47
Here are my rules:
1. You may run.
2. You may hide.
3. You may apologize.
Oh, who are we kidding? None of you think you’ve done anything wrong.
4. You may attempt to escape.
5. But you will not.
I run down the cellar stairs and grasp the railing with numb fingers. Mila lies like a broken doll in the eerie beam of light spilling down from the top of the staircase, a dark halo pooling around her head. For a moment, I’m stuck in time, struck by her terrible beauty, and then the reality of what I’ve done begins to prick at me. Little cuts all over. An overwhelming wave of panic numbs me again, and I tear the cover off the circuit breaker and flip every switch, my hands shaking. The gasoline can is heavy, but I lug it up two flights of stairs, and then another can, along with a large bottle of paint thinner. I coat the solid oak floors of the guest room and master bedroom with one can and close the doors, then hide the other in the upstairs closet with the paint thinner. I rescue my beautifultarot cards, tucking them gently into my shirt pocket, next to my heart. Then I run back down the stairs and fling open the back door.
“Kennedy! Chelsea’s locked in the attic!” I wait in the downstairs bathroom, saturated in darkness, but I know every inch of it. I know the family portraits that cover the walls, and the precise location of the group photo ofourfamily, the five of us in the Summer of Swallows, arranged on the dock. Chelsea and Ryan deep in conversation, Chase attempting to lift Kennedy over his head, Mila laughing. Me in the background, a smile plastered on my face, staring straight at the camera. Camera smiles are always fake. I pull the photo off the wall and smash it against the toilet, then turn to the sink and grab a bar of soap. Even after scrubbing my hands with lavender-scented soap, though, I smell too much like gasoline to go near her. It’s almost absurd, the delicate guest towels and handcrafted soaps, and my hands all filthy and coated with accelerant.
I hear the back door open and footsteps slowly walking up the stairs. “Something smells!” Kennedy shouts from the loft.
“Yeah, I don’t know!” I yell back. I open the back door again and wave to Chase. Chase, who buried a body. Who buried my brother’s body. And lied, and lied, and lied to me, with me, beside me. No more, Chase. No more Chase. “Hey, can you help me with something?”
He jogs inside and looks me up and down, scrunching his nose. “What did you do?”
I shrug and try to grin helplessly. “I spilled a bunch of crap from the cellar all over myself.”
He crosses the living room toward the cellar, and I bolt the back door shut and seal it with one of the combination locks the Hartfords use during the off-season. I don’t know the combination, and neither does Chase. Nobody but Kennedy does.
Chase whips around and stares at me. “What did you do? Where’s Mila?”
I back against the door, out of breath.
His eyes fall to the floor, slick with gasoline, and rise to the flickering candles, the masses and masses of candles, filling the room with a gorgeous, brilliant glow. Heaven on earth, the sky fallen down on us. I hear music in the chaos, the thumping of footsteps above, Kennedy screaming, Chase saying my name over and over, making no sense, no sense at all. He grabs my wrists.
“What did you do to her?”
Laughter spills out. I can’t help it. The question is nonsense. Ayearof lying and hiding what they did to Ryan, and he expects me to tell him about Mila after five fucking seconds?
“It’s much too early for answers,” I tell him. “Don’t you think? What’s the statute of secrets? One year. In one year, you’ll find out. You made the rules, not me.”
He stares at me in horror. “Emily.”
I push him away with all of my strength, and he stumbles to avoid a row of candles lining the windowsill by the front door. “You buried my brother?”
“No. Kennedy doesn’t know shit.” He begins blowing out candles. That’s fine. It’s fine. He won’t get to all of them. He couldn’t possibly. There are too many.
“What did you do, Chase?” I pick up one of the tallercandles carefully and begin to relight the ones he’s blown out.
“I went looking for him. Anyone would. I couldn’t accept—you couldn’t either.” He turns to me, pleading in his eyes. “I wanted to know what happened, just not like that. I didn’t want him to be dead.”
“But he was.” Every step he takes, I follow. Every candle he extinguishes, I relight.
“There was nothing I could do about that!” He gives up on the candles and takes me by the elbows.
I would have fallen for it once, melted into him and disappeared. Instead I hold the lit candle between us, a warning. “You could have told me. You could have saved my family a year of torture.”
He shakes his head, and I feel his hands trembling against my skin. Vibrating his fear straight through me. “It would have ruined our lives,” he whispers.