Summer's Edge, page 16
“All I remember is that the Queen of Cups is also the Queen of Hearts, and all I remember about her is Alice in Wonderland.”
Chelsea shakes her head. “No, she comes up over and over. She… Something about art? Love. I think Emily gets her a lot. Or was it me?”
“It was you.” I do remember the Queen of Cups. Because I always thought it was funny—it made me think of Solo cups, some kind of drinking game. It’s so hard for me to take this tarot game seriously. Chelsea always got the Queen of Cups. I wonder if this means Chelsea is supposed to end up with Emily or Chase. But it is just a silly game. So I play along to make Chelsea happy. “Maybe it means they’ll get together, but only if you help them.”
She nods. “Interesting.” She looks down at the cards. “What next?”
“Will Ryan and Chase work out their problems?”
“Good one.” She flips another card. The Nine of Swords. It’s a pretty bleak-looking card. Nine swords hang in the air, pointing down at a woman bent with her head in her hands, apparently heartbroken. “Hmm.”
“All signs point to no,” I say.
“Well, it’s all in your interpretation. Maybe it just means they have to have a painful talk. It obviously goes way beyond Ryan hitting on Mila. He doesn’t want anyone to know this, but Ryan was cut from the team.”
I clap a hand over my mouth. “So that’s why he was so upset about the lacrosse story at dinner.”
Chelsea nods emphatically. “Yeah. It’s a lot of things. Losing his place on the team, his grades are slipping, and Chase doesn’t get it. Ryan feels like he’s just losing everything right now. And honestly, I think Ryan really does feel weird about the Emily/Chase dynamic. I don’t know if there’s something new that I missed, but… he seems really fed up with it.”
“Right.” My legs are starting to cramp under me, and I stretch them out. “I got that sense earlier, too.”
Chelsea tilts her head and looks over at me. “You don’t think Ryan…?”
I burst out laughing and then clap my hand over my mouth, glancing down at the floor. We should wrap this up. “If Ryan ever had any interest in Chase, that ship has definitely sunk. But I don’t think so.”
“Right.” She hesitates. “So what were you implying earlier with the secret-lover thing?”
“Oh my god, Chelsea.” I flip my hair over my shoulder uncomfortably. “Look, obviously you and Ryan had some kind of thing while we were broken up.”
She shakes her head vehemently. “It’s not true.”
I stare at her. I don’t get it. There are lies that are justified, but right here, right now, I don’t understand how she can look at me and lie to my face. Not if she wants everything to go back to the way it was. “Something. Maybe not everything. But something happened.”
She pauses. “It’s not what you think. I wouldn’t betray you.”
“Then tell me.” I reach for her hand. “If you want us to trust each other, we have to be honest with each other. Screw everyone else. Screw Ryan and Chase and even Emily. We come first, we come last. What happened with Ryan?”
Chelsea meets my eyes for just a flickering second. “Nothing that matters. I love you.”
But she’s wrong. Everything matters. I gather the cards and set them down, face-up. The devil smiles up at us.
Chelsea slowly turns the card over. “We didn’t ask a question.”
“That one didn’t count,” I say.
But his grinning face sticks in my head as we climb back down the ladder, carefully fold it up, and join the rest of the group. The game is still dragging on, but no one seems to be feeling it. Mila is hanging over Chase’s shoulder, sipping a glass of the sangria. Chelsea was probably right about the drinking—we’ve been at it for a while now. I can feel a definite buzz, and it’s going to take a while to wear off. Chase is drumming his hands on the table, humming under his breath and rattling the hotels on his side of the board. Emily is glaring unabashedly up at Mila, fanning her money between her fingers, and Ryan is drinking straight brandy, no ice.
“Bored,” he says in a monotone.
“Guess I win, then?” Chase sweeps the contents of the board into the box, and Emily swats his arm.
“I didn’t concede. I had Park Place. That’s a draw.”
Mila yawns. “Who cares? This game is the worst. Don’t you have any movies or anything?”
