Tessa moves a step closer. She can see clearly what to look for now that she understands.
Deirdre is tending graves.
Growth patterns on the earth mark the differences, and Deirdre’s hands work at a section at the head of each plot, uncovering a rectangular marker that lies flush upon the ground.
“This is where the family was laid to rest?” she asks.
Deirdre nods. “Mr. Ashwood,” she says, “your grandfather, was Mr. Cooke’s business partner. There was no family to speak of on either side. None who cared to make themselves known, at least. Money might have brought a few distant relations out of the woodwork, but the Cooke estate was held in trust for your mother.”
Deirdre’s hands are slow but steady as she clears away the unobtrusive headstone.
“Burying them on the property was his decision, but Mam agreed. Placing them in a town cemetery would invite the morbid to come and gawk. She chose this place. It was one of her favorites. And I think she chose well. The gravestones were paid for by the trust.”
Deirdre stops to massage one hand gently with the other.
“Would you like me to—”
“No,” Deirdre says, waving her away, though not unkindly. “This has always been my duty, though I don’t come here as often as I should. One day, perhaps, it will be yours. That depends on what you and your sister decide. Until then, I can manage.”
She places another handful of roses on the ground, then runs a hand gently along the marker of the grave.
With a sigh, Deirdre struggles to her feet. Tessa is tempted to offer her support but suspects she’d be waved away again.
For the first time since she’s arrived, Deirdre turns her attention fully on Tessa. She pulls the edges of her sweater tightly around her bony frame.
“There’s something you need to know about Kitty, Ms. Shepherd.” Her tone is stern, reminiscent of the woman Tessa has come to expect.
“My sister lives in a world of her own creation. It’s not her fault, I suppose. My mother encouraged her when she was younger. It was harmless, I thought. A shared fantasy that helped them both to cope. But age has loosened her hold on reality.”
Tessa frowns, unsure where this is leading.
Deirdre raises a hand and gestures for Tessa to come closer. Tessa hesitates, but after a moment, she does, careful where she places her feet. She doesn’t want to tread upon anything she shouldn’t.
Closing the distance between them, Tessa stops at Deirdre’s side. The older woman is less fearsome up close, her eyes full of knowledge and regret.
“Look,” she says, pointing a hand toward the gravestone at their feet.
Tessa’s eyes widen as understanding crashes down upon her, upending the peace she’s gathered in this quiet, lovely place and scattering it on the breeze. Disbelieving, her gaze combs across the markers Deirdre has cleared and the ones she hasn’t.
There are six. Tessa does the math. Five members of the Cooke family. And the grave they stand in front of.
Aiden Donnelly.
Tessa stares. Her eyes read over the inscription, followed by the dates of his birth and death. A great many things become clear at once, and just as many new questions arise.
“He died . . .” Tessa looks to the grave closest.
Ruby Cooke. Beloved daughter.
Ruby was born on March 3, 1933. Her date of death was May 22, 1950.
“He died before the year was out,” Deirdre says.
September 1950. He’d only just turned eighteen.
“But Kitty said . . . the merchant marines. I don’t understand. Was there an accident?”
Deirdre shakes her head, a deep furrow in her brow. “No,” she says.
“But . . .”
Tessa trails off when the older woman grimaces. Her eyes flutter closed and Tessa notes the blue tint of her paper-thin eyelids. She sways slightly on her feet, and Tessa reaches to support her, alarmed.
“I’m sorry,” Deirdre says. “I think I need to rest. Would you mind walking me back?”
“Of course,” Tessa murmurs, alarmed by how pale the other woman has become. Tessa hooks her free hand beneath the handle of the basket of roses, and the pair of them slowly make their way back to the path through the woods.
Tessa doesn’t press her, but she can’t stop the runaway train of her thoughts. After a moment, Deirdre speaks, though she doesn’t loosen her hold on Tessa’s arm.
“There were no merchant marines,” she says. “Aiden never left here.”
Tessa studies her, but Deirdre keeps her eyes determinedly forward.
“It broke Mam’s heart when he died. Kitty’s too. I’m not sure who started it. Mam, most likely. A game of pretend, born out of grief and despair. Then there were postcards, with cheerful messages written in Mam’s hand. They were never postmarked, but neither of them mentioned that. In their minds, at least, Aiden lived on.”
Tessa tries to imagine it. Deirdre as a girl, a bystander as her mother and her sister shared a fantasy that didn’t allow her to grieve for the brother she lost.
“That must have been so hard for you,” she says. Deirdre glances at her, surprised, then shrugs.
“It made them happy, and I tried not to hold that against them. I even played along. It may not have been real, but for Mam and Kitty, together in their shared delusion, it felt real. I suppose that was enough.”
She sighs.
“After Mam passed, talk of Aiden died with her. I didn’t have the heart to play their game anymore. Not with Mam gone. Kitty and I were grown women by then, but Mam . . . she lived a great many years after Aiden died, but I don’t think she ever really recovered from his death. It was a relief when Kitty let him go. Enough time passed and the stories about Aiden and his grand adventures faded and began to feel like childhood dreams.”
