Jonah stops. He’s spotted the boys. He looks so intently at Danny’s back in the pink sweatshirt that I think his eyes will burst. He doesn’t seem to notice the rain soaking his own head and dripping down his face.
When Connor starts to walk toward the office with his wooden-leaf key, Jonah hurries to the van and climbs in as quietly as he can, moving carefully not to attract any attention. Connor walks past the spilled spoons and past Jonah’s van — he looks so casual — and drops his key in the slot of the office door. When Connor passes, Jonah crouches behind the wheel and watches Danny’s pink huddled back.
Now Connor and Danny climb into their car and slam the doors. Danny always keeps his head facing away, but somehow also keeps showing the mouse in his hand. Either holding it up against a window or balancing it on the dashboard in front of him. As Connor pulls their car out of the lot, Jonah starts the van, and I curl into my usual ball and hold my breath.
The van rocks and jerks around the lot until it’s on smooth road again. I peek up now and see that we’re following Connor and Danny’s car. I’m so excited that our plan is working that I want to whoop out loud. I cuddle myself and push my smile into my arms.
The rain pours down and the van’s windshield wipers flip back and forth so fast I think they might break off. We drive for a long time, heading northwest, inland, away from Beachport. I keep waiting for Jonah to give up and turn for the border, but for now he keeps following.
The countryside is beautiful, with lots of lakes and long forests of pine trees. Because of the warm air and rain, everything is freshly green.
Now we drive on smaller roads and the rain shines and polishes them. The cars turn many times here and there, sometimes crossing bridges over rivers and brooks. I wonder if Jonah will follow them all the way to the party, if he’ll confront huge men and demand my return. I want to believe it can all be very funny and useless and that he’ll leave without trouble.
We pass through a covered bridge and I stop myself from imagining trolls and treachery. I notice now that Jonah’s anger has begun to color him. The back of his neck is fired up. His breath has started to snort in and out like a running dog. His shoulders are tight, pulling up higher toward his ears. The sound of the windshield wipers scratching the glass — scritch-scritch, scritch-scritch — starts to make me sick.
And then Connor’s car swerves. Just a small wave on the road, weaving to the left lane and curving back into the right. When Jonah’s van hits the same patch, it swerves too, his swerve feeling much wider. More dangerous.
Gravity wants to tip me over, but I tense my muscles to keep myself and the box upright. The car brakes and accelerates and I realize Jonah’s confusion prevents him from knowing which to do.
Just as Connor’s car is about to cross a narrow bridge, Jonah swerves and brakes and accelerates again. The jolting movement knocks me into the side of the cardboard — this time hard enough to make a sound.
Before I can be afraid of that sound, I feel a punch reverberate through Jonah’s van — we’ve hit Connor’s car.
I find the peephole again so I can see what’s happening. Jonah’s car slides over the glassy road, swerving crazily, away from them, toward them. The van skids forward more quickly than Connor is driving.
Despair burns through me like tinder. How could I have let Connor and Danny help me? How could I have forgotten what happens to every innocent thing that crosses Jonah’s path? Like every last one of us, Jonah only wants to survive. Like me, I’m shocked to know, he’ll do anything for it.
The bumpers of both vehicles crunch together and apart. Connor’s car swerves wider this time and skids too. I bump side to side, and every muscle in my body contracts and tenses to hold me and the box upright.
Connor tries to accelerate his car away. But the nose of Jonah’s van is stuck to their bumper. Both cars skid, zigzagging to one side of the road, then the other. The cars are clamped together, a thundering train. It’s impossible to tell if Connor’s car is pulling the train or if Jonah’s is pushing.
Staring hard through the windshield, Jonah grunts and moans. His face and neck burn red. His hands are ice-white, blue veins pop-ping up like sailor’s rope tying them to the steering wheel.
I ache to cry out. To warn him. But I also want to hide myself from the next swerve, from the one after that, from the one that finishes us all.
The sound of tires braking on the slippery road is a terrible scream. I tense my whole body, ready to scream too. The cars swerve again, this time off the road and over the gravel on the side. Now the van jitters over each tiny bump, shaking my head, hurting my skin. I try to hold my breath but it puffs from my mouth.
Then, as if it was going there all along, as if it’s the only way to stop, Connor’s car smashes into a concrete pillar that holds the bridge. The force separates the two vehicles, and Jonah is able to steer his van across the lane. But Connor’s car keeps twisting. It bounces off the pillar and veers sideways. It slides and turns toward the embankment. It skids right to the edge of the bridge.
Now the back end dips over the bank and the front end flips up into the air. The car teeters back and forth for so many horrible seconds.
I want to reach out, sure I have the power to pull it back. But that power never comes.
Connor’s car teeters one last time, then starts to slide over the embankment under the bridge.
No sound comes out of my mouth.
Jonah hits the brakes, this time hard enough to knock me over.
And everything slows down.
Before I fall I see Connor’s car slide backwards down the ditch. I see that it’s a long way down and there is a fast river frothing at the bottom.
It’s as if I can feel Connor and Danny’s unbelieving shock in my own body. I am their terror.
