But the girl’s question keeps my focus on Charlie. What is he doing?
A few people wait behind him, trying to see whatever he’s placed on the credenza. In a moment, he steps back, shoves a hand through his hair, and when he spins around, his eyes look wild with hurt.
He doesn’t see me watching at him—doesn’t seem to see at all, really. He walks off, out of the frame of the living room doorway, and now the people approach the credenza. I hear only chatter at first, indistinct words overlapping one another, but as I separate myself from the too-close reporter, move from the living room into the foyer, I pick out threads of sentences, register a whispered “Oh my god.”
I’m standing behind a couple girls whose bodies block the new display. One of them glances back at me, then grabs her friend’s arm, pulling her aside to make room. I take a final step forward, fear cementing in my stomach at those girls’ expressions. Whether they know who I am or not, they’re expecting a reaction.
Cautiously, my gaze drifts onto the credenza, but it takes a moment for my mind to catch up with my eyes. When it does, I suck in air so sharply, it feels like I’m inhaling broken glass.
The only way out is to never come back.
The last time I saw this note, a cry clawed out of my throat, alerting the whole house that everything was different now; everything was infinitely worse. Only days ago, I asked Charlie if he knew where it was, and I accepted it as truth when he told me he didn’t.
Was he lying? Or did he find it somewhere while digging for artifacts from our past?
Looking at it again, I register for the first time that it was written in pencil. Whenever I’ve pictured it over the years, I’ve always seen the words in bold, black ink, unforgettable and permanent, but here, the graphite’s been smudged by someone’s touch. And in front of the paper is a white card, covered in Charlie’s scrawl: Note forged by Andy Lighthouse’s killer.
Sweat beads on my forehead, my body sweltering. I don’t hear voices anymore, or whispered conversations. I hear waves, I hear wind, I hear the forces of this island trying to push in.
And now I’m leaning down, squinting at the runaway note, missing for all these years.
In a second, my eyes catch on something beneath its words. I can’t tell if it’s been erased, or if it’s just faded over time, but it’s a line underscoring the sentence.
No. It isn’t just a line.
It’s a sideways lowercase i. A twin to the one in Sharpie on my hand.
In a single motion, I snatch the note and label, snapping back up. Tears warp my vision as I whip around in search of Charlie. I find him in the living room—already staring at me. I blink until my cheeks are wet, until I see him more clearly. I shake my head through the fog of my thoughts. Is this note a reproduction, one Charlie wrote, just now, with his “trademark flair”?
But no. My thumping heart goes silent. No.
I don’t want to believe it, don’t even want to think it, but the way he’s looking at me now…
Did he write it back then, the night of our birthday? Did he phrase it so we’d believe that Andy ran away? Did Charlie…
He keeps on staring. From across the room, he will not break my gaze. His is as glassy as the eyes of Dad’s deer: pained but defeated, a dark knowledge trapped in the pupils. And now, reading the question that twists across my face, Charlie hangs his head, and he nods.
twenty-two
“GET OUT!”
Everyone goes still when I scream. The only sound is a baby’s wail.
My hand, closed around the note and label, shakes at my side. The papers scratch against my palm until I shove them into my pocket.
“GET OUT! Get out of here now!”
Two roomfuls of people stare at me like fish. The only one who moves is Charlie. He sinks onto the couch in the living room, arms slack at his sides.
Footsteps rush from the back hallway, marching up behind me. “What’s going on?” Elijah asks, his notebook already out.
“Get out!” I yell in his face. Then I turn to the dozen visitors still gaping at me. “All of you! Leave! Get out of here! Go!”
I stomp toward the front door, yank it open to reveal more people dotting our lawn. Their heads all turn to me at once, alert and expectant.
“What is wrong with you?” I scream at them. “Get off our property! The museum is closed!” I whirl around to the people in the house. “Get the fuck out!”
For a few seconds, nothing happens. The baby keeps howling; the eyes keep watching. Finally, Elijah steps forward. “Come on, everyone,” he says, voice deep with authority. “Time to go.” He waves his hands, ushering bodies toward the door.
