I let out a groan before grabbing her wrist. “What are you—” she starts, but I pull her toward her closet, open the door, and drag her with me to the second one in the back. Then I yank her into the passageway and push her forward, the smell of mildew sudden and sharp.
“Stop!” she says. “I hate it back here! What are you doing?”
I ignore her, reaching for my phone in my pocket. When I turn on the flashlight, I shine it on the wood, walking a few more feet until the light latches onto paper. I look back at Tate, who’s stopped moving, and with a grunt, I grab her again, pulling her toward her nightmare of a collage.
Tate gapes at the wall, taking in her drawings like she’s awed by her own skill. Mouth ajar, she runs her hand over one and then looks at her fingers, eyes wide, as if she expects the sketch to have transferred onto her skin.
“These are of Andy,” she says.
“And how do you think I felt when I stumbled upon them? How do you think it makes me feel when I see”—I glance at one in particular, my heart stopped by all its gray, graphite blood—“my twin brother looking like this?”
Tate stares at the paper, but her head is shaking back and forth. “You think I did these?”
“Oh, stop it—they’re your studies for the Andy diorama! Just like the ones you did for the Blackburn women.”
She continues down the passageway, squinting at the other sketches, and I follow her with my flashlight, letting my vision glaze over so I don’t have to see them too. Still, I make out the shape of them, the way the papers overlap. A shiver whirls through me.
“And the way they’re arranged!” I say. “It’s exactly like the photos under the shed.”
Tate swings toward me. “Are you going to accuse me of doing those, too? Photographing murdered women?”
“Why not! You make dioramas of them!” I shout—but then I hear myself, and I shake my head. “No. Sorry. I don’t… I know you didn’t take the photos. You were a teenager back then.”
“Oh, that’s why I didn’t do them! But if I’d been—what, in my twenties? Then you could see me killing people?”
“That’s not what I’m saying! I’m just— It hurts, okay? Seeing these studies! And it’s weird that—”
“Dahlia! I’ve had three days to do the diorama. I haven’t had time for studies. What do you think—”
“What’s going on? It sounds like a bad production of King Lear up here.”
We turn to find Charlie in the doorway, lifting a hand as my flashlight blinds him. I jerk my phone back toward the wall, and he steps forward with a slouchy swagger, pulling the smell of alcohol into the tiny space. Shadows pool in the hollows of his cheekbones, and for a second, I’m stunned by how gaunt he is, like weight has dropped from his skinny frame in the last few days alone.
He takes in the papers illuminated against the wood. “What the…”
“She thinks they’re mine,” Tate says, “but they’re not.”
Her words are so pointed, so adamant, that I finally take notice. My hand slips to my side, casting the light on the floor, blackening the blue of Tate’s irises as she turns to me.
“Do you think it’s been easy for me, doing this diorama? Do you think I like doing it? I told you: I have to do it. It’s the only way I know to—” She stops as Charlie squeezes her shoulder. She closes her eyes, inhaling sharply. “But this? These sketches? I didn’t do them.”
I rub my forehead, pushing deep circles into the skin. “But—if you didn’t do them, then…”
Charlie fills my silence as I trail off. “I think you should listen to her, Dolls,” he says, words a little slurred.
“But,” I try again, “I don’t get it, who would—”
And then a different voice cuts in: “Dahlia.”
The three of us turn to find Mom in the passageway, a few feet from the door that leads to her own closet. I point my phone toward her, and it spotlights her exhaustion. Her ponytail, loose and rumpled, is pushed toward one side of her head. Her eyes are circled with shadows. Her arms hang limp at her sides.
She walks toward us, gaze brushing against the sketches taped to the wood. I shine the light on them so she can see them better, but it’s only a moment before she looks at us again. Her shoulders slump, like a person defeated.
“Tate didn’t draw these,” she says. “I did.”
fifteen
We’re stuck in a relay of glances—Tate to Charlie, Charlie to me, me to Tate—as silence stretches out from Mom’s strange confession. With four of us here, the passageway feels tighter, but no one moves to give themselves an extra inch. Even the dust seems frozen, suspended in the air, listening to us breathe.
