Chapter 69
On my fourth day of captivity, Grandmother Elizabeth came through the door.
She was wearing an autumn coat of red and brown checks, like she’d come from a ramble in the forest. Her knitting bag was over her shoulder. She sat down in the overstuffed armchair.
I put down my Econ textbook, wondering what was in the bag. Needles and yarn? Or needles, knives, and thumbscrews?
I’m just meat.
Grandmother looked me up and down. “How are you this morning?”
“Well, thank you.” I glanced up at my small rectangle of skylight. The sky was blue, dotted with the puffy white clouds of approaching winter. Early afternoon. “A bit restless. I’ve climbed that wall a hundred times.”
“We’ll take a few holds out. How’s your head?”
“Passable.” I was imprisoned by my own family in a hidden room. “No seizures, if that’s what you mean.”
“Not to worry. You don’t need those pills anymore.”
I stared at her. I’d had four days to think about the pills. About the convulsions I didn’t remember having, in those first blurry days after the crash.
“They weren’t really for seizures, were they?”
Her slow smile confirmed my guess. “Clever Jessica. Have you heard of a class of drugs called empathogens?”
I shook my head.
“From the root word empathy.” She reached into her knitting bag, and a tremor went through me. Saws? Scalpels? Forceps?
She pulled out the sweater she’d begun for me in the hospital. It was finished—scarlet, with black bands at the waist, cuffs, and collar.
I stood up, crossed the room, and took it from her. The sweater slipped over my shoulders like a gentle dream.
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
“You look lovely.”
“Empathogens,” I said carefully. “You gave me drugs to increase my…empathy?”
“Empathy, openness, sympathy, the experience of emotional communion. All those ordinary words for serotonin and dopamine. You must tell me, Jessica—what was it like?”
I moved away from her and sat down on my bed again. What little certainty I had left was crumbling. What if it hadn’t been the car crash that changed me? What if it hadn’t been Mozart?
What if it hadn’t been Hiromi?
“Tell me why.”
Grandmother pulled out her knitting. “Perhaps we should begin at the beginning.”
“Yes.”
“But where is the beginning? It’s hard to say.”
I sighed, loudly.
She didn’t look up from her needles, which began to pulse and swirl. “Don’t worry. I won’t tire you with some aimless story, full of rogues. Though I could—the truth is often picaresque.”
It took a moment: hidden in the thicket of picaresque was care.
They knew about the resistance.
My mind went back to the first moment my life had become uncertain, unmoored, unMorton. “This started with Peter.”
“Yes, perfect.”
We sat in silence for a cumbersome moment. Then I realized that she was waiting for me to continue. Like everything, this was a test.
“The target of a first assignment is never someone close,” I recited. “Not even an acquaintance. Always a stranger—but you had me kill my cousin.”
“Not just any cousin. He loved you best.”
It was difficult to say the next words. “It wasn’t only about culling him. It was about changing me.”
“Your head is better, isn’t it? You’re starting to think clearly again.”
I was. But the pills hadn’t confused me—my family had.
“I thought you assigned him to me because I was a prodigy.”
“We did. You are.” Her needles stilled, but she didn’t look up. “That’s why we needed to introduce a crisis, to make you less settled.”
“You sacrificed Peter to destabilize me.”
“Such a troublesome child, always burning things. This way, he could be of use.”
Like his body, composted in the greenhouses. Still working for the family. “What does killing my own cousin have to do with empathy?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Jessica. What came next?”
Cold settled on my skin.
“Hiromi came next.” That long, golden summer with one assignment: pretending to be in love…until it became true.
Grandmother smiled down at her knitting. “That was clever of Garrett, bringing her to the funeral. Presenting her to you, just when a space had opened in your heart.”
I tried to remember—had I felt Peter’s loss back then?
Not until Cyrus had forced me, at knifepoint, to remember those riddles. And then at the memorial service, the stories about Peter’s hobbies, his bone collection, the death of Mister Fluffernutter.
And talking about him with Hiromi. Be memorable.
“Hiromi was supposed to unsettle me?”
Grandmother shrugged. “Artists can do that, I’ve heard.”
I remembered my list of who had voted on killing Peter—my mother, Elizabeth, Cyrus, Veronica…I’d never figured out the fifth.
“So Garrett was in on the plan.”
“Don’t be absurd. He’s far too messy. Psychiatric cults, mixed with”—she shivered a bit—“the art market. I’m surprised it’s proven so fruitful. But it was merely an excuse.”
“To make me fall in love.”
“Love.” Grandmother looked up from her knitting. “Do you still believe that’s what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you kill her?”
“Because you told me to,” I said.
“And you obeyed—that was the real you.”
I closed my eyes, and in that darkness, as always, was the small room.
You’re Jessica. But not the one I know. The real one.
Hiromi’s sharp eyes had seen something behind my mask. But after the murders, there had been only adrenaline, exuberance, triumph.
Until…“The car crash. Was that real?”
“Real enough. Cyrus certainly made a mess of the Cadillac, and little Dwight’s oak tree, and your fine Morton nose.”
Cyrus, whose son I had murdered.
“But yes, the crash was intentional,” she went on. “To change your face, and to start you on the pills.”
“To give me empathy.”
“So that you…” she began, waiting for me to finish.
Patience, our old ally.
“Could become someone else,” I said. “An infiltrator.”
Elizabeth was beaming now, pleased at how far I’d come. “You never would’ve fooled them on your own—not our little prodigy, who had to learn from the other children how to cry. We had to give you that light behind your eyes.”
I looked into Grandmother’s eyes. There was no light there.
“I didn’t fool anyone,” I said.
“No?”
“This is me now, with or without those pills.” I leaned forward, pushing down my terror. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You don’t own me anymore.”
Elizabeth smiled again, gathering up her knitting.
“We never owned you, Jessica. We’ve only treasured you. We treasure you still.”