White Rabbit(5)

A highly polished staircase rises on my right, climbing to what I suspect is a loft-style bedroom or study, and I cock an ear toward the upper story. The soft noise I then hear, however—a cross between a sigh and a whisper—comes not from above, but from somewhere else on the ground floor.

As I move forward out of the foyer, a dining nook appears to the left off the family room—and then, just to its left, the kitchen. This is where I find April at last, when I round the corner, clearing the central island so I can look down at the floor.

My sister is slumped against the cupboards beneath the sink, her head bowed forward, her skin as white as candle wax against her purple bikini; and Fox lies sprawled across the tiles beside her, half-curled into the fetal position, his face nightmarishly slack.

Both of them are drenched in blood, and the fingers of April’s right hand are loosely wrapped around the hilt of a massive butcher knife.





2

“April!” I grip her by the shoulders, her flesh frighteningly cold and sticky to the touch, and drag her forward, straightening her up. The knife slips from her right hand as my knee jostles a discarded cell phone resting by her left, and her head lolls and swings on her neck, heavy as a sandbag. Frantically, I give her a hard shake. “April!”

“Holy fuck, dude.” Sebastian’s eyes are huge with panic as he prowls Fox’s body, searching for a pulse. “Holy fuck, Rufus, I think he’s dead!”

Willing myself not to lose it, I press my fingers against April’s carotid, holding my breath. When I feel the faint and erratic undulation of blood moving beneath her pallid skin, I emit a primitive noise of relief and squeeze my eyes shut tight. “She’s alive.”

“What the fuck happened here, man?” Sebastian asks me, deathly serious. His face is stricken as he backs away from Fox’s corpse, the Whitneys’ favorite son stretched across the slate floor tiles, his T-shirt so saturated with blood that its true color is impossible to determine. “What the fuck happened?”

He jolts to his feet and stumbles a little, eyes still getting wider. His anxiety is so sincere that, I finally realize, if this is some twisted prank, he is certainly not in on it. I search my sister’s body, looking for wounds or some other sign that she’s been hurt, but I can’t find anything. The blood doesn’t seem to be hers.

“April, wake up,” I command sharply, sweeping her auburn hair out of her face and tilting her chin to the light. She mumbles something unintelligible, and I pry one of her eyes open. Her pupil is a tiny dot in a pool of aquamarine, her gaze glassy and unfocused as it drifts up into her skull. “She’s on something.”

“Shit, man!” Sebastian paces agitatedly, but he can’t stop staring down at Fox’s body. “We have to call someone.”

“Not yet,” I tell him firmly, giving April another hard shake. With a guilty feeling, I swat her lightly across the face. She gives a sharp snort and her eyelids lift unevenly. “April! April, can you hear me?”

“… Rufus?” Her voice is a breathy whisper.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

Fat tears roll down her cheeks as I watch, and then, to my complete surprise, she tosses her arms around me in a flaccid, desperate embrace. Her forehead thuds against my shoulder, and she begins weakly to sob. I let it go on for just a moment before I straighten her back up again, flustered. “April, what happened?”

“I-I don’t…” She starts to look toward Fox’s body, but I take hold of her chin again and force her to face me. I can’t afford to lose her concentration now.

“Focus on me, April. Tell me what happened.”

She licks her lips, her eyes clouding for a moment before she seems to will them clear again, but her voice is a faded, broken whisper as she moans, “I don’t remember. I don’t … there was … all that blood…”

With Sebastian’s help, I haul her to her feet, and the two of us start walking her through the dining room and living room, hip-hop music blasting from speakers I can’t see. She’s like a newborn colt, her legs rubbery and untrustworthy, and her chin keeps dropping to her chest. I ask her what she’s taken, but her answers are unintelligible, and I feel the quick heat of impatience snapping under my skin. I try to quell it, recalling my therapist’s advice: Take a deep breath and step back. Over April’s head, I ask Sebastian, “Do they have a shower? Maybe it’ll wake her up.”

“There’s a bedroom through there,” he answers after a beat, his face alarmingly gray, and gestures to a door set in a small vestibule beside the stone-fronted fireplace. “It’s got a bathroom. I don’t think there’s a tub, but—”

“Let’s get her in there.”

The Whitneys’ master suite is cozy in size and luxurious in appointment—Egyptian cotton sheets, a hand-carved headboard, priceless antique armoires—but an open doorway leads to a surprisingly spare bathroom with a shower stall.

I shove April into Sebastian’s arms while I kick my shoes aside, strip off my tank top, and crank the cold water to full blast. Then I pull my blood-soaked, half-dead half sister under the hard spray with me, holding her upright while she squirms and mumbles, pink water sluicing off her and swirling ominously down the drain. Her bare skin becomes slippery as the drying blood loosens up, and I have to hold her tighter. Eventually, her struggling grows more forceful, her protests more lucid, and I slap the water off at last.