—
Fell hadn’t changed much over the years. It was still just shabby enough to escape notice, the downtown quiet on a weekday morning. I passed thewelcome to fellsign, the Royal movie theater with the marquee letters that never stayed up, the library, the Milkshake Palace, newsstands, a laundromat. If I took a left to the east end, I’d encounter the Fell College of Classical Education, a dusty place that taught Latin and Greek to a couple hundred students per year at most. Mom had wanted one of us to attend Fell as an intellectual status symbol, but none of us had even set foot on the campus.
Just to spite her, we’d never gone to college at all. Vail had his diving career, which he quit before it could be a success. Dodie got by on her considerable looks and nothing else. I had partied until Clay and Lisette happened. Ambition was not in the Esmie siblings’ blood.
Outside downtown, I took Number Six Road past the empty lot where a theme park had once been planned and then abandoned, past the motel where the pool was closed because a kid had died in it. All of that had happened after we left, but I knew that if I took theturn to the motel—where I had never stayed—I would see the pool closed and empty, dirt and leaves scattered on the concrete bottom.Get out of my head,I wanted to scream.I don’t want to know this shit. Leave me alone.
I took the turn into our neighborhood, then our driveway, my hands going cold on the steering wheel. And then I was at the house.
The street was as empty as I remembered, gloomy and still. There were no kids, no one walking their dogs, just like in my childhood. The houses were spread apart, the windows dark. We’d been the only kids in the neighborhood while growing up, isolated in a place with no other children. Whether this part of town had ever been lively, I had no idea, but even now, it was one of the most silent places in my memory. There were no playgrounds, just chilly homes with ragged lawns and missing shingles, unraked leaves, and the occasional twitching curtain. The house across the street had been empty for my entire childhood, sinking into rot. When Ben disappeared, no one would have seen a six-year-old boy if he left the house. In this neighborhood, he could have vanished without a ripple.
I looked up at our house now, set far back from the street, with its slanted gables and dark windows, its deteriorating façade, its solitary rotting shingles like sore teeth. It had probably been a prestigious house when my parents bought it, or as prestigious as Mom’s money could buy. Now it just looked sad, like a woman’s wedding dress rotting away in her closet, important for one day and now worthless.
The grounds, at least, had been maintained until a few days ago. The inside of the house hadn’t been touched in eighteen years, though I had paid the minimum to keep the water and electricity hooked up. I hadn’t done it out of love. I had done it because it was easier to keep the house out of mind if the pipes never burst or the electrical never caught fire. If our parents’ money kept the house standing, it meant none of us would have to come back.
And yet here we were.
There were two cars parked in front of the house—a beat-up old Volvo and a shiny new Jeep. I weighed them silently, making an educated guess. The Volvo, I thought, was Dodie’s, because she lived in New York and wouldn’t want to flaunt an expensive car in the city. The Jeep would be Vail’s, rented at the airport. Vail would hand money to the car rental company and drive off in whatever was handed to him without looking at the receipt.
So I was the last one to arrive. I paused when I got out of my car, listening to the hush of the wind in the trees, staring at the house I grew up in the way you’d stare at a face that you hadn’t seen in a long time. This house was the worst place, the most awful place. The place I didn’t want to be. And yet it was the next thing because Ben had asked, and where else was I going to go?
I strode up the long driveway, leaving my bags in the back of my car. I was wearing black jeans, a black sweater, and black boots that laced up the ankle. My hair was down and I wore no makeup. I wasn’t a cleaner today. I wasn’t a mother, either, or an ex-wife, or a former mental patient. I mounted the steps to the porch and swung the front door open.
The front hall was dim and smelled musty. There was a woven rug over the worn floorboards beneath my feet. A single lamp by the door, two coats on hooks, no art on the walls. My head spun for a crazy second as I oriented myself.
There was a curl of cigarette smoke lacing the stale air. “She’s here,” Dodie’s voice said from a room down the hall. The living room.
“Um,” came Vail’s reply.
I strode toward the voices, letting my boots make noise on the wood floor. In the living room, Dodie was sitting cross-legged on a chair, her sneakers abandoned on the floor beneath her. Her hair—dark like mine, though her face was different, more elfin and less serious—was tied in a twist on the top of her head. She was wearing soft, wide-legged pants, cream-colored, with her delicate bare feetfolded below the hem, and a garish tight tee of lime green with a rip along one seam. She held a plate in her lap and was lifting a cracker with something smeared on it to her mouth. A cigarette sat in an ashtray next to her, lazily lit.
On the sofa sat Vail, all six-feet-plus of him, long-legged and lean, his hair in too-long curls and a beard on his perfect jaw. His jeans looked years old, his flannel shirt only slightly younger. He was stretched across the sofa, taking up the whole thing, his booted feet crossed at the ankles and resting unapologetically on the old, dusty cushions. He was reading a magazine.
I paused in the doorway. When was the last time my brother, my sister, and I had been in a room together? I couldn’t remember. Our mother had had no funeral, and her ashes had sat in the trunk of my car until I’d finally dumped them unceremoniously into Long Island Sound.
Dodie looked at me with a smile and amusement in her eyes, then stuffed the cracker into her mouth. Vail flipped the page of his magazine.
I nodded toward the cigarette. “Put that out,” I said to Dodie. “This place is probably a fire hazard.”
My little sister chewed her cracker and shrugged. “Help yourself,” she said with her mouth full.
“Damn it.” I crossed the room, tapped the ash off the cigarette, and put it to my lips, taking a long drag. The way it made my head spin was only slightly different from the way it was spinning already. “Want some, Vail?” I asked.
“I quit,” Vail said into his magazine.
“So did I,” I said.
“So did I,” Dodie echoed.
None of us commented further. I stood in the middle of the room, smoking that sweet, sweet nicotine until the cigarette was a nub. Then I ground it out in the ashtray.
I looked at Dodie, who was licking a crumb from her lip. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, either, but whereas my features were drawn in smudged charcoal, hers were etched in beautiful, precise lines. “Please tell me that cracker wasn’t eighteen years old,” I said to her.
Her eyes went wide with delight at the thought. “No, but that would have beenamazing.Vail has been here long enough to do a food run. And I brought food myself, because I figured there was a good chance I’d starve otherwise.”
At the sofa, Vail’s boots hit the floor with a thump as he sat up. “Dodie exists on crackers,” he said, his voice gruff as always. “She puts goop on them.”
“It’s pâté,” Dodie said.
