Miri, part 5

Moving forward...

Zane chewed on his lower lip. “You can’t go alone,” he said at last.

            

I shrugged. “Can’t be helped,” I said. No, I didn’t really like the idea of wandering out into the wilderness by myself, especially given that my survival skills were pretty much limited to chopping veg on a wooden board inside the safety of an enclosed kitchen, but I didn’t figure in the end it would matter much. I’d either survive and find Kit, or I wouldn’t.

            

“I’ll go with you,” Zane said.

            

My satchel dropped to the floor with a thunk as I turned to stare at Zane. “Come again?”

            

“I can’t let you go by yourself,” he said. “You’re a kid. So I’ll go with you.”

            

“You’re only two years older than me,” I said irritably, banging drawers open and shut in an attempt to find Dad’s old knife. “I’m no more a kid than you are.”

            

“Can you use that?” he asked, nodding towards the knife I’d just unearthed from beneath a stack of clean towels.

            

I looked down at Dad’s whittling knife. He’d worked for years as a carpenter; his workshop at the back of the house hadn’t been touched since he’d been taken away, and our house — my house now, I guess — was filled with the furniture he’d made for my mother in their first year of marriage, to fill the empty rooms. I could remember him sitting out on the front step on warm nights, turning some shapeless bit of wood into a sparrow, a shell, a flute. After he’d gone, the only thing of his Mom had ever used was the knife. It had been a familiar sight for years, but Mom hadn’t let me use it until I turned twelve, when it had, for all intents and purposes, become my knife.

            

“I can chop vegetables,” I said, somewhat defensively. “That’s something.”

            

Zane snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure there are going to be a hell of a lot of vegetables waiting to be chopped into neat little cubes once we leave Granite.” He shook his head and said, gently, “You don’t know how to hunt and the last time I saw you try to throw a knife, it smacked side-on into the tree two feet to the left of the one you were aiming for. If you go alone, you will die.”

            

“If you go with me, we’ll probably both die,” I retorted. “And you have a lot more to lose than me. If you go — ”

            

“If I go, they won’t do anything to my family,” Zane said. “Because clearly I don’t care enough to give a damn that stepping out of line might put my family in danger, so clearly retaliating against me by doing something to them won’t make a difference.”

            

I rubbed my head. “You’re giving me a headache.”

            

“Does that mean you’ll let me go?”

            

No, said a tiny voice in my head. If you let him come along, you’re putting him at risk. And his family. And that’s not fair.

            

Yes, but he’s right, argued another tiny little voice. If you go alone, you’ll die. You’re used to all of your food and your clothes and everything turning up on your doorstep every week. You don’t know anything about surviving outside of Granite.

            

But his family is almost intact, came the retort. Taking him away not only breaks them up but risks further decimating his family.

            

He volunteered to come! the second voice objected. It’s his choice, not yours. Besides, he’ll probably follow you even if you say no. You know how stubborn he can be.

            

That’s probably true…

            

I groaned. “Okay, fine,” I said, as much to shut up the voices in my head as anything else. “But you do what I tell you.”

            

He kissed his fingers and pressed them against my forehead, startling me. It was an old-fashioned gesture, hardly ever used anymore. “I promise I’ll keep you safe,” he said seriously. “You may think you’ve got nothing left, but you’ve still got me. And I’m going to keep you safe.”

            

I didn’t know what to say to that. Especially since his eyes had got all dark and intense and he was looking at me with this expression that suggested that I wasn’t going to be allowed to do anything dangerous. Which was ridiculous.

            

“Okay,” I said finally. “Well. Okay.”

            

“When do you want to leave?”

            

“Um.” I blinked and looked down at my bag, still sitting on the ground where I’d dropped it. “I was thinking of leaving tonight.”

            

“Better to wait until morning, get a good night sleep, get a fresh start when it’s light,” he suggested. “I’ll go home and pick up a few things. Meet you in the morning on the road out of town?”

            

“Yeah, sure,” I said as he was out the door. I resisted the urge to shout at his back but I’m in charge, remember! Because that would be childish. And at almost sixteen, I was most certainly not a child anymore. 

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Miri, part 4

Short, but better than nothing...

