Forty-Three Geny
I waited until Wyatt was busy helping Carter get dressed after his shower. I told him I was going to relax in the living room while he did the bedtime routine. I told him maybe we could even start a fire in the fireplace. And then I slipped out the front door, got in my car, and drove away.
Grace asked me to trust her, but she’s lied to me for too long. Everything I know is because I took things into my own hands, and this time won’t be any different. Grace is up to something. This dinner and her disappearing act. She keeps lying, keeps sneaking around.
I need to know what she’s up to. Is she only digging into what happened with our dad? Or does she have her nose into something more?
She could take everything from me. I could lose it all. And I would deserve it. I can’t make my mind up between wanting to stop her and wanting to help her. I look down at the keys hanging from the ignition. The keychain with our family picture in it. My whole world. I never deserved them.
I park outside my parents’ home. Grace’s car is out front and there’s a few lights on.
I wait to see her moving past a window, but the house is still.
After a while, I decide to get out and get a better look.
I don’t want her to know I’m here. I don’t want to talk, only watch.
So I drive my car down the block a ways before getting out to walk around the house.
I’ve watched Grace like this before. From the darkness of the backyard as she moved through the house, not a care in the world.
Until she had more cares than she knew what to do with.
But as I move around the perimeter of the house now, I don’t see her anywhere.
She could be upstairs. That’s harder to see from outside.
I walk up to the back sliding door and try it, but it’s locked.
We hardly ever locked this door growing up.
But I think about the stacked boxes in front of the basement door, and it makes sense.
She’s afraid. Something to do with what she’s getting close to telling me.
I have things to tell her too. I just haven’t decided if I’m going to or not.
I move around to the front of the house and decide to stop trying to be sneaky and just go through the front door with my key.
I let myself in and slowly walk into the living room.
It feels alive in here again. My dad wasn’t gone long before Grace came back but it was as though the soul of the home left with my dad.
It felt lifeless in here without him. I could feel his absence.
And now, the house has come back to life, just like my sister.
Only, I don’t think my sister is here. It’s too quiet.
She could be sleeping, but she usually doesn’t fall asleep until the early hours of the morning.
And she left lights on. I continue farther into the house.
There are dishes in the sink. The coffee pot has about an inch of old coffee sitting in the bottom.
I want to check upstairs, but the thought instantly makes my legs feel like they’re going to give out.
It’s hard to climb, though I manage. The door to Dad’s office is open.
I peek inside, but it seems more or less the same as I remember it.
Except, as I start to turn back into the hallway, I clock an empty space on the desk.
The printer. I’ve used it many times over the years because I don’t have one of my own at home. Why is the printer missing?
I look ahead to my parents’ bedroom. The door is closed but the light is on.
Is she in there? My hand trembles on the handle, and I feel like I can smell the rot of my father’s body.
My chest feels too tight. I try to ground myself before the panic attack can take root in me.
I’m okay. My dad is already gone. I’m not going to see anything horrible when I open the door.
I push the door open before I can crumble into a sobbing lunatic. My eyes go to the closet first, as though my mind needs to prove to itself that my dad isn’t hanging inside of it. He’s not. Of course he isn’t. He’s in a casket at the cemetery.
But then, I thought Grace was too.
My mind continues to argue with itself over what is real as my eyes scan the room. Grace isn’t here. But she’s been busy.
I’ve found the printer. It’s plugged in and sitting on the floor by the window.
On the wall are dozens of pieces of paper taped in different groupings.
I force myself farther into the room, though my entire body rejects being here.
I can’t get the smell of death out of my nostrils.
I press my sweater sleeve over my nose and mouth to block it out, though I know it’s in my mind, not the room.
There are pictures of different people. Dad. Morgan O’Neil. Brooke O’Neil. Frank Gibbs. Grace. A man in a Raven PD uniform. I think his name is Officer Wilson. Garrett Wilson. There are other papers with stuff written on them. Coroner. Funeral director. Raven PD. Wyatt.
I try to decipher what Grace is saying with her wall of information, but it’s near impossible to get my mind to settle down enough to process it. Everything keeps spinning and rearranging in my brain. I can’t make sense of anything.
I pull my sleeve up to expose my forearm and pinch my skin as hard as I can. Pain explodes like a camera flash. Everything slows down. I look at the wall again. It’s then that I see that Frank’s picture is in the center of everything else. Beneath his picture is a bulleted list.
Tried to have me killed
Lied about finding my body and identifying it (coroner)
Buried bags of sand (funeral director)
Rushed Morgan’s death investigation
Brooke dead after asking too many questions
Nothing at PD done without his say so (drugs, Garrett)
My heart picks up speed again. I try to pinch myself again, but it’s not working anymore.
Stumbling over my feet, I run out of the room and slam the door shut.
My legs give out and I drop to my knees on the hardwood in the hallway.
I focus on the veining in the wood, the knots in the pine that I can draw by memory, the scuffs from so many years of wear.
For a split second, I forget why I’m on the floor outside my dead parents’ bedroom.
It comes back to me though. One horrible memory at a time.
I get back to my feet and step down the hallway, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do.
On some level, I know my mind is sick. I’ve had enough episodes to know I’m in the depths of one.
But it doesn’t make what’s happening any less real.
The door to my and Grace’s old bedroom is open, and it interrupts my thoughts, drawing me in.
I switch the light on and step inside. I wasn’t here very long after Grace was gone.
About a year. Wyatt and I had a shotgun wedding when I was eight months pregnant.
He bought the house we live in now, and we moved in together when Jack was born.
It was a hard adjustment. My life didn’t remotely resemble what it had looked like a year prior.
My twin sister was gone, I was married to and living with her boyfriend, and I was a mother.
My mind couldn’t handle it. It broke a little bit, and I don’t think, even after the therapy and the medications, that it ever really repaired.
I shut the light off and step backward into the hallway. I’d give anything to rewind time and make different choices.
As soon as I think it, I think I’m lying to myself. If I made different choices, I wouldn’t have Wyatt, Jack, or Carter. And so maybe I’d do everything the same. Only this time, maybe I’d make sure Grace was really dead.