I make my way to the house slowly. To anybody else, it would be such a serene view, but to me, the memories prevail. I see that giant oak tree with limbs like fingers, and the statues that seem to take on lives of their own. The dock that juts into the marsh, its boards now mangled and cracking from saltwater and neglect. The massive willow in our front yard, its vast network of roots erupting from the trunk and growing over the grass in all directions before burrowing beneath the driveway like varicose veins, gnarled and throbbing and cracking the pavement.
There’s a sickness in this property: something wicked that’s been pulsing through the house for centuries. Even as a girl, I could feel it. I could feel it traveling through us all.
I exhale, reach my hand through the bars, and unhook the latch. Then I walk toward the front door, knowing that they’re home. I can smell the fresh lavender of their laundry detergent billowing out through the air vent; I can see their cars parked in the back, even though I know nobody ever drives them. Growing up here, there’s just something about this place—a sensation, a feeling—that’s been ingrained in me, buried deep, like a splinter wedged fast into the skin. I’ve spent my entire life trying to ignore it, trying not to bother it, and in time, it seemed to just become a part of me: something wrong inside that’s stuck so deep, my body just learned to live with it. Grow around it like a tumor.
But here, now, I can feel it flaring up again, the mere sight of this place hitting it in just the right way.
I push my finger into the bell now and hear the noise on the other side, bouncing off the walls, the empty space. I wait, trying not to fidget, knowing that, once they answer, I’ll be face-to-face with my parents for the first time since Mason was taken. Finally, I hear the twist of the lock; the old hinges creaking as the heavy door lurches open. I hear my father’s dry throat clearing—a habit he picked up from smoking and has never been able to drop—and say a silent thank-you that it’s him I’ll have to face first.
“Hey, Dad.” He looks up at me, obviously surprised to see me standing there. I flash him a meek smile, shrug a little, and look down at the ground, studying my shoes. “Mind if I come in?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THEN
It’s been six months without Margaret, and somehow both everything and nothing has changed.
We lowered her into the ground at Beaufort National Cemetery. I remember standing there, dressed in black, the little white headstones aligned in perfectly spaced straight lines. They reminded me of fangs, small and pointy, or of standing inside a giant shark’s mouth, lost amidst the endless rows of jagged teeth. All of us nothing more than scraps of flesh snagged against their serrated edges.
The pastor had called it an honor for her to be buried there among some of our nation’s bravest soldiers—Dad was a veteran, after all, which meant that one day, he would join her there, too. I didn’t see it as an honor, though. I saw it as a cruel dishonor, because burying her there implied that there was something valiant about her death—something heroic and necessary—when in reality, she died by choking on dirty marsh water, facedown in the mud.
It was raining, I remember, but nobody had thought to bring an umbrella, so we just stood there, the three of us, water dripping off my mother’s ringlet curls as we watched the tiny casket being lowered into a pit of sludge. Her doll was in there, too, tucked beneath her arm. Mom couldn’t stand the thought of Margaret being buried alone, but there was something eerie about it to me, imagining those porcelain eyes still open as the casket was being closed, enveloping them both in darkness. The fact that time would go on, Margret’s body would decay and rot and turn into nothing but bones, and there, still wedged into her armpit, would be Ellie, her baby—eyes open, lips grinning, buried alive.
After it was over, we drove home in silence, each of us retreating to our own quiet corners of the house. Mom couldn’t stop crying; Dad couldn’t stop drinking. He retired a few months later, deciding to stay home with Mom and me indefinitely. Maybe Margaret’s death forced him to realize how much of her life he had missed; maybe the publicity of her drowning was too hard to avoid, the questions too hard to answer, so he decided to just shut himself in.
Or maybe Mom made him. Maybe she was too afraid to spend any more nights with me alone.
In some ways, life has gone on as if nothing even happened, like stubbing your toe and trying to walk through the pain with tears in your eyes. School started up again in August, the way it always has, and I just went through the motions as if everything were fine. As if Margaret’s little backpack weren’t still suspended next to mine in the mudroom, partially zipped shut with her favorite sweater peeking out. It was like we all wanted it there for her, just in case she clawed her way out of that coffin and came walking back from the graveyard, wet and shivering and covered in mud, looking for something to keep her warm. Her bedroom remains untouched, though Mom insists on leaving the door shut. Dad says it’s because she can’t stand to see it: her little bed, her pink walls, her white mesh canopy dangling like a cobweb from the ceiling. Sometimes, I stop in the doorframe and try to imagine what it must have felt like for her to open her eyes and see me standing there, rigid and staring, a silhouette in the dark.