Zane spluttered for a moment before demanding, “Are you out of your mind?”

            

I swung the bag over my shoulders and tested the weight. “No,” I said. “There’s nothing stopping me from going, Zane. Mom’s dead.”

            

“They’ll find out,” he said. “They’ll find out you’ve gone looking, and they’ll kill Kit. And your father.”

            

“Do you really think they’re still alive, Zane?” I asked. “Let’s face it, what kind of evidence does the government ever give us that they bother to keep our families alive after they take them?”

            

“Well, they have to.”

            

“Why?” I demanded.

            

“They just do!” he insisted. “Otherwise what’s the point? Where does the leverage go if they’re dead?”

            

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead as long as we think they’re alive, Zane. That’s the point. That’s where the power comes from. As long as we think our families are alive and that if we screw up then the government will kill them, then we’re not going to put a toe out of line. But why keep them alive when they don’t really need them alive?” I shrugged. “I’d like to think my baby sister is still alive out there. That’s why I’m going. If she is alive, well, obviously killing her isn’t going to stop me from going — I’m going after her despite the threats. And if she’s dead, well, then it doesn’t matter. They’ll have nothing to hold over me.”

            

“You’re insane,” Zane said. “Absolutely insane.”

“You don’t get it,” I told him. “You really don’t. Your dad was taken when you were four. Pike was a year and a half. And Taj had only just been born. None of you remember your father. It’s like he just died and you grew up without a dad. Your mother’s never spoken a controversial word in her life; she’s just a sheep. She’ll never stop being a sheep. And you and your brothers aren’t exactly rebels either. So you don’t know what it’s like, Zane, to have your family ripped apart, to have the people you love and care about taken away from you. I do. And so if there’s any chance of getting any part of my family back — well, I’m damned if I’ll sit here for the rest of my life instead of taking that chance.”

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Miri, part 3

Not happy with this section. It's too stilted and clumsy and really doesn't have any of the emotional weight that I wanted, but I'll fix it later. For now - onwards!

I don’t remember much about the days immediately following Mom’s death — most of it’s a blur. What I do remember is the funeral ritual, the night after she died. It’s one of those things you don’t really forget, you know?

            

I’ve heard that people east of the Anglor Mountains put their dead in the ground. West of the mountains, we don’t bury our dead — we light ’em up, send their souls skyward and let the flames and the smoke lead them to the peace beyond the clouds.

            

The funeral pyre has to be lit by sundown the day after someone dies. If it’s not, if the body isn’t sanctified, then the soul is trapped. It means things move pretty quickly after death, though, because all of the rituals have to be followed. Most of it isn’t done by the family anymore; things like the ceremonial cleansing and wrapping are done by Doc Jim. It’s been years since members of the family were responsible for those parts of the ritual.

            

I hadn’t ever really thought about any of the funeral rituals before. We don’t perform the rites for the people that the government takes away, because we like to believe what the government tells us and assume that they’re alive. The only family member of mine that I’d ever known to die had been Mom’s dad, my grandda Piper, and I’d only been about four at the time so I’d only watched and not participated. I’m not sure it had ever occurred to me that performing the funeral rites actually involved a dead body until I was standing next to my mother again.

            

Doc Jim had wrapped Mom’s body from head to toe in white linen, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to look at my mother’s blank face again. As Mom’s only living relative in Granite, it fell to me to light the incense around her body, anoint her eyes and temples with vanilla-scented oil, and recite the invocation; I walked through the steps automatically, feeling nothing, noticing absently how steady my hands were. When I’d finished the last repetition of the invocation, I took the torch from the priest at my elbow and thrust it into the stacked wood beneath my mother’s body. As I stood there, the flames leaping in front of me, I felt the heat against my face but didn’t move; as the flames flared higher, Doc Jim had to pull me away from the pyre. He stood by my side and wrapped his arm around my shoulders; on my other side, Zane slipped his hand into mine and squeezed tightly.

           

We stayed until the fire died down and only embers were left, glowing against the dark.

