Chapter Three
Three
I know she’s coming before the knock on the door.
In a house this old, noise seeps through every plaster-covered crack in the walls, under every uneven gap beneath the doors. It gives the place a living quality. It also makes sneaking anywhere impossible.
First, there are the squeaky stairs, each louder than the last. The shrill whine of the ancient flooring as someone steps onto it or the groan of pipes in the walls if they continue up to the third level.
But they don’t continue.
Seconds later, the knock.
I’ve been expecting it since I crept upstairs after we came home from the park. The fact I made it all the way up here without badgering is a miracle in itself. And I don’t believe in those.
“Come in,” I say, hoping my face resembles something impassive. Emotionally stable. I’ve gotten pretty good at the face in the months since Harper died. Sympathy runs dry, and grief makes people squirm. Even my family must be sick of me by now.
The door groans open and my mother walks in, eyes flitting to the instruments in the corner of the room before settling on me in the bed. It takes a second to hide her disappointment, but she’s had practice.
At least when I holed up in my room for hours before, it was for a reason. Never intentionally, I’d get lost chasing some melody, and four hours later, Mom would force some microwaved meal into my hands.
Tonight, the digital piano’s cord is still wound up from the move, and I am curled up in bed with my laptop and a sitcom I’m only half watching.
Five weeks since we left behind my childhood home near Denver.
Since Mom promised that the change of scenery would change everything.
I’d hoped going along with the move would extricate my mom’s talons from my back.
I can’t exactly blame her for lodging them there, but this move was supposed to be a fresh start for all of us.
Six months ago, right before the accident, my uncle took off with a bartender and left my aunt with a mortgage and the bookstore.
Fresh off our own tragedy—technically mine, but we’ve always been a sharing family—Mom dragged us here the moment my siblings and I finished the school year.
To help with the store. To hide from the things, the people, we’ve lost.
Grief has become an honorary Griffin. He sets the table for himself.
“Hey,” Mom says. She’s wearing her favorite robe, the one Jasper picked out for her last Christmas; it’s this horrid bluish green, but she swears it’s her favorite color.
She chews on her bottom lip, pausing before she speaks like she’s afraid to ask a question she already knows the answer to.
“We’re about to start a movie. Feel like joining? ”
“I’m good,” I say, only feeling a little guilty about it. I lift the laptop off my lap and set it back down. “Halfway through an episode.”
“You sure? Even Margot agreed.” Getting Margot to do anything is a feat, and it’s clearly meant to sweeten the pot.
“I’m okay.”
Mom tucks her hair behind her ears, and it instantly falls back into her eyes. “It’s two hours, and then you can come back up to your cave.” She’s trying to be lighthearted, but it borders too close to condescension.
“Maybe tomorrow.” The assurance falls flat. We both know it’s a lie, but where it would normally be enough to get her out of my room, tonight it lights a rare fire in her.
Mom steps farther into the room, leaning into the old chest of drawers near the door. Like the house itself, most of the furniture has been around since the beginning of time, and all of it creaks or groans or grunts.
“Joanna…” she begins, again stepping closer. The anxiety that lives under my skin slips through my pores, skittering up and down my arms as she comes to sit on the edge of the bed. I don’t move, don’t close the laptop, don’t do anything to indicate that she’s welcome.
It’s harsh. I’ve just stopped caring. It’s easier this way. Easier to keep me and everything I’ve lost where it can’t infect everyone else. The move is supposed to be a fresh start, and shoving my grief into my family’s faces negates it.
My family is no stranger to loss. After my dad left us to tour with his band almost a decade ago, it took us years to regain our footing. I might have slipped back down, but it doesn’t mean they need to.
“Please don’t,” I say, trying to kill the lecture I can sense brimming. I sound like a bratty teenager, but it’s one of only a few successful evasive maneuvers I have.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.” My mom tries her hand at a supportive smile, but it’s too plastic to be comforting.
“Yeah, I do,” I say. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. And I’m really not in the mood to hear it.”
She’s given a dozen variations of the speech. That it’s not healthy for me to hole up in my room all the time, that I have to come out at some point. That I can’t hide forever.
Her lips part, and it’s clear she’s trying to decide whether to argue or humor me.
It’s almost a disappointment when she gives in. She usually gives in.
I think part of me, the me from before the accident, before Harper died, wishes Mom would fight harder. Wishes she didn’t look at me and see a lost cause. Wishes I didn’t see myself the same.
“I worry about you. It’s been six months. At some point—”
“I said no,” I say, as cold as I can, and my mom doesn’t hide her flinch.
She looks at me for a long moment. The bruises and cuts on my face faded months ago, and even the lacerations up and down my arms have turned to shiny pink scars, but I swear my mom still sees the version of me hauled to the hospital in the ambulance the day my car went off the road.
Two ambulances: one with sirens, the other without.
Whatever internal war she’s waging ends the way it usually does, with a sigh of frustration. My mom stands, makes her way to the door, and pauses in the doorway. She meets my eyes over her shoulders, and says, “People can’t be islands, Joanna.”
I don’t argue with her. They can. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve been pulling away from land since that icy road.
And I’ve survived.
So I say, “I know,” and hope it’s enough to get her out.
“Joanna?”
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t seen any spoons lying around, have you? There are only five in the drawer, but we should have at least a dozen. I swear, every week we’re missing another.”
“Spoons?” I frown. “No. You sure Jasper’s not collecting them or something?”
“He swears he isn’t.”
“Do we buy it?”
A smile passes over her face, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Well, if you happen to find them…”
I nod.
Mom hesitates another moment, and then she’s gone.
The door shuts behind her with a soft snick. The old wiring flickers the lights, and I swear the room gets a little colder. Like the house is disappointed in me, too.
The silence hangs heavier than it did before, and a shiver rushes down my arms. Then I hear a whisper in my ear, so low I could mistake it for the floorboards creaking.
Find me.
It’s feminine and too young to be my mom or aunt.
I lean over the edge of the bed. My gaze lands on the small rectangular vent on the floor in the corner.
In such an old house, everything makes noise, and every noise carries.
It isn’t the first time I’ve caught snatches of words I probably wasn’t meant to hear.
A handful of dust bunnies caught on the vent latch wiggle with the flow of air. Relief pulses through me, and I curse myself.
“Leave me alone, Margot,” I call down into the vent.
My aunt, cousin, and siblings are convinced the house is chock-full of paranormal activity, but I’ve never been a believer. I can’t be. Because if there are spirits of the lost floating around, I would have found Harper by now. But I haven’t.
She’s just gone.