I can hear him in the foyer, directing Tate. “No, on the credenza,” he says. “I reserved it for this.”
I don’t want to go down there. I don’t want to see the guts of our childhood laid out like organs in an autopsy. I don’t want to know what Tate’s diorama looks like, now that it’s done. I want only, for now, to feel the stiff board of Andy’s bed against my back—my own punishment, for not being who he needed me to be.
I can’t stay here, though. There’s been no talk of a funeral for Andy, so whatever Charlie has planned as the “Memorial” aspect of the LMM might be the only chance I have to say goodbye. And Andy deserves that; he deserves to have me finally let him go, the way I couldn’t when he was here, the way I refused to when he wasn’t.
I roll off his bed, wipe crumbs off my shirt, and head to my room to get dressed. I settle for the closest thing to funeral attire: black jeans and a gray sweater. When I open a drawer for socks, I find Ruby’s embroidery, tucked to the side where I left it days ago. I pick it up, touching the delicate thread, tracing the flowers that encircle her handstitched confession to Andy.
Ruby’s right; it should be in the memorial. If nothing else, it’s proof that my brother was loved.
In the end, I’m glad he had that—someone who loved him, someone who wasn’t tangled up in the brambles of our family, someone he knew would never hurt him. Most of all, I’m glad he had an escape from Dad, someone to laugh with as they wrote their notes beneath the moon.
I take the embroidery downstairs, but I don’t make it past the foyer or have a chance to glance at the tables before Tate’s in my way. She’s stiff as a pillar, facing the credenza. When I follow her gaze, my chest tightens.
There he is: my twin, dead in the hole of the diorama. I take in the clothes she dressed him in—a tiny plaid shirt, little khaki pants, an outfit that could have been pulled and shrunk from his own dresser. Tears cling to my eyelashes. The Andy doll is facedown inside the grave, a miniature ax tossed in next to him, and there’s a bright red wound oozing through the hair that Tate has glued to the back of his head. A sliver of porcelain is visible between the bloody strands, and my stomach sinks as I realize what it’s meant to represent: the skull split open; the aftermath of the ax.
“Are you okay?” Tate murmurs.
I look at her. Her eyes are so blue they seem unnatural.
“How can you do these?” I ask. “Not just Andy, but—god, every doll you make is another person Dad killed. How can you bear it?”
Tate lowers her head. “It’s the only way I can bear it,” she says faintly, and it’s a while before she continues. “It’s like, when I’m making a diorama, I’m bringing the victim back, in some small way at least. And the whole time, I’m refusing to ignore how they died. Or who killed them.”
She runs a finger along the credenza, in front of Andy’s crime scene. “You said last night that I never told anyone. And on the one hand, you’re right. But maybe my dioramas were my way of telling. Not who did it, of course. But the horror of it. The brutality.” She throws up her hands. “The inhumanness.”
“Instagram posts are hardly confessions,” I say.
She snaps her head my way, looking at me like I’m so naïve. “That’s exactly what they are. People serving up their souls for public consumption. And my soul”—she rips her eyes from mine, shoving them onto the diorama—“is full of dead bodies.”
I startle at the comment—how gruesome it is; how it shivers with suppressed rage.
“So I kept doing it,” she adds. “Extra posts, series like BehindTheCrimeScenes, just so I could keep showing more of it. My sketches. The process. And I did it because it was never enough. A finished diorama was never enough for me to convey how”—her voice grows pinched, as if her throat is shrinking—“how repulsive, excruciating, how fucking unbearable it is, what Dad did.”
She shakes her head, squinting at Andy in the hole she dug for him. “But I don’t know. Now I’m thinking maybe… Maybe I won’t put this one on Instagram.”
I hesitate in surprise. “Why not?”
“Because you were right, he’s our brother, he—” She clamps her lips together before she continues. “I want people to know him, to remember him. But why should they remember him in his worst moment, at the end?”
