In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  “Nope,” I said. I had that feeling again, the uncomfortable buzz I get when I accidentally reveal how different my life was from almost everybody else’s. Not that Luke’s childhood was all fun and games. But I held my ground, didn’t backpedal with a Well, maybe, a long time ago. Luke was way too smart for that. “Never.”

  “Wanna do one with me?” I remember thinking that he looked so childishly eager, so happy. I thought about the bruise on his shoulder, that lock on his door, his days spent at Fieldcrest. And I thought: It’s harmless. Why not?

  But maybe, even then, it was more than that. He was leveling a dare, and I was childish enough, competitive enough, to take it. I wanted to play his games. But more than that, I wanted to win. No. I wanted to beat Luke. I know. It’s sad and terribly irresponsible when the adults act like children. But we’re not so far from that place, most of us. Most of us grow up very slowly.

  “Sure,” I said. “When do we start?”

  “Soon,” he said. And then he did something strange. He walked around the table and hugged me. It was soft and sweet, but I sat frozen a minute, not sure of what to do. I wouldn’t say I’m the most affectionate person in the world. In fact, physical contact makes me pretty uncomfortable. I fought not to pull back, and then finally closed my arms awkwardly around him.

  6

  When I got back to the dorm, I knew something was wrong before I entered my room. The door stood ajar, and I could hear voices within. There had been a lot of chatter around the espresso machine when I entered the lobby—which was normal. But a silence seemed to fall as I entered. And girls who ordinarily wouldn’t have given me a second glance looked at me strangely.

  Standing inside our suite, there were two uniformed officers, and two other official-looking adults standing near the fireplace. Ainsley was sitting on the couch, crying. Our dorm mom, Margie, who had been responsible for taking care of Evangeline girls for twenty-five years, was there. I’ve seen it all, girls, she said every year at orientation. So don’t bother trying to pull one over. No room parties. No overnight guests in your room. No booze. No pot. There’s no curfew, but if you’re expected, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let someone know where you are. We all like to think we’re safe here, and usually we are. But things happen, as we all know.

  Margie, fit, lean, and pushing sixty, wore a deep scowl. Elizabeth had been an Evangeline girl. Some people said that she wasn’t over Elizabeth’s death, was in therapy in order to move on from the responsibility she felt. Of course, we all knew there was nothing Margie could have done. It was an accident, a terrible accident. Or so it had been ruled, nearly a year after Elizabeth’s death.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  Everyone turned to look at me, and then Ainsley looked away. I recognized the heavyset, balding man as one of the detectives who had worked Elizabeth’s case. He had a bearish quality, a warm smile, but bright, analytical eyes. Everyone thinks bears are so cute, but their claws can easily dismantle a human body. They were always watching, those eyes, drinking in details, making connections.

  “Beck didn’t show up for class today,” Ainsley said into her tissues. I sank onto the couch beside her. “She hasn’t come back to the room.”

  I offered a slow shrug. “Beck has skipped class before,” I said. I ignored a rise of worry, of guilt. I shouldn’t have left her. “This is not a new thing.”

  “We found her bag in the trees by the path that leads from the library,” said the detective. He walked over to me and offered me his hand, which I took. His grip was hard and firm—I mean, of course it was. It wouldn’t be wet and limp, would it? Not this guy. Even though he was balding and had an impressive paunch, there was still a kind of power that radiated from him.

  “Detective Chuck Ferrigno,” he said. “Lead detective for The Hollows PD. Maybe you remember me? You’re Lana Granger, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I do remember you, sir.”

  He gave me a warm smile. “Are you okay?”

  “You found her bag?” I asked.

  He nodded. “What time did you leave the library?”

  “Around nine or ten,” I said. I thought hard, trying to remember the exact time. “Nine-thirty, I guess.”

  “And where did you go after that?” I felt the heat of everybody’s eyes on me. It was the thing I hated most, being the center of attention. I wanted to sink down into myself and I realized that I was slouching horribly. I forced myself to sit up straight.

  “You went together and were supposed to leave together, though. That’s what Ainsley told us.”

  “Right. But I wasn’t feeling well.” I really didn’t want to lie, but I had already lied to Ainsley.

  “And where did you go after that?”

  “I came right home and got into bed.” I felt Ainsley turn her head to look at me.

  “What time was that?” he asked.

  “About nine forty-five.”

  “Is that about right, Ainsley?” asked the detective.

  “I was in my room studying, and I had my headphones on,” said Ainsley. I saw her foot start to twitch. I saw the detective notice it, too. “I didn’t hear her come in.”

  The detective was scribbling in a little notepad, which struck me as kind of old school and made me think of Beck. Some people just don’t want to give up the pen and paper thing, the analog experience.

  There were a few more questions, which I heard through a kind of mental fog. Was Beck seeing anyone? Not that we knew of. Was she having a problem with anyone? No. Had she mentioned being afraid of anyone? Had she seemed depressed? No. Nothing more than the typical angst.

  “Her parents are divorcing,” Ainsley chimed in. “She’s pretty upset about that.”

  But that was news to me. It was kind of a big deal. That she hadn’t confided in me underscored the space that had opened between us lately. She’d told Ainsley but not me. A little flame of jealousy flickered inside.

  I thought about Beck’s bag sitting out there all night, my mind searching for some logical, harmless reason that her bag with all her notebooks, her laptop, probably her cell phone, would have been cast to the side of the path. I couldn’t come up with one.

  When he was done with his questions, the detective and the other officers in the room left. But not before he paused in the doorway and said, “So, Lana, how are you feeling now?”

  “Better,” I said. “I think I was just overtired.”

  “Good,” he said as he closed the door.

  When they’d gone, I turned to look at Ainsley, who was watching me strangely.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. And then she started to cry. I should have moved over to her and held on tight. I could have stroked her hair, telling her that it was all right, a big nothing. Beck would be home by dinner, I could have said. Ainsley was my friend, and it would have been right for me to comfort her. It was the expected thing. But I didn’t do that. I moved away from her instead, and she wrapped her arms around herself. I stood awkwardly for a moment.

  “Don’t worry about it, okay,” I said as I moved toward my bedroom. “She’s fine.”

  I saw her nod, but she didn’t say anything.

  I saw a shrink in town, Dr. Maggie Cooper, and I had been seeing her my entire time at school. I had sessions once a week, sometimes every other week. It depended largely on the time of year, how heavy was the burden of my past in any given season, if I was especially stressed or sad.

  I think it would be safe to say that Dr. Cooper knew me better than almost anyone alive who was not related to me, and even she didn’t know everything. But I liked her and trusted her, had never felt safer or less judged than I did on the couch in her office. Luckily, I had an appointment that afternoon.

  I told her about the things Beck had said—about Luke, about Langdon. And how I had left Beck in the library, both of us angry. And how Beck hadn’t come home. Dr. Cooper listened in that careful way she had, nodding, issui
ng affirming noises. In her office, the real world always seemed so distant and far away, infinitely manageable. I could sink into the plush couch, hug one of the overstuffed throw pillows to my middle, and just be, while everything waited swirling and chaotic outside her door.

  “I’m so sorry to hear this, Lana. It must be so frightening for you,” said Dr. Cooper. She reached over and handed me a box of tissues, even though I wasn’t crying.

  “A missing girl is always cause for alarm,” she went on. “But it’s important for you not to get catastrophic in your thinking. It could yet be a false alarm. The police are reacting quickly, which is as it should be. But, for you personally, try not to imagine the worst-case scenario.”

  “But her bag,” I said. That was really the thing that got to me. “She’d never leave that anywhere, not for any reason.”

  Dr. Cooper made an affirming noise. “That is troubling, I admit.”

  It wasn’t possible for me not to get catastrophic in my thinking, not to imagine the worst-case scenario. I told her as much.

  “It’s a process,” she said. “To change the way we think. And you have unique challenges. But it is possible.”

  The good doctor was so far out of her depth, she didn’t even know. Like a weak swimmer congratulating herself for treading water while a school of sharks circled her below the surface.

  “I’ll work on it,” I said.

  She gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. I’d noticed a change in Dr. Cooper the last couple of sessions. Was it that some of her warmth had faded? Or was she holding something back, or sensing that I was? I tried to think back, wondered if I’d said anything I shouldn’t have. It was true that I was getting very comfortable here, had even started to look forward to the sessions that I had agreed to initially only to appease my aunt. You have to talk to someone regularly about the things you’re dealing with. You need someone to help you narrate the past in a healthy way. She was a big believer in talk therapy. She was also the joint manager with Sky of my trust. Not that she ever used it to manipulate me, but it always just seemed like a good idea to do what she wanted.

  Then, to have a place to talk about some (not all) of the things that haunted me, that leaked into my dreams, that kept me feeling distant and separate from the world that went on around me, had actually been a big relief. The doctor had never once seemed rattled, never recoiled or looked shocked by what I told her.

  Of course, there are some disturbing blank spaces in my memory, places where things are foggy or black altogether. They rise up at me sometimes, white noise in my dreams, or startling flashes in my waking life. And Dr. Cooper says that it is the psyche’s nature to protect itself. She does not recommend prying into the dark places, crowbarring open the locked boxes. When you are ready to deal with those memories, they will come back, and we’ll work through it then. And they may never come back—which might not be a bad thing.

  I’m not into navel-gazing, and I am not especially curious. In fact, I’d rather avoid all unpleasantness inside myself and without. Which might explain my lack of desire for any kind of relationship, my lily-white virginity. My parents kept their wedding photo on their dresser. In it my mother is a vision of loveliness with her blond hair pulled back tight and crowned with white roses, her blue eyes shining. My father is her contrast, his dark hair long and wild, his black eyes intense and staring. The look of love on their faces, so passionate, so desirous, so joyful—it was almost an embarrassment to behold. They went from that day of ice-cream-white love to a day that ended with my mother lying in a pool of her own ink-black blood. Every couple starts off loving each other, don’t they? It’s how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

  We talked a little more about my new job, about my classes. But my heart wasn’t really in it. My mind was on Beck, and her bag sitting out there in the night.

  “Lana?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I get it. It’s impossible not to be concerned about Beck.”

  I liked how she never offered any physical comfort. I appreciate people who have a healthy respect for personal boundaries. Our culture is too touchy-feely; everyone wants a hug these days. But Dr. Cooper just sat and was present. She would let me rant and rave at her, just sat and waited as one might wait for a storm to pass. Maybe she sensed that I was uncomfortable with physical contact. Or maybe she just felt it best to establish and keep boundaries—for herself as well as for her patients.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to discuss,” she said. “And honestly I’ve been struggling with how to bring it up, or whether I should at all.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Okay,” I said. “Go for it.”

  “Your father has reached out to me via e-mail.”

  My whole body froze, and I felt my stomach go hollow and wobbly. I liked to pretend that my father was dead. In fact, I was quite good at convincing myself of it. That’s what I told those people who pushed their way into my past, that my parents died in a car accident when I was sixteen. (People usually backed way off after that, except for Beck, who had only moved in closer. Tragedy turned her on.)

  So, the doctor might as well have told me that she’d conducted a séance and was communicating with my father from beyond the grave. That’s the kind of jolt her news sent through me.

  We sat in silence for a moment, then: “Should I go on?” she asked.

  I nodded, even though I wanted to get up and run from the office.

  “Am I wrong in thinking that you have a right to know about this? We can end this discussion right now. I can let your father know that I will not be reading his messages, and that you have no desire to hear from him. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

  It was tempting to tell her that yes, that’s what I wanted. But wasn’t there a nagging curiosity, a tidal pull I still felt to him? One would think that after what he did, any bond we shared might be severed like an umbilical cord—a harsh, irrevocable cut, two parts of the same whole that would never knit back together. But that’s just not how it works.

  “What does he want?”

  I could see the blood on the floor, the perfect red handprint on the white of the wall. It was all still so vivid, if I closed my eyes I could go back and live in that house, in that moment, forever.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she said. “He loves you and there are things he wants you to know. That’s what his message says. The date of his execution is drawing near, and all of his appeals have been denied. He can only hope for a stay, but that doesn’t seem likely.”

  I didn’t have a voice to answer with. I wondered how much worse this day was going to get.

  “How does he know about you?” I asked finally. Outside the sky had gone a gunmetal gray and the dead branches outside her window quivered in a sheath of ice.

  “I have no idea,” she said, with a slow shake of her head. “Who have you told about our sessions?”

  “My aunt, my lawyer,” I said. “That’s it. Oh, and Langdon, my student adviser.”

  “Do any of those people have contact with your father?”

  “Sky Lawrence,” I said. “But he doesn’t mention it. We don’t discuss my father.”

  She pushed herself up in her seat, and uncrossed and crossed her legs again. She kept her eyes on me in that gentle way she had. I usually didn’t like it when people looked at me for too long, but with her I didn’t mind. There was never any judgment on her face, only intelligent concern.

  “I need to think about this. Okay?” I said. I knew I seemed calm and level on the outside, but there were sirens blaring inside my head. I’m good at hiding my feelings. Really good.

  “Of course,” she said. “And if you need to talk before our next session, give me a call.”

  When I left her office, I looked at my phone and realized if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late getting to Luke’s house and he’d have to go into the house alone. I was worried that it looked like sn
ow, but I hopped on my bike anyway and rode through the frigid air toward town. My face and fingers were burning with cold, and I wondered, if I had actually been capable of shedding tears, would they freeze on my face and form a mask of ice.

  7

  Dear Diary,

  Then it did stop, just like they promised. And a strange silence has settled like a pall. You would think I’d be overjoyed—my husband and my mother certainly are. They are giddy with relief, hand slapping and embracing when the baby sleeps. Even my sister was so happy for me that I could hear the relief in her voice. She has always been deeply empathetic, so much so that I have leaned too heavily on her. Yes, they are all so happy. The worst is over.

  Magically, he is sleeping for six-hour stretches and so are we all. The mental fog has lifted somewhat, and I am starting to remember what it was like to be me. I stare at him for the first time, as he lies quiet in his crib. We swaddle him in a fuzzy blue wrap, which we think might have been part of the solution. His pink face is wrinkled like an old man’s and his jet-black hair is a funny little helmet. I recognize his beauty, now that he has stopped screaming like a siren. He smells like a clean, powdery gift from the gods.

  But when I hold him in my arms, and when he takes my nipple in his mouth and sucks, I feel nothing, just a strange emptiness. He looks up at me with those intelligent, shining eyes—and he knows it. He squirms in my arms, takes no comfort in my body, which feels brittle and too bony. He doesn’t nuzzle and coo. He is an animatronic baby—he looks real, makes all the appropriate noises. But he doesn’t live. His stare is as flat and glittering as a doll’s, as though his eyes were made from glass.

  I have made the mistake of sharing this with my husband.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” I say.

  It is a rare, quiet moment. My mother, who extended her stay out of concern for all of us, has turned in early. The baby is sleeping soundly in his crib, his room filled with the sound of white noise from the humidifier. And the ceiling is a field of blue and green stars from his turtle nightlight.

  In our first shared moment in a quiet house, we are sitting on the couch trying to remember how to be alone together. But it feels awkward. He looks different, thin and pale with dark circles under his eyes. I am different in about a hundred different ways, jumpy and nervous, quick to snap. We are both waiting for the noises on the monitor that will send one of us up the stairs.