They listen to him, confused but indignant looks plastered to their faces. One by one they walk past me into the dimming light outside, shooting me glances that drip with judgment. The reporter tries to appeal to Elijah. “Press, too?” she asks. He nods and gestures for her to leave. As the last person files out, Elijah flips a page in his notepad and pulls his pen from his pocket.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” he asks me.
I glance over his shoulder, into the living room at Charlie. He’s staring blankly at the wall opposite the couch, arms limp. If I hadn’t just seen him nod—that ghastly, gut-wrenching nod—I would think he was catatonic.
“Dahlia?” Mom says. She and Tate stand near the back hallway, looking from me in the foyer to Charlie on the couch.
Elijah waits—and I consider it: keeping him here to witness the confession I’m about to pry from Charlie. Afterward, he could haul him away in handcuffs, throw him in jail, get him out of my sight forever. But Elijah’s pen perched above his pad feels too much like the fishy eyes of all those islanders.
“Leave,” I tell him.
He looks through the living room doorway at the statue of Charlie on the couch, then slings his gaze back toward me. “I think I should—”
“Get out! The fucking spectacle is over!”
He winces at my shout, but after a moment, he nods. “I’ll come back soon,” he says—and it’s meant, I think, as a warning.
“You do that,” I mumble.
As soon as he crosses the threshold, I close the door behind him.
“What’s this all about?” Tate asks, and when I turn around, she’s already drifting toward Charlie in the living room, the magnet of her body pulled toward the magnet of his. She hesitates, watching his vacant expression, before sitting down beside him. “Charlie?”
I make my way to the living room, too, stopping when I’m across from him. The coffee table squats between us, covered in old newspapers. Mom steps into the room so quietly she might as well be floating.
“Dahlia, you’re scaring me,” she says. But I ignore her.
“You wrote Andy’s note,” I say to Charlie.
Tate scoffs, but I acknowledge her for only an instant before glaring at Charlie again. “You did,” I say.
Finally, he shifts his gaze from the wall to me. Chin tilted up, he opens his mouth, looks for a moment like he might deny it, but then his shoulders drop, and more than anything else, he seems exhausted.
“Yes,” he says.
My heart rages as Tate gasps beside him. “Why?” she asks—and I can see from the shock on her face that this is news to her; this is something Charlie never shared.
“Yes, Charlie.” My voice is remarkably hard. “Why?”
A vein bulges at his temple when he clenches his jaw. “You know why,” he says quietly.
“I need to hear you say it.”
He exhales slowly. “I did it to cover it up.”
Now my heart bangs so violently, it feels like it might break my ribs.
“Cover what up?” Tate asks, and it’s almost laughable, how she still doesn’t get it.
Charlie’s eyes go blank. “That I killed him.”
“No.” Mom falls into a chair at the same second Tate gasps. “No,” Mom repeats. “No, no, no”—and just like that, it’s last night aga
in, our mother uttering her syllable of denial.
Something splits open inside me, darker than the chasm I’ve carried since we learned of Andy’s death. It’s a black hole yawning wide, sucking up my last, lingering traces of light.
“What do you mean, Charlie?” Tate cries. “Why would you— What happened?”
I lock my knees as he begins to speak. I tighten every muscle.
“That night,” he says, voice already hoarse, as if he’s at the end of the story instead of the start, “part of me was relieved to have finally told someone. To have told Tate. But another part felt claustrophobic, like the past was breathing down my neck. So I went outside for air. And I heard this thunking sound. It was—”
He doesn’t need to say it; I know that sound so well.
“—Andy’s ax. He was railing on this tree, back in the woods a bit. He was so worked up, I-I tried to talk him down.” He stares up at me. “I tried to help him, Dolls. I swear. It was the first time I’d talked to him about it, openly. He knew it had happened to me, too, but we’d never spoken about it. It was too awful to acknowledge. We were both so ashamed.
