Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The root split in two beneath my hand trowel. Sweat trickled down my neck, between my breasts, and settled in the band of my sports bra like an anxious memory. My knees were the only cool part of my body, and only because of the damp, fluffed dirt I kneeled in.
I despised tilling dirt, especially by hand.
I really did. There was something about the idea of little beings—bugs and worms, specifically—crawling through the dirt just beneath my fingertips, slowly decreasing the distance between my body and theirs, that made my hair lift at my nape.
It was one thing to rip open a bag of potting soil; another beast entirely to dig my fingers into the ground where maggots and beetles lived.
You’ll be here one day, it whispered.
The tornado of whispers wouldn’t shut up.
Images continued to flit before me. My mom, tossing another liquor bottle into a heap in the corner of the apartment.
My father, asking why I smelled the way I did.
Ivan, his nose an inch from mine, his brows slammed over his eyes as he asked, “How embarrassing can you be, Lan. Don’t embarrass me like that again. ”
Three words had circled like vultures when I’d found that closet.
Touched the door. A sick feeling coiled in at the base of my throat.
I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought of it before—but if memories replayed in that room, they’d come from somewhere.
I’d seen the attic, then, as what I assumed it used to be. What if those words were from him?
Don’t embarrass me, Lan.
Over and over they tumbled, morphing into a slew of snide remarks, ranging from Ivan’s voice to my mother’s, then to everything my father didn’t say.
What will other people think?
I don’t need you.
This is why everyone leaves you.
Mom’s voice hissed in my ear. Your father left me because of you, Landry.
If you didn’t exist he might still be here, Landry.
Tears clouded my vision. My hacks into the soil became restless, desperate, urgent. Last night, I felt it: the slow unraveling of my resolve. A realization that I didn’t want to accept.
Even now, the fettuccini noodles sat like curdled milk in my gut. Dirt flew like tiny needles, peppering my skin.
I grunted. The roots were chopped at the ends, but the stupid weed still stood tall, and suddenly I hated it, I hated that weed.
So I grabbed it by the neck and I ripped it from the earth.
Part of the roots held strong. I threw it into the bushes beside the shed, then pushed my hands into the flower bed, grasped for every last tendril of root, and ripped it some more. I threw that away, too.
What was wrong with me?
I curled over the earth. I dug my gloved hands into it, squeezed it until the dirt pushed out around my fingers.
The first sob hurt. Worse than last night. For the briefest of moments, I wondered if Mom was right. Would things have been different if I wasn’t here? Better? Easier?
I thought of Hadrian. They were sick, my thoughts. How terrible was I, to consider someone else’s lack of living family a form of luck? Because he was lucky.
No, not quite a sickness. But a rancid, evil form of jealousy. I was jealous of Hadrian. The way he had stood there while his memory played before him, how he’d been able to tell me to leave the boy behind—to leave him. I never would have asked that.
Wasn’t that what I’d been doing all this time? Even in middle school and high school, as I’d attempted to beat my way into adulthood, hadn’t I begged the universe for help? I would have asked him to stay. Had I been him, I would have begged him to save myself as a child.
Worse than that, I was jealous of everything he’d gained from his father. A home. A life alone. At one point, he had no family, no children, no spouse. No one. Everything I’d ever wanted.
It must have been easier to be Hadrian—even to be a creature, locked away in that closet.
Even forced to live memories over and over again.
At least he knew they weren’t real. And yet I awoke every day and there was always a little splinter in the back of my mind, reminding me of everything I hadn’t done.
That I couldn’t do, couldn’t say. My memories followed me. And reality never escaped me.
Shouldn’t yesterday have been example enough? I couldn’t even talk to Emma, and she and Sayer were the closest people in my life, and I couldn’t handle a simple conversation.
Pathetic.
I grabbed the trowel, fisted it like a knife, and stabbed the fluffed dirt bed.
“I hate you,” I choked. I stabbed over and over and over. “I hate you I hate you I hate you.”
That was it—that was the problem. It wasn’t that I hated people, so much that I hated myself. I hated what I’d done to myself.
