Then suddenly she wasn’t alone—there was someone there, a blur of teal, the sharp bark of a dog.
“Here you go. I’ve got you,” someone was saying. Emma was dimly aware of being helped to her feet, guided—or more like carried—toward the house. As she stepped inside, her vision went dark again, and she felt her legs giving way, heard the quick, alarmed exclamation of her rescuer—and then, mercifully, nothing.
29
DAPHNE
Then
The night her parents die, Daphne sits in the tree house, her arms around her knees. She’s too old for the tree house. It’s a child’s refuge, the ceiling so low that even she has to stoop to fit inside. When they sleep together out here, it’s so crowded they jam knees and elbows into each other all night long. Not that they ever sleep together out here anymore. Sometimes one or the other of her sisters will join her, but Emma hasn’t in weeks, and Juliette always slips away after night falls, whispering to Daphne not to tell.
Everyone keeps secrets. Daphne keeps everyone’s secrets.
If you are quiet enough, small enough, people begin to forget that you still have eyes and ears, that you can hear their murmured conversations and see their furtive errands. Daphne listens at the door to her father’s phone calls, and she knows about the drawer of secret things that her mother only brings out on special occasions, when their father is out of town. She knows the two cars that come to the house on those days, the black Taurus and the blue Impala. They’re both animals, the bull and the antelope, and she feels like this should mean something.
When the blue Impala comes, her mother puts on makeup. She slides into the passenger seat and rides away, and comes back breathless and giddy.
On those days Daphne worries about the smallest of her secrets. The things that she has gathered up, the things she can’t prove but thinks about often. The color of her eyes, the skin that doesn’t freckle in the sun, her cleft chin.
What her mother is doing is dangerous.
When the black Taurus comes, it’s different. That man comes into the house. Her mother doesn’t dress up for him. She hands him money. He leaves. But he hasn’t been back since the last time, almost two months ago. “I don’t want to be involved,” he told her mother. “This isn’t what I signed up for. You can have them, but if anyone asks, I’ll tell them I’ve never heard of you.”
The secrets gather inside her. She’s rarely told a secret, but she can’t keep them all inside, so on days like this when the pressure grows too intense, she walks out to the bridge over the river. She takes her secrets, whispers them into a stone, and drops them off the side of the bridge to the rushing waters below. The stones carry her secrets to the river and the river swallows them up. But she has no stones now, no river, and so many secrets.
I told Dad about Emma’s applications. I pretended I didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to be applying, but I knew.
She is furious with herself. She wanted Emma to stay, because if Emma leaves, it will just be Juliette. With only Juliette as a point of comparison, Daphne won’t have any chance of pleasing their mother. Without Emma, Daphne won’t have anyone to turn to when she does earn her anger. Juliette doesn’t understand her like Emma does. She had to do something.
She scrubs her hands over her tear-stained cheeks. And then she hears it—the footsteps in the grass, stumbling and staggering. She looks out the window. In the darkness, it is hard to make out the figure below, to tell light brown hair from dark. Her sister—whichever of them it is—suddenly sprawls, stifling a cry of pain. Daphne almost calls out to her, but then the figure is back on her feet and running through the woods. She’s dropped something: a bit of light from the house is enough to see the faint trace of metal in the dirt.
Daphne shimmies down the ladder, curiosity banishing her tears. She scuttles forward, fingers already snatching at the air, the dirt. Her grasping hands find the small, cold bit of metal and curl around it. She knows what it is by feel. She considers tucking it away in one of her many hidey-holes, but her curiosity is not a patient creature. It turns immediately to kneading claws at the back of her mind.
Dad is in his study. Mom is safely asleep. Easy enough to go in the back door and to the computer in the corner of the great room. They’re not allowed to have phones or computers in their rooms. The internet is, after all, a wilderness full of pedophiles and socialists.
The icon pops up on the desktop and she double-clicks it with a delightful churning of anticipation in her gut, hoping she’s not about to read Juliette’s English homework or something equally boring.