Chapter 18
Dodie
Vail found me in the upstairs hallway, facing the closed door to our parents’ bedroom. “Want to watch cartoons?” he asked me. “Violet’s going out.”
“Not now,” I said reluctantly. “We have work to do.”
Vail looked at the bedroom door, and his voice was stony when he said, “I’d rather watch cartoons.”
“So would I. But Vail, there are words on the living room wall. That’s going to dampen the mood in there.”
A look crossed his face at the mention of the scrawled words, as if a thought snagged in his mind. Then he sighed.
“The detective’s report was right about the lack of photographs in this family,” I continued.
“Of paperwork. I know our parents were neglectful, but the three of us were born, and we do exist. Ben existed, too. I already know there’s nothing in any of our bedrooms and nothing in Ben’s bedroom.
” I had already looked in Ben’s room, which should have been upsetting but had instead made me numb.
Ben’s room was completely empty, all of his furniture gone and his toys moved to the attic.
It was a blank cube with nothing of my little brother in it anymore. We wouldn’t find answers there.
“There has to be a document somewhere,” I said, nodding toward our parents’ door. “That’s the only room I haven’t searched.”
“Which means,” Vail said, the words dragging, “we have to go in.”
“Correct.”
After last night, I should be a mess. I should be sobbing in a corner or—more likely—getting in my car and driving back to New York.
Instead, I felt clear. More clear, in fact, than I had in years, as if a hangover had lifted.
It had to do with the feeling of Ben next to me, the smell of his precious head.
Despite the horror that had come after, the grief that had left me sobbing, all I could think about this morning was that after twenty years, he’d said my name.
He’d told me to find him. So I wasn’t leaving.
I had no idea whether Vail believed it was really Ben. Maybe he did. My brother looked tired this morning, lines of concern now creasing his handsome face because he was still in look after Dodie mode. Make sure Dodie doesn’t crack up mode. He didn’t know yet that he didn’t have to do that anymore.
I would go through our parents’ old room to look for photographs and paperwork that they might have hidden from us. I’d do it with or without Vail, but I’d rather have him there.
Without letting myself overthink, I grasped the knob and pushed the door open. Then I stepped inside.
I didn’t know what I’d expected. More writing on the walls, maybe, or some other ghoulish display. What I found was a few pieces of furniture covered in dust cloths. Grayish sunlight coming through the windows. The silence of an uninhabited room.
I tugged the dust cloth off the bed, then another off the dresser. There were no dust cloths in any of the other rooms in the house when I got here. Vail had removed them, I realized. He’d gone through the house, preparing it for Violet and me to arrive. But he hadn’t come in here.
Behind me, I heard Vail follow me into the room.
The bed was stripped, and the top of the dresser was empty. When Dad left—he was the first—he’d taken all of his belongings. He hadn’t even pretended that he’d be back.
After he left, the rest of us had stayed for a while, and then we’d dispersed one by one.
At seventeen, Violet had gone to a waitressing job at a resort in Long Island, where she’d lost herself partying and met her future husband.
Vail had thrown himself into the competitive diving circuit, staying with teammates or a rotation of girlfriends when he wasn’t traveling.
At fourteen, I had stayed with Mom. We had moved to Long Island. She’d used her looks and her air of inherited wealth to make a brittle circle of friends. She’d done luncheons and taken up bridge like a rich woman, though privately she’d hoarded every penny. She’d started to drink in earnest.
At sixteen, I ran away to New York, where I waited tables and saved up money to pay for a modeling portfolio. Mom didn’t come after me to bring me home.
Mom had eventually died in her small apartment in Long Island from a fall down the building’s stairs, accelerating her process of drinking herself to death. She hadn’t pretended that she’d ever come back to this house, either.
Our parents’ clothes were gone, my mother’s jewelry, my father’s ties and watches. I thought of my childhood clothes, still in my dresser drawer in my room. I’d only taken two suitcases with me when we left. What did that say about me? I wondered.
I opened one empty dresser drawer after another, while Vail searched the nightstands. “Why didn’t we ever have photographs?” I asked, thinking about how I stole strangers’ photos to put in my room alongside pictures from magazines.
“I don’t know,” Vail said. “Part of me is happy about it. I don’t want to see what we looked like then, do you?”
“Probably not.” I ran my hand over the inside of a drawer, in case my mother had added an ingenious hidden lining.
She hadn’t. “The memories aren’t good ones, I admit.
But who gets married, has children—especially ones as good-looking as we are—then never takes a picture of them?
” I pulled open another drawer. “Honestly.”
Vail crouched to peer under the bed, folding his large frame into a surprisingly nimble squat. “If Mom had kept her papers and photos in the apartment she died in,” he mused aloud, “then Violet would have found them.”
“I don’t remember Mom being pregnant with Ben.
” I confessed it like a shameful secret.
I’d been afraid to speak it aloud before.
“I have not one memory of it. Nine months. I don’t remember doctors’ appointments or a big belly.
I don’t remember her telling us a little brother was coming.
I was only six, and I try not to think about it, but that’s strange, isn’t it?
It isn’t right. I should remember something, shouldn’t I? ”
“I don’t remember, either.” Vail stood, then ran a hand through his hair. “It makes no sense, Dodie. It’s my literal life. My childhood—years and years, day in and day out. I was there. And my memories are jumbled and strange, out of order. Nothing makes sense.”
