Chapter 13
Vail
Dad left first. Of course he did. After Ben disappeared, Dad disengaged from us—as if he’d ever been much engaged in the first place—and one day, barely three months later, he was gone.
If there was a note or a goodbye, I didn’t remember it.
I didn’t remember any of us grieving him, even Mom. We were too busy grieving Ben.
Eventually, we got a postcard from Spain.
I remembered that. That fucker. I’d hate him forever, and I’d die proud of it.
There are times when blood bonds are meaningless, when holding on to your hate is an achievement to boast of.
To my last breath, I’d never forgive him for being so shallow, so selfish, for walking away from us.
I was utterly incurious about what his own pain or struggle might have been.
It didn’t matter. Long before he was dead—dissipated into noxious vapor somewhere in Europe—my father was dead to me.
I’m very good at holding on to things. It’s one of my talents.
My throat tried to close as I looked at my little sister, standing here in this dusty attic with me.
Tendrils of her dark hair had escaped from her ponytail and trailed around her delicate face.
She looked fragile in the beams of light from the grimy window.
The sight made me angry at our father all over again, made me want to spit in his grave, if he had one.
It was one of those random, unreasoning bubbles of rage that surfaced at unlikely moments, aimed at someone so long dead that they would never know.
If Dad had failed me, he had also failed Dodie, who needed a father more than I did and should have had one. He had failed all of us.
Dodie blew out a breath, aiming it upward to blow the hair from her eyes.
“Bloody ’ell,” she said in a terrible affected English accent. “It’s a mess, guvnah. Ain’t it?”
Dodie only made jokes like that when she was wearing thin.
Goofy jokes and silly accents were her tornado warning.
When she was a girl, this kind of thing preceded tears or a sinking into dark apathy.
Sometimes one after the other. Dodie was the moodiest of us, which was saying something, and this day—this entire task—was draining her faster than it was draining me.
Especially with what we were looking at now, in the attic.
My hands opened and closed at my sides, and I took a breath. Who had been looking after Dodie all this time? No one.
I’d pulled down the attic door, unfolding the steps attached to it. Dodie had changed into jeans and a T-shirt, the hem of which she’d tied at the waist. We’d climbed up, and now all I wanted was to somehow get Dodie back down those steps before she became untethered and floated away.
“I forgot,” Dodie said softly, using her normal voice now. “I forgot that we put all of his toys up here.”
I’d forgotten, too, and even now, the memory was too hard to fully recall.
Ben was a playful kid, and he’d loved games—he had puzzles, board games he made up the rules to, blocks, toy soldiers, coloring books, watercolor painting kits.
In theory, he was supposed to keep all of his toys in his room, but in reality, he’d left them everywhere in the house.
You’d wake up haunted by harrowing dreams, and then you’d nearly trip over a paint-by-numbers set and a drawing in which Ben had swapped all the colors around.
After he disappeared, his toys were still everywhere. Everywhere. As the days dragged on, turning into weeks, it became agony. Cleaning up Ben’s toys meant we knew he was truly gone. Not cleaning them up meant we believed he would be back to play with them again. Both options were torture.
Eventually, we’d boxed them up and put them in the attic.
Whose idea was it? Was our father gone by then?
I had a numb memory of dismantling a wooden train set and putting it in a box.
We’d disposed of Ben’s other belongings—the small bed from his bedroom, his clothes.
But we hadn’t had the heart to get rid of his toys, so we had moved them up here.
The train set was here in the attic, out of the box now and set up in a tidy oval.
The train sat on its track, waiting. Everything else was out of the boxes, too—puzzles and stuffed animals and coloring books.
Even the old dolls passed down from Violet’s and Dodie’s childhoods, which Ben had played with.
Everything was scattered and set up, as if a child played up here every day.
The thought that crossed my mind at the sight was, Maybe someone is playing a trick on us. I’d seen deception in VUFOS. Someone could have broken into this house, set everything up to make it look like Ben was here. There was plenty of time to do it and no one to catch them.
None of us had seen our brother. The landscapers could either be in on it or paid off. One phone call, and the three Esmie siblings showed up, no questions asked.
