d.w. gillespie
One by One
FLAME TREE PRESS
London & New York
This book is dedicated to my wife, Alicia.
As of this publication, we’ve been together for twenty years.
In that time, she’s been the first reader for more than a dozen books, many of which will rightfully never be published. There’s little doubt in my mind that she suffered through some bad books, all the while encouraging, supporting, and helping me to get better. Without her, I wouldn’t have made it this far.
Prologue
I never wanted to come here.
Dad said it would be good for me. To get away from town, the concrete, to replace it with country and trees, tall grass and woods, to hear the owls always hoot, hooting out in the dark, telling each other secrets. But what secrets could owls have to tell?
I tried to like it.
No, really, I did. Mom is the same way, trying so hard to smile. I think a lot about what a smile is, especially when you don’t mean it. It’s a mask. Something that hides the truth. I know why she smiles all the time because that’s the best way to pretend that she doesn’t see. That she doesn’t see what Dad is.
What he’s done.
Peter loves it. He’s a boy, so of course he does. He never wants to come inside, and when he does, the mud is so thick on his boots that he has to leave them by the door. Dad thinks it’s funny, but Mom is tired of it. She says, “He’s too old for this kind of shit.” I think she’s right.
I feel like I’m too old for this place, but it makes me feel like a baby too. At night, the way it breathes, the way everything creaks and pops, like the house is alive. The house in town never did that. All you had was the sound of traffic and horns, sirens somewhere far off. I miss that. Here it’s all crickets and owls, like the woods are so full of bad things that all the animals can do is just scream at each other, like maybe if they’re all miserable together, it might help somehow.
I hate the woods the most. Full of dark. Limbs that reach for you. And, of course, secrets.
I shouldn’t have painted that picture.
I did it in the long hallway in front of the stairs. That place is almost at the center of the entire house, the place where every other hallway has to come together. I wanted it to be clear, easy to see, something we’d always notice when we walked to and from our rooms. A reminder of who we are, of what we could be.
It was a simple thing. I stuck with stick figures, just to make sure I could make it work. I was pretty good at drawing by then, but something about it, the act of drawing on the walls, was so childish, something a four-year-old would do, not a third grader. It was, up to that point at least, the most impulsive thing I’d ever done. That makes me laugh now, looking back on it. Jesus, the stuff I’ve done since then.
I used the leftover paints that I’d gotten the year before. Simple stuff, big bold, primary colors. It looked almost symbolic when I was done, which, in a way, was exactly what I was going for. It was like a logo of our family, a representation – anyone could tell exactly what it was.
Like I said, I was only seven at the time, so I don’t think I was trying to be ironic. As childish as the drawing looked, it was genuine as well. I wanted to remember everyone, to remember all of us just that way. It was stupid, I knew that even then, but I hoped that maybe, just maybe, Mom would think it was cute. Like she used to.
But she didn’t think it was cute. Honestly, I’ve never seen her so mad. She said I didn’t care about anything. Didn’t care about our house, the one she worked so hard to fix up. Said she should just forget it, that she should stop trying and just let us be hooligans, running around in our bare feet, tracking mud all over. It wasn’t funny. It’s never funny when she gets mad like that, but I caught Dad out of the corner of my eye. Dad stood back, sort of smiling, trying not to laugh.
He always finds something to laugh about, even when he’s at his worst. “It’s fine,” Dad said when she finally stopped yelling. “We’re putting the paper up soon, so what’s the harm?”
“Don’t you do that,” Mom yelled, suddenly mad at him instead of me. Was that why he did it?
I could hear them the rest of the afternoon, the fighting rising and falling in waves, crashing like waves on the beach. I miss the beach. I wonder if we’ll ever go on vacations like that again. I can still remember the nights, the windows open, the endless sound of the ocean all through the night.
A week later, Dad did exactly what he said he would do, and he covered up the drawing with long, ugly sheets of wallpaper. Mom seemed to calm down after that, but nothing was the same. Nothing was right.
I should have seen it all coming. Everything changed. Forever. The family that was painted on the wall was covered up too.
Buried.
I think, in hindsight, that was the point when things started to change. I was growing up after all, and you wouldn’t believe how much I blamed myself for what happened next. If I’d stayed that little girl, that sweet, safe little thing, would any of this ever have happened?
Either way, Dad wasn’t right after that. Then again, I don’t think any of us were.
—Mary
Chapter One
The house snuck up on her as things often did. They weren’t very far out of town, not by adult standards anyway, but for Alice, it felt like they had driven cross-country. She didn’t know what to expect. The truth was she never knew what to expect. Her teacher would undoubtedly say that, out of every child in her fifth-grade class, she was the most absentminded. For some, that was a negative thing, but for Alice, it meant she was usually surprised by whatever happened.
“Head-in-the-clouds sort of girl,” Mrs. Carmichael told her parents at their twice-yearly conference. Alice had been sitting out in the hall, iPad in hand, earphones in her lap. The adults hadn’t thought she was listening. They never thought she was listening.
