Chapter 3 #2
I stared at her. She was tired. But she was always tired.
I couldn’t wait to talk to her anymore when she wasn’t.
I was turning eleven. I wanted to know things.
Lots of things. “Where are they? We don’t visit them even.
Most people go places for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
They drive. Wanda went on an airplane once.
It’s just you and me. All the time.” Plus she had started working Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was lonely.
She hugged me to her. “Do you mind it being just you and me?”
“Not most of the time.”
Mama laughed. “Well, there is your honesty. Okay. My family is mean. They want things from me I don’t want to give them because they are for you.
Not for them. They do bad things with those things they want from me.
Don’t ask me more about that. I won’t say.
Take that as truth, okay? I even have a twin sister.
We look exactly alike. Or we used to. You could be walking down the street one day and see two of us.
But she is mean. Like our father was mean.
With your daddy’s family, it’s a crapshoot.
Some of them are very good people. Some of them are awful.
Most of them are awful and he was hurt by them, deeply.
He didn’t want them in your life. Maybe someday you could meet his mom. She was better than his dad.”
This was more than she’d ever told me. “What was wrong with his dad?”
“He used to beat Daddy. All the time.”
I caught my breath. I’d never been beaten. I could barely remember my father. Maybe it was the trauma that kept me from remembering much. But I hated that for him.
Movement began to pull me awake, pushing the dream back. If that had happened I had no idea. Maybe it never did. I couldn’t tell anymore. It slipped away before I could hold onto it. When she had died, I hadn’t even known she had family. It had to be a dream. I felt myself drifting again.
“How did you pull that off?” It was Julian’s voice in a whisper. “They told us no.”
“I know they did. But look at her, she’s silently sleeping. Her eyes are moving below her lids. She’s in REM. She’s not thrashing or hurting. She’s not crying out. She’s just sleeping. It’s hard to argue with that. They left us alone.” He kissed my forehead. “Climb in this side and we’ll switch.”
The bed dipped, and I opened my eyes.
“No,” Jer whispered. “It’s just Jules. Keep sleeping. He cuddles too.”
“She knows that,” Julian answered.
Jeremy kind of rolled me over to his brother, and I let it happen. This was too nice. He must have just showered because he felt warm. “What time is it?”
Jeremy got off the bed. “Late. It’s midnight. Get some more sleep. I love you.”
Well, if it was nighttime, that was fine. Hadn’t it just been nighttime? Who knew how often I was really up or asleep anymore. Who knew how many rounds of this we had done without me knowing it?
Jules stroked my neck. I didn’t see Jeremy anymore. Had he just left or had time passed?
I liked the cuddle, but I was awake. “I thought a lot about your play. When I was there.”
“You did?” He didn’t stop his stroking.
“I did. I even asked the girls what ghosts they were carrying. I thought about my ghosts.”
He sighed. “I was so afraid you were going to be one of my ghosts. We couldn’t find you anywhere. Like the world had swallowed you up. I couldn’t… never mind. What were your ghosts?”
“My family. Your family. Parts of my life. The Poor Relation. Pretty much everything. I wasn’t going to go back to New York.
I can’t let my family near me again. When I turned eighteen I was going to vanish.
And I thought… maybe I would reach out as soon as I was safe at some point to see if you had all moved on or you might like to see me again sometime. Somewhere else.”
His voice was low. “Oh, Alatheia, we will never move on. We would still be looking.”
My eyes closed.
There was only so much I could do in the room. Days later I could stand. I could walk. I could shower. I could eat. And I was going stir crazy.
Phoenix arrived to replace an exhausted Julian. I didn’t think he was sleeping even when I wasn’t with him, but he stared at me with a smirk. “It’s pretty bad once you start to feel better. Come on. You’re not locked in. Let’s walk to a place I found.”
A place he found? “How long were you here?”
Phoenix handed me some slippers and, when I’d put them on, placed his arm around me, drawing me to him.
He was… calmer. Less jittery than I had ever known him.
Not to mention he actually seemed to be present mentally when he was with me.
His eyes really dove into me, like he saw me very clearly all the time.
I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I did know that he was attentive beyond what I could have imagined.
“I was in your room. The same one. For a week. Before they moved me to elsewhere in the hospital. This is detox. That next place is ‘okay, let’s tackle the addiction.’ They’ll be moving you soon, too.”
I squeezed his waist. “What made you finally decide to do it?”
“What made me finally decide?” He actually sounded confused. “Really? I got my girlfriend arrested. She was sent off and we couldn’t find her, and we find everyone. Vanished. It was my fault. I had to get clean. There was no other way. Clean or dead. That was it.”
Dead? “Don’t say that.”
“Well, I preferred clean. So I am. Every day. It’s new. I have no answers about it in any way that makes any sense. Not yet anyway. But, I’m here. You got yourself rescued and we are going to get you feeling better.”
I’d been avoiding questions. Jer had given me quite a lot to ponder. But maybe it was time to push a little harder. There was only so much I could handle at one time. Processing was slow.
“How did I get myself rescued? You came and got me.”