In the diorama, Andy’s hand clings to the soil, almost like he’s trying to push himself up. I tear my eyes away to watch Tate’s face, how rapidly she’s blinking.
“Because isn’t that what I’ve really done with the Blackburn women? I thought I was memorializing them. I worked so hard to get every detail right—even begging Charlie, torturing him really, to tell me what he remembered of each scene—all so it could seem as real as possible. So people would remember that the women themselves were real. Human. More than just a murder. Only now, I don’t know anymore. How are people supposed to see them as more than the murder when the murder is all they can see?” A tear slides down her cheek. “I guess it was all I could see.”
She reaches toward the diorama, fingers hovering above Andy’s body before she pulls her hand back.
“This was always how I coped with what Dad did. But I think it just kept me stuck in it. Like Charlie is. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve heard that story in its entirety, but he told it the exact same way I remember him telling it on your sixteenth birthday. With the same gestures, same big pauses. Almost like it was scripted that way. Like stage directions in a play.”
“You’re saying it seemed rehearsed? You think he’s lying?”
“No,” Tate is quick to reply. “I just mean, he’s stuck in it. He relives it all the time. But—how could he have ever moved on from it? It’s not like he can”—she raises one shoulder in a feeble shrug—“get help. Or go to therapy or anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” She scrunches her brow, like the answer is obvious. “He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone why he’s so messed up.”
“He wouldn’t have to explain it all,” I suggest. “He could just tell them he was”—I search for an appropriate word—“abused.”
As I say it, I know it’s the correct term for what our father did to our brothers. I think of Charlie, crouched on the kitchen floor, tears slipping down his cheeks—and how I didn’t go to him. Mom and Tate surrounded him with their arms, building him a safe place to fall apart, and what did I do? I ran away. I refused him even the tiniest acknowledgment of his trauma.
“No,” Tate says. “It’s too risky. Because what if—”
She stops, turning to the right at the sound of footsteps, Charlie coming toward us from the back hallway. He holds what looks like a checklist, focusing on the paper as he steps into the foyer. Glancing up at me, he stiffens.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey, Dolls,” Charlie says, slow and timid. At first, he seems afraid I’ll lash out at him. Then his face changes, as easily as sliding on a mask. His features harden, and he holds up his list. “Glad to see the two of you enjoying some sisterly bonding time. Meanwhile, I’m actually working—ever heard of it?”
His hair is slicked back, recently showered, and as he glares at us, it’s as if he’s scrubbed away his vulnerability, watched it swirl down the drain like dirt.
He’s so good at pretending. It makes my skin prickle, makes me attempt a final appeal to call off the museum.
“This doesn’t feel right, Charlie. After what you told us last night, how can we just—”
He whips a hand into the air. “To reverse course now,” he says, “when everyone knows the LMM is happening, would only make us look suspicious.”
“We are suspicious! Dad was a serial killer!”
“If this is your way of telling me you’re going to the police, you might as well spit it out.”
“I’m not,” I admit. And at the relief that flashes across his face, I add, “Not right now, anyway. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Charlie repeats, an edge to his voice. “Well, good thing, Dolls. B
ecause we’re minutes away from opening the house.” He pauses. “Literally and figuratively.”
He turns around, heading back the way he came. Tate sighs as he goes, dropping her eyes to my hand.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at Ruby’s embroidery, its words pressed to my thigh.
I try to exhale my frustration, forcing out a breath that’s hot and long. “Just something for the museum,” I say.
She tilts her head. “You’re displaying something? I’m surprised you even came down for this. Especially given…” She waves a hand, referencing the spot where Charlie just stood.
I stare at that spot as I answer. “I’m trying to say goodbye to Andy.”
But those words together—Andy; goodbye—sound like a foreign language.
“So you’re okay with the Honoring then?” she asks.
“What Honoring?”
“Oh. Just—it’s Charlie’s ‘grand finale.’ We’re doing a public Honoring for Andy. As a demonstration, kind of?”
