CHAPTER 19 UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS
UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS
In my parents’ bedroom my mom has every drawer on my dad’s side of the dresser open. She’s pulling out the contents, sifting through pockets, and undoing pairs of socks to check inside.
“Can you two look in the closet?” she asks. “Go through every coat, every bag. Look inside every shoe.”
“I know going through his stuff was my idea but I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I say. “Do you really think he left a note that has the address of the secret society on it?”
My mom lets her shoulders roll forward. “I don’t even know, baby.
If you see something weird just let me know, okay?
I don’t know what else to do.” The sadness and desperation in her voice is palpable.
“When I tell you this stuff involving reanimation is a secret, I mean it. The only reason I know the little bit that I do is because of what I am now.” She looks down at her hands as she clutches my dad’s T-shirt.
“He had to tell me something. I couldn’t stand not knowing anything about what happened to me.
I pressed him about it for years until he finally gave me something.
Mostly the information about Grandpa Redwood and not much else.
” She sets his T-shirt down and just stares at it.
“It always felt like we were running out of time, like a clock was ticking, but I thought it was because of me. My condition. I thought he was worried about how I’d take care of myself but now I realize it was something else.
” She looks like she’s on the verge of tears and I quickly go to her, putting my arms around her.
She hugs me back, then nudges me toward the closet because regardless of how terrible this is, we have work to do.
I open the heavy doors of my parents’ bedroom closet. I pull my dad’s button-downs and coats off their hangers and search them inside and out. Noah goes through shoeboxes and tote bags. We don’t find anything and neither does my mom, who sits on the bed with her head in her hands.
“Let’s check the top shelf,” I say, even though I’m sure it only contains folded sweaters and extra winter comforters.
Noah steps into the closet and reaches up to pull down a stack of dusty knitted sweaters when a loud crack echoes through the room. Noah stumbles, spilling the sweaters onto the ground. He sits down hard. His foot has gone straight through one of the wooden boards in the bottom of the closet.
“You got termites in here, Mrs. Redwood?” Noah asks as he pulls his foot out of the hole.
I quickly pull up his pant leg and examine his bare skin. He seems okay. No scratches or cuts. I let out a long, slow breath as Noah pulls himself to his feet. My mom comes over and examines the hole in the floor.
“What in the world?” she asks, crouching to peer inside. “Meka. Shine a light in here real quick.”
I grab my phone and angle the light downward. It illuminates the space as my mom reaches inside and comes up with a stack of dusty papers.
“What is it?” I ask.
My mom carries the stack of papers to the middle of her room and sits down on the floor. “This stuff ? ? belongs to your dad but I—I don’t know if you should look at it. I don’t know if I should look at it.”
“Why?” I ask as I sit down on the edge of her bed.
“He hid it,” my mom says. “He doesn’t want us to see this.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “We have to find him.”
My mom thumbs through the stack and begins to lay the different things out on the floor. She picks out a photograph and hands it to me. It’s of my dad. He’s wearing a cap and gown, smiling his familiar little half smile. There is already sadness in his eyes.
“High school graduation,” my mom says.
“Do you think he already knew what he could do when he was that young?” I ask.
My mom nods. “He’s always known.”
I can’t help but look at my hands again.
Hadn’t a part of me always known something was off about me too?
I picture Grandpa Redwood telling my dad what he could do when he was little.
It must have been a heavy burden for a kid and I’m sure this is what he was trying to shield me from by not telling me.
Noah sits down on the floor near my mom.
She hands me another photo. This one is of me and her together.
She’s got me slung on her hip and I’m giving the camera a wide grin with no more than three teeth in my mouth.
Mom’s smiling wide. I stare at the photo—her smooth brown skin, her hair down; she’s got on a tank top and shorts like we’ve been outside in the sun.
The picture is so completely normal, but I can’t look away. Something about her is different.
The realization that I’m a baby in the photo and it had to have been taken before settles on me like a dark cloud. She was alive in this photo.