“No.” I take her glass off the table and place a coaster under it. “This is a lakeside retreat. You don’t come here to watch television.”
“You sound like a timeshare seller.” She smiles lazily, and I try to hide my annoyance.
“Well.” I sit down on the leather armchair. “How may I entertain you?”
She falls into Chase’s lap and fishes an apple slice out of her glass. “I don’t know. What else is there to do?”
“We could go night swimming,” Emily says. “Skinny-dipping if you’re feeling daring.”
“Nope.” I begin to gather glasses. “No drinking and swimming. Too dangerous.”
“But, Mom,” Chase whines.
“House rules,” I say. He knows the rules. And they’re fair. It’s not like I don’t allow swimming after a glass of wine or a beer. But all of us have been really going at it tonight. And when that’s the case, it’s just not safe. There have been tragedies on this lake before. At least a couple every year. A girl drowned not far from our house when I was a baby, and my parents immediately put me in infant swim lessons. And let us not forget my attempted murder via the dripping man. My dad has hammered these rules into my head since I was allowed to step onto the boat. Not only to keep me safe, but because we’d be personally liable if someone else had an accident on our property. My father the lawyer, ladies and gentlemen. But as coldly pragmatic as it may sound, he’s right. And if I sound coldly pragmatic, I’m right too.
“I want to see the stars,” Mila says. She grabs Chase’s hand and tugs him toward the back door. “Come take me.”
Chase looks helplessly back at me. “Sorry, guys. I’ve been claimed.”
“I said no.” I don’t mean to say it so sharply, but all three of them look up at me, a little surprised.
“Sorry.” Mila exchanges a bewildered look with Chase.
“She didn’t want you here,” Emily says.
I stare at her furiously. “That is not true.”
Emily shrugs. “I just think we should be honest. You said we should push her out like the lady no one cares about in The Sound of Music. The gold digger.”
Mila looks so hurt for a second that I want to hug her and shake Emily at the same time. It’s true, but it’s not the truth. Parts of the truth are just as deceitful as blatant lies. But Mila’s expression transforms so quickly, so smoothly, that I see my window for forgiveness close forever right before my eyes. “The one who doesn’t inherit seven brats? Easy pass.”
I turn to Emily, but all that comes out is one word. “Why?” I already know the answer, though. I betrayed her. I chose Mila. And as my punishment, she took Mila away.
39
I link my arm around Chase’s. No one is going swimming tonight, regardless of how many people it pisses off. Not after the dripping man’s appearance on the dock this afternoon. And the girl on the stairs in my bedroom. And the glass shattering in Mila’s hand has me nervous too. And the cellar door slamming. Something is wrong. “Help me in the kitchen, Chay. I need your strong man arms.”
Resentment flashes in Mila’s eyes, but she holds her tongue and Chase allows me to guide him through the French doors. I shut them behind him and lean against the cool metal of the refrigerator.
He hops onto the counter and looks at me expectantly. “I assume it’s my strong man ears you’re really interested in.”
I hedge for a moment, absently tapping an empty glass with my fingertips. Glasses don’t just shatter. It’s the sort of thing the dead do when they’re upset. It’s very hard to dismiss it as an accident. “I’m sorry about what Emily said. It was out of context.”
“I figured.”
“But you can’t go swimming tonight. Or ever without me. I have to be there.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Mommy dearest.”
“I mean it. No waiting until I’m asleep and sneaking out. It’s dangerous.” An unsettling feeling creeps over me, and I place the glass quickly back on the drying rack.
Chase sighs heavily. “You used to be fun, Kennedy.”
That one hurts. “You used to be nice.”
We look at each other awkwardly for a moment.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says finally.
I should echo him. But I don’t. I don’t believe him. And I don’t believe he’s going to listen to me. That scares me more than anything else right now. This secret is wearing me down. It’s exhausting. I feel like a hypocrite keeping anything from Chelsea while holding a grudge against her for keeping things from me. She should be the first to know. But at the same time, that’s the reason I can’t tell her. She won’t come clean about Ryan. If only she would just tell me the truth.