“Friendly,” the teacher continued, “and smart as a whip, but would walk onto a train track if she was daydreaming.”
Her parents, Frank and Debra, said nothing. After all, what could they say? They knew the facts far more than her teacher ever could. From what Alice could tell, they’d gone through the usual rounds that most parents with such a child went through. She could still remember the questions, the ones they whispered to each other when they thought she was in bed.
Was she going through a phase? Was there some medical reason, something as mild as attention deficit disorder or as serious as mini-seizures perhaps? Or was she, quite simply, a bit different, a phrase that most parents refuse to even consider?
The neighborhood that held their original home, the only home as far as Alice knew, might as well have been an ocean away, and so she stared out the window, dreaming, thinking of nothing and everything all at once, same as always. A song played on the radio, something from the Nineties, her parents’ time. She didn’t pay attention to the lyrics, but the music made a scene in her head, a vision of the house, the family, a sunny day without end.
It won’t be like that.
A voice in her head, one of many, some of them bright and lively, but not this one. This one sounded a bit like Eeyore. She ignored it. Despite this gray stretch of winter, she knew the sun would be out soon enough, and everything dead would be alive again.
There was some discussion from the front seat as to whether or not this house was the house, the final house. It was clear to Alice, watching from a distance, that Debra, her mother, was far more cautious about the move. After all, their current house was a good house, a fine house, and things that were fine didn’t need to be replaced. There had been more talk in the months leading up
to the ultimate decision, talk about budgets and long-term goals, but it was clear that her father’s mind was made up. All that remained was the tedious task of convincing everyone else.
“You have to use your imagination,” her father, Frank, said from behind the steering wheel.
Debra, her mother, nodded, familiar with the line of argument. “I used my imagination last year with the camping trip. I seem to remember a cabin that was supposed to be quaint, romantic, and adventurous. I learned the limits of my imagination that weekend.”
Frank laughed, a goofy sound, boyish despite the fact that he was nearly forty. “I stand by that decision,” he said, grinning.
“You would,” Debra said. “You didn’t find the spider in the shower.”
“How big was it again?”
“Bigger than my fist.”
“Strange such a monster got away and you were the only one who saw it.…”
Alice, drawn away from daydreaming, watched them banter back and forth. It was different now that the choice had been made and the papers had been signed. Before, there was an edge to them both, a strained, painful sharpness to the conversations. It had seemed to Alice that both of them wielded their true feelings about moving as if they were knives without handles, something that wasn’t safe to hand off to another person without that person getting cut. The simple fact that they cared about not hurting each other seemed to stand for something. Even so, there was no denying the past few months had been bad.
Frank had lost his job as a training manager at a local factory the previous year, and his new one, a commissioned sales job, wasn’t nearly as well paying. Debra, already a higher earner than him, was now the official breadwinner. But through some strange magic, Frank had convinced her to go along with this new house.
“It’s a steal.”
Everyone in the family heard that phrase so many times over the past few months that it was practically tattooed on the insides of their eyelids. Alice and her older brother, Dean, watched the whole thing from afar, occasionally objecting, but never really feeling the need to push too hard. Dean was, after all, a sophomore in high school, and at the apex of teenage self-centeredness. He was fifteen, and mere months away from driving, so he had more pressing things on his mind than getting involved in family affairs. It seemed like just another one of their father’s schemes, up there with becoming a real estate agent and starting his own restaurant. Most of these flights of fancy would pass on their own, but this one – this house – seemed to hang in there longer. It was his first real scheme after losing his job, after the family “took a hit” as he liked to say. But the rest of them had less patience for schemes now, less room for them too. They were toeing a thinner line than ever before, and you could see it, their mounting anxiety hiding in plain sight, peering through the cracks of the family armor.
Dean and Alice had, on rare occasions, confided in each other that they were certain divorce was the final spot on the treasure map that was their parents’ marriage. But now, after their father somehow persuaded their mother to go along on the new house, everything had changed.
Don’t you wonder what it is? a whisper inside her asked. There were lots of voices inside her, and for years, Alice was convinced that there were lots of voices inside of everyone. Loud and quiet voices. Mean and sweet voices. And most of all, scared voices, little voices that were so soft they were barely voices at all.
Yes. She did wonder what it was that had swayed her mother and ultimately made her parents’ marriage suddenly pull itself out of the dive it had been in for the past year or so. Now, they would laugh together. Flirt. Dance to whatever happened to be playing. And so it was now, a feathery back-and-forth between them that was as saccharine as a romantic comedy. Alice realized, the week of Thanksgiving of all times, that her mother was now part of her father’s game. Her no-nonsense, practical mother was complicit. And with that fact out of the way, Debra was wrapped up in the fun of it all. Their marriage, unquestionably old and tired at this point, had something new, a little spice thrown into the recipe. Eventually, the arguments drifted off. The fights diminished. And everyone had a single goal to focus on for the near future.
The house.
They had, by all accounts, no business moving, but Frank, in his never-ending search for a project, a deal…
…a purpose?
