Reese
Things move quickly now.
They happen fast, before I can speak, before I can process what’s happening. Before I can reason with her, before I can beg,
before I can say to Emily what I’m thinking, that I’m scared and that I know it’s not Mae on the other side of the door.
I try grabbing for her hand again, but it gets around mine this time. It drifts further out of reach. I watch as she moves
toward the door. As she reaches for the handle, I feel a scream well up in me that won’t come out, that can’t come out because
it’s trapped. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and bury my face in my hands.
I can’t see anything with my eyes closed.
The turning of the dead bolt startles me. I moan, but if Emily pauses, if she looks back, if she hesitates at all, I don’t
know.
The door rasps as it opens. The cool nighttime air rushes in.
Outside, the sound of bugs gets louder.
Emily’s voice is bewildered when she speaks.
“Can I help you?” she asks, her voice formal and cold in a way that confirms all of my beliefs.
It’s not Mae at the door. It’s someone she doesn’t know.
“Kylie,” I hear and, all of a sudden, incomprehension edges out fear.
The voice is not Daniel’s, though it belongs to a man, someone whose voice I don’t recognize.
Slowly, I lower my hands from my face. I open my eyes to find him standing just on the other side of the door looking in, straight past Emily and to me, his attention rapt.
It’s in the way he looks at me that makes the fear come instantly back.
His eyes are damp. His chin trembles, his mouth falling open.
His voice is full of emotion, shaking and in disbelief as he says, “It’s you. It really is you.”
He steps in, over the door’s threshold, so that he’s in the cottage with us.
Emily’s laugh is strangled. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says, trying to be polite, stepping in front of him to stop him from coming
all the way in. But Emily is something like five foot two and this man is tall, his chin at the top of her head.
He comes in anyway. He steps easily past her so that when she speaks again, her voice has changed, becoming firm. “I think
you’re mistaken, sir. This is my daughter, Reese. You must have her confused with someone else.”
She reaches for his arm, which he shrugs off.
The look of recognition on his face and in his eyes is beyond doubt.
He puts a hand to his mouth. He lets out a sob, something involuntary that sends me to my feet, that makes me go around the
back side of the sofa so that there’s something between him and me.
It doesn’t stop him. He comes across the room, his head cocked, staring at me, not blinking.
He says, “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?” his eyes wide and bright. “Do you know how long we’ve been looking for you? Your mother and I. We’ve looked everywhere for you, Kylie. We never stopped searching.”
My voice trembles when I speak, my whole body shaking. “Mom.”
He crosses the room, scrambling around the arm of the sofa, moaning as he comes right up to me before I can run, touching my hair, Emily’s frantic voice in the background telling him no, to stop, that he has the wrong person, that he needs to leave, her hand grabbing for his, though he brushes her off harder this time so that she falls back, bumping into the edge of the coffee table and losing balance.
“Mom,” I say again, fear in my voice. He sweeps me into his arms and then he pulls back, cradling my face in his hands.
“We’ve searched everywhere. For years. I never gave up. Look at you,” he says, running his hands over my hair again, the clamminess
of his hands pulling at my hair. I sob and he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, baby,” his voice wild as he lets go of my hair,
setting his hands on my shoulders. “You’re all grown-up.”
My eyes bulge. I can’t blink, I can barely breathe.
“Mom.”
Emily comes forward again. She lays her hand down on his arm, pulling as hard as she can. “Get away from my daughter. Get
your hands off her. She’s not who you think she is.” In an instant, the man throws his elbow back. It hits her square in the
face, her head snapping back with such momentum that I don’t know how her neck doesn’t break. I gasp, watching in horror as
she rights herself, her eyes dazed, blood leaking from her nose.
But the man is unaffected. He never once looks at her to see if she’s hurt. He doesn’t ask. He never takes his eyes off me
as Emily stumbles backward, her hand pressed to her face.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks, as I try backing away. “Do you remember me, Kylie?”
“Leave me alone. Don’t touch me. You’re scaring me.”
Emily stumbles. She finds Wyatt’s baseball bat leaned by the front door, where someone left it.
She jacks it up over her shoulder with both hands.
She comes after the man, grunting from the effort.
At the same time, he looks back. He hears her or sees it out of the corner of his eye, sensing the blow.
At just the right time, he turns; he catches the barrel of the bat in his hand as it comes raining down.
He tugs once. That’s all it takes. Because Emily’s hands are wet with blood, they’re slippery and weaker than his. They can’t grip the bat.
He takes it with ease. He drives it instantly backward, plunging the knob at the end of the bat into her stomach. She cries
out, clutching her stomach, crumbling to her knees, gasping like she can’t breathe. I start to cry, “Get up, Mom. Get up,”
wanting to help her, but instead backing further away, putting distance between myself and him, because the man is reaching
for me again. He’s telling me we have to go, that this woman isn’t my mom, that my mom is waiting for me at home, that this
woman stole me, that she took me from him. He starts to cry then, actual tears. “God,” he says, “Joanna is never going to
believe it’s you. She’s never going to believe you’re home.”