As Mom views the sketches, a medley of emotions plays across her face: horror, guilt, pain. “This hallway,” she all but whispers. “It was a fairly common feature, back when the house was built, in homes of this style. The idea was to connect the master bedroom to the nursery, making it easier for parents to reach their children in the night. To soothe them. Feed them. Keep them safe.” She tries to smile, but her lips quiver. “My mother called it the Protection Passage.”
“Mom,” I say, not bothering to hide my impatience. “Why would you draw these pictures?”
She drags her gaze from the wall, settling it on me instead. “When we thought that Andy ran away,” she says after a while, “I couldn’t stop imagining all the ways he might die.”
A chill creeps over me, starting at my shoulder blades, crawling up my neck.
“I’d see him knifed down in some alleyway, or a man with a gun to his temple…”
She trails off, and I know she’s thinking of her parents, how the bullet smashed through her mother’s skull and hit the glass cabinet beside her, shattering their wedding china. It’s a story we’ve been told a million times, how afterward, once the bodies were gone, Mom had to gather the pieces of plates and bowls, their ivory details outlined in blood.
“And I thought,” she says, “I thought that if I got them down on paper—these awful images—then I could, I could ward against them somehow.”
Charlie snorts. “Ward against them?”
“I couldn’t stop drawing. Every day, another way he could die. Another way I saw him when I closed my eyes. And I think now that maybe I…” A tear slips down her cheek. Her voice becomes brittle. “Maybe the images wouldn’t stop because part of me knew he was dead.”
Shame flares in my cheeks. Part of me—all of me—should have known, too.
“I drew and I drew and he never came back, just like the note said. So I kept on drawing, and I put all the sketches in here. I couldn’t bear to have them lying out in the open. But I couldn’t bear to get rid of them either. They were wards. They were protection. But, no—they weren’t. I couldn’t protect him. He was already…”
Her shoulders shake with a sob.
“But Mom,” I say, “in all these sketches, you drew him as he actually died. With a head wound.” I pause, steeling myself against a wave of nausea. “How did you know?”
I expect her to say she just knew, that she intuitively felt how Andy had died, just like I should have known he wasn’t out in some city; he was stuck beneath bugs and sludge.
But Charlie speaks first. “That’s not true,” he says. “Look.”
He points toward one of the sketches, and as I focus my light on it, I’m surprised to see he’s right. In this picture, Andy isn’t limp on the ground, bleeding from the head; he’s in a hospital bed, cheeks so sunken they look sucked in. And now I notice that in another, he’s crumpled in front of a car, and in another, he’s slumped against a wall, a knife protruding from his stomach.
My own stomach churns at these images—but I’m realizing that, ever since I first found them, I never fully took them in. My eyes skimmed along the pictures, clinging to only a few, where, yes, the wound appeared to be in Andy’s head. But there were so many others I’d skipped past, overwhelmed by the quantity. Even when I showed them to Tate and Charlie, I blu
rred my vision, keeping myself from seeing my brother dead.
“I did this to him,” Mom says, and now she’s pointing at the wall, eyes blazing with the guilt I saw just flickers of before. “It’s my fault Andy’s dead.”
The sentence stabs me—a hot, sharp wound in my chest. As Mom turns to us, I hold my phone low enough to keep from blinding her, but high enough to see how her brows squeeze together, how the creases around her mouth seem to deepen.
“It was karma—”
“This again,” Charlie grumbles.
“For the lie I told,” Mom finishes.
For a moment, there are only our shared glances, volleyed between me and Charlie and Tate before we return our attention to Mom.
“What lie?” Tate asks.
Mom dips her chin, staring at the floor. “My parents weren’t murdered,” she says, her voice as quiet as a match being struck. “They died of lung cancer.”
Everything inside me goes still. Tate’s mouth drops open. Charlie blows out a laugh.