But Chase. Chase is my oldest friend. Chase has always had my back. I would trust Chase with my life.
And if I keep this secret any longer, I will break.
I take a deep breath. “How do you feel about ghosts?”
Chase bursts out laughing. “Is my ghost story freaking you out? It was a joke. Dead is dead.” He reaches for Mila’s purse sitting out on the counter and pulls out a clove cigarette. I shake my head at him, and he shrugs and places the cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Life is short and then you die.”
This is going to be harder than I thought. I close the kitchen window. It’s getting cooler outside, and the cold is slowly seeping into the house. “Sure. But after that. More things in heaven and earth. Et cetera.”
He flicks his imaginary ash on my nose. “There’s a difference between what has yet to be discovered—like the universe beyond what technology allows us to explore—and fairy tales. Infinite things that we can’t imagine exist because they’re beyond the scope of what we know. But ghosts aren’t. We can imagine them. We made them up. They are dreamt of in our philosophy. That’s all they are. A dream.”
“Cool speech.”
“But?”
“What if they’re more than that?” I feel a warmth surrounding me, their warmth. And for a moment I’m filled with hope. They aren’t always angry or upset. They used to be my friends. “You’re looking at ‘your philosophy’ as all of human knowledge. But all you really know is what you’ve seen for yourself. People have witnessed things. You know I’m an evidence girl. But there are studies documenting cases of people showing cognition while their hearts are stopped, for example. Some scientists theorize our minds live hours after our hearts stop. They used to believe it was seconds. What if the line keeps moving? Science is a process of discovery.”
“You know better than to take anecdotes as global fact. And there are scientific explanations for the phenomenon of walking toward the light, life flashing before your eyes—it’s the process of the brain dying.”
“Well, what about the cross-dimensional theory? Ghosts could be a time-space glitch,” I say desperately.
“Maybe if string theory actually held up,” he says condescendingly. Then he eyes me curiously. “You’ve put way too much thought into this.” I have. I’ve spent years of my life researching every possible way to scientifically justify my experiences. But nothing can explain the unexplainable. You can’t experience the brain death of another human being. If it were simply a phenomenal crossroads of remarkably similar coexistent universes, why do they look dead? How can there simply be a universe identical to our own in which the dead live? It sounds too similar to traditional notions of the afterlife. A story I’m telling myself to explain the unexplainable. To comfort myself about something truly unsettling. The fact is that I see things that are not there. There is no evidence that what I see and feel is real. People like me are placed in hospitals, given pills, and treated as defective. But I am not defective. I just can’t prove what I know to be true.
I draw a deep, shaky breath. It’s now or never. “If someone experiences something you can’t explain, you have three choices. You can take it on faith, rule it out definitively, or just accept that your reality isn’t theirs, and you might not know everything there is to know.”
He stares at me. “Okay. What is there to know? What can you personally vouch for? Because I don’t buy into stories, but I’ll believe anything that comes from you. I trust you, Ken.”
Say it. My grandmother’s cuckoo clock ticks in the hall. Say it. A moth circles the ceiling lamp. Say. Time slows down. Say. The air in the room grows warm and thick. Say.
He’s lying. It’s the same line my parents and the doctors and the social workers fed me to get me to talk in order to draw their various conclusions. Imaginary friends. Suppressed anxiety. Projections of trauma, the root of which couldn’t be weeded out. Everything but the truth. Chase doesn’t know what to do with the truth.
The truth is, there’s a place at the lake house only two of us know.
Under the boardwalk, in the deep, dark dirt. We dug a little grave, Chase and I, and laid the bones of the rabbit to rest. It didn’t seem right to tell Chelsea. She had been so incredibly upset by the discovery of its tiny body in the cellar. I’m not sure whether Emily was actually upset or just mirroring Chelsea. We did that sometimes. It was how we learned to relate. I understand that now. There is so little that we genuinely share anymore.
