He motions to the disposable gloves beside the bucket. Sarah pulls the latex over her fingers, feeling like Grandma’s plastic-covered couch.
She opens the hall closet and smells Ben’s coat before she sees it, even over the whiff of bleach. His particular blend of soap and aftershave and deodorant lingers. So familiar, another intimacy she doesn’t want anymore. She viciously yanks the coat and scarf off the hanger. The crisp wool of the coat swings in her hand like a pendulum, weighed down by its pockets’ contents.
She draws out a key on a black fob and a phone. Facial recognition probably won’t identify Ben’s battered and bloodied face, so she can’t unlock the phone. Not that she wants to call Graham now anyway. He didn’t believe her and had asked Ben to pick her up, and look what happened. Look what he did. What did she do to deserve this?
The key, however, is not the key to the apartment they’d shared, but for a car. The rental car in the driveway. Sarah’s heart leaps into her mouth. This is the chance she’s been waiting for. She could grab her backpack and run out the door right now. Get in the car and keep driving. Vanish into the blowing snow like so many visitors to the Suicide Motel before her.
A warm, latex-sheathed hand plucks the phone and key out of her palm.
“I’ll leave the car at the motel,” Caleb says. “That was the pattern with the other disappearances. He came to the house, you rejected him, he went away angry. We’ll drop his things in the woods and back you up. Uncle Isaac will believe us. I’ll call him in a day or two and report the car, if he doesn’t drop by and see it himself.”
Caleb holds out another garbage bag, and Sarah drops in the coat and scarf. He rests the phone on top and pockets the key, and then tucks the bag back in the closet.
And just like that, all the remnants of Sarah’s old life are stashed away. Yes, it’s easy to believe Ben would drive away from the house, his head clouded by rage, then abandon the car and walk into the woods. Drawn by the call many men have heard before him.Do you hear us screaming? Come, you can scream with us. Another tithe paid to the Suicide Motel.
Elijah ties up the garbage bags and brings them to Caleb. He takes off his mask and smiles, wincing from the cut on his lip. “Good as new,” he says, waving a gloved hand at the gleaming parlor. Sarah could convince herself that Ben never showed up if it wasn’t for the coppery tang of his blood on her tongue.
Caleb peels off his own mask and pushes sweat-damp hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist. “I’ll move the car and then take these to the town dump. I have to go anyway to toss the broken glass and crap from the motel. No one’s going to find that suspicious. Elijah, get your coat.”
“He can’t go out like that,” Sarah says.
Elijah’s face is a war zone. Caleb exhales. “You’re right. Will you two be okay here alone?”
“Of course,” Sarah says. “I’ll get him cleaned up.”
Caleb nods. “First aid kit is in your bathroom. I’ll be back soon. Lock the door.”
When the door closes behind him, Sarah turns the deadbolt and snaps into action. She finds an unopened bag of peas in the kitchen freezer, wraps it in a tea towel, and hands it to Elijah. He presses it against his darkening eye. She doesn’t want to sit in the parlor ever again, so she says, “Come on,” and heads up the stairs.
She leads Elijah to the main bedroom. He hangs back in the doorway, pain in his good eye. “He can’t hurt you anymore,” she says. But the memory still does, she knows that. She takes his hand and gently guides him across the floor.
The room is warmer than the rest of the house, like it’s the heart of Sweetside Manor. Itisthe heart after all, if it had once hosted Jacob Vass. Its dark, rotten heart, beating with ugly secrets. It’s appropriate she’s sleeping here.
Elijah sits on the bed and picks up the beat-up copy ofMacbeth. “Who would’ve thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” he quotes from behind the bag of frozen peas, his split lip quirking.
Sarah grimaces. “Please don’t joke, Elijah.”
She finds the first aid supplies and dabs the cuts on Elijah’s face with antiseptic ointment. He whimpers, twitching a little, and she remembers how he’d curled up in a ball to deflect Ben’s kicks.
“Oh my God. You must be—” Sarah snares the hem of his paint- and blood-spattered shirt and gently tugs it over his head. His torso is lean and pale, a boy’s body even though he’s not much younger than her. None of the skin is broken, but a mottled red runs up and down his arms and along his ribcage, casting the white lines of old scars in stark relief. His chest rises and falls slowly, his eyes sad as if his mother’s ghost is looking out from his face.
Sarah wonders whose ghost looks out from her face.
She touches one blushing rib with a fingertip. “I don’t know how to tell if anything’s broken.”
“They’re not. I know what it feels like.”
“Oh, Elijah.” This sad, lonely boy took the brunt of Ben’s anger, and his father’s. Her eyes well up with tears, and she puts a hand on his bare shoulder. He leans his cheek against it. His skin is cold from the frozen peas. He smells like blood, but it doesn’t turn her stomach anymore.
It smells like freedom.
It smells like being alive.
It smells safe.
She blinks, releasing a tear down her face, and she realizes she’s happy.
They sit quietly, Elijah’s cold cheek pressing into the back of her hand, listening to their breathing and the call of the wind. A warmth blooms in the pit of her stomach. Not the full-body flush she feels around Caleb, but the coziness of a favorite sweater. Elijah’s easy to be around; he wears his feelings on his sleeve. As opposed to Caleb, who shuttles between an easy smile and a smouldering tension in his upper body, as if he’s fighting his inheritance of violence. Elijah doesn’t seem to want anything in return. He’s just glad of the company.
