The nearest hospital has to be ten or twenty miles away. I wonder if Nolan and Emily would have left for the hospital without telling us. I wonder if they planned to call on the way, but then Emily forgot her phone and Nolan couldn’t get a signal.
But then I see it through the porch screens, one flapping loosein the wind: Emily and Nolan’s dusty black Volkswagen parked just outside on the drive. The car is still here, which means they haven’t gone anywhere.
They’re still in the cottage.
My throat tightens. It’s hard to breathe as my eyes move around the room. At first glance, the porch is empty, but then I just barely make out bare feet stretched on the floor, overhanging the end of the bed, and I realize the porch is not empty like I thought.
My heart starts to beat faster. A hand rises to my mouth as I feel myself shift closer rather than away by instinct, seeing that the skin on the feet is discolored, the pigment far different than healthy feet. It’s purpling, the skin tone now nearly the same as the mauve toenail polish, which I know, before I ever see her face, is Emily’s because we went for pedicures together before we left on the trip and I helped her pick out the polish, which matches mine.
I come slowly around the edge of the bed, thinking unrealistically that I can help her, that I can still save her. “Emily?” I ask, the word slipping out of me, weightless and insubstantial until I see her and my knees give, and I have to hold on to the bed frame to keep myself upright.
Emily is dead. The blood beneath her is telling. No one could lose that amount of blood and survive. She’s completely motionless, lying on the floor of the screened-in porch on the far side of the bed as if caught trying to escape or to hide. There is no rise and fall of her chest to say that she’s breathing, that she’s still alive. Her face is turned slightly to the side—her neck not at all angled right—so that I bear witness to the grayness of her face and a cloudy, half-opened eye. One of her arms is bent at an impossible angle too, the shoulder jutting out of place, and her mouth gapes open from a last breath or a final scream. Her phone lies just out of reach, a missed call from me on the screen.
I’m frozen in shock, in fear. Though my every instinct tells me to run, to go back to our cottage, lock the door and call the police, I can’t get myself to move.
I hesitate for only seconds. But even that is too much. It’s too late.
Before I can get myself to go, there’s the sudden, very cerebral sensation of not being alone anymore. A movement in my peripheral vision maybe, or the soft, slow creak of a floorboard.
Reese
Seven Days Earlier
We’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s been hours since we got off the expressway, since I saw something normal like a McDonald’s. At first, we were on some two-lane road surrounded by farms for a while—listening to Emily’s playlist, also known as the same five songs on repeat, over and over again until I wanted to die—and now we’re on some two-lane road surrounded by trees. We’re in the actual forest. Everywhere I look there are trees, so deep and packed so close together you don’t know who or what is living in them, though every so often we pass a gravel drive that vanishes into air with tire tracks and signs at the end that say things likePrivate PropertyandNo Trespassing, and that’s how you know someone lives in the trees. When buildings do crop up, they’re dodgy as fuck, like those single-story metal storage units (you just know there’s a dead body in at least one of them) or little roadside diners advertising Friday fish frys, whose dusty parking lots are filled with nothing but motorcycles and two-tone cars straight out of the ’80s.
This is the kind of place you see on the news, where people disappear and are never seen again.
The parental units are in the front seat, fighting again because Nolan is lost. Nolan always gets lost, because he spaces outand doesn’t pay attention to where he’s going. At this point, he’s missed like three turns, and the GPS is glitchy as fuck because cell service around here sucks, so no one knows where we are anymore. We’re just on some road, mostly alone, surrounded by trees. Every once in a while, someone will pass by, going in the opposite direction, but they’re all old Ford Broncos and jacked up trucks. They’re not like us. A little while ago, there was one truck that flew up from behind with a windshield so tinted I couldn’t see the driver’s face. He rode our tail for a while, swerving and revving his engine, making everyone nervous. “Just go faster, Dad,” I said, while Emily told him to pull over and let the man pass. Nolan did neither, undeterred, saying that if the other driver wanted to, he could pass, which eventually he did, laying on the horn and giving us the bird. When he got in front of us, cutting intentionally close, I saw that on the back glass was one of those bumper stickers of Calvin, peeing with his pants around his knees and his ass crack hanging out, and another of a silhouette of a woman with massive breasts that saidMy other ride is your mom, if that’s any indication of the kind of place where we are.
Mae asked what it meant.My other ride is your mom.
Emily is mad at Nolan for getting us lost. She thinks he’s incompetent. She can’t let it go. It’s not just that she’s mad we’re lost, but her anxiety has kicked in and she thinks something bad might happen to us, that we might die out here or something, and if we did, it would be all his fault.