“I’m sorry, what?” he says. “Is this a joke? Have you been slipping something into your cookies I don’t know about?”
I snap my head from him to Mom, waiting for her to make some sense. She’s hugging herself, her lips moving without sound. After a few seconds, her breath solidifies into words.
“… within months of each other,” she’s saying. “They’d been smokers for decades. For my father, it was just—something everyone did. His father, his grandfather, everyone at the company. It was part of the culture. Cigarettes were passed around like cups of coffee.”
I lean closer, unused to hearing her speak of their business. It was irrelevant, she always said. Whatever harm the guns they made might have caused, it didn’t mean their murders were karma. But now—there weren’t any murders at all? My head swims as I try to catch up.
“… and my mother picked up the habit, once she started working with them. Our walls were yellow with smoke. My clothes always smelled. And they got sick around the same time, when I was twenty. I remember thinking how unfair that was. Both of them? Not one but both?” Her eyes shift back and forth, pacing the floor like feet. “It was a terrible disease. Stage four. Spread to their liver, their bones. Went to my mother’s brain.”
Tears drip down her cheeks, and there is nothing in me that wants to comfort her, nothing that wants to reach out and wipe her sorrow from her face. All of me—every cell and atom and breath—is fighting to understand.
“She went first,” she continues. “And then my father, not far behind.”
Tate slumps against the wall, crushing some drawings with her shoulder. “So, wait,” she says. “There were no gunmen? No home invasion?”
Mom shakes her head. “Only cancer.” She looks at us now, spearing us with her stare. “But that ‘only’ was the problem. Nobody saw my parents as victims, or their deaths as tragic, because they’d smoked themselves straight into that cancer. People came to their funerals and said, ‘Well.’ That’s all they had to say. ‘Well.’ And I knew what that meant. It meant ‘Well, what did they expect?’ Meant ‘Well, they did this to themselves.’ ”
As I watch her scowl at the memory, a realization clicks into place. “Is that what you really meant,” I ask, “whenever you said you didn’t want anyone to think of their deaths as karma?”
Except she didn’t say deaths. She said murders. She specifically said they were killed by the very guns their company made—a detail so dark I never questioned its veracity, never would have believed that someone could invent it from thin air.
Mom nods, hugging herself tighter. “However they may have… contributed to their illness, I still lost them. Both of them. And their loss felt as raw and unfair and—and violent to me as if they’d been killed unexpectedly, as if someone had arbitrarily chosen to murder them because they walked down a dark street too late at night, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Her last sentence hums in the air, made resonant by its familiarity. How many murder docs did we watch that spouted that same line? The wrong place at the wrong time.
“I mourned and I mourned and I mourned,” Mom says, her palms open in front of her, as if she’s remembering the weight of her grief, trying to hold it in her hands. “And do you want to know the only thing that comforted me?” She closes her eyes, breathes in deeply, then opens them again. “Murder.”
Tate grips my arm. I look at her, but she’s focused on Mom. Charlie’s glaring at the floor.
“Not the committing of it. But the stories. Stories of gruesome, real-life murders. Stories where people are left behind to grieve someone who was torn away from them. Stories where the… the terrible cruelty of life was so absolute.” Fresh tears dampen her lashes. “Undeniable.”
Even in the shadows, I see her gaze drift from us, distant and hazy.
“So I invented a story like that of my own. I sold my parents’ house in Connecticut, sold their whole company, and I moved here, to their summer home, the place where I’d spent every July and August of my life. And when people here, who had known my parents, asked what had happened to them, I didn’t tell them about the cancer. I couldn’t bear to see it again, the doses of sympathy, so uniform and measured, followed too often by that ‘Well.’ I wanted to see horror on their faces. I wanted them to feel even a sliver of what I felt about what had happened.”
