We Were Never Here(56)

* * *



—

We built a campfire before bed, both of us lost in thought as the wood snapped and sputtered. I held my marshmallow over the glowing coals, rotating the stick until I’d achieved a uniform ochre. But Kristen plunged hers into the flame, turning it into a torch and then gazing at the tiny inferno so it was reflected in her eyes.

Years ago, we’d been right there, sitting around the campfire on Novak’s verdant edge, when she first told me what had happened to her parents. It was the summer before junior year, a moment seared into my brain.

“My mom wasn’t even supposed to be home,” she’d said, her tears reflecting orange, like lava. “The night of the fire? It’s so messed-up. She was supposed to be up in Door County with her girlfriends, and I was gonna go to a sleepover because I hated being alone with my dad.” The injustice had brought tears to my eyes too. “But Dad wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home. Ugh, it makes me so angry.”

I’d shuffled my camping chair closer to hers, then grabbed her hand. We’d been so young, still—twenty years old and newly close. “So you were home? That must’ve been so scary.”

“It was terrifying. The smoke alarm woke me up and I tried to run into the hallway, but the doorknob burned my hand.” She clutched her palm to her chest, as if she could still feel the white-hot pain. “I opened my bedroom window and climbed onto the huge maple tree there—I’d done it a million times before. And then I ran over to Nana and Bill’s.”

    As she described the rest, it played in my mind like a scene from a horror film: Young Kristen screaming and jabbing at the doorbell until her grandparents finally woke and let her inside. Nana and Bill physically restraining her as the fire trucks arrived. She’d thrashed and hollered, begging to be let back into the blaze so she could find her parents in the choking blackness. But the fire had trapped them in their suite. They were burned alive, unsalvageable like the house that collapsed around them.

Now, seventeen years after the tragedy and almost a decade after Kristen shared the memory with me, she poured water on the campfire so it bubbled and hissed, and we bid each other good night.

Hours later, I stared at my bedroom’s slanted pine ceiling, unable to sleep. Crickets scratched and rattled outside the window; a fat insect or possibly a bat thumped into the screen. I counted, then counted again. Like if I added it up enough times, I’d get a different answer.

Kristen’s parents. Jamie, whose brief life Kristen had kept from me. Sebastian, then Paolo.

Five deaths in fewer than twenty years.

I’d thought we attracted violence when we got together, somehow pulling in the energy of chaos, of poor decisions and awful dudes. And I trusted Kristen, I knew her soul, knew she was loving and good. But it was the kind of thought you can have only in the woolly shame of the middle of the night: God, that’s a lot of death for someone so young.

I thought back to Nana’s email yesterday: Kristen has been acting a bit strange lately.

And Kristen’s words in Chile: We see things they miss.

I yanked my phone from its charger and turned on its flashlight. I tiptoed past Kristen’s room and eased myself down one creaking set of steps, then paused at the top of the basement stairs. Why are basements so creepy, even when they’re refurbished? I flicked on the light, pulling the door closed behind me before the beam could scatter. Awake, alert, I stalked through the den and reached for the door to the unfinished section.

    One, two, three, four, five. Five lifeless bodies, families grieving, psyches stopped too soon. I knew all about the last two—I knew they were self-defense, a case of wrong place (okay, wrong head-injury placement), wrong time. If I just knew more about numbers one through three, I could quiet this trickle of treason, of suspicion. Kristen and I were 100 percent counting on each other to keep our secrets safe. I needed to know what I was dealing with. Whom I was dealing with.

I pulled the knob and blinked into the darkness. Okay, this part is legit scary. I groped around for a light switch but caught nothing but shelving units to the right and left, cobwebs detaching to coat my fingers. I swept my phone’s light across: work bench, rowing machine, table saw. And more utility shelves topped with bins and boxes. There—a bare bulb hung from a beam in the ceiling, ten feet away.

The cement floor was cold on my socked feet, and when I pulled the light’s cord I saw movement, a scattering. I spotted a massive millipede disappearing beneath an old wooden chest and pressed my hand to my thrashing heart. Just bugs.

Where to begin? I rifled through the nearest shelves, tilting boxes to read their labels, tipping dust into my lungs. The furnace clanged on and a scream caught in my throat. After a few minutes I found the right boxes, newer than the others, in an alcove behind the boiler: Kristen Bedroom.

I dragged the first box into the rec room and plopped onto the floor, then cringed at the loud hiss the tape made coming loose from cardboard. High school and college stuff, English papers and random playbills and concert stubs, a certificate awarded to the pom team’s MVP. Too recent—by the time Kristen was in high school, her parents and best friend were already dead.

With the second box, I hit the jackpot—here was Kristen in her tween years, skinny-limbed and red-faced with a mouthful of braces. I pulled out a stack of thin King of Kings yearbooks. There were two sections for every grade, perhaps forty students per graduating class.