twenty-seven
Mabel Darling
This can’t be real.
I’m weightless, floating, a balloon untethered, dropped by a careless child’s hand. For once, I want to go back, but I can’t find my way, can’t seem to return to my body. I can’t find the hand that let me go, the one that promised to hold on.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Baron stumbles to his feet, backs away from his brother’s lifeless form. His eyes are wild, crazed with pain. For one brief flash, there’s hope, and I think, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s not Baron at all. Maybe everything will be okay.
Baron never shows that much emotion. Never feels it.
But then his eyes fix on me, and the rage is like nothing I’ve ever seen, nothing I can withstand.
I shrink down, take a single step back. Being invisible, quiet, and harmless as a baby bunny used to save me, and when it didn’t, drifting away did.
I got greedy. I got tired of being quiet.
I wanted to make noise, to strike back. And now I pay.
Baron seizes me by the throat, his fingers digging in.
I am defenseless as a little bunny. I have no poison, no knives, no guns. No window or wine bottle presents itself. There’s poison in my pocket, but I don’t reach for it.
“What did you do?” he asks, his breath heavy, labored.
“Nothing,” I manage.
Baron’s fingers tighten, cutting off my air. His eyes blaze hotter than the fire consuming Summer House behind him. Hotter than Baron has ever been.
“Duke?” I mouth, but I have no voice. His fingers are crushing my windpipe. Already, my vision swims, dots of black appearing. Already, my mind is fading.
This is the punishment for my crimes. I always knew the risk. I thought eventually, the police would come for me, no matter how well I hid my tracks, no matter who buried the bodies in my wake. But it’s not the courts that will make me pay.
This is a different kind of justice, one as ancient as human sacrifice.
My knees buckle, and Baron does to the ground with me. I’m vaguely aware of the damp, solid earth below, the fire climbing to the sky above.
This is how I pay. With my life.
It’s more than fair. I’ve taken so many.
This is what happens, not when you take a life, but when you get greedy.
No one likes a greedy girl.
The court system wouldn’t have been kinder.
Probably, they would have been crueler. They would have paraded my traumas out one by one, hanging on every salacious detail, using them for their own titillation later, when they were at home with their wives and husbands and daughters of their own, in bedrooms down the hall.
“Where did he put his fingers?”
“Did it hurt?”
“How old were you the first time it happened?”
“What did he say to you while he was inside you?”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?”
“Did you enjoy your grandpa’s special kisses?”
“Did you cum?”
They don’t like it when ordinary people dole out the justice that they would never have the courage to deliver.
So I don’t mind that this is how it ends. I prefer it, even. I stare blindly, sightlessly, up at him, and I feel myself slipping away.
Suddenly Baron jerks his hands back like I’m made of scorching embers and not smooth cardboard.
He stumbles halfway to his feet, backing away from me like he did Duke.
Then he falls to his knees, and a scream of the deepest, blackest anguish rends the night, his throat, his soul.
He slams his fists to the ground, battering the earth, punching it with such ferocity that I listen for the sound of his bones cracking.
All I hear is that raw, animal scream, as primal and ancient as the first cry of the first infant being born.
It sends shivers down my spine, and some answering part of me pushes me up.
I crawl to him, wrap myself around him, even though I’m wrapping myself around the embers that will burn me alive.
We’re pulled back from that edge, that dangerous place so deep and dark inside us that it could swallow us and all the world.
Sirens deafen, cut through and silence his screams. Lights blind. Emergency vehicles are speeding down the road.
Baron grabs me, drags me up. “I can’t,” he says.
Still gripping my hand, he runs for the car.
“What about your brother?” I ask, looking back. “And Seeley?”
“That’s not my brother,” he says.
“My cat—”
“I got him out,” he says, stuffing me into the driver’s side of the car. “He’s fine. We’ll come back for him.”
He slides in with me, and I scramble over into the passenger seat as he shoots out of the driveway onto the road, not bothering to look even though it’s a busy road.
He roars away, away from the house and the fire and the death, as if we can outrun it now that we’ve been chasing it so long that it finally caught up.
“What happened?” he asks after a minute.
He sounds better, though barely controlled, and his voice is hoarse, raspy.