…had come across the place while searching around online. He couldn’t get enough of the house-flipping shows, and Alice could see the twinkle in his eye when he first started talking about the place. There was little doubt in her mind that he could imagine himself as one of those young, strapping hosts, barreling in with a sledgehammer to carve out the diamond hiding in the mess of an old, forgotten house.
Her parents were still bantering in the front seat, but Alice had seen enough flirting; she glanced back out the window. The sky, gray blue, melted into the winter trees, whose bark was a deeper gray. They passed by them too quickly, and the trees blurred, becoming something liquid, a mealy, gravel-colored slime that dripped from the sky, taking hold in the brown-and-yellow earth.
There are monsters here.
Another voice, darker, not nearly as easy to ignore as the gloomy one. This was the nighttime voice, the one that rarely snuck out when the sun was still out. The neighborhood wouldn’t allow for monsters. There were patches of darkness, places where foul things might hide, but not nearly enough to sustain a grim ecosystem. Monsters loved the woods, places the streetlights never touched, where the only light was that of a sagging moon on nights when even the clouds were afraid to show themselves. If any monsters made it into the neighborhood, they would find themselves stuck, abandoned, struck dead by the sunlight. All you had to do was stay on the lit path; any ten-year-old knew that.
But out there, in the gray, passing landscape, it was different. This wasn’t her place. It wasn’t just her home she was leaving behind, but it was also everything that her home meant. Safety. The expected. The known. Out there, in the leafless gray woods, anything could happen.
No, Alice didn’t know what to expect at all. But when she saw the house, she knew it was theirs. As they pulled up the long, gravel driveway, under a roof of old oak trees, the house came into view in its entirety. She wasn’t sure if she gasped, but it felt like she did. It didn’t so much as sit on the wooded lot as loom, a lovely, strange thing. It looked to her like a giant doll’s house, something that was once pristine but had been left out in the garden for years, forgotten, then discovered once again. But the strangest thing of all was that, despite the dirt and grime, it hadn’t lost its odd beauty.
“Here we are,” Frank said in a jovial tone.
Debra sighed, a motion that started from the roots of her hair all the way down to her toes, the car’s light atmosphere dampening slightly. From where Alice sat, she could tell that her father was pretending not to notice. She’d seen her mother’s own excitement, stirred up by her father over the past weeks, but there was something different now, some greater finality to the moment. The excitement still existed, surely, but it was hidden behind the long hours of work that it would surely take to bring the house to life.
“Where’s the front door?” Alice asked.
Frank laughed. “It’s an odd duck of a house,” he replied. “It was built before the main road was. Back then, there was a little dirt road that went down the side here. So, from the road at least, the house is sideways. The front door is over there.” He pointed toward the side of the house.
“Weird…” Alice said, following his finger.
“It’s got personality,” Frank said, stepping out. “You won’t find anything like that in all these cookie-cutter neighborhoods where every third house looks the exact same and you can piss out your window and hit your neighbor—”
“Frank,” Debra said quietly. “We get it, honey.”
Debra stepped out of the car and stared up at the hous
e, taking in the abandoned enormity of it.
“What the hell were we thinking?” she said to herself.
Alice stood half in, half out of the car and just kept staring. She had never seen anything like it in her life. Their current home was one in a line of very similar homes in a neighborhood just a few miles away from her school. It was, as her father described it, an assembly-line house. Nothing unique, nothing different, and thus, nothing special. It wasn’t until he came around to the possibility of moving that he began to talk that way about their home, and the idea that anything could be wrong with the house she grew up in seemed somehow sacrilegious to Alice. The thought had simply never occurred to her that her room, her own little slice of the world, might not be perfect.
She missed most of her parents’ conversation as she stepped out of the car, lost in her own thoughts. The house wasn’t just big; it was also absolutely massive, swallowing their house at least twice, maybe more. That alone was enough to catch her eye, but it was just the beginning. The shape of it was so subtly wrong that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around why it was. A wide, bloated bay window marked the side of the house in the center, and beside it, a tiny porch made up of nothing more than a few brick steps and a concrete landing. The mere size of the house seemed to hint at something more resplendent, like a Gothic, Southern mansion. But this porch…it was pure utilitarianism.
Gone was the familiar warmth of red brick, replaced by layers of wooden siding, the off-white paint peeling in sheets. The roof was a mess of odd angles, a peak in the center followed by a precipitous drop on one side and a gentle slope on the other. There were no answers to the design or look of it, at least not to a ten-year-old, but the overall feel of the place was unmistakable. A gigantic weeping willow, whose trunk was dangerously close to the edge of the house, leaned over the roof, threatening to eat the entire thing. The wisps of leafless branches reached down from the highest point brushing across the front of the bay window. Just looking at it, admiring it, Alice was filled with a sense of bubbling anticipation mingled with dark revulsion. It felt like stumbling across a dead body, something deeply wrong yet impossible to look away from. In a few short moments, Alice was smitten.
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