Chapter 24
We drove back to the house in total silence.
All the mourners were gone, so it was just us and Monica.
I was glad she wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she even wanted the company, especially if that company took the form of the very girls who were, more or less, responsible for her daughter’s death.
But Monica had softened in the aftermath of the wake.
To my surprise, she welcomed us back just as she had that first night when Skye was still with us.
We ate from whatever was in the fridge and pantry—boiled eggs, stale crackers, brown bananas mashed with a fork and smeared across slices of gluten-free freezer bread.
None of it tasted like anything much. All my senses were still dampened, my ears ringing faintly, my hands numb, my vision prone to spirals of vertigo whenever I turned my head.
I realized, in a kind of distant way, that I was having a panic attack.
Not the kind that Adeline had suffered—violent affairs with a lot of crying and hyperventilating, puking sometimes if things got bad enough.
No, what I was experiencing was something more muted, removed.
Like I was being pulled slowly out of my body.
“Come sit with me,” said Monica, and I felt her hand at my back, a soft pressure.
I came to and saw that she was standing over me, all the rest of the girls looking on with concern.
I scraped back from the kitchen table and stood up, letting Monica guide me to the living room.
I settled on the couch, and Monica limped across the room to the piano bench, her knees giving a little beneath the weight of her, which, frankly, wasn’t much.
She was so small that it almost scared me.
I hadn’t noticed until that moment how frail she really was under all those layers of shawls and scarves and silk.
“Are you all right?” Her gaze was searching, her eyes raw and swollen from crying; the dried tears had formed crusting tracks down her hollow cheeks.
I realized that I should have been the one comforting her.
She was the one who had lost a daughter, and I’d had almost a year to come to terms with my own sister’s death.
But I knew full well, from my own experience grappling with grief, that there was nothing a person could say to ease a pain like that.
Nothing anyone said to me had ever helped.
I decided it was best to stay quiet, thinking Monica would do the same.
But then she spoke in a scraping whisper.
“I hope she felt it all, in the end. She would’ve wanted that.
You only die once, after all. She would’ve wanted to make the most of it, to witness every moment.
To relish it, even. Skye was always so curious that way.
Even about bad things. Especially about the bad things.
Maybe that’s why she found her footing with the girls. ”
It was a grim hope, maybe a cruel one. Skye was young, and I couldn’t imagine what she felt in those final moments—the terror of the water filling her lungs, sinking alone to the bottom of the pool, to her death.
What kind of mother would want their child to experience that?
But then, Monica was no normal mother, and Skye was not a normal daughter.
Monica raised her gaze to me, searching. “Why are you with them? You’re not like them. Not made of the same stuff. I know you try to hide it, but it’s obvious. You don’t belong. I saw it the moment you first walked through the door.”
“People keep telling me that,” I said, with no real defensiveness this time.
I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone anymore.
I knew the truth of what I was. And the truth was terrible.
“But you’re right. I’m not like them. They’re full of life.
Skye was full of life. But not me. I’m less like the girls than I am like Death.
All I do is bring pain and chaos wherever I go, sometimes without even realizing it.
I did it to my sister—I see that now, and I know that’s why she’s gone. ”
Monica stared down at her hands, her expression pained.
“I promised Death my first child, but I never actually expected to have one. I was your age, or thereabouts, and sick when I made my bargain with him. Really sick. The kind of sickness you don’t recover from.
I had stopped fighting it, and all the strength I had left to spare was channeled into this anger.
I was so mad my life had been stolen from me, and when Death came…
that anger turned to desperation. I think I would’ve sold out the world to live. ”
My mind scrambled to process what she’d just confessed. That Skye had been the collateral, the person she’d offered up to Death to spare her own life.
“I took precautions, of course. All these medications to keep me from having a child. I even tried to find a surgeon who would take my womb, but no one wanted to do it. They couldn’t understand why a young girl with her whole life ahead of her would want to do something like that to herself.
They didn’t want to be responsible for my mistake.
If they only knew.” Monica shook her head with disgust. “Anyway. I met a boy. Death took him, too, years ago now, and even if I’d known that back then, I think I still would’ve fallen for him, been with him.
