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“Did you leave because I did something to him? Something I don’t remember?”
He looks at me, his mouth half open like he wants to respond, but at the same time, he can’t.
“Answer me.”
Ben sighs, looking down at his shoes. Finally, he shakes his head.
“I think you should go home,” he says at last, turning around and opening the door. I can see Valerie inside, perched on the edge of a barstool, sympathy in her eyes. “Whatever it is you’re looking for… you’re not going to find it here.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
As much as I hate to admit it, Ben is right.
I’m not going to find what I’m looking for here. I have to start from the beginning—and the beginning isn’t the night Mason went missing. It isn’t the night Ben and I met.
The beginning is back in Beaufort. The beginning is the night Margaret died.Thatis the beginning—the tip of the first domino. The cataclysmic butterfly flap that sent my entire life into motion. I can’t ignore it anymore. I can’t pretend to believe my father’s lies, pushing down all the evidence I had seen for myself: the nightgown, the carpet, the mud. Because I’ve known, for a while now, how it looks. Where it points.
Not only with Margaret, but with Mason, too.
I’ve known, I’ve just refused to see it. I’ve refused to turn on the light. But the fact of the matter is, I can’t live my life in the dark anymore. I can’t. It’s been too long.
I’m in the car now, driving north along the coast. Home is less than an hour away, and still, I rarely go back. Only when it’s absolutely necessary. I haven’t called, haven’t given my parents warning of my arrival, because to be honest, I don’t want to commit myselfto it. I want to give myself the option of pulling up, seeing that house—myhouse—looming large behind that wrought-iron gate and simply turning around and driving back to Savannah, because I know the mere sight of it, the memories, might be strong enough to change my mind.
I drive across Port Royal Sound, my eyes skipping over the vast ocean, and into downtown, passing so many landmarks—all of them, in some way, a backdrop to my youth: Bay Street, teeming with tourists, where Margaret and I used to go for ice cream on warm Saturday nights. Pigeon Point and that old wooden playground where we would walk each weekend, the two of us holding hands as we crossed the busy street. I remember the slide, particularly. That shiny metal and the way the sun would make it as hot as a stovetop, but we didn’t seem to care. We would still rush up that ladder, over and over and over again, and glide down on our backs, our stomachs, our sides. I remember the skipping of our bare skin as our shirts rode up, our bodies squealing all the way down as they stuck to the metal like eggs on a frying pan. That tinny burn and the red welts on our fingertips that would eventually crust and peel.
I drive past the cemetery next, an unavoidable landmark, and look the other way.
Finally, I get to my street. I slow the car considerably, practically crawling toward the cul-de-sac, like a prisoner making his way to the gallows, stalling for time. My house sits at the very back of it, the endpoint of the road. Go any farther and you’d drop into the sea.
I pull off to the side, park on the grass, and climb out of the car, the whiff of salt and mud hitting me as soon as I open the door. The gate is still there; the plaque, still there, although by now, the ivy has grown so thick that you can no longer read the inscription. The jasmine is supposed to be in bloom this time of year, its nutmeggy smell infiltrating the air, but the tiny white blossoms, usually thinand spindly like starfish bleached from the sun, are brown and crusty instead, their pedals flaking off like dried skin.
Even the plants can’t escape the death of this place.
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, afeeling—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 thetwist 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 silentthank-youthat 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 crueldishonor, 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.
