“No lights on,” Mack says. Houses like this always feel vaguely accusatory. Every perfect line, every well-chosen accessory says You don’t belong here, like the spa. The windows watch her, making sure she knows they see her.
But it’s twilight now, and no lights are on. The window eyes are blank.
“Let’s go.” Ava limps straight through the grass, deliberately stomping every flower bed on her way. The back door is unlocked. She checks for an alarm system, but there doesn’t seem to be any.
“It’s a good town.” Mack drifts into the house, remembering the bus driver who wouldn’t meet her eyes. “A safe town.”
“Look for car keys.” Ava tracks dirt across the spotless tile. If Mack is afraid of leaving a trace, Ava is determined to muddy the whole fucking place. But it’s hard to tell, since the kitchen is all browns and oranges, a relic of another decade, meticulously kept up but woefully dated. The fridge has several children’s drawings displayed with magnets. Mack trails her fingers along them; they’re brittle with age. One falls, dislodged, drifting to the floor like a leaf. Where the magnet held it is a single pristine circle, untouched by the sun, protected from time. Mack leaves it where it lies.
Ava opens the door from the kitchen to the garage. Inside, there’s only a four-wheeler and the empty space where a car doubtless goes. “Dammit.” She retreats inside and careens through a fussy dining room, the large, polished table dominating the space, unsoftened by yellowing lace doily place mats. Unlike Mack and LeGrand, Ava has references for what a nice house is, and this definitely was one, but hasn’t been updated in decades. It’s a time capsule of expensive poor taste.
Mack and LeGrand trail after her, unsure what to do. Ava finds the family room—though it lacks any of the warmth or chaos of an actual family—and collapses onto a floral couch, the fabric shiny in a way meant to look elegant but that makes it slick and uncomfortable. She eases her leg in front of her with a hiss. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she can’t do much more. She’s at the limits of her pain tolerance, genuinely afraid she’s doing further permanent damage.
“Two choices,” she says. “We keep going, look for another house, another car. Increases our odds of being found. Or we wait. Doesn’t seem like someone young lives here, and old people don’t stay out late, right? Plus the four-wheeler makes me think the owner is in on everything. So we wait, and when they come back, we take their car.”
LeGrand wants to keep going, is almost as uncomfortable as Mack in this house, but he can see how much pain Ava’s in. He doesn’t want to ask her to walk any more. He looks to Mack to make the call, but Mack isn’t listening. She’s examining a china hutch filled with porcelain figurines.
Imagine having enough money for the things you need, and deciding what you want next is a collection of little boys and girls with garishly cherubic faces in a variety of poses and outfits. The exaggerated innocence of the little girls in pink, frilly dresses, gazing over their shoulders with o-shaped lips, feels almost obscene.
Mack looks over her own shoulder. Ava and LeGrand are watching her, waiting for her decision. No one should make her decide anything. She still feels sure she’s forgotten something, left something crucial behind. The park tugs on her, like she’s a compass and it’s true north. The idea of driving away from it all, just…leaving? Seems more surreal and impossible than the monster waiting for them in the maze.
But Ava is in pain. She gave more details for the option that involved staying here, which makes Mack suspect it’s the plan Ava prefers. “We wait,” Mack says, then walks into the kitchen to look in the fridge. She lost her bag with all her carefully hoarded protein bars. Left it behind in the park. Maybe that’s what’s drawing her back. She laughs quietly to herself at the thought of going back in to retrieve it and literally entering the belly of the beast for her troubles.
Ava doesn’t know if they’re making the right decision, but she wants to cry with relief that she doesn’t have to stand up again yet. She has to do something about the pain. The pain is distracting her. It’s going to make her a bad leader, and it’s going to get someone hurt or killed.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” she asks LeGrand, who nods in response. He sets down the bag of rubber duckies. She didn’t notice he kept them. Useless now, but of course LeGrand would carry them until instructed otherwise, in case she needed them. In case he could help.