            

After the funeral, Allie stayed with me, cooked my meals and made sure I ate, stripped off my clothes and dumped me in the bath every day and scrubbed me until I was clean. I walked through those days without any sense of my surroundings or really being aware of what I was doing; if it hadn’t been for Allie I probably wouldn’t have eaten or bathed. I was grateful for her presence, though at the time I really didn’t much acknowledge her and when I did I wasn’t very nice to her. Allie held me when I cried and didn’t say anything when I snarled at her, although she did, kindly, comment on the amount of weight I was losing and the state of my hair. Despite having her stand over me every day while I chewed and swallowed, I dropped so much weight that my dresses hung off my bony shoulders like an ill-fitting burlap sack. My hair knotted badly that Allie couldn’t get the comb through it; instead, she took a knife to it, shearing off my hair close to my scalp until there was only an inch or two left.

           

“Jeez,” Zane said when he walked through the front door and saw me for the first time after the funeral. “You look like hell.”

            

I looked up from the satchel I’d been bent over. “Thanks,” I said, rubbing my hand over my head. “Allie says she asked me if it was okay before she cut it and that I said yes, but I don’t remember. I’m not sure I realised my hair was gone until I looked at myself in the mirror last week.” I sighed. “Allie said it’s been two months since the explosion. Did they find out what happened?”

            

“Faulty boiler,” he said, leaning against the door frame.

            

I took a deep breath. “I see. Stupid.”

            

“Yeah.”

            

I toyed with the ribbon I’d wrapped around my waist, twisting it around my fingers. “Your brothers — ”

            

“Pike’ll have a limp,” he said, coming further into the kitchen. “His right leg got cut up pretty bad by shrapnel. But he’ll be fine. I’m more worried about you.”

           

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. I frowned and looked around. “Have you seen — never mind.” I grabbed Dad’s flick knife from the counter and dropped it into the satchel on the table. “Allie’s decided I’m enough back to normal to live by myself now. I remember to eat these days.”

            

“I can see your bones,” Zane said. “You look like a walking corpse. It’s not very attractive. Eat more.”

            

“I’m trying. Everything tastes like ash.”

            

He winced. “I’ll have Mom make some stew for you.” He picked up a pan from the counter and turned it over in his hands. “Have you thought at all about what you’re going to do for work? Doc Jim said there’s a couple people in town who’ve said they’d be willing to take you on.”

            

“No,” I said, rolling up a dress and stuffing into the bag. “I’m not going to go to work.”

            

Zane blinked in surprise. “Miri, I know you’re still getting through your mom’s death, but — ”

            

“I’m leaving Granite,” I said, tucking the last of my supplies into my satchel and fastening the clips.

            

“Wait, what?”

“I’m going to find Kit.”


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Miri, part 2

I heard the explosion, but everyone in Granite is used to hearing explosions because of the work in the quarries so I didn’t think anything of it until my friend Zane burst into the house.

“The school’s burning,” he said.

The egg I was holding dropped from my suddenly numb fingers and smashed against the stone floor. “My mom.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Come on.”

I ran after him down the main road. A sooty plume of smoke rose above the school, or where the school used to be, filling the air with ash. Only a corner of the school was burning in earnest; the rest sported pockets of flame amidst the rubble. As Zane and I skidded to a stop, I saw Max, the fire chief, carrying a tiny limp body away from the destruction, and I heard a wail go up from one of the parents. And then I saw my mother.

      

She’d been thrown clear of the building in the blast and lay draped over one of the schoolyard climbing toys like a rag doll, her hand just brushing the dirt. Blood dripped down her arm and muddied the ground beneath her fingers. I cried out and pushed past the barrier that had been erected, dodging around one of Max’s men as he tried to stop me. And when I got close enough I realised that the blood was from my mother’s head, from the crushed skull and torn flesh that told me that she wasn’t going to get up and walk away. I dragged her down from the play structure and cradled her in my arms, oblivious to the red stain spreading across my dress, and thought about crying. But the tears didn’t come, and I just sat there rocking my mother for what felt like hours, only barely aware of the movements of the rescue and cleanup crews around me, until finally, at long last, Doc Jim crouched down in front of me.

            

For someone who worked with dead people, Doc Jim was an awfully normal man. And he was kind. My dog had died two months after Dad went away, and Doc Jim not only tried to save the dog for me, even though he really only worked on people, not animals, but he also brought me a puppy when his bitch whelped later that year. He was a good man.

