Across the street, the front door of a small, boxy house with pale yellow siding opened and a little girl thumped down the steps on bare feet, carrying a doll in a bright pink dress. The girl’s skin was pale and her hair was long and dark, with dozens of tiny white flowers growing on thin woody vines peppered throughout the length.
The child tottered out onto the lawn, where she spread her arms in the sun, then settled onto her knees in the dirt, sitting on her own heels. She began to play with her doll, talking to it in a high-pitched voice, and Rebecca noticed that the child’s lower legs, folded beneath her, looked...fuzzy. Indistinct, in the grass and dirt.
Roots, Rebecca realized. Her grandfather had said the family across the street were dryads. They gained sustenance from the soil, like a plant, through retractable roots that sprouted from their feet and legs when they came in contact with the earth.
Sara scooted down to sit on the step next to Rebecca, drawing her thoughts back to her own yard. “What did she say?”
“Erica?” Becca shrugged. “Nothing.” Nothing since that night at the police station, anyway. Not even the day of the double funeral—the second-worst day of Rebecca’s life. The police had told both girls they might be called to testify, but in the six days since, they’d heard nothing from the cops. Nor from the state’s attorney.
Like the rest of the world, hypnotized by the national tragedy unfolding before them, Rebecca was getting her updates from the nightly news.
“I heard that all of the kids who survived were six years old. Well, all of them butyou.” Sara popped her gum again, and Rebecca privately marveled at the older girl’s nerve.
People stared at Rebecca when she walked her grandfather’s dog up and down the street, which she only did to get out of the house. They whispered when she went to the grocery store with her grandmother. And once, a stranger had put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “God bless you, dear,” at the post office, while her grandfather was buying a roll of stamps. But since the night her parents had killed two of her three siblings, no one had come right out and asked such invasive, painful questions.
Until Sara Cooper.
“I wasn’t home when it happened,” Rebecca whispered, hoping Erica wouldn’t hear her over Meredith’s enthusiastic counting of her own hula hoop revolutions.
“Twenty-five! Twenty-six! Twenty-sev—Wait, that doesn’t count! I only dropped it for a second!”
“So, has your sister always been that weird, or is this new since that night? Like, from the trauma?”
Rebecca looked up from the paint chips she was picking from beneath her fingernails to find Erica bouncing contentedly on the Pogo Ball in the cracked driveway, one hand on the hood of their grandfather’s car for balance. The only thing “odd” she could find about her sister’s behavior was that the six-year-old was surprisingly coordinated and well-balanced. At least, compared to Meredith Cooper, who’d moved on to the hula hoop after she’d fallen off the ball and scraped her knees twice.
“Do you think she’s...like...scarred for life?” Sara asked when Rebecca went back to scraping paint from the railing without response. “After seeing something so horrible? My mom’s a therapist, and she said your sister’d probably need psychological counseling for the rest of her life. She said there’d be nightmares. Emotional regression. Maybe even bedwetting.”
“I thought your mom was the guidance counselor’s secretary,” Rebecca said. “At school.”
Sara shrugged. “She steps in to help with the counseling whenever there’s a problem.”
Rebecca went back to flaking paint from the railing, because she’d been taught that when one has nothing nice to say, one should say nothing at all. Of course, the fact that that adage had come from the mother who’d stabbed her brother and sister to death had led Rebecca to question the merit of the advice.
Still, Sara’s question plagued her.
Rebecca had hardly gotten three consecutive hours of sleep in the two weeks since the killings. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Laura’s body, splayed out in a tangle of bloody limbs on the floor. She woke up from frequent nightmares drenched in sweat, staring up at the living room ceiling because she refused to sleep either in the dark or in her mother’s old bedroom.
Yet Erica...
Becca stifled a yawn while she studied her sister. Erica had plenty of energy. She wasn’t exactly laughing and joking with Meredith Cooper, but that wasn’t something she would have done before that night in August, either. She’d always been kind of a loner, playing alongside other children, more often than with them.
Erica had been sleeping and eating just fine since that night, though she maintained that their grandparents’ house “smelled funny,” and she hadn’t wet the bed once since she was four. Rebecca wasn’t sure what “emotional regression” might look like, but she was pretty sure Erica was recovering very well from what she’d witnessed.
Extraordinarily well.
For another half hour, Sara and Rebecca sat on the steps, watching their sisters play in the yard. The popping of Sara’s gum became a counterpoint to the steady thump of the Pogo Ball against the pavement and the occasional clatter of the hula hoop, when Meredith’s hips failed her.
Across the street, the young dryad stood with her doll and tossed flower-strewn hair over one shoulder on her way into her house.
Rebecca had just decided to go in for a cold Coke when a police car pulled to a stop in front of the house. Blocking the driveway.
Becca stood, her mouth suddenly dry. There must be news about her parents. Or maybe the cops had more questions.
Meredith let her hoop fall when two uniformed police officers got out of the patrol car. Before they’d even made it onto the grass, a second car pulled up behind the first and Rebecca’s pulse began to throb in her ears. Thishadto be about her mom and dad.
Grandma Janice had gone to see them, separately, and she’d said Becca’s parents had both been in tears. That they remembered nothing of what had happened that night. That they’d begged for pictures of their children and asked how Rebecca and Erica were dealing with everything.
Rebecca found their recent behavior just as puzzling as the way they’d acted that night. Though not nearly as disturbing.
