Chapter 34
Andrew locks the door to the cellar, but by now it’s a token gesture.
He knows I’m too weak to escape. Moments after I watch him walk into the woods, I use the coat hanger to open the door and Maria draws the bolt on the other side.
The padlock is where she’d left it, lying on the floor and still attached to the hasp.
We lean into each other like two famished ghosts, Maria’s leg trembling against my own. Overhead, the weather vane creaks.
“Did you do it?” I whisper.
“Yes. I put it right inside. Do you think it will work?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t want to get her hopes up. “It might. We’re due a little bit of luck, aren’t we?”
She looks sadly at me with her filmy eyes. “Your head.” She puts her cold hand on top of it and strokes the bristles. “He shaved it.”
I nod, reaching up to touch it myself. It feels odd, running my fingertips over the shape of my skull. I wonder how I look. No mirrors in the Bray house, I say to myself. In that moment, I remember about the clamshell mirror I’d told Maria to find in my bag.
“Maria, did you—did you see yourself?”
She nods, her lips pressed tightly together. A tear tracks down her cheek.
“I saw a stranger with brown eyes and no scar where a scar should be. I’m not the girl in that photograph and I’m not Maria Garrison, Andrew’s sister. Am I?”
I shake my head slowly. “It’s why he shaves your head, I think. To stop you noticing that your hair isn’t blond. It’s dark, just like your eyes. It’s why he took away all the ways you might see your reflection, even just a glimpse.”
“He hates me.”
“No. He doesn’t. But there is something very wrong with Andrew, Maria. He has a sickness, deep inside him. It means he does terrible things, but he tells himself it is for the good, because he is doing it for you.”
Maria sits quietly. Another tear slides out from under her eyelid.
I grip her shoulders and turn her carefully to face me.
Her skin is waxy and pale. “Let me tell you what I think about your brother, Maria. When I was little, my parents made me have an operation. They did it because they loved me, and they thought they were doing the right thing. Sometimes that’s how it happens.
The people who love you make decisions for you, and sometimes they’re good decisions and sometimes they’re not.
I think Andrew started making bad decisions and now he doesn’t know how to stop. ”
She seems to absorb this as the wind makes husky, whispery sounds at the window.
“And was it? The operation. Was it the right thing?”
“No. It wasn’t. It changed me in ways I wasn’t expecting, and they didn’t even remove everything, not quite. I think they left part of it behind.”
“Like a serving-knee.”
I laugh at that, surprised to find that I still can. “Yes, just like that.”
We both fall silent. Part of me hopes Andrew hits a patch of ice and runs the car off the fucking road. Part of me fears it. Because we’ll die out here without him.
“Hazel?”
I turn to her.
“I was thinking about Scout. About you asking me if he lived. I think there’s a way I can find out for you.” She looks up at the ceiling, as if the answer will be written there. “You have to help me, though. I can’t do it alone.”