Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
The west wing on the third floor of the Blackridge community hospital is probably fuller than it has ever been.
In addition to the swarm of nurses and doctors, there are half a dozen police officers stationed along the halls, holding back the wave of reporters that have descended on the town in the last twelve hours.
I haven’t dared to check the internet, but according to Margot, every news station is covering the story.
I was unconscious when we arrived at the hospital last night and woke to the bright sun in my hospital room this morning.
Ample time for news outlets to catch wind.
A decades-long string of lost kids attributed to a mad scientist who tried to play God.
Over a dozen kids sacrificed for one. Already, it’s a media circus, and it will only get worse when Holden goes to trial.
As horrible as it sounds, I’m glad I’m not the only one in a hospital bed.
Jasper’s presence in the room next door means my parents’ and Paige’s feverish energy is split.
They’ve been fluttering back and forth in full mother-hen fashion, but right now, with Jasper under the doctor’s thumb, my room is blissfully quiet.
There’s only Margot, who hasn’t left my side since we got here.
She’s curled up in the chair beside my bed.
I thought the whole thing was a bit excessive, but my doctor says until they know exactly what I was drugged with, they can’t release me.
But I’m better off than anyone else, though it doesn’t look it.
My right arm is in a cast again and will be for the next few months.
I have a bruised windpipe, leaving me with a croaking voice and deep bruises like a noose around my throat.
A split lip and more bruises from my fall down the stairs.
I’ll likely be discharged before the day is over, but Jasper is being held for observation at least another day.
It feels like the Griffin family has moved again, this time into a hospital.
I have a few minutes of peace when Margot reluctantly heads down to the cafeteria for caffeine; not coffee, because she swears it tastes like poison and is pretty sure everyone else thinks so, too, and is lying about it. I’m not allowed a cup despite pleading to my nurses.
The next time the door opens, it isn’t Margot who comes in but my dad.
He’s been in town for days, yet I feel like I’m finally seeing him not as the young dad in over his head who took off, but as the man he is now.
A face with more lines than I remember, dark bags under his eyes, looser skin.
His once dark hair is more salt-and-pepper now.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says. He drops into Margot’s chair. “How you holding up?”
I swallow dryly and instantly regret it. The throbbing pulse in my throat lingers a few moments before I try to speak.
“I’m okay.”
His lips pull thin. To my relief, he doesn’t call my bluff.
“Look, I wanted to say…”
I open my mouth to protest, but before I can, Dad says, “I know, I know, you’re not in the mood for it, but I need you to know something.”
I lick my lips. Wait.
Dad straightens in his chair, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry, Jo. Sorry for running, and running so far and keeping it up for so long. I know I left a lot of pain behind me when I took off, but I need you to understand it had nothing to do with you. At least, not in the way you probably think.”
“Wasn’t it?” I ask. “You didn’t want to be a dad.”
“Is that what you think?”
I say nothing.
He lets out a sad laugh. “I guess that’s on me.
I wasn’t here to tell you otherwise. But I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to be your dad.
I left because I didn’t know how. And I figured I’d do less damage from far away.
I was immature, and I made all the wrong choices, and by the time I realized that, you and your mom and Margot and Jasper had your own lives. So I stayed away.”
I can’t bring myself to speak. I don’t have the energy for placation.
“I messed up, kid. Maybe if I’d stuck around, none of this would have happened.
Maybe Blackridge would still be a footnote.
” He shakes his head. “But would-bes don’t matter.
And I’m not running anymore. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you kids.
And it starts now.” He smiles, and there’s something shy about it.
I can see the person he used to be, the boy who was in too deep before he realized where he was, who ran as fast as he could.
“I have a job interview next week. Evergreen High is looking for a music teacher.”
“Evergreen? But that’s—”
“Less than a half hour from here,” he says.
“You…you—” I stop, unsure where I’m going. Of all the things I expected him to say, this isn’t it.
“I’m staying,” he says.
My lips part, and I zip them back shut. Tears prick the backs of my eyes.
Dad reaches out, takes my hand, squeezes it.
I’m saved from fully dissolving into tears by Margot’s return.
She comes back with a giant cup of soda in her hands, sipping as she steps back into the room.
She’s still in her pajamas, her hair is a tangled mess, and the bags under her eyes are as pronounced as my own. But she grins when she sees me.
Dad pushes to his feet. “I’m going to check in with your mom and Paige,” he says, squeezing Margot’s shoulder as he slips past us and out into the hall.
Margot reclaims her chair. “You heard, I’m guessing.”
I nod.
“This whole thing really freaked him out.” Margot drops her gaze. “It freaked us all out.”
I reach out to take her hand. I have to use my nondominant one, since the cast on my right leaves my arm in an awkward angle.
She gives me a reassuring smile.
I frown at her. “Is that my…”
She looks down at her hoodie—my hoodie, actually—and arches her brows.
“How long did you wait after I was gone to raid my closet?” I press. “Am I going to get home and find you’ve taken over my room?”
She shrugs. “I mean, you weren’t wearing it. And if you did die, I couldn’t let your clothes go to waste.” Her tone is light, but the set of her jaw gives her away. “As for the room, I’d have given it a proper month. I’m not a monster.”
“Just an asshole,” I say, entirely unconvincingly.
Margot grins. She opens her mouth to speak, but her eyes snap to the television hanging on the wall across the room. Her lips pull into a thin line. At my questioning look, she jerks a chin toward the TV. She reaches for the remote as I twist to get a look.
“—believed to be responsible for the disappearance of at least thirteen children and teenagers from Blackridge and the surrounding areas over the past two decades. Holden is currently being held without bail. Court proceedings will—”
I snatch the remote out of her hands and kill the power. The TV can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.