Deirdre stops. They’re nearing the edge of the forest now, and Tessa can see the point ahead where the path will take them out. Fallbrook, and the Donnellys’ fairy-book cottage wait on the other side of those trees.
“Nearly a year ago,” Deirdre continues, “and much to my surprise, Aiden returned.”
Tessa frowns. She considers the implications of everything Deirdre is saying and all that she’s not.
“Has there been an official diagnosis?” Tessa asks carefully.
Deirdre gives her a half smile, one that seems to say Tessa will understand one day. When the time comes.
“No,” she says. “To what end? I’ve learned to play along again, and Kitty’s happy. At least, she was.”
“Until I showed up,” Tessa says, completing the sentence.
Deirdre nods. “Yes.”
There’s no judgment in the word, no sense that Deirdre blames Tessa for something she couldn’t have known or predicted, but Tessa feels the responsibility settle on her shoulders all the same.
“Mam suffered with dementia, too, in her last few years. I recognized the signs in Kitty when they began. Stories about our brother are one thing, but when she started to see more than just Aiden, I had to face the truth.”
“I’m so sorry,” Tessa says. “That must be a terrible burden.”
Deirdre waves off the sympathy. “There are worse things. Kitty mostly remembers what she wants, and I let her. At this point, my one goal is to protect my sister from her own failing mind.”
“And now she wants me to make a movie to prove her brother innocent of a crime that no one believes he committed.”
Deirdre raises her brows again. “You misunderstand,” she says. “Aiden’s death was no accident. He took his own life.”
Tessa pulls in a sharp breath. Deirdre watches as her words sink in.
“By that time, Lawrence Pynchon had died in jail,” she continues quietly. “The police were convinced they’d gotten their man. And even if they hadn’t, no one was going to continue investigating a crime in which all the possible suspects were dead. But that didn’t stop the locals from speculating.”
“So Kitty wants h
is name cleared for good reason,” Tessa says.
“Oh yes. I, on the other hand, can think of no bigger disaster than an attempt to prove Aiden’s innocence. People said he killed himself because he couldn’t live with what he’d done.”
“Are you saying . . . ?” Tessa can barely fathom it. Aiden was her brother.
“I’m saying I believe they were right.”
Deirdre drops her hand from Tessa’s arm. She’s recovered some of her strength, and her color has returned to normal. She walks a few steps forward, then turns back to speak again.
“My brother is dead, Ms. Shepherd. He has been for a long time. Truth and lies make no difference to him. The world has forgotten he existed. But for Kitty . . . I think the truth might destroy her.”
35
Tessa stares at the black marks she made on the parlor wall. Little lines, scribbles, that add up to nothing. Questions she has no business asking.
A useless exercise in futility.
She’s wasting her time. She’s wasting Margot’s time. Worse, she’s waltzed into the lives of two elderly women who lived through a horrifically traumatic event and stirred up painful memories best left dead and buried.
Tessa stands on the chair she scooted next to the wall when she was still telling herself she wasn’t planning to make a documentary about Fallbrook.
She was lying. The story is a lifeline, one she’s desperate to hold on to. Margot had Ben. Margot had Mom. Tessa, alone in the city, had only her work.
Without it, there’s nothing left, and in that empty space, the anxiety will grow unchecked. Meds help to keep it at bay. Therapy has taught her coping skills. But Tessa never forgets. She can’t. It’s a patient little monster, waiting and watching for her to drop her guard.
She can feel it now, the panic she’s been fighting since she clicked on the link to Oliver’s first video. Since she opened the door to find Margot at her apartment. Since watching her mother lowered into the ground.
Tessa grabs one peeling corner of faded wallpaper. With a sweeping slash of her hand, she rips it from the wall.
Little worries will grow, until they take up so much space in her head there’s no room left for rational thought. An article about faulty engineering will leave her unable to drive across bridges without breaking into a trembling sweat. A recall on one type of produce, and she can’t purchase food that might have been shipped on the same truck. Statistics about pedestrian fatalities will keep her locked into one city block.
Eventually, her world will shrink to the space of her apartment. Four walls. Four silent walls. No television, no internet. The risk of hearing about world leaders edging closer to a renewed nuclear arms race, endangering even the tiny space she has left, is too great.
She grabs another curling edge of the ancient rose paper and yanks, tearing across the space with her arm.
The fear will grow bigger. It will grow vicious, gnashing teeth, and Tessa will grow smaller, until finally, desperate and alone, she’ll crawl out of the bathroom where she’s been hiding in the tub and find her phone. She’ll dial the number for the one person who can make her feel real again.
But Margot won’t answer.
Tessa rips down the roses with both hands now. She rips, and she rips again, until the ground around the chair is littered with piles of moldy, shredded paper.
She stands, her chest heaving, and stares at the barren, termite-eaten boards she’s exposed.
Tessa’s hands come to her mouth, pressing to hold back the fear, and her face crumples. She slides downward into a heap.
Panic is building like a cyclone, bringing her thoughts around to the same place in ever-widening circles.
She’s afraid. She’s afraid of emptiness. She’s afraid of fear. She’s afraid of fear eating away at her life, the way it did before.