Anyway.
Something had to be done. I couldn’t let my father drop the body into a dumpster or toss it in the woods to be picked over by owls and coyotes. I know that’s how nature operates. But people don’t. We bury our beloved.
Every year I plant white roses along the path. Every year they die. The ground is much too soft for roses; the shade too gentle.
I hope that’s the reason.
Chase has been a good friend. He didn’t hesitate when I asked for his help, and he’s never spoken a word. He never knew who the rabbit was, only that I felt it deserved a final resting place. And he knew how to dig a grave. Even as a child, his arms were strong. We snuck out after dark and retrieved two spades from the shed, then the body from the trash can. We dug on our hands and knees in the dirt, a deep hole, deep enough that storms wouldn’t bring it back to surface. There wasn’t much moon that night, and it misted periodically, and by the time we were done, we were covered in mud.
We tucked the garbage bag around the body like a shroud, to protect her for a while, then lowered her carefully, and whispered the Gettysburg Address, which we agreed was the best non-religious text to recite at a funeral and was fresh in our minds from Mrs. Oglebie’s class. We washed the mud off ourselves at the edge of the dock and headed back to the house when they finally arrived.
They didn’t show themselves; that time was over.
Instead, there was the sound of feet, light, quick, beginning from the far end of the boardwalk, by the stone table, gathering speed in the darkness. My heart raced as I stared down the planks, empty and bare. The footsteps grew louder, nearer, as the sound rushed straight through me. It was the oddest feeling, like having an X-ray taken. You search your body for a sensation, and even though you find none, you know something has made contact. The footsteps continued down toward the dock, and my throat squeezed as I realized they were heading toward the lake, toward the dripping man, but before I could cry out, there was a sudden, chilling silence, and then a tremendous splash.
Chase turned toward the water, looking startled. It’s the only time he’s ever witnessed them, or their wake, anyway, and he hasn’t spoken a word about it since.
“Stay away from my house,” I whispered.
But it wasn’t my house. It’s never been my house. The dead always have the upper hand. They see every move we make. They know our darkest secrets.
We buried a body under those boards.
That cannot be undone.
“It’s just an old family legend,” I say now. I can’t tell Chase my secret. What I’ve seen; what I know. I’ll never say it. What’s the point? He won’t hear me.
He grins, but there’s annoyance underneath. “What does that have to do with night swimming? Which, may I add, we do every year?”
“Not without a Hartford. And I’m not going this year.” I take his cigarette and toss it into the trash. “Legend or no legend, rules are rules.” I look him in the eye. “Right?”
His grin doesn’t fade. Neither does the resentment beneath the surface. “You got it.”
* * *
Back in the living room, Emily is sunk even deeper into the couch. I want to say something comforting, but I don’t feel like speaking to her yet. She hasn’t apologized, and it strikes me that she never apologizes for anything. I apologize when I mess up, and I do mess up. Chelsea apologizes. Chase, even Ryan. But Emily. Somehow, whenever we fight, it is someone else’s fault. She is always the victim, no matter how deeply twisted things get. Like her half-truth to Mila earlier, or to Chelsea about the heirloom. I never told her to insinuate that Chelsea stole anything. What I said was that she should throw my mother under the bus. No one would get mad at my mom for banning me from having friends over the way they would hate me for ending our long-standing tradition. Emily twisted that, and I honestly don’t know if Chelsea has ever forgiven me. Emily should have apologized then. And she should apologize now. Any real friend would feel horrible for what she did.
Ryan barely glances up when I walk into the room. He tosses a pack of cards to Chelsea. “Texas Hold’em?”
Chelsea looks to me. “What do you want to do?”
I shrug. “Poker sounds fine.”
Emily stands abruptly and stalks upstairs. In a moment I can hear stomping footsteps in the attic.
“I think she’s waiting for you to apologize,” Ryan says as he deals, without meeting my eyes.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I snatch my cards off the table. “You saw—” Then I realize that he doesn’t know what actually happened. Only Chelsea and Emily know. It’s best that way. Contain. Defuse.