            

“Hi, Doc,” I said faintly, staring at him without really seeing him.

            

He smiled sympathetically at me. “Hello, Miri,” he said. “Do you think I could take your mama for you?”

            

My arms tightened around her body. “She’s gone, isn’t she.”

            

“I’m afraid so.”

            

“Really gone.”

            

“Yes.”

           

I swallowed. “It’s like — when they take your family away, at least you can pretend they’re living this nice life, right?” Doc murmured in assent but didn’t interrupt, so I kept talking. “I mean, maybe my dad and my sister are dead and have been ever since they were taken away, but we don’t know that. I mean, how would we know? We can just keep pretending. But I can’t — ” I choked and stopped talking. “I can’t pretend Mom’s going to go off and live this nice life. You don’t recover from a smashed head. You don’t get up and walk away from being dead.”

            

Doc laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You need to let her go, Miri. The rituals need to be done.”

            

I took a deep, shuddering breath, and then, for the first time, looked down at my mother. The ruined side of her head was against my chest; from this angle, she looked normal, like she was sleeping. Except for the cuts on her cheek and her lip and the fact that she was pale. And it was so strange — I’d never touched a dead body before. Her fingers had gone cold, her face had gone cold, but her body, the skin over her heart — it was still warm. The life had long since gone, but not all the heat had disappeared. Even so, there was no fooling myself that she was going to come back to life; even without the head wound, it was easy to feel that there was no life under the skin. Even when sleeping Mom had always hummed with energy, and now that energy was just gone.

            

“Okay,” I said finally.

            

Doc Jim nodded to his assistant, who brought over a gurney. Between the two of them they gently lifted Mom from my arms and laid her down, pulling a blanket up over her face. Then Doc Jim held out his hand to me.

            

“Let me help you,” he said.

            

I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. I stood, wavering slightly, and watched the assistant cart my mother away, feeling completely numb.

            

“I don’t feel anything,” I said.

            

“It will come,” Doc Jim said. “When the shock fades away, you’ll feel more than you want to.”

            

I looked around blearily. “Oh,” I said, remembering, “Zane. Zane’s brothers. Are they—”

            

“They’re fine,” he said. “The younger one is a bit battered, but they’ll both be fine.” He put an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get you home and out of those clothes, okay?”

           

I plucked aimlessly at my blood-stained dress. “It was Mom’s favourite dress.” My red fingers caught my eye and I stared at them for a moment, briefly wondering how they’d got so bloody.

            

Doc Jim motioned someone over. “Allie’s going to take you home, Miri,” he said. “You remember my wife, Allie, don’t you?”

            

Allie smiled at me and replaced Doc Jim’s arm around my shoulders with her own. “Poor thing,” she murmured. “Come along, then, dear.”

            

I discovered that just at that moment, I quite frankly didn’t care what I did or who I was with, so I blindly followed Allie back down the road to my house. 


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Miri, part 1

New YA story. Only just started it, so it's still pretty rough around the edges. Names are subject to change since I haven't really settled on much of anything yet.

Also, dunno what happened with the formatting. Apologies for that!


When I was eight years old, the government came and took my father away. 

I don’t remember my dad all that well. I mean, I’ve got memories of him and stuff, but mostly I just remember him being really tall and having really comfortable shoulders. He used to pick me up and swing me around our living room every night when he got home from work. I know I look like him, because Mom’s got a picture of the three of us from not long after I was born. I have the same brown hair that flops over my face and the same grey eyes. I even smile like my dad. It’s my little sister Kit who looks like both of our parents — she’s got Dad’s grey eyes and Mom’s blonde hair and she looks like a tiny fairy, except she’s as stubborn as a pig. We’re both like that, though. That we get from both of our parents.

Which is the problem, really. 

You’re probably wondering what my dad did to get taken away. Let me ’splain to you how this works. You don’t speak out against the government. If you do, you’re not the one who gets taken away; they figured out years and years ago that if you arrest the troublemakers, that just fires up everyone else. What they do instead is take hostages to keep everyone quiet. So it wasn’t my dad, really, although he wasn’t exactly a model citizen. It was my mom.