I can feel my heartbeat thrash in my ears.
Emily’s voice is rasping as she tries to get up. “Run, Reese,” she puffs out, using what little strength she has to reach
out, to curl her hands around his ankle, holding on to him so I can go.
She says it again. “Reese. Run,” and I do. I turn, running onto the porch, where I try to break out through the screens, tearing
one from the frame, thinking that if I can get out, I can get help. But in the few seconds I have before the man kicks Emily’s
hands off of him, before he grapples with her for the baseball bat and I hear the dull, horrifying sound of the bat against
bone, the rip doesn’t become big enough for me to get out.
As footsteps approach, I turn, looking for a place to hide. I throw myself under the bed, lying flat on my stomach beneath
it, my whole body trembling.
It’s darker on the porch, though it’s not black because the light from inside the cottage reaches it.
He carries the bat when he comes, setting it gently on the floor.
He doesn’t see me at first. He only sees the tear in the screen, which he goes quickly to, fingering it, examining the size of the hole, peeling it back to look out into the dark night on the other side.
My heart thumps against the wooden floor. I hold my breath. I see Emily through the open door as she struggles to get up,
pushing against her body weight, but then losing her grip so that her hands slide out from under her and she falls back down.
I eye the bat on the floor, calculating the time it would take for me to get out from under the bed, to run to it, and if
there would be enough time.
There isn’t.
He turns away from the window.
“I know you’re in here,” he says, his tone soft, warm. “Don’t be scared, Kylie. Please. It’s just me, your dad. I’m not going
to hurt you. It’s time to go home, baby girl.”
This man is not my dad. My dad is sound asleep upstairs, sleeping like the dead. I wish that he would wake up. I pray to God
for him to wake up, thinking of all the times he slept through his alarm clock going off so that Emily would have to splash
cold water on his face, or the one time the fire alarm got coated with dust from the new floors going in, and it went off
in the middle of the night. Nolan slept through that too.
I scream silently in my head. Please wake up. Help us.
He doesn’t.
The man comes to stand at the edge of the bed. He knows where I am. He knows that I’m here, that I’m lying under the bed.
My breath shudders and I try to hold it, to control it, to not let him hear me breathe.
All of a sudden, he bows down. He crouches close to the ground, his eyes locking with mine. “Get away from me,” I scream.
“Leave me alone.”
“This doesn’t have to be so hard,” he says, just like Daniel said, reaching under, wrapping his hands around my ankle, pulling as I kick.
Emily’s face is wild, harried when she finally comes in. There is blood in her hair, a small pit along the hairline. It drips
down the side of her face, into her eyes. She sways. Still, she bends down; she tugs on the man’s arm as he tries dragging
me out from under the bed by my feet. At first, when she pulls, he loses his grip. She manages to get his hands off me, long
enough that I squirm further away, almost to the other side of the bed, where I will be free and where I can make a run to
the front door for help.
Before I can, he flings her off him hard. She falls all the way to the ground. In an instant, he gets up. He searches for
the bat, picking it up where he left it. He hoists it over his shoulder, bending his knees, leaning over, putting his whole
body into the swing, and I’m so fucking scared all I can do is cover my ears so I don’t hear the sound as her body lurches
before becoming still.
“It’s time to go, Kylie,” the man says, reaching under and pulling me easily out from under the bed, the wood floors making
it impossible to resist, to find a toehold, to anchor myself under the bed.
In the distance, a door opens. The man looks up. He lets go of my arm. He tightens his grip on the bat as Nolan calls down
over the stairs. “Emily?”
I whimper, “No, please, stop,” reaching for his leg as the man turns, as he makes his way from the porch toward the cottage.
“Please don’t hurt him.”
Through the glass, I see Nolan standing in the upstairs hall, looking around. He’s leaned over the stair railing, covered
in shadows, an almost negligible glow from a night-light lighting up his face. He’s squinting, trying to bring the cottage
into focus, though he doesn’t wear his contacts when he sleeps and without them, he’s blind.
The man steps into the cottage. “Emily?” Nolan asks, his voice dulled down by sleep and the distance.
He brings his gaze toward the man, though because he can’t make out the man’s face without his contacts in, he only sees that a figure has appeared and is crossing the room quickly, going toward the bottom of the stairs.
I scream, but there’s no time for him to react.
I watch as Nolan’s face changes as the man comes into focus and he realizes it’s not Emily. It’s someone else. Someone he
doesn’t know. A stranger.
He stumbles back a step, shielding his body. He only ever gets one word out. Who.
I don’t watch it happen. Instead, I press my hands to my ears, my body curled around Emily’s, to block out the sound. “Wake
up,” I beg into her ear. “Please wake up. I need you.”