All the Dangerous Things(21)

I imagine opening myself up at the stomach, placing Margaret snugly inside. It feels like that sometimes. Like she’s mine to protect. Like without her, I’m hollow.

I glance at the statues: a frog playing the ukulele, a baby with wings. There’s a woman directly across from me, bigger than the others, her mouth hanging open and her stone eyes looking directly into mine. She used to be a fountain, I think, but she hasn’t been hooked up in ages. Instead, there’s some kind of black algae trickling out of her mouth. My gaze follows as it cascades down her chin, her neck. It almost looks like she’s possessed.

“Ma’am?”

I look back at Margaret. She’s holding out a pitcher, her eyes darting back and forth between me and the cup and saucer she’s placed in front of me.

“Please,” I say in my best British accent. I lift the cup and make a show of pushing my pinkie up, sky-high, because I know it’ll make her laugh. Margaret giggles, tilting the pitcher with both hands. It’s too heavy for her, I can tell, and the ice and liquid comes barreling out and overflows out of my cup and into the grass.

“My apologies,” she says, licking the side of the pitcher before placing it back down. For some reason, it makes me smile. The way she says it, like a little adult. She heard it somewhere, I’m sure—Mom on the phone, maybe, or on some TV show—chewing it over in her mind before parroting it back.

She’s always watching, always listening. Always absorbing life like a sponge, silent and porous and malleable in our hands.

“I saw the footprints.”

My neck snaps toward Margaret, still standing above me, her head tilted to the side like a curious bird. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed those—those faint, muddy prints trailing their way from the hall to my bed—but I should have known better. Margaret notices everything.

“Do you go outside?” she asks. “At night?”

I don’t know how to answer that, so instead, I glance back toward the marsh, my eyes on the water lapping against the dock as I try to conjure up a memory dancing somewhere in my subconscious. Somewhere out of reach.

“I guess,” I say at last.

“What do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you go swimming?”

“I don’t know,” I repeat, closing my eyes.

“Why can’t you just sleep normal?”

“I don’t know, Margaret.”

She plops down next to me, her bare legs coppery and smooth. I watch as she pushes a few strands of sweaty hair off of her forehead before she turns to me again, all those questions swirling in her eyes.

“Is it because of what happened?”

It comes to me in flashes, like something out of a nightmare: me, creeping down the hallway, careful not to get caught. Dad, pacing the halls, white knuckles around a bottle of brown liquid while my mother lay splayed out on a mattress, white sheets staining red.

“We’re not supposed to talk about that,” I say.

“This house is a little creepy sometimes.”

I glance back to the house, standing tall at the top of that giant hill. I’ve lived my entire life in this house; aged from a newborn baby cradled in my mother’s arms to now a very independent eight. And as I’ve aged, things have changed. I’ve changed. We all have, really. We’ve all turned into something different, almost unrecognizable, mutating with time like the wood itself.

“Yeah,” I agree. “It’s so big, so old. Lots of noises.”

“You ever feel like we’re not alone in it?”

I think about the plaque bolted out front and all the other people who have called this place home. The statues that seem to have minds of their own and the soldiers who died here, their bodies probably scattered around the property, piles of bones buried beneath the floorboards

“It’s just me. Walking around,” I say, because I can’t bring myself to tell her that I feel it, too: the company of something otherworldly that I can’t quite name. The ever-present aura of something, or someone, trying to warn us, scare us. I can’t even bring myself to kill bugs here. Whenever I watch my dad slap at a beetle with a rolled-up newspaper or pop a tick between his fingers, I instinctively flinch and say a little prayer, knowing that each one is just adding to the body count. Tipping the scales of this place even further in the direction of death.

I twist back toward Margaret, but she isn’t facing me anymore. She’s facing the water, and I can see her spine protrude from the back of her neck, a skinny little centipede slithering beneath the skin.

“Try not to worry about it,” I say at last.

Margaret nods, her eyes still trained on something in the distance, and I follow her gaze to the giant oak tree on the edge of our property, its mangled limbs hanging directly over the water and the Spanish moss twisted into its bark like knotted hair. It’s low tide now, the water slowly retreating, and I can hear the clicking of tiny fiddler crabs as they climb over one another, their movement making it seem as though the ground is alive, breathing.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


NOW

I tried to get some rest yesterday. To prepare.

I took a couple of sleeping pills at noon and sunk into my couch, letting my lids grow heavy. Then I felt my eyeballs roll back, a redness dripping over my vision as I stared at the inside of my own skin, my veins. As I let my mind wander for a while, getting lost in a feverish kind of dream—an open window, that prehistoric stench of the marsh—but still on the brink of consciousness.