Gun Shy(54)

“Are we going to have a problem?” he asks me. I shake my head emphatically.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“No,” I reply. “No problems. I swear.”

“Good,” he says, apparently satisfied. “Find a box for that.” He jabs a finger toward Jennifer.

“For Jennifer?” I ask.

He looks impatient. “For the kid.”

“Oh.”

He leaves the attic again and I look around properly for the first time. My whole focus has been on Jennifer and her baby, but now I look past them, to the large pine box she was obviously locked in, the padlock hanging loose, the lid flipped open. I peer inside the box to see ordinary things, things you wouldn’t equate with death and dying. A pillow. Blankets. An iPod, ear bud headphones still attached. Gingerly, I lift one of the ear buds to my ear. It’s blasting music. I don’t listen long enough to hear what’s playing.

I search the room for a box. My eyes land on a stack of milk cartons in the corner, meticulously stacked, almost as tall as me. Making sure I’m still alone, I take one of the cartons from the pile.

It’s old and waxy, just like the one I found downstairs when Ray interrupted me last week. But this carton is different. The picture on the side hasn’t been rubbed out.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?

Every hair on my arms stands on end as if I’ve been electrified. They used to put missing kids on milk cartons. Isn’t that exactly what Damon said to me in the kitchen the morning Jennifer’s disappearance broke on the news? I study the grainy black and white image of the kid pictured. Daniel Collins, aged ten. Went missing from the sidewalk outside his house on August 26th, 1987.

It was his tenth birthday. He’d been checking the mailbox, and then he was just gone.

I memorize the date and the name, putting the carton back in its spot and selecting another one. It’s identical. I check two cartons, then five, ten. They’re all the fucking same. Daniel Collins, born 1977, disappeared 1987. I don’t recognize the face on the photo, it’s so grainy and blurred, but I store the name in the recesses of my mind for future reference.

I hear movement downstairs and leave the milk cartons, spying a box I know I can use. My mother’s wedding dress from when she married my father, something I thought Damon would have insisted she throw out after he moved in. It’s heart-shaped, and I take the lid off gently, mindful that my bloody fingerprints are now all over it. I’m a part of this, now. I am an accomplice. I am complicit.

Better to be an accomplice than to be dead, I suppose.

Inside is a smaller box, identical heart-shaped cardboard, among the stiff old silk. I take the smaller box out and lay it on the floor beside Jennifer, mindful to keep it away from the blood pooled beneath her body. This box contains my mother’s veil; the most beautiful French lace, material she found at a thrift store and sewed herself while I grew in her belly. I take Jennifer’s tiny baby from her chest and place it in the pile of lace, covering it as best I can, before replacing the lid.

“Cassie!” Ray’s voice cuts through the buzz in my ears. I leave the heart-shaped box and follow the sound of my name downstairs to the bathroom beside my bedroom.

It’s easier to cope with the sheer volume of blood upstairs, in the dark; here, it is lit up in Technicolor. Damon is sitting in the bottom of the bath, his face in his hands. He did not shed a single tear when my mother died, apart from the few fake ones he squeezed out at her funeral, but here, in the wake of Jennifer and her baby — he sobs like a broken child. Ray hears me enter the small space and steps back, his bloody hand immediately fishing a cigarette from his jeans pocket and lighting up.

“Come on, brother,” Ray says quietly.

Damon is shaking violently; covered in the blood of his child’s life and death, in the bottom of the empty bath. I look to Ray; he gestures with the cigarette in Damon’s general direction. There are no words exchanged but his meaning is clear — fix that.

So I do what comes via instinct; I undress Damon as best I can, blood-slicked fingers fumbling with the buttons on his uniform, the tan stained a red so dark it’s almost black. I get his socks off, his shirt, his boxer briefs, and the key from around his neck that hangs on a thin chain. I’ve never seen it before, but I don’t have time to study it. I set it all beside the bath in a pile, and then I turn the faucet on, warm water shooting down and slowly, ever-so-slowly washing Jennifer’s blood from his skin.

I scrub the red from his body as if he’s a child muddied from playing in the rain instead of a murderer bloodied from keeping a girl tied up in his attic. His blue eyes stare at the wall at the end of the bath, unfocused, unseeing. He is somewhere else. When he’s finally clean, I shut off the water and wrap a towel around his shoulders.

I can’t breathe properly. My chest hurts. I have too many questions. The blood is gone and I need something to drink. Maybe I’ll tip a bottle of bleach down my throat and end it all before something like this happens to me.

I stand on shaking legs and walk toward the hallway. As I’m about to step out of the bathroom, Ray stands in the doorway, his bulk blocking my path. He looks me up and down, fixing his eyes on mine. The message is clear: You’re not going anywhere.

Ray smokes. Damon stares. I stand between the two brothers, biting the insides of my cheeks until I taste blood.