“I don’t know,” I say, and without warning, a rush of tears scalds my eyes, pours down my face. I turn to the window so he won’t see. “A car drove by, and—”
“What car?” His voice is flat but impatient, hard as stone.
“I don’t know,” I say again. “A—an Chevy I think.”
“You know cars,” he says. “What kind of car?”
“It was dark, and it happened so fast,” I say.
“It slowed down, and the window went down, and in the half-second before it happened, all my brain landed on was that they were going to ask directions. And then they started shooting, and I just threw myself down by instinct, and I covered my head. I didn’t see the license plate.
It was a sedan, an older model, a mud brown color. ”
He’s silent a minute, his fingers drumming. Then he mutters one word under his breath and rips the car around, sending me crashing into the door.
“Blue.”
“Brown,” I correct, grabbing the dash when he floors it.
The car roars forward, everything outside the windows a blur as he bears down, not letting up.
We fly toward down, then onto the road that leads toward my old neighborhood.
Baron doesn’t speak. I feel sick at the speed, my stomach dropping out when he hits a little dip in the road.
And then we’re back in the neighborhood where I grew up, where Hickory House and Lilac Place sit side by side, silent sentinels watching over the agony within their walls.
I cut my name into the closet there. I never spoke, but I left my mark. One day, my brother found me sitting in there, and he sat beside me. He carved his name next to mine. Baron’s brother lived there after us. The mark he’s left will outlast every cut I’ve made.
As we roar past my mother’s house, I remember the night we burned it down.
I remember Duke taunting me, mocking me, pushing me past my limits, until I grabbed the gallon of gas and sloshed it along the back wall.
I remember him laughing and spinning me around and around as it went up in flames, the sparks dancing in the sky and in his eyes, on a night so much like this one, so different.
I remember realizing for the first time that my body was more than a container for my mind, that it mattered too.
He brought me to life, made me laugh, taught me the meaning of fun.
The realization that I will never again hear him laugh hits me, leaves me reeling.
Baron slams the car into park, throwing us forward. He’s out the door and into the house, and I can hear him yelling before I’m even out of the car. By the time I’ve climbed out, he’s in the front, yelling at someone outside.
“Where is she?” he bellows.
I make my way around. Harper and Royal are sitting on the curved staircase, the set to the right, sharing a cigarette.
“She’s not here,” Harper says, sounding hollow.
“Who’s not here?” I ask.
“Where did she go?” Baron shouts. “Where is she?”
“Calm the fuck down,” Royal says. “We don’t know. Her sister ran in, and grabbed Olive, and said they had to go right now.”
“Who?” I ask again.
“Blue,” Harper says, tapping the cigarette and frowning.
“She was in a panic, talking a mile a minute about getting out of town. I didn’t want to let her leave, but she kept saying, ‘She’s mine,’ like I would try to keep her.
She was crying and frantic, but fierce too, y’know?
I’ve never seen her like that.” She glances at Royal.
“Do you think she’s in some kind of trouble? ”
“Yeah, obviously,” he says, scowling.
“Who’s Blue?”
“Blue is Jane,” Baron says.
“Who is Jane?” Harper asks.
But I’m already putting the pieces together, laying them down like stepping stones in front of me, horror dawning as I go down the path that leads from what I did in that basement a year ago to this moment.
As if he’s followed me there, Baron speaks.
“Duke is dead,” he says, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion whatsoever.
Gone is the madman hammering the earth with his fists like he could open a portal to another world, a world where his brother lived; like he could turn back time if he hit the earth hard enough to spin it backwards on its axis.
Royal gives his head a little shake, blinking at us in shock, uncomprehending. “What?”
“No, he’s not,” Harper says, like the very thought is ridiculous, like we’re playing a joke on her that’s so unbelievable she won’t even entertain it. “He was just texting earlier today…”
I know how she feels. How impossible it is to picture a world without our messy, chaotic, beautiful boy in it, dancing and laughing and mocking everyone and everything, even death.
Tonight, death gets the last laugh.
“He died a few minutes ago,” Baron says.
He once called me a robot, but now he’s the automaton, inhuman and methodical.