I’d noticed myself that the house wasn’t dusty enough. But why would someone call us back here like this?
The people who faked abductions for VUFOS usually wanted attention, which was tied to money.
Some wanted one more than the other; some wanted both equally.
Some people just wanted to feel important about something, even if it was for a crazy thing that not many people cared about.
Getting the attention of a handful of UFO investigators was more attention than they’d ever had in their life.
There was no one at our old house looking for our attention or our money, at least not yet. My mind went over the angles, and then I looked at Dodie again. Her breathing had gone shallow. Maybe someone just wanted us to feel that deep, bloody slice of pain.
“Go back downstairs,” I said, my voice calm.
“He was here,” she said in reply, her gaze fixed on something. I followed it and saw that a small rubber ball was lazily rolling into the corner, losing momentum as if someone had abandoned it a moment ago. It made no sound.
A trick, I thought. There had to be a way.
If someone had years without interruption, they could use magnets, strings, traps to fool us.
I hadn’t heard noises from the attic since I’d been here, and you couldn’t lower the steps and leave without making a lot of noise.
My gaze shot to the window, which was dusty and shut, the only view out of it of the trees that Dodie and I had walked through this morning.
Had this been set up while we were out of the house, searching the back property? Or before we arrived?
Why do it at all?
We had money, all three of us—plenty of it now.
Mom came from money, and Dad hadn’t had enough access to it to waste it all away.
Mom’s money had bought this house when they first married.
Mom’s money had gone into a trust fund for each of us that we got when we turned eighteen.
It was enough that I could do unpaid work for VUFOS and Dodie could get occasional modeling gigs and Violet could clean houses, and we didn’t have to worry where the rent came from.
We’d lived frugally for the first years, making the trust funds last until Mom finally died, when we got the rest of it.
Money could motivate most people to do just about anything. But if this was a trick to get money, it was an elaborate one. I couldn’t see the point of it, at least not yet.
I looked at Dodie again. There was no part of my little sister that believed this was a trick. No part at all.
“Go back downstairs,” I said again, more gently.
She shook her head. “Don’t clean it up, Vail.” Her tone was arguing, as if I’d suggested it. “Don’t take pictures. We’ll wait for Violet to get back. She’ll know what to do. She’ll—”
“Shh.” I pressed my fingertips to her elbow. “Go downstairs.”
“He wants us to see something. He led us here.”
I looked around again at our little brother’s toys. The watery footsteps—could someone have faked those, too? The ball had stopped rolling and was wedged in the corner. Nothing moved or made a sound. I could see no message, no pattern. Just a child’s playthings that announced, I am here.
I wanted to believe it. If it was really Ben, was that what he was trying to tell us? That he was here?
My gaze caught on something and I stepped forward, picked it up.
A glider made of balsam wood in the shape of an airplane.
It was a kit in which you took the pieces of balsam and slid them together, the slender parts fitting into the notches in the other pieces.
Ben had put it together, but he’d done it wrong, with the wings upside down, opposite of the tail.
“It won’t fly,” I’d explained to him as I’d gently pried the pieces apart again, trying not to break the thin wood.
“If the wings and the tail are opposite like that, the airplane won’t fly. ”
Ben had watched my hands as they worked, and then his gaze had trailed away, bored.
He was rarely bored, but mechanical things did it.
He was the unusual little boy who had no fascination for play dump trucks or police cars or fire trucks.
The airplane, with its painted stripes and painted windows for pretend balsam wood passengers, interested him not at all.
“You’ll see,” I’d told him. “When we fly it, you’ll see.”
That was the morning of hide-and-seek day. I’d taken the plane apart, but we hadn’t reassembled it. Ben’s interest had moved on, and we’d left the pieces in a pile and played other games instead.
A few hours later, my little brother was gone forever.
I picked up the airplane where it sat now, on top of a dusty box. I remembered picking up the pieces and packing them away, my head throbbing, my eyes watering.
The airplane was assembled now. I ran my fingertip over the wing, which was assembled the wrong way. Then down to the tail.