“I tried to tell him, though. Tried to convince him that this would end for him soon. In a couple years, he could leave and he’d see there was life on the other side of… of Dad. I told him he could be anyone he wanted to be. He could go to college, go anywhere really; he could start a family that’s nothing like ours. And he stopped then. He seemed to latch onto that. I thought I’d calmed him down, that he’d be all right. But then…”
His Adam’s apple bobs. He turns his head toward Tate, whose eyes are wide with horror—but still soft somehow. Still supportive. In her chair, Mom rocks herself back and forth.
I don’t move at all.
“Then what?” Tate whispers.
“He handed me his ax. And I took it. I thought it meant he was feeling better. But then he—oh, fuck—” He rakes his hand over his face, and my stomach lurches. I steel myself for the blow I know is to come. “He told me to kill him.”
“What?”
It’s not the blow I expected. It’s not a blow I believe in at all.
“That can’t be true,” I add.
Charlie shrugs one shoulder. “He did. He told me to kill him. ‘Before I do more damage,’ he said. And I knew that desire. Of course I did. The desire for someone to see it. To stop it. To make him… not a part of it anymore.”
He glances at Mom, lip curled back to bare his teeth.
“But I still tried to talk him down. I told him it’s Dad who does the damage, not us. But I knew that wasn’t true. Even if we never touched those women, we were culpable. And he could see that I knew it. He kept begging me to kill him. Truly begging me. He got down on his knees. Said he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He said, ‘I love her, Charlie, but anyone who dares to love me will only be ruined.’ And then he said I was wrong, he couldn’t have a family, could never have kids like anyone else, because all he would do is fuck them up. He had no hope anymore. That’s what he kept saying. That there was no hope for him.”
Charlie looks at me, and I’m a deer caught in the headlights of his eyes. “I didn’t get it at the time—what had triggered him that night; I knew Dad had killed Jessie Stanton the week before, but it seemed like more than that. Something fresh. But now—what is it, Dahlia, that he said to Ruby Decker, when she told him she loved him, when she brought up a future they could have together?”
My mouth moves without speaking, lips stitching together the silence. Then I swallow, throat huge, and mumble out the words: “ ‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ ”
“In my blood,” Charlie repeats. “Fuck. When he said ‘I love her’ that night, I thought he was referring to you, Dolls. That he didn’t want to ruin you because of what he’d done. But when you told me about that embroidery thing, I realized he must have meant Ruby. He loved Ruby.”
My lungs betray me, admitting no air.
“And I get how that would have undone him,” Charlie continues, “having to reject someone he loved, just to keep them safe. Of course he felt hopeless after that, like he’d always be alone. I know that feeling—I’ve never lasted more than a month in a relationship. The second they get serious, I have to get out. Even when I’m crazy about them. Especially when I’m crazy about them. Because how could I let anyone love me? How could I inflict my true self onto someone I care about? I swear, when someone says they love me, it only makes me hate myself more. Because I don’t deserve anyone’s love, not after what I’ve done. I don’t even deserve it from my sister.”
He looks at Tate when he says this, not me. She shakes her head, lips parted but wordless.
Charlie drops his head to stare at his hands. Tate grabs them with her own.
“And god, this museum,” he says. “I was standing here, Ruby’s story running through my mind, and I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it anymore. Perform. Pretend. It’s exhausting, you know. I’m always so fucking tired.”
He locks his eyes onto mine.
“So I put the note out. Publicly. Immediately. So I couldn’t chicken out, I couldn’t go back. I knew you’d see it, and you’d know, and the whole performance would be over. Because that’s always been the problem. It was my performance, my insistence on ignoring the past, on keeping it quiet, that brought Andy to the point he was at that night—that dark, impossible place where he begged me to kill him. He said he didn’t have the guts to do it himself because he was such a coward, he’d always been a coward, ‘We’re such cowards, Charlie!’ ”
It stuns me, how clearly I hear both my brothers in the sentence. I glance at my empty, trembling hands. Andy never told me he felt like a coward, but I knew him enough to know that he fought with trees to fight his feelings. I can picture him snarling those words.
