All the Dangerous Things(26)

It’s realizing that you’re not really alone at all.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


THEN

I sneak down the hallway, toes pointed, my bare feet avoiding the boards that are prone to creaking. I know them all: the soft spots in the wood that shift under the weight of my heel; the rusty door hinges that whine in the night. Margaret and I have turned this house into our own enchanted labyrinth—roaming halls, twisting doorknobs. Poking our heads inside barely used rooms and holding our breath as we trail our hands across the furniture, leaving behind nothing but finger streaks in the dust. The corridor looms before me now like a tongue rolling out of the depths of a darkened throat, but still, I force myself forward. Into the underbelly of the house.

It’s quiet, but my parents are awake. I can hear them shut inside Dad’s office. I can hear them whisper.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” my mother says, her voice like silk that’s starting to tear. “Henry, you don’t understand.”

I feel a rock lodge in my throat, and I swallow, trying to force it down. Dad works in Washington—the Rhetts have been in Congress since my grandfather’s grandfather, or so the story goes—but he always comes home for the weekend before turning around and leaving again every Monday morning. He usually brings Margaret and me some kind of present when he’s back—candied pralines or boiled peanuts or bags of thick, juicy scuppernongs that he picks up from a roadside vendor on his drive back from the airport—a reminder of his love for us that has slowly started to feel more like an apology. Or a bribe.

“I need you to come home,” she continues. “Stay home with me. Please.”

“You know I can’t do that,” my father says, his voice low and stern. “Elizabeth, you know that. You’ve always known that.”

“I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I’m starting to feel … I don’t know. The girls. Some days, I look at them, and I—”

“Yes you can,” he says. “You can do this. The girls are fine.”

Margaret brought it up again at dinner tonight: those footprints on my carpet, muddy and fading like my memory, my mind. I can still hear the clank of my mother’s fork as she dropped it; my father, staring at us, probably imagining me wandering into the marsh at night. My white nightgown sticking to my ankles, my calves, my thighs. The water moving higher and higher until it poured down my throat.

“Maybe if we could just get some help,” my mother says now, her voice perking up. “If I could get some help—”

“No.”

The room grows quiet, but it’s the kind of quiet that’s heavy, dangling over them like a piano suspended by a string, threatening to come crashing down in an instant and bury them in the debris. And that’s when I hear my mother sigh—a sigh of resignation, maybe. Frustration. Of knowing that no matter what she says, no matter how hard she pleads, come Monday morning, he’ll be gone again, and she’ll be left to deal with us alone.

“Elizabeth, this was the deal,” my father says. “My job is in Washington, yours is here. I thought this is what you wanted?”

“It was,” she whispers. “It is.”

“You can stay home,” he says. “You can paint. We can keep growing our family.”

Another bout of quiet, but this time, different. Intimate and fragile. I think I can hear the groan of a chair, the sound of rustling clothes. The almost inaudible suction of two lips pressed together, moving in unison. I take a step backward, trying to make my way back upstairs, when the board groans beneath my feet—and suddenly, I can tell that the movement has stopped. I can feel their eyes on the other side of the door, watching me freeze in fear, like a deer on the wrong side of two headlights barreling fast.

I hold my breath, stand perfectly still, until I hear the screech of a chair being pushed back, my father’s lumbering footsteps growing loud.

My heart plummets as the door swings open.

“Isabelle.”

I stare up at my father towering above me and feel impossibly small. He looks at me for a moment, quiet, before opening the door wider. Inside, I see my mother sitting on the arm of his office chair, nightgown hanging off one shoulder so I can see the pop of her clavicle. She stares at me in the doorframe, her eyes waxy and red. She’s been crying, I can tell, and I feel guilty. Guilty for making her feel like this.

I think of her words to my father, a hushed whisper. A desperate pleading.

“You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t understand.”

“I couldn’t fall asleep,” I blurt out, realizing they might be thinking it right now: that I’m doing it again. That I’m walking the halls of the house in my sleep, standing here with my eyes open and an emptiness on the other side.

My mother stands up and glides across the room, joining my father in the doorway. She continues to stare, examining me. It’s the same way she looks at me sometimes when I wake up in the dark, standing in the bathroom with the faucet running or holding a spatula in the kitchen. The same way she tilts her head to the side, like she’s studying me. Like she’s trying to determine if I’m real.

Like she’s afraid.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


NOW

That man from last night, sitting on his porch. Something about him has been irking me, bothering me, sticking to my side like a burr digging in its spikes.