Chelsea shakes her head. “No, she comes up over and over. She… Something about art? Love. I think Emily gets her a lot. Or was it me?”
“It was you.” I do remember the Queen of Cups. Because I always thought it was funny—it made me think of Solo cups, some kind of drinking game. It’s so hard for me to take this tarot game seriously. Chelsea always got the Queen of Cups. I wonder if this means Chelsea is supposed to end up with Emily or Chase. But it is just a silly game. So I play along to make Chelsea happy. “Maybe it means they’ll get together, but only if you help them.”
She nods. “Interesting.” She looks down at the cards. “What next?”
“Will Ryan and Chase work out their problems?”
“Good one.” She flips another card. The Nine of Swords. It’s a pretty bleak-looking card. Nine swords hang in the air, pointing down at a woman bent with her head in her hands, apparently heartbroken. “Hmm.”
“All signs point to no,” I say.
“Well, it’s all in your interpretation. Maybe it just means they have to have a painful talk. It obviously goes way beyond Ryan hitting on Mila. He doesn’t want anyone to know this, but Ryan was cut from the team.”
I clap a hand over my mouth. “So that’s why he was so upset about the lacrosse story at dinner.”
Chelsea nods emphatically. “Yeah. It’s a lot of things. Losing his place on the team, his grades are slipping, and Chase doesn’t get it. Ryan feels like he’s just losing everything right now. And honestly, I think Ryan really does feel weird about the Emily/Chase dynamic. I don’t know if there’s something new that I missed, but… he seems really fed up with it.”
“Right.” My legs are starting to cramp under me, and I stretch them out. “I got that sense earlier, too.”
Chelsea tilts her head and looks over at me. “You don’t think Ryan…?”
I burst out laughing and then clap my hand over my mouth, glancing down at the floor. We should wrap this up. “If Ryan ever had any interest in Chase, that ship has definitely sunk. But I don’t think so.”
“Right.” She hesitates. “So what were you implying earlier with the secret-lover thing?”
“Oh my god, Chelsea.” I flip my hair over my shoulder uncomfortably. “Look, obviously you and Ryan had some kind of thing while we were broken up.”
She shakes her head vehemently. “It’s not true.”
I stare at her. I don’t get it. There are lies that are justified, but right here, right now, I don’t understand how she can look at me and lie to my face. Not if she wants everything to go back to the way it was. “Something. Maybe not everything. But something happened.”
She pauses. “It’s not what you think. I wouldn’t betray you.”
“Then tell me.” I reach for her hand. “If you want us to trust each other, we have to be honest with each other. Screw everyone else. Screw Ryan and Chase and even Emily. We come first, we come last. What happened with Ryan?”
Chelsea meets my eyes for just a flickering second. “Nothing that matters. I love you.”
But she’s wrong. Everything matters. I gather the cards and set them down, face-up. The devil smiles up at us.
Chelsea slowly turns the card over. “We didn’t ask a question.”
“That one didn’t count,” I say.
But his grinning face sticks in my head as we climb back down the ladder, carefully fold it up, and join the rest of the group. The game is still dragging on, but no one seems to be feeling it. Mila is hanging over Chase’s shoulder, sipping a glass of the sangria. Chelsea was probably right about the drinking—we’ve been at it for a while now. I can feel a definite buzz, and it’s going to take a while to wear off. Chase is drumming his hands on the table, humming under his breath and rattling the hotels on his side of the board. Emily is glaring unabashedly up at Mila, fanning her money between her fingers, and Ryan is drinking straight brandy, no ice.
“Bored,” he says in a monotone.
“Guess I win, then?” Chase sweeps the contents of the board into the box, and Emily swats his arm.
“I didn’t concede. I had Park Place. That’s a draw.”
Mila yawns. “Who cares? This game is the worst. Don’t you have any movies or anything?”
“No.” I take her glass off the table and place a coaster under it. “This is a lakeside retreat. You don’t come here to watch television.”