Let me backtrack a little. About one hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago, we had ourselves a bit of a revolution. No one’s quite sure about how long ago it was — the emphasis in history class is more on the fact that the revolution led to our current beneficent leaders. But however long ago it was, the people pretty much decided they were done with the shitty lives they were living and rose up against the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was beheaded, his wealth repossessed, and we embarked on a grand new life of equality.

Well, that didn’t last long. 

Turns out the leaders of the revolution decided that they didn’t want to hand over power to the people once they’d accomplished their goals. At first they claimed they’d stayed in control in the capital just to ensure the smooth transition into equal treatment, but pretty soon it became obvious that they had no intention of relinquishing their power. And by that time it was too late. In a pretence of including everyone in governmental decisions, there were dozens of people living in the capitol under the same roof as the leaders of the revolution, but pretty quickly it turned out that they weren’t really guests. They were hostages, no matter what they were actually called. And as our fearless leaders began to make it obvious that life in Haldera wasn’t really going to become equal for all, they also made it clear that all of those people they’d been gathering, ostensibly to plan for the future, were in fact there as insurance against rebellion. Because if your husband or wife or child is sitting in the capitol with a figurative sword hanging over their head, you’re pretty unlikely to suddenly decide to object to the way things work. You’re not going to rebel when any step out of line might mean the death of someone you love. 

So that’s how it’s been ever since. Now, though, it’s more strategic. The government still keeps hostages, but it promises that if you behave, if your family behaves, then they might only take one person — and if you’re really good and no one in your family ever sets a toe out of line, then maybe they won’t take anyone at all. In the beginning, there were some really unpleasant public executions of the family members of the vocal protesters; the executions were broadcast repeatedly on all channels as a warning of what would happen if people though they could get away with challenging the authority of the government. In the case of the worst offenders, their entire families were made examples of. Daeleen Parker is the most famous of those who went up against the government and lost; she lost her parents, her grandmother, all three of her siblings, her husband, and her infant son before she finally went silent. Now there’s scattered protests, but there aren’t many of them. Because the thing is, people are willing to risk their own lives to change the world. People are willing to die for their causes. But most people aren’t willing to let the people they love die for their cause.


My mom was a persistent offender. I grew up listening to her complain about the government; she called them fascist and totalitarian and talked about one day getting out from under their dictatorial rule. When I was very small, she mostly only voiced her opinions around the dinner table; when she was eighteen and first starting to speak out, they took away her big brother, who she absolutely idolised. My uncle Terry was the only family Mom had, and since they didn’t have anyone else to take away from her she still protested from time to time. But then she married my dad, and she loved him so much that she shut right up because she was afraid that they’d take him away from her. And then they had me, and she was even more afraid because she didn’t want to lose either of us.

But my mom was bad at being quiet, and the older I got the worse she got at holding her tongue. I think all of the years of quietly talking about her objects with Dad, in the safety of their own home, had made her complacent. She’d been able to have all of those thoughts without any consequences. Gradually, little by little, she started whispering her thoughts to other people outside of our family. Then one day, my dad didn’t come home from work. We received the standard missive, of course, telling us in the most cordial of language that Ellis Donerson’s presence had been requested in the north on an extended visit to one of our main cities, to serve his government. That’s what the letters always said. They’d promise us that the family members taken would be well looked after and that they would be very comfortable — as long as the offending member of the family minded their tongue. They weren’t hostages, but guests — at least as long as the family behaved. If they didn’t, well, then they might kill the guest.

My dad was thirty-five years old when he was taken away. He’d been married to my mom for thirteen years. And not long after he went away, my mom discovered she was pregnant with my little sister, Kit. The problem was that even after Dad was taken away and Kit was born, Mom kept protesting. She was a teacher, you know, so she kept getting bolder and bolder about trying to incorporate her ideas into her classroom, until she just became too damn dangerous again.

When I was fourteen, Kit disappeared. She was only six. I don’t know why they took Kit and not me; maybe they figured that since she was only a kid, and she was the last thing Mom had to remember Dad by, that maybe that would finally shut Mom up.

And it did.

I have this memory of stirring soup for dinner one night, waiting for Mom to get home from marking papers after classes. And when she walked in the door, she stood there for a full minute, just staring at me, before finally walking over and crushing me in a hug. 

