam and Bea hold hands and cry, and the tears they watch us through burn brighter than the fire. I can almost see us reflected in them like in a kaleidoscope, like a disco ball turning and turning around the empty bonfire pit with the rest of the bedroom burning.
I am trying to run, but it feels like I’m underwater, Alice a dead weight pulling me down. The bedroom has never seemed so big. In my arms, Alice flickers and switches. She is beaked, she has wings, a tail. She is a tree, a mountain, a park bench. She’s made of wood and of fire and I know that in her arms I’m flickering too; I can feel it, the shiver up my spine, the crawling of insects, the pain like needles that soon becomes too much for me to bear, and I open my mouth and scream louder than I’ve ever screamed and the house screams with me.
The ceiling caves in. It sends a hail of fiery beams down over us, hitting our heads and our backs like it’s doing it on purpose. I lose my grip on Alice and she falls to the floor. In the middle of the bedroom, in the middle of the darkened pit, a fire starts up, lit by the plaster of the ceiling and the ghosts of the attic and the choking smoke. It burns white. It roars. It opens the house up like a mouth.
Alice’s hand reaches toward me in the fiery darkness and I grab it and run toward the door, half on my feet, half on my knees, when the house starts shaking like an earthquake. Sam is retching in the doorway, bent double, hands on his knees. Bea pulls him up and out of the way as Alice and I leap over the burning beam and burst through to the landing, bringing the flames with us in our clothes and on our skin.
The Accident Season Page 20