“You sound like a timeshare seller.” She smiles lazily, and I try to hide my annoyance.
“Well.” I sit down on the leather armchair. “How may I entertain you?”
She falls into Chase’s lap and fishes an apple slice out of her glass. “I don’t know. What else is there to do?”
“We could go night swimming,” Emily says. “Skinny-dipping if you’re feeling daring.”
“Nope.” I begin to gather glasses. “No drinking and swimming. Too dangerous.”
“But, Mom,” Chase whines.
“House rules,” I say. He knows the rules. And they’re fair. It’s not like I don’t allow swimming after a glass of wine or a beer. But all of us have been really going at it tonight. And when that’s the case, it’s just not safe. There have been tragedies on this lake before. At least a couple every year. A girl drowned not far from our house when I was a baby, and my parents immediately put me in infant swim lessons. And let us not forget my attempted murder via the dripping man. My dad has hammered these rules into my head since I was allowed to step onto the boat. Not only to keep me safe, but because we’d be personally liable if someone else had an accident on our property. My father the lawyer, ladies and gentlemen. But as coldly pragmatic as it may sound, he’s right. And if I sound coldly pragmatic, I’m right too.
“I want to see the stars,” Mila says. She grabs Chase’s hand and tugs him toward the back door. “Come take me.”
Chase looks helplessly back at me. “Sorry, guys. I’ve been claimed.”
“I said no.” I don’t mean to say it so sharply, but all three of them look up at me, a little surprised.
“Sorry.” Mila exchanges a bewildered look with Chase.
“She didn’t want you here,” Emily says.
I stare at her furiously. “That is not true.”
Emily shrugs. “I just think we should be honest. You said we should push her out like the lady no one cares about in The Sound of Music. The gold digger.”
Mila looks so hurt for a second that I want to hug her and shake Emily at the same time. It’s true, but it’s not the truth. Parts of the truth are just as deceitful as blatant lies. But Mila’s expression transforms so quickly, so smoothly, that I see my window for forgiveness close forever right before my eyes. “The one who doesn’t inherit seven brats? Easy pass.”
I turn to Emily, but all that comes out is one word. “Why?” I already know the answer, though. I betrayed her. I chose Mila. And as my punishment, she took Mila away.
39
I link my arm around Chase’s. No one is going swimming tonight, regardless of how many people it pisses off. Not after the dripping man’s appearance on the dock this afternoon. And the girl on the stairs in my bedroom. And the glass shattering in Mila’s hand has me nervous too. And the cellar door slamming. Something is wrong. “Help me in the kitchen, Chay. I need your strong man arms.”
Resentment flashes in Mila’s eyes, but she holds her tongue and Chase allows me to guide him through the French doors. I shut them behind him and lean against the cool metal of the refrigerator.
He hops onto the counter and looks at me expectantly. “I assume it’s my strong man ears you’re really interested in.”
I hedge for a moment, absently tapping an empty glass with my fingertips. Glasses don’t just shatter. It’s the sort of thing the dead do when they’re upset. It’s very hard to dismiss it as an accident. “I’m sorry about what Emily said. It was out of context.”
“I figured.”
“But you can’t go swimming tonight. Or ever without me. I have to be there.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Mommy dearest.”
“I mean it. No waiting until I’m asleep and sneaking out. It’s dangerous.” An unsettling feeling creeps over me, and I place the glass quickly back on the drying rack.
Chase sighs heavily. “You used to be fun, Kennedy.”
That one hurts. “You used to be nice.”
We look at each other awkwardly for a moment.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says finally.
I should echo him. But I don’t. I don’t believe him. And I don’t believe he’s going to listen to me. That scares me more than anything else right now. This secret is wearing me down. It’s exhausting. I feel like a hypocrite keeping anything from Chelsea while holding a grudge against her for keeping things from me. She should be the first to know. But at the same time, that’s the reason I can’t tell her. She won’t come clean about Ryan. If only she would just tell me the truth.
