Chapter 18 Above
Above
At two o’clock, my phone rings, and only then do I remember that I’m supposed to be at school.
Stammered apologies and claims of a migraine buy me sympathy but not much patience.
I get someone to cover my afternoon and take the rest of the day, but it sounds like I’m going to get a lecture when I return.
I can’t believe I forgot I was supposed to go back.
This is concerning. I should be concerned.
But I’ve never done anything like this before.
It was a lapse, that’s all. And for a good cause.
Because now I know something I didn’t before.
Meghan wasn’t just making things up—-at least, I don’t think she was.
Why would she invent a sighting only to hide it away in her journal?
The podcast is from a year ago, and the entry is from before that.
She was going out into those woods for a long time.
And I’m pretty sure I know who she found there. There’s only one person who makes sense.
“You gotta stay here this time, buddy,” I tell Barry. I promise him a walk when I get back, then gather my things and head out the door.
Only Emily’s car sits in the driveway at the Hill house. I’m glad. I assume Andrew is still hanging around somewhere. He lives twenty minutes away, after all. But I don’t feel like dealing with him right now. I want to get Emily alone.
This time, she answers the door quickly.
She’s enveloped in a soft gray sweater, oversized for her petite frame.
She looks unsurprised to see me, but she always has that canny look about her.
Her hair is up in a messy bun, the roots touched up again to perfect golden blond. “Audrey,” she says simply.
“You lied to me.” It’s not what I meant to lead with, but I swallow down a stammering follow--up and let the words linger, demanding a response.
Instead, she stares at me a moment, and then lets her hand drop from the knob and turns. She drifts inside, leaving the door open. For a moment I stand on the doorstep uncertainly. Then, gritting my teeth, I follow.
Music is playing somewhere deeper in the house, the fuzzy edge of a woman’s voice pushing through a thumping beat. Emily is in the kitchen, her back to me. She’s pouring water from an electric kettle into an oversized mug.
“Can I get you anything? Tea?” she asks without turning around. “I don’t keep anything alcoholic in the house, but there should be some Coke in the back of the fridge.”
“I don’t want anything,” I say. “Except answers.”
She turns, holding the mug with the string of the tea bag draped over the lip. She rotates it slowly in her hands, regarding me. “You’re angry.”
“I read Meghan Vale’s journal,” I tell her.
Her eyebrow raises slightly. “What did it say?”
“She saw you. In the woods. She saw you and thought you were the witch.” It sounds less damning, spoken out loud.
“Really.” She sounds genuinely curious.
“She said your hands were red, like they were covered in blood,” I press on. “What were you doing out there?”
“What makes you think it was me?” she asks, again with that air of untroubled curiosity.
“You think there’s some other woman wandering around on your property?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She glances to the side, eyes focusing on nothing in particular. “She could have been making it up.”
“She wasn’t.”
She makes a soft humming sound. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?
” She waits for an answer, but I don’t supply it.
She hums again and then walks back the way she came, leaving me to follow.
She pads through the living room and down a hallway beyond to the back of the house, where a sunroom has been converted to a studio.
Canvases lean against the walls, are slotted into shelves, hang haphazardly.
There are so many my eye has trouble picking them apart from each other.
The easel in the center of the room hosts a large canvas on which the beginnings of a portrait seem to be forming—-rough, broad strokes carving out the planes of a face in flesh tones.
You can see the angles of the cheeks and jaw, the line of the nose, the shadowed sockets where eyes will be painted, but nothing else has been added.
“Who is that?” I ask.
Emily sets her tea on a small table beside the canvas, cluttered with paints and jars of grayish water. “I don’t know. I haven’t found her yet,” she says, turning emerald--bright eyes on me. An unfamiliar scent suffuses the air—-paint and canvas, I suppose, and something astringent laid over it.
There are other portraits tucked among the paintings. Some of them look familiar, as if I’ve passed them on the street, and maybe I have. My eye catches on one—-a man with tousled dark hair and high cheekbones and blue eyes to drown in. “Liam,” I say.