We didn’t mean to have Skye. I’d told him under no circumstances would I ever have a child.
But she just…happened, despite all my precautions.
Skye was a miracle. I didn’t know I was pregnant with her until I was laboring in the bathtub alone.
I delivered her myself. Pulled her out with my own two hands. ”
The idea of that, of Monica giving birth alone in a bathtub, was both gruesome and fitting. It made sense that a girl like Skye was dragged into the world that way. “Jesus.”
Monica only smiled. “I know it sounds crazy, but I was happy. And that happiness was dangerous, because it blinded me to reality. Deluded me into believing that it would last forever. I forced myself to forget the deal I’d struck with Death so that I could cling to that joy for a little bit longer.
I thought things would be okay, and for a while, they were.
They were better than okay, actually. My career started taking off.
I wed the man I loved. We’d created this perfect little girl.
Everything felt like it was going to be okay until the day my husband took his life, leaving me alone with Skye.
And I thought surely that was sacrifice enough, surely Death would be satisfied.
But, of course, he wasn’t. He never is. He didn’t show himself to me again until the night that Skye went into anaphylactic shock just before her third birthday.
She’d developed an allergy to nuts, which I found out as she was suffocating.
“I rushed her to the hospital, where she very nearly died. They managed to stop the reaction just in time. As soon as she was stabilized, Death appeared at the foot of her hospital bed. He told me that he would take her soon, though he wouldn’t say when, even though I begged to know how much time I had left with her.
I wanted him to at least give me that. But, as you well know, he’s not particularly accommodating.
He left that night, and afterward…” Monica shook her head.
Whatever she was going to say, she couldn’t bring herself to.
“When Shiloh and Naomi showed up years later, I knew that it was time for me to let her go, knew that Death was making good on his promise to take her from me. I was relieved, to be honest. I’d thought that, when he did come for her, it would be final, the end of her life.
And it was, in a way. I knew the moment I gave her over to the girls that she would never be mine again.
Our life together, as I knew it, was over.
So I let her go. Sometimes that’s all you can do. ”
“You’re wrong,” I heard myself say. “You’re her mom. You should’ve fought for her. Even if it was pointless. That’s what she would’ve done for you.”
Monica hung her head in shame. I couldn’t believe she was the same bold and glamorous woman I’d envied just days before. I saw that all of it—the clothes and the money—was just a distraction, really, a front for her cowardice. “It wouldn’t have made a difference either way.”
“Skye said otherwise,” I whispered. “She said that, if we came here, you would teach us how to fight back. That you had answers.”
“She was mistaken.”
“Then why did she sound so convinced?”
Monica dragged a hand back through her hair. “Because I only told her half the truth. I never told her that she was what I traded for my own life. I didn’t want her to hate me.”
“She wouldn’t have. Skye was all love.”
Just then, there was a sharp cry; both Monica and I startled at the sound. Chloe burst into the living room, panicked.
“What’s going on?” I asked, springing to my feet, certain that Death had returned to finish off the rest of us. A part of me was almost relieved, if only because I was so ready for it to be over, for the dread to end. “Is he here?”
Chloe shook her head. “Shiloh’s locked herself in the bathroom, and we can’t get her to come out.”
The room reeled. I rushed forward, catching myself on the wall to stay on my feet, sprinting through the living room and shouldering my way past the girls and down the hall to the guest bathroom at its end.
Naomi and Riley were there, taking turns banging on the door.
No sound came from the other side, even when I shouted Shiloh’s name, begged her to let us in.
I felt like the floor dropped beneath me, and all at once, I was back in Michigan, ripped through time to the day that Adeline first disappeared. I was back in that hallway, banging on the door, crying out for my sister who was already dead. “Open the door. Please open the door. Please—”
Riley—her bruised eye screwed shut from the fight at the wake—gave the door a vicious kick.
Then another. It burst open and struck the wall with a sound like a gunshot.
And there was Shiloh, curled fetal on the floor.
There were open pill packets strewn about her, plastic bottles with the tops pried off.
Froth collected at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were closed.
I screamed.