But Chase. Chase is my oldest friend. Chase has always had my back. I would trust Chase with my life.
And if I keep this secret any longer, I will break.
I take a deep breath. “How do you feel about ghosts?”
Chase bursts out laughing. “Is my ghost story freaking you out? It was a joke. Dead is dead.” He reaches for Mila’s purse sitting out on the counter and pulls out a clove cigarette. I shake my head at him, and he shrugs and places the cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Life is short and then you die.”
This is going to be harder than I thought. I close the kitchen window. It’s getting cooler outside, and the cold is slowly seeping into the house. “Sure. But after that. More things in heaven and earth. Et cetera.”
He flicks his imaginary ash on my nose. “There’s a difference between what has yet to be discovered—like the universe beyond what technology allows us to explore—and fairy tales. Infinite things that we can’t imagine exist because they’re beyond the scope of what we know. But ghosts aren’t. We can imagine them. We made them up. They are dreamt of in our philosophy. That’s all they are. A dream.”
“Cool speech.”
“But?”
“What if they’re more than that?” I feel a warmth surrounding me, their warmth. And for a moment I’m filled with hope. They aren’t always angry or upset. They used to be my friends. “You’re looking at ‘your philosophy’ as all of human knowledge. But all you really know is what you’ve seen for yourself. People have witnessed things. You know I’m an evidence girl. But there are studies documenting cases of people showing cognition while their hearts are stopped, for example. Some scientists theorize our minds live hours after our hearts stop. They used to believe it was seconds. What if the line keeps moving? Science is a process of discovery.”
“You know better than to take anecdotes as global fact. And there are scientific explanations for the phenomenon of walking toward the light, life flashing before your eyes—it’s the process of the brain dying.”
“Well, what about the cross-dimensional theory? Ghosts could be a time-space glitch,” I say desperately.
“Maybe if string theory actually held up,” he says condescendingly. Then he eyes me curiously. “You’ve put way too much thought into this.” I have. I’ve spent years of my life researching every possible way to scientifically justify my experiences. But nothing can explain the unexplainable. You can’t experience the brain death of another human being. If it were simply a phenomenal crossroads of remarkably similar coexistent universes, why do they look dead? How can there simply be a universe identical to our own in which the dead live? It sounds too similar to traditional notions of the afterlife. A story I’m telling myself to explain the unexplainable. To comfort myself about something truly unsettling. The fact is that I see things that are not there. There is no evidence that what I see and feel is real. People like me are placed in hospitals, given pills, and treated as defective. But I am not defective. I just can’t prove what I know to be true.
I draw a deep, shaky breath. It’s now or never. “If someone experiences something you can’t explain, you have three choices. You can take it on faith, rule it out definitively, or just accept that your reality isn’t theirs, and you might not know everything there is to know.”
He stares at me. “Okay. What is there to know? What can you personally vouch for? Because I don’t buy into stories, but I’ll believe anything that comes from you. I trust you, Ken.”
Say it. My grandmother’s cuckoo clock ticks in the hall. Say it. A moth circles the ceiling lamp. Say. Time slows down. Say. The air in the room grows warm and thick. Say.
He’s lying. It’s the same line my parents and the doctors and the social workers fed me to get me to talk in order to draw their various conclusions. Imaginary friends. Suppressed anxiety. Projections of trauma, the root of which couldn’t be weeded out. Everything but the truth. Chase doesn’t know what to do with the truth.
The truth is, there’s a place at the lake house only two of us know.
Under the boardwalk, in the deep, dark dirt. We dug a little grave, Chase and I, and laid the bones of the rabbit to rest. It didn’t seem right to tell Chelsea. She had been so incredibly upset by the discovery of its tiny body in the cellar. I’m not sure whether Emily was actually upset or just mirroring Chelsea. We did that sometimes. It was how we learned to relate. I understand that now. There is so little that we genuinely share anymore.
Anyway.