She steps over to pull the piece out from behind one depicting a spray of fern leaves with a snake twining through them, and looks down at it with a critical eye. “It isn’t him,” she says.
“But it looks—-”
“It’s a version of him. That’s all you can do. Images are nothing but light falling in a particular way, in a particular moment. And painting is trying to pin it into place, but it will always get away. This version of Liam doesn’t exist, but I tried to preserve it anyway.”
“I don’t think I know what you mean,” I say.
“It doesn’t make much sense,” she concedes.
“Words aren’t really my thing. Trying to explain it, it’s like—-” She opens a hand as if to grasp something from the air, closes it.
Her eyes shut briefly. “When you spend enough time by yourself, you lose the trick of making sense to anyone else.” It sounds like a self--deprecating joke, but she doesn’t smile.
“Did you meet Meghan Vale or not?” I demand, impatient. She drifts past me, back to her working canvas. She picks up a brush but doesn’t do anything with it yet.
“I met her.”
“Did you talk?”
“Yes.” She picks up a palette smeared with the colors of the portrait and begins to mix two patches together, darkening one to deeper shadow.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “You knew I was looking for her.”
“The things she told me weren’t for sharing,” she says.
“But you let me come out here. You acted like—-you pretended to help me,” I say.
“Did I?” She looks over her shoulder at me, her eyes devoid of any hint of deceit. “You wanted to look for her. I brought you out to where she’d been. It was what you needed to do.”
“You could have told me you spoke to her.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” she says. “The last time I saw her was well before she left. Nothing she told me would find her for you.”
“You can’t be sure of that. You could know something that might help me find her.” Frustration is growing in my voice, but my anger can’t find purchase. She seems so incredibly unbothered by all of it.
“Is she even who you’re looking for?” Emily asks quietly, and then my eyes track past her, and I freeze.
“That’s—-you—-why did you paint Janie?” I demand, because there she is, staring at me from a background of smoky gray.
“Is that who that is?” Emily asks, twisting to look. There’s a little frown on her lips.
Suddenly I’m not so certain. It looks like Janie, yes.
The red hair, the round face, the elegant nose she always hated.
She had a list of the things she would change about herself someday.
Her jaw (too weak), the skin under her chin (too loose), her boobs (too small, of course).
She would laugh about how she would reinvent herself so thoroughly she could be someone else entirely.
But now I can’t hold the memory of her clearly enough in my mind to say for sure if the features in the painting belong to her, or if the sight of it has brushed aside memory, and suddenly there’s a thudding fear in my chest that I’ve forgotten her, let go of her, and that this betrayal at last is the thing that will damn me.
I couldn’t even hold on to her memory properly.
But, no—-I do remember. The jangle of the bell and her hair whipping around as she burst in that first time we met, strands of copper.
The crinkle of her nose when she didn’t approve of a joke I made.
The moss green of her eyes. The woman in this portrait has blue eyes, muted ones, and a narrower jaw; her hair falls in waves, and it’s more golden, the red only a gleam where the light hits it just right.
And she’s older than Janie was when I knew her.
Older than Janie ever got to be, in all likelihood.
Emily moves to a desk against the wall and retrieves a framed photograph from the drawer. She hands it to me, and I see my mistake.
The photograph is of the Hill family as I never knew them.
Two adults stand to either side, each of them holding a pale--haired baby.
Liam and Emily, the twins. Melinda and Andrew stand in between—-Melinda with dark hair and serious eyes, wearing a bib dress a bit too young for her; Andrew in a soccer uniform, showing off the dimpled grin that would make him a darling of the school for more than just his athletic skills.
I don’t know if I ever met the siblings’ parents. I certainly don’t recognize their father—-dark--haired like Melinda, with a neatly trimmed beard and shaggy hair, grinning wide. The mother, though, looks familiar for obvious reasons.