I hated what I’d let happen to me. I hated that I’d never said anything. That I physically couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I chucked the trowel against the shed with wet cheeks. It bounced off with a clang and plunked right into the grass.
Days began to bleed together. A Tuesday held no specialty to a Friday. The only way I kept track was by the TV shows I watched at night before midnight came.
Sometimes the closet opened, and other times it didn’t. Thankfully, the next time it did, the yellow eyes came with it. Paint prices were my topic of choice that night.
Each night he visited, I realized I liked talking to him more than I did keeping my thoughts to myself.
“He asked me if my husband was looking for something,” I complained, eyes closed, talking with one hand.
The other hung limp over the side of the bed.
The TV whispered, lower than it ever had, because I was worried Hadrian wouldn’t be able to hear me talking over it.
“Couldn’t he see that I was alone? Not every woman has to be married to be in a freaking hardware store. ”
Another evening, when Hadrian hadn’t shown yet, I pulled Irene’s copies out of the nightstand.
Maybe there was something I was missing. I started searching key words again, until I landed on the library’s contact page. I chewed on the inside of my cheek, then glanced to the closet.
Would he mind if I asked Irene if she knew anything? Surely he wouldn’t.
But what if she said no? What if she’d not wanted to help Aunt Cadence any more than she had? What if the idea of the house being haunted had scared her away?
I highlighted her email, copied it, and opened a draft before I had the chance to think twice. This wasn’t about pride or fear of being rejected anymore. This needed to be logical, and the only logical thing to do was at least ask Irene if she knew something.
I kept the email concise, out of fear that I’d scare her away:
Hi Irene,
I hope this email finds you well. I came in a while ago asking about my aunt’s house, Harthwait, and there have been a few developments while I’ve been here.
Do these look familiar to you, by any chance?
I happened to find a Reddit post that sounded similar to the issue I’m having, that I believe you wrote.
Please let me know if you’d like to talk—if not, I understand.
I double-checked that I’d typed my phone number correctly and attached the photos of the doorframe before hitting send.
After that, I flopped back on my bed and glared at the ceiling.
“Hadrian.”
A scratching sound came from under the bed. It should have been concerning that I didn’t jump, only held completely still, until a familiar voice said, “Yes, dearest?”
I rolled over onto my side. One clawed hand edged out from under the frame. “Did you ever go to college?”
A dark laugh. “To be frank, I didn’t need to.”
The conversation started with my interest in history during college, then somehow snowballed into my lack of dating since then.
“I just never felt the need for it,” I told the nightstand. It felt good to get it off my chest.
He chuckled.
“Maybe at first I thought it was me,” I muttered. I ran a finger along the edge of the nightstand. Then the corner of the paper. I turned Hadrian’s picture to me. “Then, as I got older, the idea of dating felt so tiresome. Why put that much effort into something that would only fail?”
“Not all relationships fail.”
“I mean, like—when you’re changing so much as a person. Your twenties are so pivotal.”
I didn’t realize that he’d crawled from under the bed and perched against the dresser, as he’d done before.
The TV continued its murmur. Maybe it was the low light, but I could have sworn his skin wasn’t as gray as before.
The tips of his ears seemed rounder, shorter, but those eyes—they were still as bright as they’d always been.
Almost as if he were a bit more human tonight.
“.… buy within the next thirty minutes and receive a free …”
For the first time, I reached for the remote and turned the TV off. But he felt too far away.
I slipped from under the sheets, situated my sweatshirt, and took a seat on the floor at the foot of the bed directly across from him.
“There is truth in finding people for a season in life. Sometimes they are building blocks. Others, they’re a foundation for you.”
“You speak like you’ve had that before,” I said, content.
“Not particularly. I have seen it, myself, but never experienced it.”
I tucked my chin into my palm, thoughtful. “What do you mean?”
“I was never in a place to give someone all of myself, Landry. I took. I did a lot of—taking, before.”
The air grew charged then. Unsaid questions formed on my tongue, but the churning of his eyes made me think twice. Taking could mean a number of things. My brow furrowed.
I said, “I wish I’d done that. Taken instead of given so much.”
“No, you don’t. Not truly.”
I ran my hands over my knees, down my shins, and onto the rug. I shrugged.