Something had to be done. I couldn’t let my father drop the body into a dumpster or toss it in the woods to be picked over by owls and coyotes. I know that’s how nature operates. But people don’t. We bury our beloved.
Every year I plant white roses along the path. Every year they die. The ground is much too soft for roses; the shade too gentle.
I hope that’s the reason.
Chase has been a good friend. He didn’t hesitate when I asked for his help, and he’s never spoken a word. He never knew who the rabbit was, only that I felt it deserved a final resting place. And he knew how to dig a grave. Even as a child, his arms were strong. We snuck out after dark and retrieved two spades from the shed, then the body from the trash can. We dug on our hands and knees in the dirt, a deep hole, deep enough that storms wouldn’t bring it back to surface. There wasn’t much moon that night, and it misted periodically, and by the time we were done, we were covered in mud.
We tucked the garbage bag around the body like a shroud, to protect her for a while, then lowered her carefully, and whispered the Gettysburg Address, which we agreed was the best non-religious text to recite at a funeral and was fresh in our minds from Mrs. Oglebie’s class. We washed the mud off ourselves at the edge of the dock and headed back to the house when they finally arrived.
They didn’t show themselves; that time was over.
Instead, there was the sound of feet, light, quick, beginning from the far end of the boardwalk, by the stone table, gathering speed in the darkness. My heart raced as I stared down the planks, empty and bare. The footsteps grew louder, nearer, as the sound rushed straight through me. It was the oddest feeling, like having an X-ray taken. You search your body for a sensation, and even though you find none, you know something has made contact. The footsteps continued down toward the dock, and my throat squeezed as I realized they were heading toward the lake, toward the dripping man, but before I could cry out, there was a sudden, chilling silence, and then a tremendous splash.
Chase turned toward the water, looking startled. It’s the only time he’s ever witnessed them, or their wake, anyway, and he hasn’t spoken a word about it since.
“Stay away from my house,” I whispered.
But it wasn’t my house. It’s never been my house. The dead always have the upper hand. They see every move we make. They know our darkest secrets.
We buried a body under those boards.
That cannot be undone.
“It’s just an old family legend,” I say now. I can’t tell Chase my secret. What I’ve seen; what I know. I’ll never say it. What’s the point? He won’t hear me.
He grins, but there’s annoyance underneath. “What does that have to do with night swimming? Which, may I add, we do every year?”
“Not without a Hartford. And I’m not going this year.” I take his cigarette and toss it into the trash. “Legend or no legend, rules are rules.” I look him in the eye. “Right?”
His grin doesn’t fade. Neither does the resentment beneath the surface. “You got it.”
* * *
Back in the living room, Emily is sunk even deeper into the couch. I want to say something comforting, but I don’t feel like speaking to her yet. She hasn’t apologized, and it strikes me that she never apologizes for anything. I apologize when I mess up, and I do mess up. Chelsea apologizes. Chase, even Ryan. But Emily. Somehow, whenever we fight, it is someone else’s fault. She is always the victim, no matter how deeply twisted things get. Like her half-truth to Mila earlier, or to Chelsea about the heirloom. I never told her to insinuate that Chelsea stole anything. What I said was that she should throw my mother under the bus. No one would get mad at my mom for banning me from having friends over the way they would hate me for ending our long-standing tradition. Emily twisted that, and I honestly don’t know if Chelsea has ever forgiven me. Emily should have apologized then. And she should apologize now. Any real friend would feel horrible for what she did.
Ryan barely glances up when I walk into the room. He tosses a pack of cards to Chelsea. “Texas Hold’em?”
Chelsea looks to me. “What do you want to do?”
I shrug. “Poker sounds fine.”
Emily stands abruptly and stalks upstairs. In a moment I can hear stomping footsteps in the attic.
“I think she’s waiting for you to apologize,” Ryan says as he deals, without meeting my eyes.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I snatch my cards off the table. “You saw—” Then I realize that he doesn’t know what actually happened. Only Chelsea and Emily know. It’s best that way. Contain. Defuse.
