Chapter 7
7
Inside, I start to thaw and my skin begins to sting and burn. Somehow it’s always worse than the cold, those first few moments out of it. In my thick wool socks, my footsteps are all but silent. I’m nearly to the kitchen doorway when the thread of conversation within snaps into focus.
“What do you think?” Louise is asking. I still instinctively, even my breath going quiet.
“She seems sweet.” Alexis.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Rose replies, and my heart sinks.
Louise, tone practical: “What do you think he’s told her?”
“Nothing,” Rose says as my thoughts tilt wildly in confusion. “He wouldn’t tell her anything.”
A skeptical noise from Louise. “Alexis?”
The moment of silence that follows is suffused with reluctance. “I don’t think—” Alexis begins, and then down the hall a door shuts. The conversation in the kitchen cuts off cleanly.
“We can talk about this later,” Louise declares. “Alexis, give your mother the nutmeg if you’re just going to stand there.”
Alexis steps around the counter and into view. She looks toward me, startled—and screams.
Louise and Rose move rapidly to see what Alexis is staring at. “Good Lord,” Louise says, and Rose contributes a less restrained “Jesus Christ.” I look down at my hands, gore-scabbed, blood in the creases. Despite standing back from the slop of guts I must have gotten splashed, because the soft cream of my cabled sweater is liberally spattered with it. Rose crosses to me and puts a thumb to my cheek; it comes away bloody.
“Shit. Sorry, I was outside and Magnus—” I begin.
“Is he hurt?” Alarm in Alexis’s voice.
“She means he’s out there butchering a deer,” Louise says, a hint of contempt running like a seam of tar through her voice.
“I’ll go get cleaned up,” I say quickly. I must look like I stepped off the set of a horror movie.
“Not here,” Louise says. “You’ll need more than a quick washup in the sink. Go back to your cabin. Leave the clothes on the doorstep, I’ll have Irina collect them. We might be able to salvage them.”
I mutter something—I’m not even sure what—and flee. Behind me I hear Alexis again— Holy shit —and the scrabble of conversation pitched too low for me to make out.
My skin feels like it’s on fire as I make my way back around the pond. The blood on my sweater is like a scarlet flag, and I swear even out here in the woods I can feel eyes on me.
When I reach the cabin, I strip off my sweater and run cold water over the stains in the kitchen sink before they can dry. The water runs red, then pink, slipping down the drain.
I know how to get blood out of clothes.
Blood on my shirt, when I was seven and Beth screamed at Joseph to control me and so he took off his belt the way his father had always done, the first and only time because as he struck out, his grip slipped and the buckle snapped free, caught my back. Skin splitting, me shrieking, Joseph gathering me to him with tears in his eyes, promising never again, and I thought his regret was the same as love.
Blood in my underwear, when I was eleven and terrified and no one had told me enough to know I wasn’t dying, but I was too afraid to go to Beth, and I didn’t figure it out until one of the neighbors’ daughters saw the spreading stain on my skirt and wordlessly handed me a tampon, then laughed when I asked what it was for. Her mother told Beth. Beth told Joseph. It’s early, isn’t it? he asked.
I got mine at fourteen , she said.
She’s developed for her age. We should keep an eye on that.
Blood soaking through my skirt, too much of it, not stopping, and my hands covered with it and Beth looking on in horror.
Blood everywhere. On my hands. On my arms. Droplets and scattered lines, an artwork in dull crimson across my chest, and the lights of the police cruiser reflecting off wet asphalt.
I’ve never minded blood. It’s a trail to follow, back through my memories. I always feel as if there’s something else there, a final step lost in the gloom—before the Scotts, before any of it. Blood holds a promise that someday I might remember what it is.
I scrub my hands in hot water in the bathroom sink. Scrub my face, too, which is freckled with tiny drops of carmine. I dress again. It’s no loss, the sweater. There are so many more.
The Scotts would extract every ounce of value they could get from their possessions. They rarely threw things away—not if it had some kind of use, not if they might find one for it in the future. The Daltons can have whatever they want. A thing needs to be very valuable indeed to bother with it. The smallest flaw, and they’ll simply get rid of it.
I dress again, checking every inch of my skin for stray spots of blood. It’s only when I’ve pulled a fresh sweater over my head that I see the small shape on the windowsill, framed by the crack between the curtains.
A box the size of my palm, gift-wrapped in glossy green paper and bound with red ribbon, sits tucked against the other side of the window.
I peer outside. The woods are quiet. No sign of my visitor.
I unlatch the window and open it cautiously so that the box doesn’t get knocked into the snow. It falls inward instead, toppling into my waiting hand. It’s light, seemingly empty. The tag taped to it bears a single word in a typewriter font. DORA .
My mouth is dry as paper, my blood cold. No one has called me that in years.
I pull the end of the ribbon. It comes undone and drops to the floor. The box is one of those wrapped top and bottom, so all I have to do is lift the lid.
The only thing inside is a slip of paper. Four words, and nothing more.
You shouldn’t have come.