Chapter 24 #2
I choked out a laugh that was supposed to be disbelieving, but when I thought about it, I didn’t disbelieve it at all.
My siblings would think nothing of forging whatever paperwork they needed, by any means necessary.
It would be a top-shelf forgery, too. Sometimes it was useful to have next to no morals.
But I hadn’t called them. For a while, when I realized what was really happening, I’d believed I belonged there, in the hospital.
I’d believed I shouldn’t be free. It had even been tempting to be relieved at having no choices anymore, at not having to pretend to be normal.
It had taken time for anger to replace the shame and despair.
“I’ll call you next time it happens, then,” I said.
“See that you do,” Dodie chided me. “But let’s get back to this problem. Maybe Dad was Ben’s father. Who was his mother?”
“Someone local?” Vail asked.
“Maybe,” I said, “but Dad traveled a lot.” Business was always the explanation we were given.
He’s away on business. Dad had no business we could discern aside from marrying Mom’s money and making all of us miserable, but children don’t question their parents.
When you’re a child, no one wants to know what you’re wondering about.
You shut your mouth and wonder in silence, because you don’t know anything yet and no one wants to hear it.
I felt a quick, hot burst of angry pride that my own daughter was a mouthy bitch.
“So she could be anyone, from anywhere,” Vail said, deadpan. “That narrows it down.”
“Gus Pine is looking into it,” I said. “If someone’s baby was stolen, they would have reported it to the police. It’s a start.”
“If she was local, there would have been gossip,” Dodie added.
“A single woman in the sixties, having a baby alone. Unless she was married.” She sighed and rubbed her fingertips on her forehead.
“Ugh, this is hard. I detest thinking. I talked to the neighbors, but they haven’t lived there long and didn’t know a thing. ”
“What neighbors?” I asked.
“The Chathams, on the other side from the Thornhills,” Dodie said.
“I wandered over there and knocked on their door to say hello. I gave them my most charming version of myself. There are two parents in their thirties and a daughter of around nine or ten. The daughter has an unflattering short haircut and is named Terri. The mother is a receptionist in a dentist’s office and the father is a lawyer.
They moved here for his job. They’ve been in town for eight months.
They don’t know where the Thornhills went.
They weren’t very friendly. They seemed a little spooked. ”
“If you’re not spooked in our neighborhood,” Vail said, “then there’s something wrong with you.”
We contemplated that for a moment. Maybe the neighbors had seen a little boy at our house, or lights, or something else.
Maybe they knew the reason the Thornhills had left so quickly.
Or maybe they had just looked around at our dead street and our weird town.
Maybe they had opened a Fell newspaper, read about hanged priests and poltergeists and Cathy Caldwell, and wondered what they had done.
“What did you tell them about us?” Vail asked Dodie.
“That we grew up in this house and we’ve come back to clean out our parents’ things,” Dodie replied. “I told them we’re going to decide what to do with the house, whether to sell it or not.”
“That sounds so normal,” I said. “Maybe we should do that.”
Vail’s voice was icy. “We’re not selling that house.”
I nodded. Ben was in the house somewhere, so the house was ours forever.
“But the clearing-out part. We don’t have to sell, but do we have to keep our parents’ bed?
Would it kill us to get rid of the ugly wallpaper or our childhood furniture?
I know we’re all psychologically damaged, but when I’m in that house, I can see just how damaged.
Maybe we could throw out some furniture and lessen the damage a little. ”
“Maybe,” Vail said, “but what about the attic?”
Dodie looked at me, her eyes soft for once. “Go into the attic, Violet. Please. Go see for yourself.”
I felt the muscles in my jaw tighten harder, felt my teeth try to grind.
I’d given myself the tasks so far that had taken me out of the house.
I could have sent Vail to the hospital to look for records.
But deep down, even though I had come all this way to be in the house, all I wanted was to leave.
“I’ve been busy,” I snapped.
“So have we,” Vail shot back calmly, not buying it for a second. “Go into the attic, Violet. See it for yourself.”
“You have to,” Dodie said.
I bit my lips together, fighting it. It was too hard.
I had come all this way to Fell—had given up my job, left Lisette, left everything—and now that I was here, I couldn’t face Ben.
I couldn’t face my failure. I wasn’t soft like Dodie, and I wasn’t hard like Vail.
I was just soft enough to feel gutted, just hard enough to be a bad big sister and a bad mother.
I was the big sister, the mother, the one who was supposed to know the answers, the one who was supposed to be soft and hard at the right times.
Instead of being competent, I walked a tightrope I had fallen off so many times that I was irreparably broken. I was cracked in half.
Still, I was here now. I was the big sister, the mother. I had no parents. There was no one to handle this for me. There never had been, and there never would be.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”