She releases a cold, airy chuckle. “They stayed away from me after that. Didn’t want the tragedy that had touched my life to creep over into their own. And that was fine. I didn’t need them. I had newspapers and books and films and endless, endless stories of people like me. People who existed in the interviews. People who said, ‘She was so full of life, I don’t understand how she’s gone.’ Or ‘I’ll never be over it.’ ” She pauses, her expression now blank. “I think of those lines all the time.”
“Mom…” Tate says, but either she doesn’t hear her, or she can’t be stopped.
“Living inside those stories,” Mom continues, “gave me something I hadn’t had before: validation for my grief.”
She takes another deep breath. “And when I met your father”—Charlie’s head snaps up—“and he asked me for my story, I told him the one I’d been telling everyone on the island. Then I took him here, to my family’s home, and I showed him the papers I’d been collecting. I showed him the true crime books. The films. And he didn’t even flinch.”
Her face changes, briefly awash with admiration. “He accepted the darkness I wanted to surround myself with. He understood what it meant to me: solace and protection. I wanted my children to be better prepared for the world than I had been. I wanted to warn you all, as early as I could, about how life can just”—she grits her teeth, forcing words between them—“tear you apart.”
Teeth bared, shaking her head, she resembles an animal ripping meat off a bone.
“And I wanted you to have those stories to fall back on, if you ever did lose something in a way you couldn’t make sense of, even as others tried to explain it away.”
Mom shudders, a quick burst of anger before the sorrow, the shame, sweeps over her again, dragging her shoulders down.
“I thought I was giving you tools to survive. But then”—she hesitates, and when I tilt my light toward her face, I see her swallow—“after Andy left, I thought maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe the darkness I exposed him to had actually sent him running, instead of keeping him safe. I thought of him, all alone out there, no money, no access to a bank account, and I couldn’t stop seeing everything that might happen to him. And then I couldn’t stop drawing what I saw, trying to… to pull those possibilities from the universe. And then…”
Her hands shake as she runs them through her hair, disturbing her lopsided ponytail, pulling it from its elastic band without seeming to notice.
“When we learned Andy was murdered,” she continues, “I knew, without a doubt, that I was to blame. I’d made the wrong choice, been the wrong kind of mother.” Her voice n
arrows to a whisper. “It was karma, Andy’s death. I lied about my parents being murdered, and then my child was murdered in return.”
She sobs once, so loud I jump. Then she buries her head in her hands and cries like nothing I’ve ever heard. The passageway thunders with the sound. The walls could come crashing down.
Tate takes a tiny step forward, the only distance she can move. “Whatever else you did,” she says, trying to be heard above Mom’s noise, “whatever lies, whatever—” Tate turns her head sharply, as if Mom’s confession is only now landing, sudden and stinging, a slap across her face.
“Andy’s death wasn’t karma for anything,” she continues. “That’s just… superstition, it’s—”
“Andy was killed with his own ax!” Mom screams. “Just like his namesake! I called this into the world. I lied about murder and he was murdered.” She drags a hand down her face, fingers clawing at her cheek. “And those women. The shed. Murder has been circling us for decades! How can that not mean something?”
“I don’t know,” Tate says. She looks at me, eyes a little wild, like she’s asking me to step in, to speak to our mother, but I have nothing to say.
“I don’t know,” Tate repeats. “I don’t know, I…”
She slumps against the wall again, sliding down until she’s perched on the floor. I slump back, too, opposite her. But Charlie is pillar-straight. His fists clench, unclench. His nostrils flare.
“I’m so sorry I lied,” Mom says between sobs. She presses the heels of her hands against her cheeks, as if to dam up her tears. “I can’t undo it, I can’t take it back. But I’m so sorry. To all of you. To Andy most of all.”
“You’re sorry?” Charlie shouts. He slaps the wall, making the rest of us jump.
“I am,” Mom whispers after a moment. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t—” He covers his face, groaning into his hands, and when he speaks again, his slur is gone, each word precise. “What else have you kept a secret? What else did you know and never say?”
I tilt my head, surprised by the rage in his questions. Surprised by the questions themselves.
The Family Plot Page 17