“And suddenly,” Charlie continues, “I was looking right at him, but I couldn’t even see him anymore. I just saw myself. The confused and terrified kid I’d spent years trying to distance myself from—through miles, through auditions, through every role I played on every fucking stage. And it was all there that night—all that rage and shame and self-loathing, just under the surface of my skin, still leaking out of me from sobbing it all to Tate. And I couldn’t stand to look at him. At me. So I swung the ax. And I killed him.”
My legs collapse under me. My knees slam against the floor, palms slapping the wood. As tears soak my face, my shoulders shake with sobs and my stomach clenches like a fist.
My brother. My twin. My beautiful, unknowable Andy.
The pain sears me inside. When I open my mouth to howl, my breath scalds my tongue.
“And I buried him,” Charlie says above my sobs. Above Mom’s sobs, too. Above Tate’s. We are three broken women, at the mercy of a story from a broken man. He doesn’t cry at all.
“And I wrote the note. And the next day, I got the hell out, and I’ve never come back until now.”
I press my forehead to the floor. My chest convulses as I cry, my throat already raw. Behind my closed eyes, I’m seeing the boy in the credenza, the one who held my hand and shushed me in the dark; I’m seeing how his tongue touched his upper lip when he carved his name into wood, when he claimed a little something of his awful world for himself; I’m seeing him crash into his beanbag chair, seeing him stand by my bed, pulling me from a nightmare I didn’t know I was in; I’m seeing him smooth down his hair, seeing it spring back up, seeing both of us laugh at his untamable parts.
I want to latch my fingers onto his. I want to tug him free of our father’s grip. And I want to go back and know him—really fucking know him—and tell him that, even in that knowing, I love him, I love his untamable parts.
I stay on the floor as long as I need to. A long time. A really long time. Sobs threaten to tear me apart, to crack me open like an earthquake does the ground. But my body is relentless; it keeps me together, trapping my agony inside me—a sharp, ricocheting thing.
W
hen I finally drag my arms off the wood, lift my head to look at my family, I see that I’m the only one left crying. Mom’s gaze is wet and haunted and fixed on Charlie, but her tears have paused for now. Charlie keeps his eyes on his lap, folding and unfolding his hands, glaring at his own fingers like he wishes they belonged to somebody else. Tate is watching our brother so fiercely I imagine he can feel her stare like a windburn on his cheek. Her lips are pushed to the side, like she’s deciding on something, and even before she speaks, I know that what she says will make me sick.
“We’ll keep it a secret,” she tells him.
And there it is, a tidal wave of nausea, about to take me down. “We’ll what?”
“He’s suffered enough,” she says, whipping her head toward me. “And you heard what he said: he was only giving Andy what he wanted—a way out. Right?”
She looks at Mom, who’s frozen in her chair. “I…” Mom says, but when seconds pass and she doesn’t continue, fury rockets through me, blasting through my grief.
“You can’t possibly agree with her,” I seethe. “He killed Andy. He killed your son!”
“He says… he says Andy wanted that,” Mom murmurs.
“Andy wanted help! Or that’s what he needed, at least. Not an ax in his fucking skull!”
“I know. I know. And that’s my fault. I kept it…” Mom bows her head. “I kept it too dark in here to see the real darkness. I should have noticed. I should have protected you all so much better than I did.” Her breath shivers as she exhales. “I’m so sorry, Charlie. I’m sorry I didn’t know.” She lifts her eyes to him. “I didn’t protect you then, but I can protect you now. Tate’s right, you’ve suffered enough.” She clasps a hand over her mouth, triggering her tears. “My god, how you’ve suffered!”
Tate nods eagerly, watching Mom. Then she pivots toward me. “Please, Dahlia.”
“You’re crazy,” I fume. “What do you think is going to happen? The police are closing in on Dad. Elijah was here today, nosing around the house, and it’s only a matter of time before they find definitive proof that Dad was the Blackburn Killer. And once they do, they’ll—”
The Family Plot Page 25