I gape at her. Just the thought of that—something so personal becoming so performative—makes me sputter out an indignant chuckle. “Wow. Charlie’s thought of everything, huh?”
Tate crosses her arms, immediately protective. “Well, what did you think he meant by Lighthouse Memorial Museum?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. You’re right. With our family, what else would it be?” I look at the wooden hoop dangling from my hand. I tap it against my side like a silent tambourine. “I need to find a place for this.”
Tate nods, gaze still sharp. “I should go help Charlie.”
I take a final glance at the diorama—the last I’ll see of it before others see it, too—and as Tate walks away, a shudder of anger, or maybe just grief, passes through me. The Andy doll wears little white sneakers, the heels of which stick out from the dirt like something trying to grow.
Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I do a sweep of the rest of the foyer. Charlie’s leaned our stolen doors against the walls, using them as display areas for the old watercolors and sketches from Tate’s bedroom. Behind Closed Doors, he’s labeled the series. See what artist Tate Lighthouse created before anyone was watching.
On the table closest to me, a card reads, Murder documentaries, an essential element of Lorraine Lighthouse’s homeschool curriculum. Behind the card is a stack of DVDs, some whose spines are familiar to me, others I barely remember. On another card, on a different table, the typewritten font reads, Portrait of Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, namesake of Dahlia Lighthouse. Tate rendered the painting in black and white from the famous photo of Elizabeth: dark curls, dark brows, dark lips. As a kid, I used to stare at it until my eyes lost focus and the painting became a Rorschach test, all those black and white blobs swimming around until they rearranged to show me myself.
He’s displayed the other namesake paintings, too: Sharon in muted shades of gold; Charles in his baby chair, reaching for the only birthday cake he ever lived to see; Andrew in a suit and beard, frowning into the distance. “What a dweeb,” Andy once said about the Borden painting, and that single memory fills me with a longing so strong it hurts to breathe.
As I head into the living room, I pass a table with Dad’s hunting rifles, and nausea threatens to bowl me over. I have to distract myself with other exhibits until the feeling subsides.
For a while, I stand before the stubs of Honoring candles, used on each of our birthdays. Mom saved them, apparently, writing our name and age in black marker along the wax. Charlie has displayed them in chronological order, separate rows for each of our eighteen years. My cheek twitches at Andy’s—shorter than the rest, stopping two candles too soon.
There are stacks of newspapers, fanned out neatly along the coffee table in the living room, and there are Lighthouse children murder reports, as assigned by Lorraine Lighthouse, on each of the end tables. Charlie has also displayed legal pads and pens, as if someone might be moved to write a report of their own. I recognize Andy’s sharp, angular handwriting on one of the piles of stapled papers, and I zip my eyes away.
Voices burble in from outside. The windows frame a view of people gathered on the lawn, and on the perimeter of the crowd, there’s a group of middle-aged women with their arms crossed, bouncing on their feet to stay warm.
Soon, they’ll be in our house.
I find an empty spot beside a heap of old Honoring calendars and place Ruby’s embroidery there. Using one of Charlie’s pads and pens, I write, A sixteenth birthday gift from Ruby Decker to Andy Lighthouse. It looks amateur compared to the typewritten labels. I glance at my hand, Charlie’s Sharpie mark still visible, despite how hard I’ve tried to wash it off. On my makeshift label, I add a line, a space, and a dot beneath the words, mimicking that sideways, lowercase i of Charlie’s “trademark flair.”
“What did you just do?”
When I turn around, Charlie’s in the doorway, glowering at the embroidery from across the room. Walking toward it, he nudges me aside. Then he picks up the card I’ve hastily written and reads.
“What the fuck is this?” he finally says.
It’s a stronger reaction than I expected, even though I knew he’d be annoyed with me for disrupting his aesthetic. Still, I explain Ruby’s embroidery: how she loved Andy and he wouldn’t let her; how he refused this present the last night anyone saw him; how, when she spoke of the future she wanted for them—marriage, kids—he grew angry, grew cruel.