“I don’t know whether my dreams were real or not.” It was easier to confess in this room, in which our past was so dead and empty, like a vacated husk. “I dream of cold water, but I swear I feel it. It’s so real. Ben was real. I don’t need a photo or a piece of paper. He was real.”
“Then who was he?” Vail’s voice nearly cracked, and I turned to look at him. I had never seen my brother, the most solid and implacable person I knew, look so uncertain and broken, so tired. “We have to face the possibility, Dodie.”
I licked my lip. “What possibility?”
“You know what possibility. That if Mom didn’t give birth to Ben, then he came from somewhere else. From someone else. That we don’t know who he really was. That he wasn’t ours.”
“Stop it, Vail. He was ours.”
“In the ways that mattered, yes. But biologically? Scientifically? I don’t remember Mom being pregnant, either. I remember bringing the crib from the attic—”
“While Mom held Ben in her arms,” I said. “I remember that, too. But why didn’t we prepare the crib before the baby was born? We’d have had months to prepare, but we didn’t set up his room until he was already here.”
Vail looked around the room, distraught. “Why don’t I remember? It’s driving me crazy. These are big things, important things. I was eight. Why don’t I remember Ben being brought home? I swear to God it’s this house, Dodie. It messes with your head.”
He was right. I’d never had trouble with my memory like I had when I lived here.
In New York, I didn’t wonder whether my dreams were real, or believe that I was drowning in bed, or lose entire memories of important events.
Outside this house, I might not remember everything, but my life wasn’t a half-finished quilt with patches missing, with worn-out holes.
All of it—the dreams, the lost time—had seemed normal to me as a child because it was all I knew.
I didn’t ask questions about my little brother appearing suddenly one day or the fact that we didn’t take pictures or send Ben to school.
Everyone older than me seemed fine with it, so I assumed it was the way the world worked, when I thought about it at all.
Vail opened the closet door and walked inside. “So what do we know?” he asked, his voice muffled in the closet. “Let’s start with that. We both remember setting up Ben’s room when he was a baby. Mom was holding Ben. Dad wasn’t there.”
“Dad was definitely not there.” I closed my eyes. “It was summer. School was about to start. I worried about the baby being too hot. I remember putting cool cloths against his skin.”
“I don’t remember that.” There was a shuffling sound in the closet. A cardboard box came flying out. It skidded across the floor, obviously empty. “Fuck it, there’s nothing in here. Not even a grocery list or an old receipt. It figures.”
“What do you remember?” I asked. “About when Ben was born. What else?”
My brother emerged from the closet, his cheeks flushed with frustration.
“Dad was away—I remember that clearly. I was angry about it. I remember waking up sitting in a chair next to Ben’s crib because I’d fallen asleep there, and Ben was hungry, so I gave him a bottle, and I was mad because neither Mom nor Dad was there to look after him. ”
Bottles of milk. I remembered those, too, which meant that Mom hadn’t breastfed Ben. Plenty of women didn’t breastfeed, but it was another nugget of information dug out of my memory. “So what happened, then?” I asked. “Mom just…stole a baby? Why would she do that?”
“Maybe someone gave him to her,” Vail said. “Maybe Ben was abandoned.”
I tried to picture our mother finding a swaddled baby on our doorstep, like something from a nursery rhyme, and bringing him into the house.
Mom had no sisters or brothers who could have given her their offspring.
“Did she go to a hospital and take a baby?” I asked, incredulous.
“Or an orphanage? Do orphanages exist? Did she adopt a baby without telling us? My head hurts.”
“And where was Dad in all of this?” Vail asked. “Did he know Mom had either stolen or been given a baby? Was he in on it? Was Ben his, maybe, and not hers?”
That was a possibility. Maybe Dad had impregnated a girlfriend, and Mom had taken the baby in. “She never said anything about it, even after he left,” I argued. “Mom hated Dad. You’d think she’d mention that she was raising his mistress’s offspring.”
Vail looked frustrated again. “This is the first time I’ve ever wished that my parents weren’t dead.”
“Same. I’d do a séance, except that I’m afraid one of them wouldn’t leave when it was done, and I’m happier with them on the other side of the veil.”
“It’s odd that Violet hasn’t seen either of them in this house yet.” He looked around. “This room doesn’t feel as haunted as the rest of the house does, either. Even in death, they abandoned us. What assholes.”
“They wouldn’t dare come back,” I said darkly. “Even after dying. They wouldn’t dare.”
Vail put his hands on his hips, some of his exhaustion evaporating in his indignation. His shoulders went back, and he looked like the conquering athlete, even in his ancient jeans and flannel shirt. “Dodie, this is a dead end. I’d trash the room, but they didn’t leave anything to trash.”
I turned for the door. “Whatever. I’m done with them. Do you want to watch cartoons now?”
He followed me into the hall and closed the door behind him. “I have a better idea.”
“Oh?” The old habit of following my big brother’s bad ideas kicked in. “Please tell me it involves getting out of this house.”
He passed me and paused at the top of the stairs. “It does.”
“Then don’t keep me in the dark, stupid. Tell me.”
Vail pulled a key from the back pocket of his jeans and held it up, pausing for dramatic effect.
I lifted an eyebrow, waiting.
“I found this under a planter on the Thornhills’ porch,” he said. “They’re not home, remember?”
Oh. I smiled. This was my idea of fun, and he knew it. “Hell, yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”