The Spite House(71)
“She’s away right now,” Dad said, sounding robotic. Sounding programmed.
“Oh. Okay,” Stacy said. “Can I ask what’s for dinner? I’m really hungry.”
Months later, Dess still carried guilt over the twinge of terror she felt at hearing this. She’s a monster, she first thought. She’s not really her. She’s something pretending to be Stacy. That’s the only explanation. Or else me and Dad just went crazy together. But when they got her home that night she didn’t go for their throats or demand a glass of blood instead of water. She ate the pancakes Dad made for her, because that was her favorite.
“Pancakes for dinner?” she said. “Really?”
“Pancakes whenever you want,” her father said. He still sounded flat, but Dess understood it was because he was working to keep from screaming out in joy, or from insanity, or both at once. She felt the same thing. A bubbly madness. Glee heaped upon hysteria. The world stopped making sense and that should have been cause for concern, but not when the nonsense broke so beautifully in your favor. Stacy was with them again. Eating dinner like a living person. Laughing at her own jokes. When she excused herself to go to the bathroom, Dess almost lost her mind laughing.
“She has to go to the bathroom,” she said after Stacy stepped away. “That’s a real thing, Dad. That’s not like a ghost thing. That’s a real thing.”
Her father shook his head. “This isn’t real. This isn’t possible.”
“It’s real, Dad. I’m really here, I’m seeing this with you. Her plate’s empty. Somebody just ate that food and it’s her. She’s here.”
“I know. I know. But, Jesus Christ, this is impossible.”
What neither of them dared speak of was the possibility that—even if it was real and not a shared delusion—this was temporary. Tomorrow morning, or the next day, or the day after, they would wake up and Stacy would be gone again. This was merely a small reprieve. A flash of generosity from some incomprehensible force too far removed from humanity to understand the potential for cruelty in its charity. Because once Stacy was gone again it would be like they’d lost her for the first time. However many centimeters they had crawled away from their initial grief, they would lose them and be right back where they started. They had no time to prepare for her reappearance and would be unprepared for her next absence.
Aware of this, neither Dess nor her father slept that first night. When Stacy said she was tired, they felt an urge to prevent her from going to bed, remembering that night in April when the illness seemed to make her drowsy before taking her. They stayed up late with her, playing the ABC game and listening to music and watching her favorite shows, until finally she could not resist sleep any longer.
When she got to her room and saw her favorite doll resting against the pillows, she went up to it and said, “Bedtime, Miss Happy.” Dess felt any lingering doubt wash away.
She and Dad stayed in the room with her as she slept that first night, barely passing a word between them. Dess spent almost all night on her phone, searching for whatever she could find about people returning from the dead. She imagined her father was doing the same.
When Stacy woke up the next morning, Dess felt a dangerous optimism stirring. She’s back for real, she thought. This isn’t a one-off thing. She’s going to have her whole life back. She didn’t share these hopeful thoughts with her father. She let him be the first to broach the subject of Stacy being with them permanently, two weeks after she first returned. Only he did not sound as positive about it as Dess had expected.
“We have to figure out what we’re going to do if she’s really back,” her father said.
“Dad, I’m starting not to think it’s an ‘if’ anymore.”
“Right. Then we have to figure out what to do.”
“What do you mean?” Dess said, although she didn’t need an answer. She knew.
“How long do you think we can go like this?” he said. “You and I know that this is a miracle. The ultimate miracle. But if anyone else found out, I don’t know that they all would feel the same way. They might think she’s something else.”
Dess remembered her own first thoughts upon seeing her sister alive again. She’s a monster. Something pretending …
“That might not even be the worst of it,” her father said. “The ones who do think she’s a miracle girl might get more obsessed with her and be more dangerous than the others.”
“So we can’t let anyone find out about her.”
“Right. But how do we go about that? We can’t just keep her hidden in the house forever, but we can’t let her be out and about where anyone might recognize her either.”
“You think we have to move?” Dess said.
Her father raised his eyebrows and glanced away, then answered properly. “Not quite as simple as that. We have to think long-term. What if she ever gets sick again? Not like what happened before, I just mean the flu or pneumonia or anything normal where she still needs to go to the hospital. How are we going to hide who she is then? What do we do about school? Even homeschooling has paperwork involved. If she’s really going to get a new beginning, we’ve got to get her a whole new identity.”
Dess scratched her head like she was digging an idea out. “You know, Dad, maybe it’s time to let Mom know about this. I get why we waited, we had to make sure it was really real. But she deserves to know. She also could probably work this out better than we could.”