“He said to her,” I tell Charlie, “ ‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ I didn’t know what that meant when she first told me, but now—” I blink back tears. “He must have been thinking about Dad. Worrying that Dad’s evil was something he inherited, and might inflict on someone else.”
I’m surprised by Charlie’s face as I speak; his mouth is ajar, his brows are furrowed, and his expression is filled with something I can’t name—disgust, I think; maybe distress. When I finish, he squeezes his eyes shut, cheeks bunching with the effort, and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Moments pass, swollen with his silence. Outside, there’s a burst of laughter, the shriek of a child, a woman saying, “Soon, I think.” That seems to jolt him back to life. He releases his nose, puts the card onto the table, and lets out a sigh.
“Nothing,” he says.
But as a tear creeps out of the corner of his eye, one he slaps away with a furious hand, it’s clear that it’s something. He has that look again, that same anxiety I saw when the police searched his room.
Before I can push the issue, Tate and Mom appear in the living room. Tate has an arm around Mom’s shoulder, steering her forward like she needs help just to walk, and it strikes me as strange, how quickly Tate seems to have forgiven Mom’s lie. How quickly she’s managed to trust her again.
I look at Charlie. He’s chewing his lip, gaze lost out the window as he stares at the crowd on the lawn.
“Well,” he says after a moment. “It’s time, isn’t it? Let’s give the people what they want.”
twenty-one
Thirty minutes in, I’m perched on the bottom of the stairs, watching people drift in and out. Some cock their heads to consider me, as if I’m another exhibit, while others ignore me, talking over my head about the pictures of Mom’s parents.
“Get this: she tells people they were murdered,” one woman says to her friend, “but actually, they died of leukemia.”
I don’t correct them about the type of cancer.
“That’s so creepy,” the friend replies.
For a while, I don’t recognize anyone. There are more college students than I would have expected—mostly women—with their ponytails and timid giggles and school sweatshirts. They flock to the diorama.
My chin is propped on the heel of my hand, eyes willfully glazing over, when I hear a familiar voice.
“Hey.”
I stare up at Greta—here, in my house, despite my turned-off ph
one, my attempt to keep her away. Her mouth is tilted into the suggestion of a smile, but her face is somber, brows knitted together.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
She sits beside me on the stair, then folds me into a hug. My chin falls onto her shoulder, the rest of me stiff. We’ve never done this before, lingered in each other’s arms. I want it to feel safe, feel warm, but she carries the November cold on her clothes.
“Your phone goes straight to voice mail,” she says when she pulls away.
Greta gestures to the visitors milling around, some with their arms tucked tight to their sides, like they’re afraid to even brush against a wall, get the dust of Murder Mansion on their skin.
“This is pretty crazy,” she says. Her eyes rove the exhibits until they skid to a stop on one of the paintings. “Whoa. Is that Kitty Genovese?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my god, I love that case. Did you know that Winston Moseley, the guy who murdered her, was married with three kids? He told police he just got up in the middle of the night, left his sleeping wife in bed, and drove around trying to find a woman to kill. How fucked up is that?”
I focus on the floor so my thoughts can’t flick to Dad. Still, my breath is shallow. All my muscles are clenched.
“Oh! There’s Linda Cook. I’m obsessed with the name for that case: the Cinderella murder.”
There’s a hint of giddiness in her voice, and I’m grateful that, from here, she can’t see Tate’s diorama—only the people who hunch over it, scrutinizing every detail.
“He could be here, you know,” Greta says after a while. She leans in, speaking softly toward my ear. “The Blackburn Killer.”
Beneath the foyer’s chandelier, her eyes seem to shimmer, same as they do when she looks at her laptop, gaze glowing from its artificial light.
“If he did kill Andy,” she continues, squeezing closer, “he’d probably get off on coming to the memorial. Really, he could be anyone here.”
A baby shrieks in its mother’s arms.
“Well,” Greta adds, “not anyone.”
The Family Plot Page 23