Burn Our Bodies Down(71)

But I have lost the last of my patience. The question tears out of me, blunt and desperate, near to screaming. “Did you set the fire? Did you kill her?”

Gram sighs, deep and exhausted. Turns and sags against the counter, the water still running. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. Is it really killing when she wasn’t…” She trails off, shrugs.

“Wasn’t what?” Not a daughter. Not a sister. But she came from here, and I saw the report at the morgue. Her mirrored heart, just like Katherine. And something else, too. The chemical in her blood. “Gram, what’s ridicine?”

Her face falls, goes clear enough that even in the dark I can see everything—the surprise, the fear.

“Where did you hear about that?” she says. If I thought panic would turn her fragile, the way it can with Mom, with me, I was wrong. “Answer me right now, Margot. Where?”

I lift my chin, set my shoulders. “Connors. He said it’s some banned chemical. Were you using it here?” I throw my arm out, gesturing to the fields beyond the porch, to the crops bearing stillborn fruit. “Is that what made them this way?”

It’s too big a question, and I don’t even know quite what I mean. But I’m not wrong. I know that.

Gram looks at me for a long time. And it isn’t pain in her eyes. It’s something else, something older and deeper. I think I’m always two people to her and Mom. Myself, and the ghost of the girl before me.

“I have lived with my mistakes,” she says softly, finally. “So has Jo. We’ve both done what we could. And it hasn’t mattered at all.” I watch, confused, as she pulls a bobby pin from her bra, gathers her curled hair into a knot and pins it at the back of her head. “Some things just get worse and worse, don’t they, Mini?”

The nickname rips through me. “Stop,” I say. “I’m not them.”

“Oh, no?” She’s mocking me, but there’s no energy to it. “You’re here, aren’t you? You sent your mother away. You made yourself my girl.”

I did. I tried so hard to be hers. To be anyone’s, if Mom wouldn’t have me.

“I sent her away because I know what she did,” I say instead. It’s not true at all—I didn’t then. But I do now.

“And what’s that?” Gram asks.

“She killed Katherine.” It comes out easy. What a relief, to say it out loud, to let Mom be what she is. To stop pretending she could ever love me the way mothers are meant to love children. Mom’s spent seventeen years hiding from what she did, and the whole time she had me right in front of her. Me with a face just like hers. Like Katherine’s. How do you love the worst thing you ever did?

“Yes,” Gram says with a strange sort of pride. “She did. That’s where you come from. That’s your Nielsen blood.”

“No. No, I won’t be like her. I won’t be like you.”

“You already are.” She gestures to me, the wave of her hand encompassing me from head to toe. “You’ve done exactly what we have. You’ve put this family first, as you should.”

She’s right. I have decided that protecting this place is worth more than anything else. I have let Fairhaven wrap its arms around me, because nothing ever has before. But something isn’t good just because it wants me, is it? Gram’s not better than Mom. Her, kneeling in front of me, calling me her own—that’s just the other side of the coin.

One day, I told myself, one day you’ll have to let go. Maybe that’s now.

“You’re right. I have,” I say. Gram raises her eyebrows. “But I won’t do it again.” And I start walking. Out the back door. Off the porch and onto the grass. A glance around the corner at Gram’s truck, a shovel and a shotgun in the flatbed. I could take it to grab Tess and bolt, but Gram probably has the keys, and I can’t drive stick. It doesn’t matter; I’m gone anyway.

I am leaving. I am getting Tess and we’ll go to the police and we’ll say this is how it is, and something will change. The driveway a stretch of dust ahead of me, the Miller house up ahead, and it feels so far but I’ll walk as far as I have to, as long as Fairhaven’s behind me.

“Margot!”

Don’t. Don’t turn around. I feel the urge to go back tugging at my feet, but I keep walking. You don’t have to stay somewhere just because someone wants you to, I tell myself.

“Margot, you can’t go.” Gram is close behind me now. We must look ridiculous, marching through the evening in our party dresses, anger crackling like static between us.

“Why the hell not?” Another step. Just one after another, Margot.

“Please,” Gram says.

That. That’s what stops me in my tracks. I can hear the effort it takes her to say it. I can hear how much she doesn’t want to.

“You don’t have to look at me,” she says after a moment. “Just listen.”

I do, and I hear her skirt rustle as she comes closer.

“If it’s spread to the Millers,” Gram says when I don’t move, “that means it’s getting worse. I started this—you understand? So I had to stop it.”

“It” what? I want to press her, but I know if I turn around, I’m giving up. Instead I take the smallest look over my shoulder. All I can see of her is the swing of her skirt, her hand slightly reaching toward me.