Chapter 40
Vail
I went to bed in my clothes. Instinct, probably, because something must be up. Anne Whitten wasn’t going to stay this quiet.
Since I didn’t expect to sleep, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, my hands laced behind my head.
Did I think about Charlotte? Maybe a little.
The kiss she’d given me had faded to the periphery, but I thought about her story of the little girl and the mailman.
I understood now why she’d told that story.
Mostly, I hoped that Charlotte had gotten out of town all right, and that she’d kept driving until she was as far away as she could get.
There was a soft murmur of voices from Violet’s room, and then silence.
—
When I woke, I was curled on my side and a warm body was climbing into bed with me, sweet-smelling and achingly familiar. I curled around my little brother and gathered him close, digging my nose into his warm skin at the collar of his pajamas.
“Ben,” I said.
He squirmed to get comfortable. I heard him breathing, felt the rise and fall of it.
“It’s okay, Vail,” he said.
He’d said this because I was crying, my tears soaking soundlessly into the cotton of his pajamas.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” His voice was truly Ben’s. His palm patted the back of my hand, and I knew that he was truly my little brother, even though that wasn’t possible, even though Ben hadn’t really been Ben. Or maybe he had. It didn’t fucking matter.
“I failed you,” I choked out.
“I was hiding,” he said. “I came back for you, but I had to leave, so I’m sorry, too. I didn’t want to go, but I can’t stay.”
“Please,” I begged him. “Please stay. I’ll do anything. Please.”
There was no reply, and I sobbed into his neck. Because we both knew the answer.
How was his skin so warm? Was I crazy? His hair tickled my face.
He breathed evenly, in and out, and I counted each breath like a prayer.
It didn’t matter who he was, who I was, where we were, or what year it was.
It didn’t matter where we had been or where we were going.
It only mattered that he was my brother.
I held him tight for as long as I could.
When he was gone again, it felt like my chest had ripped open, like my guts were spilled on the floor. I lay exhausted, still smelling his scent. And then a familiar white light came on above me, glaring down over the bed.
“Wake up,” a voice said.
I’d researched sleep paralysis, and I knew what it was supposed to feel like. I tried to flex my hand on the blanket, but nothing happened. Sleep paralysis, but I wasn’t asleep at all.
“Wake up,” the voice said again. A woman’s voice in a harsh whisper, excited. The same voice that had spoken those words to me before I hit the thing with a vase.
Somehow, I moved. I was in a dream state, myself but not myself. I wasn’t moving my own body, onto my back to look up, and when I spoke, it wasn’t words that I planned to speak.
“Annie?” I said. “What is it?”
The figure above me wasn’t an alien. The light wasn’t light from a UFO.
It was a woman of about twenty, her hair pulled back and her face a pale moon.
I had the feeling that I had heard her screaming only a few hours ago, heard her walking toward me down the hall, but right now she was just a woman.
In her hand she held a lamp with a glass cylinder, and the light it gave off was weak and yellow, not blinding white light at all.
“Wake up,” she said again. “And don’t call me Annie.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll remember next time.”
“Fine. Now get up. I want to show you something.”
My hand came up and rubbed my eyes. I was small, sleepy. Confused at being awoken from my dreams. “Something in the middle of the night? What is it?”
“You’ll like it, I promise,” Anne said.
I hesitated. I wanted to make Annie happy, but something felt like it might be wrong. “We’ll get in trouble,” I hedged.
“We won’t if you sneak out quietly like I tell you to.”
“But why?”
She went rigid, and I knew she was getting angry. My throat went dry. She was always so angry with me. I was about to tell her I’d do anything she wanted when she spoke.
“Do you remember the place where they’re building a cellar?”
I nodded. They had tried to build a cellar for extra storage, but the hole they dug in the ground kept filling with water. They couldn’t keep it dry, so they gave up. I’d been strictly forbidden from exploring the still-open hole, because it was dangerous.
“I remember,” I said.
“Well, there’s ducks living in it,” Anne said.
I started to get excited, forgetting my fear, forgetting the rule that I wasn’t supposed to go to the cellar hole. “Ducks?”
“A whole family,” Anne said. “Including babies.”
“Baby ducks?” This was the most exciting thing I could have imagined. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that baby ducks were born in spring, not in autumn, like now. But I ignored it. Maybe ducks could be born in September, too.
The only way to know for sure was to see for myself.
I sat up. “Can we go now?”
“Yes, we can,” Annie said, “but you must be quiet. There’s no time to change. The ducks might be gone by the time we get there. You could miss your chance to see them.”
“I’ll be quick,” I promised. “And quiet, too. Should I put on shoes?”
“It isn’t far,” my sister said, which meant that she didn’t want me to wear shoes, so I didn’t. I slid out of bed and stood in my bare feet. “I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s go.”
—
When I landed on my knees on the floor, I was no longer crying. Cold moonlight shone through the window. Someone screamed down the hall, something crashed, and my own scream was already coming, bursting from my chest. The word that came out of me was No.