“Classic psychosexual pattern,” Emily says, and I stare at her blankly. “Andrew and Janie,” she clarifies.
“You mean he dated someone who looked like his mother,” I say. “And you.” I remember how angry he was that night, when Janie joked that she and Emily could be sisters. She’d hit too close to an uncomfortable truth.
“Word of advice. Don’t point out to Andrew that he has a type. It gets awkward fast,” she says with an unpleasant twist to her lips.
She’s beautiful in an ethereal way, and almost kind, but altogether strange. She unsettles me, and she seems to want me to call her on it. “Why were your hands red?” I ask.
“Because I was coming back from the slaughter,” she says. Her smile is a slash like a knife. “You won’t find her here, Audrey.”
My lips part. I mean to ask her something about Meghan, but instead, I find myself saying, “What happened to you?”
She doesn’t give me the mercy of looking away. “The classic tragedy. My mother died,” she says in uninflected syllables. “Saintly Elizabeth.” She tilts her head toward the portrait.
“She was beautiful.”
“She was perfect,” she says, like it’s a correction.
She puts on a voice, like she’s quoting someone.
“ ‘And doesn’t Emily look just like her? So she should be perfect, too.’ Imagine putting that on a child.
Imagine only ever hearing how wonderful a dead woman is and how you ought to be just the same.
It only lasts so long, of course. Before you grow up and the gaps start to show.
So maybe you aren’t so much like her after all.
Not so beautiful. Not so perfect. And the only other thing you know about her is she’s dead. So.”
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else I can say.
“After she died, my father became convinced that there was danger lurking behind every rock,” she goes on, as if she hasn’t heard.
“Melinda and Andrew didn’t get it so bad.
They were older. Melinda was almost out already, and Andrew had football.
But with me, it just got worse and worse, until he didn’t want me leaving the house at all.
He used to stand at the foot of the bed at night and weep.
What a terrifying thing.” Her gaze grows distant.
She turns, frowning, and busies herself with shading the curve of an eyelid.
“Anyway. Maybe I understand someone wanting to escape and not be found.”
“But you stayed,” I point out.
“He wasn’t wrong. About the world out there,” she says. “There are awful things in it.”
“That’s not all there is.”
She doesn’t answer. There’s only the soft sound of her brush against the canvas.
“It was because of you, you know,” she says softly. “Because of homecoming.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “What was because of me?”
“I blamed you. Because you left me to walk home instead of taking me with you. Because I was where I wasn’t supposed to be. He never let me leave again, not really,” she says. Her voice is still distant, untroubled. “He pulled me out of school. Locked me away in my tower.”
I grasp for words, but can’t find them. She looks straight at me, and now it’s my turn to dodge her gaze, turn away. I left her there, yes. But how could I have known? How could any of that be my fault? It isn’t. Of course it isn’t, and there’s no anger in her eyes, but she speaks it like a fact.
My eye fixes on a set of paintings in the corner. More nature paintings—-a fallen tree, its roots packed with earth; a scattering of leaves around a single speckled egg; a hole in the ground, rectangular, dropping into solid shadow.
The trunk of a tree carved with five lines.
“You knew it was there,” I say, voice hoarse. “The hand. You painted it.” The carving in the painting is just that—-lines slashed into the bark. No red to mark it. Red palms—-not blood but paint.
Did Emily make that mark, and then let me “discover” it?
“You knew about the hand. You saw Meghan Vale and you lied about it. What else are you lying about?” I demand, stepping toward her.
Her hand moves. I flinch, but she only reaches as if to cup my cheek, her thumb barely brushing my skin. “You won’t find her, Audrey. You should stop looking,” she says. Her fingernails settle lightly against my neck.
“I won’t,” I say, hardly breathing.
“I know.” She drops her hand. Turns away. She’s done with me. She’s blocking in the shape of an eye now, building it out of shadow and light. That’s all any of us can see. The light and the shadow, and our mind fills in the rest.
With my heart hammering in my chest, not fully certain if I am afraid, I retreat.