I glance over at her and she’s got four more photos from before spread out in front of her. Her hands are trembling as she arranges and rearranges the pictures.
“I don’t remember anything about the reanimation process,” my mom says, keeping her voice low and steady. “I remember being in the car with you and your dad and we were . . . running.”
A chill runs up my back. “Running?”
My mom shuffles through more papers—one of which is a sketch of a body with markings eerily similar to the ones on my mom’s chest and back.
“When I think back, it’s hard for me to piece together,” my mom says.
“I thought it was just the road, the driving conditions, but no.” She closes her eyes like she’s trying to resurrect a memory.
“We just got in the car and left. I—I remember now.” She blinks repeatedly.
“We were running from them. These people. But they found us, didn’t they? ”
My heart ticks up as images of the dream—the memory—blaze to life in my head. I’m in the back seat, Mom and Dad in the front, the song on the radio, and . . .
“There was someone in the road,” I say.
“What?” My mom’s head whips around. “I—I didn’t see anyone. At least I don’t remember—I don’t even remember the crash. I only remember looking into your face and feeling that we needed to go.” Mom sets down the papers and stares at me. “Who was it? What did they look like?”
The image burns bright in my mind’s eye.
There was someone in the road that night—someone standing in front of our car.
I saw him through the front windshield. He loomed over the hood as my dad jerked the wheel and our car tumbled off the road.
His face is a blur in my mind, like it’s made up of different parts my memory and imagination have cobbled together.
He has the face of the man I thought I saw in my window when I was five but that, too, is a blur, like someone had smudged his features.
“I can’t remember clearly,” I say. “It was a man, I think. He was standing in the road. I saw him through the window.”
Mom sits quietly for a moment. “They’ve been here all along,” she whispers more to herself than anyone else.
Noah reaches out and picks up another piece of paper.
“It’s embalming but for . . . ?pets?” Noah asks, a clear look of confusion on his face as he reads the paper. “Can Mr. Redwood bring back animals too?”
“I’ve never seen him do that,” my mom says softly, taking the paper from Noah and handing it to me. “He’s never mentioned anything like that to me.”
The paper shows a sketch of a dog with various incisions and markings on it.
I had a dog named Vick when I was three.
He died unexpectedly when I was six and I remember how devastated I was.
I stayed in my room, didn’t eat, and I cried myself to sleep for weeks.
If I had known I had this power, that it could work on pets, I might have done something unspeakable.
I quickly flip the paper over and push it away from me.
As Mom and Noah look through the papers, a newspaper article catches my eye. A woman with red hair is pictured as she holds up a plaque with her name on it.
“Look!” I say, scrambling off the bed and joining Mom and Noah on the floor. I snag the paper and point to the woman. “This lady was here the night we got takeout before Noah died.”
Mom takes the paper and reads the caption. “Camille Phelps wins prestigious Holcomb prize for her work in furtherance of Thiel embalming.”
“What’s that?” Noah asks.
“The Thiel technique is used to embalm a body that’s going to be used for medical research,” Mom says. “It makes the body and organs appear more lifelike. Medical students use corpses treated with the Thiel technique to practice on.”
Noah holds up his hand. “You sure I can’t throw up?”
My mom nods; then her expression changes. “It says this woman, Camille, died of an aortic aneurysm.” She glances at the paper. “This paper is from 1998.”
“So I’m guessing she’s reanimated now too,” I say. “Otherwise, how was she standing on our porch?”
Mom stacks up the papers and I spot another article. This one had been paperclipped to several others just like it.
“Man from homeless encampment in Ithaca goes missing,” I read aloud.
I flip to the next article. “Two women missing from Ithaca encampment.” I glance at Noah.
“That guy you bum-rushed while we were in the shop, his name was Mr. Lions and he was saying someone was gonna get him and cut him into pieces.” I hand Noah the stack of articles. “Maybe he wasn’t out of his mind.”
My mom puts her hands over her mouth. “I can’t even wrap my brain around what he was implying.”