Epilogue
Stranger
I have a new name. It isn’t my own, of course, but it’s starting to feel familiar.
Melinda had things in place for years before she died.
A trail Andrew wouldn’t be able to follow, if we had to use it.
It was not so much more work to give my new self a sister.
We look so alike, after all. It’s how I knew, that day in the woods; I knew she was one of us. We had merely been waiting for her.
“You could go back,” I tell her. “You’re eighteen. You didn’t do anything wrong, not really.”
But Meghan won’t leave me. We belong with each other. All of us. They’re quiet now, unseen, but I feel the pressure of them. They aren’t real, of course, but then again, neither am I. Neither is this girl Meghan has become. We’re all of us inventions.
I think about you sometimes. I wonder if you’re well; I think you are, but I think you must still wonder. You’ll work it out eventually. When they don’t find my bones in the ground; when you put the dates together.
I shouldn’t have gone to see you that night.
Call it a moment of weakness, the fleeting delusion that I might somehow be able to steal back into my old life.
But there was nothing to go back to. I need to talk to you, I said, but you never turned around.
And then I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in your window, my face reshaped by first deprivation and then the scalpel, and I realized that even if you did see me, you wouldn’t know me.
You deserved better than me. You always had. It was so long between that night and when you finally started looking that I don’t blame you for forgetting when exactly it was. For not realizing that Mason Hill had been dead for months already. That I had already shed my skin and taken on a new one.
Andrew told me once about the night he went into town to get drunk—-the same day Liam and Emily brought me to the house.
The two of you in the back of the car, and how, when you told him who you were, he suddenly knew—-realized who I was, under all that grime.
You thought he was upset because I left him, that I’d meant something to him in those few disastrous weeks we dated, but I was never anything to him.
His shock was only because he’d suddenly realized that the creature in that bunker was a person after all.
It made me real. It made him ashamed. That I knew him, and knew what his father had done. What he had done.
It should have inspired mercy. But Andrew felt only rage. I think if Liam hadn’t brought me into the house, he would have killed me that night.
I owe Liam that much, at least.
Andrew didn’t say my name for another year.
He didn’t want it to be true. I told him he was wrong.
He pretended to believe me. It was easier that way.
Liam never put it together. Melinda might have, but if she did, she never said anything.
She needed me to just be Emily. The sister she could still save.
Oh, Oddity. I loved you. But I only knew how to love you cruelly.
I like to think that someday you will come and find me. That you will walk into the woods with a string of white beads and I will be there, and you will not mind my bloodied hands, the things I’ve done. You’ll look into my face and know me, and you’ll speak a name that’s truly mine.
In the meantime—-
You’ll be okay, Oddity.
And so will I.