“If you would have just been paying more attention, this wouldn’t have happened,” she says.
“Do you think I wanted to get us lost? That I tried to get us lost? God, Emily, you just don’t know when to shut up sometimes.”
Emily goes stiff. She checks her phone then to see if Aunt Courtney texted, but it’s pointless because there is no cell signal,which is also somehow Nolan’s fault (maybe if we were on the right road, there would be cell service). Emily could just let it go, but she doesn’t. She says something instead then about how Grandpa, RIP, used to use an actual map when they went on family vacations so they never got lost because they didn’t need Siri telling them where to go, they didn’t rely on modern technology, he could just figure it out with his brain. And then, to really drive the point home, she dredges up the one time we were driving in the city—thatNolanwas driving us in the city—and Siri took us on a tour of some of the sketchiest parts of Chicago, because it was the fastest route, as if Google Maps comes with a feature to avoid areas with high crime. I thought it was funny at the time, but Emily thought we were going to get killed. She kept screaming at us to close our windows and lock our doors.
“You wanna drive?” Nolan asks now. “Here, you can drive,” he says, jerking the car onto the side of the road so hard that I crash-land into Mae in the back seat. We skid on gravel, stopping abruptly. I’m not wearing my seat belt and so, when Nolan slams on the brakes and thrusts the gearshift into Park, I fall forward into the back of Emily’s seat. “You can drive then, since you’re so much better at it than me.”
Except he doesn’t take off his seat belt or get out of the car, which is how I know—how we all know—he’s bluffing. Nolan knows that if Emily drives, we’ll go ten under the speed limit the rest of the way—her hands in the ten and two position—and no one wants that to happen because, if we have to stay in this car any longer than is absolutely necessary, someone might die.
“Could you two stop?” I ask, feeling my temper start to flare. “Could you just, like, I don’t know, act like fucking grown-ups for a change?”
Emily says nothing, but she gazes over a shoulder at me, looking disappointed, which is no different than the way she alwayslooks at me. Because I saidfuckin front of Mae. Because I said fuckat all. Because I didn’t side with her, but chose to stay neutral like Switzerland. If I had just told Nolan to act like a fucking grown-up instead, things might have been different. I might have gotten away with it. Emily is pretty when she smiles—her blond hair a wavy bob with bangs that most people could never get away with, her soft blue eyes making her look kind—but mostly all I ever see is her angry or her resting bitch face and deepening frown lines that she no doubt blames on Nolan or me.
She used to be happy. I remember that. Sort of.
I look away, texting my friend Skylar.I wanna KMS, I say and hit Send. It’s the summer before our senior year. For months my best friend, Skylar, and I planned to spend it doing things like going to the Indiana Dunes or taking the train into the city to go to Oak Street Beach. Instead, I’m here with these losers. Mae is okay, but the rest of them I can’t stand. My brother, Wyatt, sits in the back seat alone, where he hasn’t taken his eyes off his phone the whole entire trip, and I know he’s probably looking at pictures of naked girls, though every time Emily asks what he’s doing, he saysnothing. It’s not nothing. He’s lying to her. Because that’s what he always does—lies—though, because he’s made high honor roll every semester since he started kindergarten and will probably go to college on a full ride baseball scholarship, they think he’s likethe perfect child. He can get away with anything.
As Nolan slips the gearshift back into Drive and pulls back onto the road, Emily starts muttering things under her breath like, “They’re going to be there before us,” and, “I told Courtney we’d be there by three,” as if that matters, as if anyone cares.
“What do you think, they’re gonna leave if we’re not there by three?” I ask, and she gives me another dirty look over her shoulder. This time, Emily holds my gaze before letting her eyes run down my neck to my clothes. She doesn’t like what I’m wearing,which she told me before we left, how people will think I’m a slut if I dress like one.Is that what you want people to think? That you’re a slut?We were standing in the kitchen when she asked. I didn’t know what to say and so I said nothing. I thought maybe she would take it back, that she would realize, because of my silence or the look of astonishment on my face, that her words cut deep and say sorry or something, but she didn’t. To be fair, she didn’t lead with the slut comment. She started by saying, “You are not wearing that. Please go find something else to wear,” and when I said no, she changed her approach.
“Put your seat belt on,” she says now, and I want to ask why and what she’s going to do if I don’t, but instead I put my seat belt on, jamming the buckle in with gusto, the strap shackling me to the seat like a hostage, which is exactly what I am. A hostage.
In less than a year, I’ll be eighteen, and then I’m getting away from here. If I survive that long.
