House of Glass (21 page)

“Are you all right?” her mother asked when she caught her breath, and Livvy was trying to say yes, that he hadn’t hurt her, he hadn’t done anything to her. She had gotten away before anything really bad could happen. Even though she would never forget the memory of his hands on her skin.

“I hit him with my mug,” she finally managed to choke out, but her mother just kept asking if she was okay. Finally she grabbed her mother’s hands and squeezed them hard.

“I’m
okay,
” she said, catching her breath. “How’s Dad?”

But her mother just held her tighter, sobbing into her hair.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Jen finally managed to catch her breath. “Were the police at the door?”

“No, Mom. It’s Aunt Tanya—”

“Tanya’s here?” Jen should have known the plan would never work, that whatever Jake told Tanya, she would come here to check it out for herself. And now Tanya was stuck with them, sucked into this nightmare, and it was her fault for letting Livvy try something so desperate and doomed to failure.

She had to keep her daughter from going down the stairs, because Ted was down there, and Ted was dead. He had died in her arms. There was no way Jen was going to let her baby girl see that, her girl who had already been through so much. Ryan sickened her, and if Jen was given the smallest opportunity, she would kill him for what he’d done.

It was all too much: her husband was dead, her baby was missing, her sister was about to walk into a nightmare and she had failed to protect her daughter. From the start, Dan had promised an orderly resolution, a simple transaction from which they’d all walk away. Instead, Jen’s world was shattered, and all that was left was for her to die, too.

Through her agony, she heard her sister’s voice, muffled by the door.

“Jennie! Oh, my God, Jennie, what is going on?”

Dan said something Jen couldn’t make out, and then Tanya cried out, her screams high and unintelligible.

All Jen could do was to pull her daughter close and try to cover her ears. In the next second, someone opened the door and pushed Tanya through. She fell into the wall, as the door slammed shut. Jen grabbed for Tanya to prevent her from falling down the stairs.

“It’s okay. I’m okay,” Tanya said but Jen couldn’t speak, and somehow the roles all shifted. Tanya gathered her and Livvy into her arms, and there was a shadow of a memory, another time when Tanya had held her like this. Another time when Jen was sobbing so hard that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and Tanya had saved her. No, that wasn’t exactly right. Tanya had...she had helped her, or found her, or—the past was getting all tangled up together with the present.

“We’re going down the stairs now,” Tanya said firmly. She supported Jen on one side and Livvy took the other. They went down the stairs in a tight scrum, the three of them clutching each other, Tanya making sure they didn’t fall, that everything would be all right.

“Don’t let Livvy see,” Jen whispered and Livvy twisted her body, trying so hard to look, but Tanya was stronger. She’d always been strong, a wiry alley cat. She’d only lasted one year on the cheerleading squad before she was kicked out for what happened after Homecoming, but during that year she’d done all the most dangerous stunts, held up girls heavier than she was, supporting their weight on her hard, knotted shoulders.

At the bottom of the stairs, Tanya took off her coat and helped Livvy into it, zipping it up over her bare torso. She didn’t ask where Livvy’s shirt was. Between the two of them, she and Jen got her over to the couch, shielding her from a view of Ted. But Jen had seen his body lying on the floor, curled like a letter
c,
his hand still clutching his wound. And she knew that Tanya had seen him, too.

“Mom—” Livvy gasped for air. Jen rubbed her back and exchanged a look with Tanya. Her sister’s face was pale as paper, her eyes wide and questioning. “What happened to Dad? Tell me. Please, I have to know.”

“Oh, honey...”

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Dan killed him. Dan did it, didn’t he?”

Jen hesitated, wishing she could keep the truth from her, that she could send her daughter back forty-eight hours into the fairy tale of Before, into the dumb luck good fortune of the life they never appreciated enough. She would happily give up her own life, if she could make things right for Livvy.

But that wasn’t possible. And now, her job was to let go of everything they couldn’t ever have again, and seize hard on what was left. What was left was her children and now her sister, a ragged and desperate cohort. Jen wanted to sink to the floor and fade away, but instead she had to be like Tanya: strong and fearless.

She swallowed, her throat raw. “Livvy...yes. Dan shot Daddy when he was trying to get help.”

Livvy made a sound that broke Jen’s heart: a wretched exhalation of grief and loss that sounded much too old to come from her baby girl.

“Daddy was brave and he was strong and he was going to get help, just like you went to get help. I am so proud of you both. I won’t ever be able to tell you that enough, honey. You and Daddy did everything you could because you’re fighters and you are strong and you are better than—so much better than these monsters. And that’s why we’re going to...”

She faltered, because what were they going to do, exactly? What reserves did they have left, what weapons to fight against the evil upstairs? She’d thought Dan could be reasoned with, but he’d proved to be just as reckless and dangerous as Ryan. They’d used all their wild cards, and all they had managed to do was ensnare Tanya, too, and now she was trapped in the same bloody, deadly web.

If only Jen could just lie down next to Ted and die with him. It was too hard—it had all been too hard, not just the invasion but the days leading up to it, the family that seemed to splinter a little more every day despite all her efforts to keep them together, the love that had escaped her marriage like smoke carried away on the wind, the sweetness of the babies she’d held in her arms. The past that never seemed to leave her but never came into focus, a shroud that prevented the joy from getting close enough to take hold of. The losses—her mother, her father, even her sister, all slipping away from her when she had tried to hold them tight. