House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Lara took a deep breath.

  Lana lay inside, swaddled in pink satin, her thin hands clasped over her stomach, her eyes closed. The hair draped artfully across the lacy pillow was exactly the same pale blond as Lara’s, but otherwise they looked nothing alike, nothing at all. And that was freaky, because for most of Lara’s life, looking at her sister had been like looking in a mirror. Everybody had mixed them up—their friends, their doctors, even their teachers (Mrs. Quillen among them). It had happened so often that Lara had sometimes wondered if maybe their parents hadn’t gotten them confused at some crucial moment as well. How hard would it be? You wake up bleary-eyed in the middle of the night, you feed the babies, you burp them and change them, and maybe you put them back in the wrong cribs—you’re exhausted after all, it could happen to anybody, and besides who’s going to know, except they go through the rest of their lives with the wrong names, Lara is Lana and Lana Lara, both of them playacting at lifetime roles without ever even knowing it, and if that was the case then maybe she, Lara, was the one who was supposed to be dead, maybe she was the one who was supposed to be in the casket—

  —but it wasn’t a casket was it it was a coffin—

  —yes a coffin and soon now they would be shutting the lid and she would be all alone there, alone in the dark waiting for the first spadeful of dirt to rattle—

  Lara clutched the edge of the coffin.

  The casket.

  Their parents hadn’t gotten them mixed up. It was a crazy idea, that’s all. Mom must have told them a thousand times about the little ID bracelets they had worn. Lara had seen them herself, pasted carefully inside the photo album with their birth pictures and the wrinkled prints of their tiny feet and a thousand other mementos of their childhood.

  Besides, they hadn’t looked very much alike in nearly a year now, had they? The change had been almost imperceptible at first, but it had happened all the same. The leukemia had slowly but surely turned Lana frail and wizened, like an old lady, so that looking at her was less like looking into a mirror than looking through a window in time at the self she might become in seventy or eighty years. Lara had even gotten used to it after a while, that sense of her own discrete individuality, she had even—

  —yes, Lana hissed inside her mind, face it why don’t you—

  —she had even grown to like it. And now something else came floating into her thoughts, a stark unpleasant memory dredged from the muddy lake bottom of her mind: waking up in the recovery room after they had taken her bone marrow and catching a glimpse of her own face in the mirror. She had been wan and tired-looking, pale from the anesthesia, and for a moment she thought she had seen Lana staring out from behind her own frazzled eyes—the new and not-so-improved Lana, the leukemia Lana. And in that moment, she had felt a fierce joy blossom like a terrible rose within her, joy and gratitude that it had taken Lana, not her, that Lana was going to be the one who withered away and died.

  And now she had.

  That’s all. Lana had died. And Lara was okay. I’m okay, she told herself. It was something of a relief, actually, to look into the casket and see a stranger, someone so entirely not her, not even her sister, just a body, like one of those weird little space aliens you sometimes saw on television, all head, all eyes and face with a spindly set of arms and legs dangling below it.

  Except Lana wasn’t a stranger. Hadn’t Lara herself given Lana the heart-shaped silver locket that even now lay pale and shiny against the pallid flesh of her breast? And if she reached down and opened that locket, wouldn’t a photo of their twinned faces stare back at her? Wouldn’t she see two sets of initials engraved on the inner side, hers and Lana’s, and wouldn’t they be the same initials? The answers were yes and yes and yes. Why?

  Because Lana was her sister. Lana was her sister and now they would never again lie awake giggling into the small hours of the morning, never pass notes during class or watch television or play hopscotch on the front walk, never blow out the birthday candles on their cake together because Lana wasn’t having any more birthdays, her birthdays were over, finished, kaput, done, Lana would never do anything at all, ever again, except lie there and be dead and—

  —you didn’t take care of me, Lars, you wanted me to die—

  “I’m sorry,” she moaned, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and she leaned in over the casket to touch her sister’s hand; how cold it was, how cold and unyielding, the skin firm and chill as she lifted the fingers to her face, saying, “I’m sorry, Lana, I’m so sorry,” and suddenly it was all too much for her, Lana’s flesh against her lips and the hum of voices approaching from the foyer and the stench of the gardenias—

  —like rot like things that were rotting—

  —so sweet and cloying that she thought she would be sick, she could taste the bile flooding her mouth—

  “Lara!”

  Her mother’s voice startled her, arcing through the rising bank of hysteria like the beacon of a lighthouse, illuminating everything for a single glaring instant of flashbulb lucidity—the casket on its pedestal and her parents moving toward her in horrified unison, a dark-coated man from the funeral home at their heels—before the fog closed in once again. Words welled out of her, choked and panicky: “I’m sorry, it should have been me, it should have been me—”

  Lara turned back to the coffin, still clutching her sister’s hand. If she could touch her face, if she could only—

  Lara felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders. Her father’s voice cut through her thoughts, sharp, admonishing—

  “Lara!”

  —but that was all so far away. If she could rest her face against Lana’s face, if she could only make her understand, she hadn’t wanted her to die, she hadn’t, she was so tired of watching her be sick, that’s all, she was so very tired of feeling helpless, of—

  “Stop, Lara!”

  “No!” she cried. “No, it should have been me, it should have been—”

  Her voice spiraled into incoherent sobs, alien and distant, wholly apart from her, drowning out the strained, urgent commands of her mother and father, the dark-suited stranger. Hands clutched at her, pulling her back. Lara tore at them, wrenched herself free, she needed to touch Lana, she needed to make her understand—

  Lara never quite sorted out what happened next. Maybe her legs got tangled up with those of the surrounding adults, maybe her foot caught on the table—some kind of wheeled cart, actually, she saw—that lay under the enveloping white drapery. All she knew was that one minute she was crying in panic at her mother’s hands, twisting to escape her father’s embrace; and then, in the stark inert instant that followed, she found herself lurching with a kind of dread slow-motion inevitability toward the casket. She cried out, and reached for something, anything, to break her fall.

  But it was too late.

  Her hand slipped across smooth and marbled flesh—she felt the delicate silver chain around her sister’s neck snap beneath her fingers—and then everything came down with a carpet-muffled crash: Lara, the three grappling adults, the ridiculous pink-and-white lozenge of the casket itself. Lara scrambled away, clutching the chain and its locket in one fist, her ankle giving with a white-hot twist of agony, and then she found herself staring into the glazed unseeing eyes of her twin, her twin who was no longer her twin at all, who had passed irretrievably beyond some border to a place where there were no twins anymore, where there was nothing, nothing at all, now and forever, but the cold stone weight of eternity. Weeping, Lara climbed to her knees and stared down at her sister’s body, spilling from the pink-and-white casket like a broken Barbie doll, a painted plastic mockery of a human being. Makeup caked her pores. Her lips had parted slightly, exposing a shiny glimmer of wire and a thick yellow bead of adhesive.

  She was dead.

  Lara had failed her.

  Lara’s mother was weeping, a distant atonal hitching of breath, and her father was talking slowly, gently, in the sure steady voice you used to calm a frightened animal. La
ra sensed the dark-suited man climbing unsteadily to his knees at the edge of her vision.

  But none of that mattered. It might have been happening in another world. Nothing mattered. Nothing was real but the broken-Barbie-doll sprawl of Lana’s body and the stark, icy fact of Lara’s failure. And now, gazing down into the blind, staring emptiness of her sister’s face, Lara found herself making a promise that she would never again fail anyone she loved, she would save them all, she would. She said it aloud, uttering the words in an incoherent rush, “I’m sorry I’ll save them all I’ll save them all for you I promise—”

  “Lara, honey—”

  Lara looked up into her mother’s face, subsided back into the warmth of her embrace, the honeysuckle scent of her perfume.

  “I promise,” she whispered fiercely. “I promise.”

  4

  The teacher hadn’t wanted to notice the boy, hadn’t wanted to pay him any special attention. On the first day she had greeted him as she had greeted all the children: warmly, with a smile designed to say, You’re welcome here. You will succeed here.

  It was her first job and she was lucky to have it; she knew that. Lots of girls she had graduated with would have killed for a place in such a school: affluent, sophisticated, as well-manicured as the community it served. And she was still young enough—idealistic enough—to believe that she could make a difference. She’d been trained in the best liberal tradition. She wasn’t a racist, she knew that. Yet her eye was drawn to him all the same, and not alone because his was the sole dark face in the neat rows of small upturned faces that greeted her every morning.

  No.

  It was that he was so strange, such a strange and silent child. He was intelligent, she had no doubt of that. His written work was flawless, a little frightening actually, it was so precocious. Still, more than half the year was gone, and how often had she heard his voice? Twice? Three times? How often had she seen him interact with the other children? How often had she seen him do anything other than sit in his desk and write, write, write, filling reams of spiral notebooks with his cramped, careful hand?

  He was obviously adopted: his parents were white and pleasantly bland, perhaps a touch more prosperous than those of his classmates, but otherwise indistinguishable. And if they seemed blissfully unaware of his eccentricities, she was partially to blame. The question of his parentage made conferences a delicate matter. She never knew quite how to finesse the issue—whether to openly acknowledge it, skirt it altogether, or seek the safety of some yet-undiscovered middle ground—so she had opted for cheerful vagueness: What a pleasant child, he’s no trouble at all, and usher them out the door. Similar scruples had prevented her from making inquiries among the staff. An excessive interest would be unseemly.

  She was new here, after all.

  She sat now in a wash of late-winter California sun, polishing an apple idly against the hem of her blouse and watching him across the rows of empty desks. It was lunchtime, and the cries of children at play drifted up through the half-open window, but neither of them noticed. He was too intent on the lines he was inscribing in the notebook atop his desk. She was too intent on watching him.

  He rocked as he worked, a steady soothing motion, like the swing of a boat at anchor. He clutched his pencil so tightly that tiny white crescents had appeared under the neatly trimmed arcs of his nails.

  The other children neither liked nor disliked him. They simply went about their business as if they couldn’t see him at all—as if he radiated a subtle negative charge that sent them skating off into new orbits whenever they got too close. He had mastered the art of invisibility.

  She took a bite of the apple, savoring the tart flavor, and watched him some more. The room smelled pleasantly like the classrooms of her youth: chalk dust and the faint, sweet orange-peel odor of pencil shavings. The clock ticked steadily, drawing the hour slowly toward one, science, then social studies, the lazy fag end of the day. In ten minutes the bell would ring, and the hall would fill with the shrieks of children, the clatter of feet against the stairs.

  And still he wrote, his small dark face solemn and clenched, like a fist.

  There was something … What? The word came to her out of the air: Obsessive. Yes. Something obsessive about it. Something disturbing, maybe even dangerous.

  Later, the teacher would wonder why she did what she did next, and those were the words that would come back to her: obsessive, disturbing, dangerous. She would tell herself she did it out of concern, concern for his welfare, concern for the safety of the other children. The child needed professional help. She would be remiss in her duties—to him and his classmates—if she simply stood by any longer.

  That was all rationalization, of course. The truth was, she did it out of curiosity.

  She finished the apple, dropped the core with a bang into the empty metal wastebasket—

  —he didn’t react didn’t even flinch—

  —and stood, smoothing her skirt.

  “Benjamin?” she said.

  He didn’t react to that either. He stared down at the notebook, his hand racing across the page.

  The classroom seemed very quiet suddenly, the shrieks from the playground faraway. Her heels echoed in the stillness as she walked down the aisle and knelt at his side.

  “Benjamin,” she said quietly.

  He reacted this time. He straightened abruptly, snapping the point off his pencil. It slipped from between his fingers and rolled to the floor at her feet. He turned to look at her, his brown eyes fathomless, opaque.

  “What is it you’re writing all the time?” she said, but he didn’t answer. He simply returned her gaze, his dark face impassive, utterly devoid of emotion, and she said, “Can I take a look? Do you mind?”

  He said nothing, but he didn’t protest when she slid the notebook out from under his hands. He just stared at her, waiting.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Then she started to read.

  5

  There was an apple tree in the front yard which had leaned for so many years into the winter winds tearing down from the ridges that it never quite recovered come spring. It flowered late, and what little fruit it put forth was pinched and green, sour on the tongue. At midnight, Abel stood in his bedroom and stared out at the tree as the storm his mother had predicted hammered the house, hurling a fine grit of snow against his window. Beyond the faint condensation of his breath fogging the glass, it hunched arthritically, its stunted branches glistening in the yellow nimbus of the streetlight.

  Shivering slightly, Abel turned away and slid beneath the threadbare covers of his single bed. As a child, he had often lain awake nights, gazing up into the darkness, chasing the shape of a future which would never quite come clear amid the tangle of shadowy branches printed on his ceiling. Even then he’d known he wanted nothing to do with his father’s profession. Even then he’d sensed something false about his mother’s daily demeanor: the veneer of cheerful normality with which she saw his father off to work in the morning and welcomed him home at the end of shift. Once or twice—when Dad was running late, or when he stopped for a beer at the Yellow Badger and forgot to call—Abel had caught a glimpse of the unplumbed depths of terror which lay just beneath that mundane surface. And so he’d sought the refuge of a future inconceivably far away from Copperhead, from West Virginia, from the dirty and often dangerous business of mining and the daily terror it induced. He didn’t know what it would be exactly, that future, but he searched for it anyway, glimmering vaguely among the shadows on his bedroom ceiling: something different, something infinitely removed from the world he’d always known. Something glamorous.

  Now, lying awake and listening to the storm rock the house, he watched a more ominous pattern take shape in the shadows overhead: the hunched form of a miner, his head twisting in terror as he heard the first premonitory rumbles in the vast density of stone overhead. The wind shifted, rattling the window in
its frame, and in the play of branches on the ceiling Abel saw the shadow figure stumble, cowering as the terrific tonnage of rock collapsed upon it, a crushing, killing weight.

  Abel winced, the knowledge of his father’s death bearing down upon him like a black wind out of the mountains. Protected. All these years, his father had believed himself protected, and they had collaborated in propping up his fantasy—Abel and his mother both—imbuing the watch with powers it could not have possessed, as though, having saved his life once, it had conferred some kind of lifetime immunity upon him.

  At two, Abel had been too young to remember the event itself, but he had heard the story so often that it had assumed the dimension of myth in his mind. He had merely to close his eyes, and he could see it, summoning up the images from some deep internal well of imagination: a handful of men hunkered over their lunch pails, his father stepping away to glare in frustration at the frozen hands of his battered Timex, the fresh-cut ceiling breaking loose at his back. The town had gathered in horror to watch the body bags trickle from the dark mouth of the mine. But for the busted watch, his father would have been inside one of them.

  “Damn watch saved my life,” Dad would say. “Dumb luck, that’s all it was.” But even as a child, Abel sensed that his father attributed his deliverance to something more than luck. He had continued to wear the watch, for one thing, strapping it religiously around his wrist every morning despite the fact that he’d never had it repaired, neither the balky gears that had ground to a halt thirteen minutes short of noon, nor the crystal, which had been cracked by a flying shard of debris during the slate fall. And whenever he told the story—which he did compulsively—he always unbuckled the watch, letting it dangle from his hand as he gazed down upon it with an expression which partook of a variety of emotions—puzzlement, sorrow, even wonder—but which somehow transcended them all to become … what? Something wholly private and internal, Abel thought. Awe, maybe. Even reverence.