“I didn’t hear a question.” I could do this all night. “If you think Violet is crazy, then why are you here?”
She paused, and then she said, “It was either this or school.”
I fell a little bit in love with her.
“Coming here was stupid, in case you were wondering,” I told her calmly. “Stupidity runs in the family, because what you did sounds like something I would do. We came to this house before you did, and we aren’t leaving, so we’re in no place to judge. But now my siblings and I have to worry about you as well as ourselves.”
Lisette twisted, placing her palms on the bed to look back at me. She wasn’t on the verge of crying anymore. “What’s going to happen?” she asked with a child’s certainty that I’d know the answer.
I adjusted the last loose strands around her face. She really had lovely hair. “If I had to guess, Violet will take you home to your father tomorrow.”
“And leave you here alone?”
“Not alone,” I corrected her. “Vail is here.”
“But what’s going to happen?”
For the first time in our conversation, I decided not to tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I had no answer, that I wasn’t sure that even Vail could protect both of us from whatever haunted this house. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t think I would get to go back to New York, and that the thought made me sad, because for the first time in my life I had things I wanted to do. Things I was looking forward to.
I didn’t tell her that from the moment I answered the phone and heard Vail’s voice on the other end of the line, part of me had believed that I wouldn’t get past this. That my story, such as it was, was beginning its last chapter. There would be no more chapters after this one.
Instead of telling her all of that, I asked, “What would you do if it was your little brother, trapped in this house? Your little brother who asked you to come home?”
She didn’t have an answer for that, and neither did I. So we went downstairs to dinner.
39
Violet
When Lisette heard that she was to sleep in my room with me, she argued, because of course she did. My God, could that child argue. It was like living with fourteen-year-old Dodie all over again, and once had been more than enough.
She wanted to sleep in our parents’ bedroom—the master bedroom—by herself. I told her she was sleeping with me. I’d put up with my parents’ bed if I had to, but Lisette would not sleep alone.
It didn’t matter that Dodie had explained the dangers of the house to her. It didn’t matter that Lisette was a selfish child who had run away from home and was in a heap of white-hot trouble, that she’d cost us my paltry visitation rights, that she was putting herself in danger and making the rest of us deal with it. She argued until I wanted to put her out in the rain or scream. Or both.
Vail finished his dinner—hard-boiled eggs, toast with butter, cheese, and apples, all things I’d cobbled together from the fridge—and pushed his chair back, picking up his empty plate. “I wouldn’t sleep alone, myself, if I didn’t have to,” he said in a bored, flat voice.“The thing in this house is nasty and it hits hard, especially at night. But you do what you want. I’m going to watch TV.”
Lisette watched him, her face pale, as he washed his plate and left the room. I watched her try to imagine what kind of thing would make Vail admit he was afraid.
“Fine,” she said to me after a moment. “We’ll sleep in your room.”
—
Lisette watched TV with Vail for a while, and then she came up to my room and changed into her pajamas. Her arguing seemed to have exhausted itself, because she slid into the bed with me without a word, keeping a chilly foot of space between us.
I turned the lamp out. We lay on our backs in the darkness.
“I’m sorry I screwed everything up,” she said after a moment.
I could only be honest. “It was already screwed up.”
“I’ll talk to Dad. I’ll tell him that I—that I want to see you. That I came here to see you and Uncle Vail and Aunt Dodie. That you didn’t tell me to come.”
I had no answer to that. Maybe it would make a difference and maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t get a chance with Lisette until she was an adult, if she would even speak to me by then.
“Why did you do it?” I finally asked her.
“Dad wouldn’t have let me come,” she replied. “He says I shouldn’t be around you, but he never explains why. He would never have said yes to me coming here, so I didn’t ask. And when you told me about your brother, I just thought…I don’t know.” Her voice went thick as her throat closed. “I don’t fit in anywhere. I don’t have many friends. I don’t do sports or theater at school. I thought that I wanted to know where I come from. I thought it would help.”