“I won’t lose you too,” she said against my hair. “I hate to say it. But they’ve won. As long as I have you, I can’t — ” She stopped, took a deep breath, and then finished by saying, “They’ve won. The only way to fight back is if you have no one left for them to take away. And I still have you. I hate it, but they’ve won.” 

After that, she was an almost distressingly model citizen. She never spoke out of turn, she never wavered from the state-sanctioned curriculum, and she never voiced another opinion about the government’s hostage policy.

And then when I was almost sixteen, she died.


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365 Days of Rain, part 10

The rest of this story may be found here.


Ryan was in a bad mood when I turned up the next morning. As I walked through the door he was finishing a conversation on his cell, which culminated with a sharp “goodbye” and him chucking his phone across the counter.

“Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?” I asked, dropping my bag behind the counter and leaning against the doorframe.

“Something like that,” he said. “A friend of mine is having a party tonight and I need a date.”

“What, and you can’t find one on such short notice? Pity.”

“Cute,” he said.

“So who was on the phone?”

“Jaime. Can you pull all of the Balogh off the shelves, tag them with a yellow sticker, and put them on the racks?”

I pushed away from the counter and wandered along the aisle until I found the Bs. “Who’s Jaime? Ex-girlfriend?”

He snorted and turned on the computer. “Hardly. She’s a barista at Batdorf.”

“You’re sleeping with her.”

“Not since November.” He stabbed at the keyboard with a vicious finger. “Hence why she won’t go with me tonight.”

“You must have dozens of go-to girls,” I said, pulling books off the shelf and stacking them on the floor.

He leveled an annoyed glare at me. I ignored him. “Apparently,” he said after a moment, “none of them are free tonight.”

“Gosh, it’s rough being you.”

“Say,” he said, doing his best to sound as though the idea had just popped into his head, “you’re not doing anything tonight, are you? You could come with me.”

“Can’t,” I said. “My friend Adam is coming up from Portland. I have to pick him up from the Amtrak station at a quarter past six.”

“He could come too.”

“What, won’t he need a date?” I inquired snidely. I gathered up an armful of books and staggered towards the turning rack by the register. “Or were you just trying to preserve your image?”

Ryan filched the top book off my stack and flipped through it. “There’s someone who’s going to be at the party that I’d really rather thought I wasn’t single.”

I snickered. “Okay, fine, I’ll go,” I said. “As long as Adam gets to go too, and as long as you drive.”

“Yup,” he said. “We can leave from here.”

I looked down at myself. “Is the attire for this party casual?” I inquired, indicating my jeans and t-shirt.

He winced. “Not exactly…”

Which is how I wound up walking out of Macy’s at six that evening carrying a strapless cocktail dress and matching heels that I was pretty sure I was going to topple out of as soon as I actually tried to dance in them. And promptly began to stress as soon as I slid into Ryan’s pickup and realised the time.

“We’re going to be late to pick up Adam,” I said. “It’s, like, a half hour drive from here.”

“So call him and tell him we’ll be late.” He sped through a yellow light and hit the freeway. “I hope he brought a nice shirt…”

Spence VI

Find the rest of this story here.

Faye moved the eggs around on her plate and shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t had many friends in years.”

“You’re shitting me. You had loads of friends here.”

Glancing up at him, she leaned back in her chair, putting her feet up on the table. “You’ve met my mother. She’s a loony. Makes it kind of hard to bring friends home.” She picked up a piece of egg and dropped it into her mouth. “And then when you’re famous,” she continued, “you get people who think being your friend will make them famous. Or they want your autograph. Or, my personal favorite, they think being your friend means they get to fuck you.” She shrugged. “I gave up on friends years ago.”

“Jesus,” Conway said, linking his hands behind his head and tilting his chair back. “That’s just sad.”

“Yeah, I spend all of my time weeping over how pathetic my life’s become,” Faye said sarcastically.

“Nobody’s going to give a shit about how famous you are here, you know.”

“Except super-excited fan-girls in the Iga.”

Conway laughed. “Katie. Yeah, her mom said she was pretty thrilled that you were in town. Although she didn’t sound real happy about how you treated her.”