Somewhere inside the swirling chaos, Tessa forces her arms up to protect herself.
Time passes, but she doesn’t know how much. Minutes? Hours? A lifetime?
Tears fall, and Tessa shakes, and a little voice, a voice that might be her own, struggles to be heard.
“Breathe,” the voice says. “Deep, deep breaths from the center. In and out.”
One. Two. Three.
“I am afraid.” The words form on her lips in a weak, shaky whisper. “But I am not in danger.”
Breathe again, between the choking sobs.
Once. Twice. Three times.
“Fighting feeds the fear. Accept the fear. This too will pass.”
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
“I am afraid, but I am not in danger.”
Tessa knows where this can lead but pushes back, hard, at the thought.
Once before, she went all the way down, a descent that spiraled out of control, free-falling faster than she ever had before. She didn’t understand what was happening. She had no room for understanding, no room for anything except the fear. It was everywhere, in every thought. It overtook her senses until there was nothing else left.
Almost nothing. There, in the abyss, she had one last hope. Margot.
Somehow, in the midst of her panic, she managed to reach her phone. With shaking hands, and a desperation she never felt before, she reached out to her sister.
The call rang and it rang. There was no one at the other end of the line. Her phone fell from her hand and clattered on the bathroom floor, lying useless as Tessa fell farther into the darkness.
In real time, less than an hour passed after she dropped her phone. In Tessa’s mind, the minutes turned to lifetimes.
They were the bleakest moments of her life.
And then the phone rang. Tessa grasped it for the lifeline it was, and Ben’s voice was there, a connection to her past, to her present, to her everything.
“Tessa?” he asked.
She doesn’t know if he could make out any of the words that tumbled from her lips between the sobs and the pounding, pulsing anxiety. She doesn’t know where he told Margot he was going.
But she knows he was at her door before the night was through.
She holds tight to the thought of Ben, who dropped everything and came to help her when she needed him.
“Fighting feeds the fear. Accept the fear. This too shall pass.”
Her last real descent was so long ago. She had bad days, of course, but none so bad as that. She collected the clear days like badges of honor. Thirty days, one year, ten. She holds those numbers tightly, as if they can protect her, but they can’t.
But this time, Tessa is prepared. She won’t let the fear take her all the way down. She fights against it with all the weapons she’s collected since that terrible day. She repeats the words, breathes deeply between them. More time passes. More breaths.
She channels her thoughts to calm. She rides the waves of anxiety until, at last, they begin to recede.
Weak now, as exhausted as if she’s run for miles, Tessa sits with her arms around her knees, her head resting on top of them. She’s shaky, she’s wrung out, but the worst of the storm has passed, and she begins to feel a little bit like herself again. Her edges are slowly coming back into focus.
She opens her eyes, surveys the damage spread around her.
Once rational thought returns, Tessa can see what she refused to see before.
Margot’s right. Tessa shouldn’t be here. This place belongs in the past. It doesn’t have to be sold—they can simply walk away and leave all the arrangements in place, just like Mom did.
The ground will eventually swallow Fallbrook whole, and Kitty and Deirdre can live out the remainder of their lives on money from the trust.
Tessa forces herself to her feet. She sways a bit on shaky legs, and places a hand against the wall for support.
She won’t hide any longer.
It’s time to deal head-on with the consequences of the mistakes she’s made, no matter what that brings.
Tessa walks to the door of the parlor. She places a hand on the doorknob and throws one last look over her shoul
der.
It’s time to leave this place.
Tessa turns back to the door, rotates the knob, and pulls.
Nothing happens.
She frowns and places both hands on the doorknob, bracing her legs like she did when the front door was stuck.
She pulls again.
Still nothing.
Finally, she stops, staring with wide eyes at the barrier between herself and the outside world.
She doesn’t want to believe it. It makes no sense.
But she can’t hide from the facts.
The door to the parlor isn’t stuck.
Someone has locked her inside.
36
KITTY
Kitty is trapped, locked inside her own head with the terrible, unwanted suspicions.
“You can’t trust her, you know.” Aiden is skipping rocks across the brown-and-green surface of the pond.
“Don’t talk like that,” Kitty says. “She’s our sister.”
Aiden shrugs. “That doesn’t mean she can’t lie. Dee can lie with the best of them, Kitty.”
She frowns. She hates it when he’s like this. It makes her feel disloyal, pulled in two directions at once, with no way to please anyone.
“That’s not fair,” Kitty whispers. “You never told me about Ruby.”
Aiden turns to her, surprise widening his eyes.
“You knew about Ruby,” he says. “Everyone knew! I loved her as long as I can remember.” He turns back to the pond and sends another rock flying. His voice is soft when he continues. “It was the best day of my life when I realized she felt the same.”
“That’s not the way I remember it,” Kitty scoffs, angry for his sake, even if he can’t dredge up any anger for himself.
“It was, Kitty cat. It was beautiful. While it lasted.”
She stands, dumping the rocks she’s been collecting for him on the ground as she does.
“And how long was that, Aiden? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”
He doesn’t look at her. Instead, he tosses his last rock into the pond. It sinks to the bottom with a hollow plunk.
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