“They’re saying that whatever he was doing down there was, like, a continuation of this big project he was involved in. I guess they were taking healthy cells or something from mice and transplanting them into sick ones. Almost like transfusions but not.”
“Someone’s done a deep dive in the last twelve hours,” I say.
“Not much else to do. Mom and Dad are acting like…well, like our parents, which is always weird to see them do together. Paige is ready for a fight, and you and Jasper have been surrounded by nurses, so I’ve been googling. A lot.”
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“Have you?” she counters. Before either of us can admit that no, obviously not, that Jasper is the only Griffin who has shut their eyes in the last twelve hours, she continues, “Anyway, apparently Holden’s project got shut down when they moved on to human trials. A few people died.”
“So he found new subjects,” I say, and my tongue is thick and dry.
“I still can’t believe it was him. Hiding under everybody’s noses. I mean, he was part of the searches. Telling Paige and Mom and Dad that we’d find you, that we’d find Jasper. And the whole time, he had you both locked up in his goddamn torture chamber.”
I picture him reassuring my family, swinging a flashlight around the dark forest as if he didn’t know exactly where to look.
Holden claimed to not be a monster but a desperate father.
And maybe, once upon a time, that’s all he was.
But the moment he took that first kid, he lost all claim to any benevolent goals.
Good intentions crumble under so many bodies.
“They’re still looking for…” Margot stops, her mouth twisting. “For remains. So far, they’ve got a few personal items, like a phone and some stuff that didn’t burn, but no bodies. And no one knows where Cecily is.”
“They won’t find any bodies,” I say, and I know it to be true. Someone like Holden doesn’t get away with such horror for so long without knowing how to cover his tracks.
“They have to be somewhere.”
“He runs a veterinary clinic, Margot. You think he doesn’t have a cremation chamber?” My stomach twists and lurches even as I say it, and Margot’s vaguely green look means she knows it’s true.
Margot swallows visibly. “God, I didn’t even think about that.” She shakes her head.
I lean back into the stiff pillows propped behind me. My hand drifts up to my neck, dotted with bruises in the shape of large, wide hands. Holden’s hands. My throat is less swollen than last night, but I refused the pain meds offered by the nurses, so it throbs.
I think I’ll be hesitant to put any medication in my body for a while. Won’t be able to trust what’s in the vial or pill bottle.
“You almost died on me again,” Margot says. “I really need you to stop doing that.”
“Because it was totally a choice,” I say.
Margot stiffens. “You were on your own. You didn’t ask me to come with you. I could have helped. Maybe I could have—”
“This isn’t on you,” I say. “And it’s not like I knew what would happen when I got out of bed and followed a hallucination into the woods.”
Except it wasn’t a hallucination. Like it wasn’t a hallucination that led Margot into the creek.
It was Ingrid. Screaming at the top of her lungs, trying to get someone’s attention.
I can’t say she went about it in the best way, but it worked.
She saved all of us. And I was far too late to save her.
Margot swipes a tear off her cheek as if she’s angry at it for falling. “You scared the hell out of me, Jo. When I woke up and realized you were gone—”
I lean forward, take her hand in mine.
Her fingers curl around mine and squeeze hard.
This time, she lets her tears snake all the way down her cheeks and onto the white blanket.
“I know I don’t say it a lot, but I fucking love you.
You know that, right? You may be moody and reclusive, but I love you.
And I’m really, really glad you’re okay. ”
“I love you, too,” I say. I squeeze her hand. “We’re all okay. It’s over.”
“You really think so? Even with Cecily out there doing god knows what?”
“I do,” I say. And it’s the truth. Maybe it’s presumptuous, or maybe it’s a side effect of all the medication, but the air feels different. Like the tension permeating this town like a fog has lifted. Or lifted enough to see through.
Once, at one of my follow-up appointments after the accident, a nurse gave me her metaphor for surviving grief. It wasn’t the first or the last time I’d heard something in that vein; everyone has their tried-and-true method, and everyone believes theirs is the best.
Hers was like this: grief is a ball bouncing around a box.
In the beginning, the ball takes up the whole box.
It fills out your life. Every time it hits a wall, it hurts.
But as time passes, the box gets bigger.
The grief stays the same size, and it hits the walls a little less.
It hurts just as much when it does collide, but as the world moves on and life fills the box with more space, the collisions are less frequent.
Right now, the box is barely big enough for the loss stuffed inside. But all of us—Aisha and Sloane and Finn, our families, the families of the kids we couldn’t save—will grow. The loss will live inside us, but we will live.
“She’d be proud of you, you know,” Margot says. “Harper.”
The tears I’ve been holding back since I woke strapped to that table fly forward, blurring my vision as they trickle down my cheeks. I wipe them away and try to smile. It’s probably more of a grimace.
“And as pissed as I am at you for going off into the woods by yourself, I’m proud of you, too,” she says. “You saved a lot of lives. And stopped us from losing any more.”
“When did you get all grown-up on me?” I ask.
Margot snorts.
“I guess I haven’t really been paying much attention,” I say. I’ve been stuck in my grief bubble, not bothering to peek outside. Not seeing that the people I love were changing, growing, while I tried my hardest to stay still.
“No, you haven’t.”
“I am now, though.”
“Good,” she says. She leans back, folding her arms over her chest. “Speaking of paying attention…”
I frown, already suspicious of where she’s going with this.
“He’s at the other end of the hall. But I haven’t seen him or Nora.” Margot leans back, lifting her sneakers up onto the bed. She stretches a foot forward to tap mine beneath the blanket.
“Can’t put it off forever,” she says. She stands, heading for the door. “I’ll keep the parents busy for a few minutes. You better not be in here when I get back.”
Then she’s gone, and though it triggers my fight-or-flight response, I force myself to my feet and make my way toward the hall.