I held the airplane that wouldn’t fly, listened to the rush in my ears, and tried to breathe.
—
In the kitchen, I took the milk from the fridge, then opened the cupboard, looking for the chocolate Quik I’d bought. I poured two glasses of milk and found a spoon. My hand had almost stopped shaking.
Dodie dropped into a kitchen chair, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright in a way that was a danger warning. “He was there,” she said. “Ben was there, Vail. He was there.”
I spooned chocolate into her glass of milk and stirred.
“I never thought—I never.” She shook her head, her gaze far away. “I thought he was gone. I thought he’d blinked out into nothingness, that I’d never see him again. For the rest of my life. Until I died.”
“You might not see him.” I kept my voice level and careful. I put her glass in front of her on the table. “Drink this.”
“I’m going to see him,” she said, her voice hushed. “His little face. The smell of his hair. Do you remember the smell of his hair?”
“Of course I do.”
“I believed it was over,” she said. “I thought that this was my life now. Ben was gone, and this is my life. What if that isn’t my life?”
“Drink your milk,” I said. There was no point speculating about tricks, not when she was in this mindset. I’d talk to Violet about it. “You believe he stopped existing, when you know the things that Violet can see?”
Dodie took a deep sip of her chocolate milk, so she was listening to me at least a little.
Her throat worked as she swallowed, and the flush on her cheeks faded.
I should probably find something for her to eat that wasn’t paté.
“Violet sees shadows, ghosts. Like old sepia photographs. People who died a long time ago. And Violet stayed here last night with us, and she didn’t see him.
” She looked at me, her gaze focusing from wherever it had been.
“He showed himself to us, Vail. Not Violet.”
I nodded, sipping my milk. I had to maintain the illusion that this was a normal conversation.
If I caught any of Dodie’s excitement, it would feed back to her and she would start to spiral.
There would be tears. Or she’d pick up that glass of milk and smash it in sudden anger.
Where the hell was Violet? She was better at calming Dodie than I was.
I was still trying to think of the right thing to say when Dodie reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out crayons, dropping them onto the kitchen table.
Three of them—red, yellow, blue, all well used.
They clicked softly as they landed. I felt a brief spurt of outrage that she’d picked the crayons up, but I swallowed it. Dodie could not be yelled at right now.
“I thought you didn’t want to touch anything,” I said in a level voice.
“He wanted me to take these,” she said, her tone a challenge. She gave me a look that dared me to argue with her.
“All right,” I said.
“I’m going to leave them here.” Her hand hovered over the crayons, and I could see that it was shaking, just like mine had been. “Don’t touch them.”
I shrugged like it was no big deal. “Do what you want. I’m done with this for now. I’m going to see if I can fix the TV signal.”
My little sister’s hand wavered for another moment. Her gaze dropped, and then she glanced at the wall clock, which had stopped working sometime in the last twenty years. “I don’t even know what time it is,” she mused.
“Go have a nap,” I advised her. “I promise to come get you if Violet comes home with important news.”
“I suppose I could sleep.” She rubbed a hand over her face, then pushed back her chair and stood. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
She’d told me that already, but I nodded as if this was news. “Then nap,” I repeated.
She walked to the kitchen door, then paused. She seemed to consider her words before she spoke them. “You’re not leaving?” she asked.
It was the same tone I’d heard from her on our walk this morning. Dodie was scared. I held her gaze with mine, picked up my chocolate milk, and swigged from it as if nothing bothered me. “Nope,” I said.
She nodded. I heard her steps ascend the stairs.
I put my glass down, then scrubbed both my hands through my hair as I exhaled hard, feeling the scrape on my scalp. I couldn’t look at the crayons on the table.
One day. We’d been here one day, and already Dodie was about to crack like a raw egg, her yolk spilling all over the floor. Either I’d lost my ability to keep her tethered, or this situation was particularly bad. Probably both. I needed to talk to Violet about it.
Where the hell was Violet?
It felt like the house was breathing, waiting for me to do something.
I needed to be busy, or I’d crack like an egg, too. And one of us needed an unbroken shell.
I left the crayons behind and walked to the living room to fix the TV.