So slow it could be a leaf unfurling, the car slides toward the river. No doors fly open. No windows roll down. No arms of boys come out from the sliding car. No Danny. No Connor. No Danny.
The back end hits the water, the trunk dips into it, broken metal plunges into the furious waves. And that’s all I see because my fall is over too. My head hits an old fuel pump and pain echoes through my whole body.
Just before my eyes close, I hear Jonah’s voice. “No.” A groan. Agony. “No no no no no no.” He opens the van door and gets out. My eyes close, my ears close, I am in darkness.
When I open my eyes, I don’t know where I am. There are voices talking a long way away.
“What was the purpose of your trip, Mr. Hubb?”
“Our ferry to Founder’s Island broke down. Lots of people stranded. Had to pick up fuel lines in Portland.”
“All right. Have a safe trip.”
The sound and feel of the van accelerating.
Between my legs, my pants are soaked. My head aches so much, it feels like it’s draining away. My hand goes to it. When I look at my fingers, they’re covered with dark, sticky blood. I lie down again and close my eyes. I wait for my body to die.
I’m disappointed when my eyes open again. I don’t want to run any-more, don’t want anyone to come and save me, don’t want to kill Jonah. Just want to sleep and sleep forever.
Every time the van stops, it wakes me up again and disappoints me.
It’s very dark around me. Jonah isn’t in the van anymore.
The clang and creak of another, bigger engine starts up. There’s a drone and rumble of something huge underneath and around us. We’re on the move again.
The van sways, and I’m swayed with it. A giant metal cradle. A lullaby of rumbling and groaning. The smell of eggs fried too long — diesel fuel.
The ferry back to the island.
I wonder what Jonah said to the islanders before he left. What lies he’ll tell them now. Gemma ran away. I need to go find her. My beloved daughter is missing. I’ve done everything I can. She’s gone. She’s gone. Everyone mourning for me. Gemma is gone. We did everything we could to find her. Poor Jonah. Poor, poor Jonah.
I think about my mother. The lies she was forced to believe. Or forced to make up to accept me being gone. For so many years. Sixteen.
How can anyone fix that?
And then I remember: she has a name. Shannon Birkshire.
She has a strong face and dark brown hair and gray eyes.
In all the years I imagined her, I never got her right.
And there is a father. A real one. Kevin. A doctor. Someone who makes people better.
There is a brother.
Now I know exactly where they are: on a spot on the earth as clear and steady as a compass point.
I feel the ferry bump up against the pier markers in Keele’s Land-ing. I don’t know how late it is, but it’s very dark out. The sun would have set just before 9:00 p.m. If it’s this dark now, it’s much later. The time of night when islanders will have been in bed for a long while.
For the first time since I left, I let myself think about Peg. I remember her profile on the stretcher at the hospital. How still she was. The slight tightening of her fingers around the stretcher bars. Her slight fingers touching my wrist and cheek.
I hear Jonah climb back into the van and drive it off. On land, he gets out, closes the ferry gates, and gets back into the van. Even though I know it’s too late, even though I’m too tired to care or wish for it, something in me still waits, waits for people to come running from houses, for them to call after us, calling for me. But the only sound is the crunch of the gravel under the van tires as it winds over the narrow road up to the keeper’s house.
The van finally slows to a stop. Still my bloody head rests on the old fuel pump. Still I can’t think of moving or of choosing a place to move to. But when Jonah leaves the van and I’m left alone wrapped in the overturned cardboard box, preserved in my own sticky blood and drying pants, as the engine ticks somewhere in the van, ticking down seconds, I know that I need to get up.
My body does the work for me: turning over and reaching up, pressing out of the box, turning the door handle, pushing the door.
By reflex, I breathe in the blissful cool island air. The smells I know so well and love with all my heart. The salt, the trees, the bushes, the dirt. Everything with its own smell, unique and pure.
The house is still repulsive to me, but I draw close to a lighted window, like a dying moth.
Inside, I see Jonah shaking Marlie from sleep on the living room couch. Marlie leans up quickly and rubs her eyes. Then she stands and puts both her hands on Jonah’s chest — she’s asking him something, begging him. He has a sad frown on his face, and he shakes his head very solemnly. With grave slowness, he pulls her cellphone from his coat pocket and hands it back to her. She doesn’t take it but slaps a hand over her mouth, so Jonah puts the phone down on the coffee table. When he straightens and looks at her again, Marlie throws her arms around him and burrows her head in his shoulder.
Am I dead to them, or am I impossible to find?
I can tell from the tremors in Marlie’s back that she’s crying. Crying as hard as I think I should cry, as hard as I wish I could cry.
From Jonah’s coat pocket, left behind when he took out the phone, two ribbon loops stick out — the same loops that decorate the shiny bag from the Beachport jewelers. The old crushed bag with a diamond ring inside.
My body walks me down the path to the lighthouse. It is so dark, but I know every curve of the path. Every turn. Every rock. The closer I get to the cliffs, the more the sea mist thickens.
Once again, fog settles over the woods.
When I arrive at the clearing at the end of the path, the lighthouse gives a bright wave through the darkened clouds. I go toward the light, trying not to think about the hole that Biscuit started and what it covers. Instead, I walk around it and go right to the lighthouse door.
