Sign Here(92)
She allowed herself two deep, grateful gasps before flipping them off (a gesture she knew was bad because her mother slapped her when she asked what it meant) and stomping to the first-floor bathroom, where she locked the door before she let herself cry. It was the first time Lily felt in her throat that bitter terror that, alone, she was not strong enough to thrive here.
* * *
—
WHEN LILY CAME TO, she thought she was a child again, back in her uncle’s pool. As she choked on lake water, she thought, for just a second, she could hear her cousins’ roars of laughter in her ears. Until she felt her hands tied to the boat lift underneath her and realized that the sound she took for laughter was only the sound of the dark water, rising.
She was lucky, she thought as she paced her breath with the gentle lapping of the freshwater tide. It was a weeknight, and a quiet one. If Gavin had strapped her down unconscious on the metal arm of the boat lift on, say, a Saturday afternoon or the Fourth of July, she would have drowned. But it was a weeknight, and the lake breathed easily like all those vacationing around it.
That day in the pool was the day Lily stopped thinking of herself as a solid person. She had traded her dreams for her mother’s, and then attached herself to Silas, looking to him to keep her afloat. And when he couldn’t, she turned to Gavin. Because the world had told her that if she sacrificed as much as she could—if she kept herself small and quiet, swallowed back her questions and angers and fears—she would eventually be light enough for someone else to carry.
Yet there she was, strapped to a boat lift, and somehow, Lily felt solid. And she knew that despite all her effort to silence it, all those holes she drilled into her own solidness, her strength had not forsaken her.
She managed to loosen one of the knots enough that when she exhaled and pushed herself up, tightening her stomach muscles as in childbirth, the remaining knot caught on a sharp edge of the metal lift. Then it was only a matter of time. A thread or two with each contraction until, finally, she felt the rope let her go.
How much time would she have saved, she thought as she worked her puckered fingers over the knot around her ankles, if she had just let herself be solid from the start?
She freed her ankles and slipped into the water, taking just one delightful second to feel her body upright and under her own control. But she could feel it for only that one second, because once she knew that she wasn’t going to die there, all her other feelings came rushing in. And she couldn’t feel any of them yet. Not the shock, the horror of what Gavin had done to her—who he was all along, and how very wrong she had been about him. Not Philip’s letter, the answers it gave. Certainly not the terror about what came next, where Gavin had gone after he left her there to drown. She couldn’t think; she just had to act.
The lake was the same color and temperature as the air, a thicker but otherwise equal atmosphere, and if she didn’t focus she could easily mistake one for the other, believing to sink was to swim. Lily felt her way along the shadows of the boathouse’s insides, darker, somehow, even in nothing but darkness, until her fingers gripped a slick pole of the ladder.
When she cut the frenzied thinking out of her brain, the chorus of mean and certain voices she had believed, until that moment, to be her sanity, Lily found she had a lot more room in herself for knowing. And she knew, she thought as she started up the hill toward what was left of the target practice, toward the tree that held Rose’s rifle, that if she had to, she could kill him.
SILAS
IT WAS THE FIRST time Silas had seen him all grown up, but he would’ve recognized him anywhere. Not if Sarah hadn’t died, of course. If Sarah hadn’t died, Silas wouldn’t have even remembered the handful of times he met little Gavin Kelly, who went to a boarding school outside of town. Shy and skinny, uninterested in sports. Gavin, of course, would’ve known Silas. Everyone in their town did. And after Sarah died, everyone knew Gavin too.
“What are you doing here?” Silas asked, but Gavin ignored him, instead walking up to Ruth. When he knelt down beside her and she fell straight into him, Silas knew.
It wasn’t his aching imagination that made her look like Sarah. It was her blood.
“Where is Mickey?” Sean asked, taking a step forward.
“I’d watch it,” Gavin said. He waved one hand above Ruth’s head, which was burrowed into his chest, and the moonlight caught a glint of metal. “I don’t want to have to use this.”
Silas grabbed Sean’s arm and pulled him back behind him.
“Dad,” Ruth sobbed, and Gavin used the hand that wasn’t holding the gun to pull the back of her skull against him, his fingers deep in her hair. “Shh, chickadee. You did good. It’s all done now.”
“Dad,” Sean said, “what the fuck is this guy talking about? Where is Mickey? Where’s Mom?”
Silas shook his head, scanning out of the corner of his eye for a branch, a rock. Anything. But he kept his legs planted firmly in front of Sean.
“Look, Gavin, I need to know where my daughter is. I’m sorry about what happened, but—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Gavin said, and the woods jumped. Ruth might’ve jumped too; Silas couldn’t be sure. “You have no idea what it means to be sorry. Do you think Sarah never talked about you—about how awful you all were to her in school?”