We came to a stop in a room with a view with a lake. I gasped. “Is this the lake?” I deliberately emphasized the word.
“This is the lake. Granny thought you would know it from where you were in the journals. This is the good lake.” He rolled his eyes.
“I hate placing that kind of value on things. But there it is. The other lake is the problem, where my family who may have kidnapped me and killed people still live. We’re avoiding them. Most of them don’t come here.”
Most? It dawned on me. “That nurse?”
“The mean one? Yes. Distant cousin. Very distant. But this one is ours. Or where we come from. On my fathers’ side.
” He motioned for me to sit, and he sat next to me.
“You rescued yourself because you left that message, which only you could have left, and I traced the comment to the island you were on. Then, Kit found out there was a fucked-up school there, which we knew nothing about and showed up on no research, so your family dug deep to find the worst place ever. Getting you out wasn’t hard because you don’t belong to your family anymore.
So we were able to convince your paternal grandmother to let us get you out and take care of you for a while.
Stephen sweetened the deal with the island by making it financially better to simply shut down.
It took two weeks. Two of the longest weeks during the longest time. ”
I put my head on his shoulder. “I’ve lost all time.”
“Yeah. I bet.” He strung our fingers together. “Ask me. You have questions. Jeremy told you days ago about your dad’s family. Ask. You’re brave enough to ask. You always have been.”
I swallowed. “Who are they? Where have they been?” Something niggled in the back of my mind. I knew something, didn’t I? My mother had said something? Or maybe I had dreamed it. What was it? I couldn’t remember.
“You’ll never believe it, but actually Kit had started to suspect before you were taken because he’d started to look into your mom and who she hung out with. Alatheia, your real last name is Monk.”
I sat up. “What?”
He nodded. “Monk.”
“As in Murial Monk?” She had been my frenemy for a little bit in that she scared the shit out of me but also was kind of nice to me at the same time.
“Yep. Your first cousin.” He shook his head. “She’s ecstatic.”
“Really?” My mind whirled. “Okay. Too much. I need…”
“Time. Yes. I know.” He pressed on my head until I set it down on his shoulder again. “But Alatheia, you are richer than we are. Significantly.”
I didn’t care about that. At least not now. Murial was my cousin? Davis was my cousin? How… the sibling that went missing. My father was the sibling that went missing. They’d told me about him. They thought he was on an ashram or something. But no it was my dead father.
Phoenix and I sat together staring at the lake.
It was huge and framed by towering pine trees, their branches heavy with the weight of winter’s chill.
No snow but just what looked like a dusting of something.
It was afternoon, the sun was starting to dim.
Around the lakeshore, big houses stood like sentinels.
People not in the know would think that they were symbols of wealth, and they were, but they also hid what happened in those houses.
The families created here weren’t traditional.
One woman, multiple husbands. For generations now. Big enough to hide secrets.
The water shimmered under the pale winter sun not quite gone from the day. It was soothing. It had been days since I’d been randomly falling asleep, but I yawned.
Phoenix squeezed my hand. “Nap if you want to. I did here. A lot.”
“You just sat here alone and napped?” I rubbed my nose to his shoulder, almost like I was keening. I couldn’t help it. I was so fucking needy.
“My brothers never left me alone. In a good way. They left me alone when I had to lock in and get through things. But they were here the whole time. Waiting for news on you. And keeping me company. I made them promise they would leave to go to you if I wasn’t done and ready.
They agreed. So we knew we would get to you and I wasn’t ever abandoned. ”
That was so Lent of them.
All of them together against the world.
“You didn’t get me arrested and sent off. I chose to grab that bag. I should have thrown it on the floor. I think we can blame it on Maggie drugging me.”
He shook his head. “I played a role. One hundred percent I did. And Maggie will no longer be a problem.”
What did that mean? “Is she dead?”
“No. It was bad enough when she fucked with you because that pissed off Murial and now that you’re her cousin? Forget it. My father bankrupted them and Murial ran them out of New York. Maggie is somewhere else now. You are now Murial’s family.”
That was sort of… nice? In a weird, disturbing way. Why had we stayed away from them? Why had I been hidden, living in a trailer when both my parents came from money?
It was too much. I closed my eyes.
Barrett’s arrival roused me, which was a good thing. I didn’t want to sleep all day. He sat down next to me, and I lifted my head to smile. Phoenix was so quiet that I looked over. He was asleep, his head sort of tipped back. He breathed deeply.
“When you weren’t in your room you had to be here. His favorite spot. We called this Phoenix’s healing spot. He’s out.” He motioned toward his brother.
I took Barrett’s hands in mine. “I’m so sorry we had a bad morning, the day I was taken.”
Barrett’s head fell forward just a touch like for a second he couldn’t maintain it with his neck.
“Alatheia, you are never going to know how it haunts me. How that has ridden me every second of the days without you. Why didn’t I kiss you and tell you I loved you?
Why did I storm out of there? Because I was unprepared for my test, but that isn’t your problem and never was. I am so sorry.”
I kissed him. “I thought it was a terrible ending for us.”
“Not an ending. Never that.”