“You’ve mentioned Katie twice. Who the hell is she? She’s not — ” Her eyes widened, and for the first time she glanced at his left hand, the fourth finger of which was conspicuously bare. Faye frowned. “She’s not your daughter, is she?”

He choked and brought his chair down hard. “Jesus, no. She’s one of my kids. My students. I ran into her mom — you remember Cindy Lanners — and she couldn’t wait to tell me about her daughter’s brush with celebrity.”

“Your students,” Faye said flatly.

Conway grinned. “High school English and drama and the boys’ baseball team.” Seeing her look of disbelief, he added, “We can’t all be famous, Spence.”

“But you hated school.”

“Life’s ironic that way.”

“Jesus.”

Conway stood and collected the plates. “So what are you planning to do while you’re here?” he asked, scraping the plates and putting them in the dishwasher. “Are you working on a new book?”

His back was to Faye, so he missed the shudder that ran through her. When he turned back around, she’d drawn one knee to her chest, her foot balancing on the edge of the chair. He swallowed. Her lack of clothing made it hard to concentrate.

“Maybe you should think about a shower,” he suggested when she failed to respond to his question.

Faye gave him a look. “Is that your way of telling me I smell?”

“Well, I wouldn’t suggest entering any beauty contests until you clean up a bit,” he said. “Seriously, why did you drink so much last night? The Mariners aren’t that bad.”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” Faye said, standing up. “Anyway, thanks for coming by, I guess. And breakfast. Thanks for that. Guess I’ll see you around.”

“Spence, it’s Saturday. I have nothing to do. Do you want to — ”

“Oh, go away,” Faye said grumpily. She turned and stalked down the hall without bothering to see if he was listening, unearthed a clean pair of underwear and a bra from her bag, and dug out a towel from Sarah’s linen closet. It was eerie, in a way; almost all of Sarah’s things had been left exactly where they had been when she was living in the house. The glasses in the cabinet, the linen in the closet… It struck home as Faye pushed open the door to Sarah’s bedroom and saw Sarah’s hairbrush on her vanity, her neat row of lipsticks, the jar of anti-ageing cream… Faye swallowed and shut the door. She wasn’t ready to deal with this — not physically, with a roiling stomach and a pounding head, and definitely not emotionally. Instead, she went to the bathroom at the end of the hall, closed the door, and locked it. She leaned against the wood for a minute, pulling herself together, and then dumped the towel and underwear on the counter and turned on the shower as hot as it would go. Sarah’s hot water had never been very good.

She stood under the water for a long time, letting it wash away the dried mascara and sticky alcohol and soothe her unhappy head. For awhile she tried to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come; instead, images flashed through her mind, of Aunt Sarah at her door in New York, of Aunt Sarah on the floor in her apartment, of the flashing police lights and the sirens fading into the distance. Of Barney growling at the door and of her flinching every time someone knocked.

When she climbed out of the shower, she was shaking. Fingers trembling, she wrapped her towel around her body and opened the bathroom door. “Conway?” she called. There was no answer, and a sudden panic flooded Faye’s body as she remembered that the back slider had been open and that if Conway had left, the front door would have been left unlocked.

She ran down the hall, leaving a trail of water behind her to sink into the carpet, and smashed into Conway as she rounded the corner into the kitchen. She screamed and kicked away from him, knocking her elbow against the door frame, before she realized who he was.

“Jesus Christ, Spencer, what the hell is wrong with you?” Conway demanded, crouching down in front of her and grabbing her arms.

“I thought you’d left the house,” Faye said, scrabbling at her towel to hold it up. “I was worried about the doors.”

“You look awful,” he said, sitting down next to her. “And terrified. Who did you think I was?”

His face flickered through her brain before she firmly thrust him away. “No one,” she said, lurching awkwardly to her feet. “I was just — startled.”

He stared up at her, debating whether to call her out on the lie, and finally said, “Okay.”

Caught off guard, Faye half-turned back to him. “Okay?”

He pushed himself to his feet. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever’s going on with you, you clearly don’t want to talk about it, so I’m not going to make you. But if you ever change your mind, you know where to find me.” 

Previous: Spence V