I don’t turn on the fluorescents when I’m inside, but close the door tight.
And even though I don’t bid it, a sound begins to grow around me like nothing I’ve ever heard before. An animal roaring and a siren blaring. It echoes all over the tower. Not just me screaming but someone else too.
When nothing is left of the scream but its echo, I make my way to the ladders.
Squares of faded light from the windows guide me up. One rung after another, climbing higher, in and out through shadows.
For the first time I see it is a darkhouse, not a light one.
At the top, I push the door open against the wind and crawl out. I know the view is going to take my breath away; already the breath is leaving my mouth.
Outside, the sun peers over the edge of the horizon and turns the fog around the lighthouse into pink gauze. If ever there’s a time to step out on the clouds and walk away, this is it. I won’t ever have to see anyone again. Won’t have to pretend and make up stories for Peg and Scotty. Won’t have to decide what story to tell Marlie. Won’t have to pass through air that someone has made poisonous with lies. Won’t have to face the keeper.
I climb up onto the rail and swing my feet over the ocean. The wind tugs me this way and that, the fog twists itself around me.
Just one step and I could be on the clouds. One step and I could be standing on fog, light as air, bright as light.
Time keeps changing the way everything looks. Aidie’s voice sounds so sweet. I turn, and there she is, sitting beside me on the rail. She’s not at all angry or sad. She’s so small.
“Where did you go?”
The rising sun starts to dissolve the fog. A ray of light pierces through and creates a prism on her luminous skin.
Everything is always changing, she says.
I want to throw my arms around her. “I missed you so much.”
Tell me how I got here.
I want to hold her so close that we’ll never come apart. “I thought you were gone forever.”
Tell me. How did he do it?
“Let’s not talk about it, Aidie. Let’s just be together.”
You read his journals in the cave.
“I didn’t.”
You saw the experiment when you were ripping it down.
“I don’t remember.”
We were four months old.
“Please, Aidie. It’s not important.”
He watched her marry someone else, watched their happiness, watched her get pregnant.
“She said hello a few times. She smiled at him. She didn’t really know him.”
Once, when he was a boy, she called him a natural scientist.
“He invented a singular experiment to impress her.”
He left his home in June, right after we were born, so no one would suspect him later. He collected everything he needed to take care of us. He found the island.
“They needed a lightkeeper.”
In late October, just before the winter freeze, he went back to Beachport, crept into our house, and stole us from our cribs.
“Stop, Aidie.”
He fed us cough syrup to keep us asleep, put us in baby seats, and hid us in the back of his van.
“Under cardboard boxes punctured with holes.”
“What were we,” he wrote, “but barely developed creatures with flexible behaviors.”
“The maternal bond was weak.”
We wouldn’t miss her.
“We hardly knew her.”
The islanders accepted his wish to keep to himself.
“They didn’t know. How could they know?”
He spent the winter preparing us.
“We ate together, slept together, grew together.”
He taught us to take care of each other. Feed each other. Comfort each other. Reward systems and punishments. Our bond had to be strong. We had to evolve as a pair.
“He was going to take us back when he proved it could work. When our mother would recognize the greatness of his work.”
He loved our mother. That might be true.
“But you got sick.”
In June, just after their first year, Subject A. expired.
Those were the
words he used.
“The birthday he gave me wasn’t the day we were born, but the day you died.”
Afterward, he told the islanders that he had to rescue his only child. He left with you, hidden, and was gone for a week. Before he came back, he scratched and clawed his own face, and told everyone a crazy woman had done it.
“He wouldn’t let Peg dress the wounds.”
Everyone was so smitten with you.
A realization settles in. A cloud. “’The other didn’t do her part,’” I say. “That’s what he wrote in his journal. ‘She didn’t save her sister.’” I shiver in the cold wind. “I didn’t do my part, Aidie. I didn’t save you.”
Aidie and I look at each other for a long time. I grasp and pull on tears so she won’t see them.
Who is Lindsay?
I don’t say anything.
Who is Leah?
I shake my head.
Aidie stretches her arms like she’s waking from a long, satisfying nap. He plucked silver birds off ears. Lindsay or Leah whispered to the birds to fly away. Only one silver bird had the courage to leave and it fluttered all the way to the windowsill. Its silver wings were so heavy, it had to throw itself into the mysterious sky. But it only landed in the grass below. And the perilous journey so exhausted it that it couldn’t move anymore. So the silver bird hid in the grass until one day it could sparkle up at a tourist who rescued it and gave it back to its rightful owner. Aidie stands up and balances very carefully on the rail. And now that the story is over, we get to live happily ever after.
“You’re making that last part up. We never imagine anything right, Aidie, so don’t hold your breath.”
I am holding my breath. She flaps her arms and pretends she can fly.
“Stop!” I yell. “You’ll fall!”
So will you, she says and takes two small steps, one foot balancing in front of the other like a tightrope walker. She whispers something under her breath that I can’t hear. When I lean in, she says, Should I do it? She turns to face the ocean and reaches a pointed foot over the rail.
The Darkhouse Page 19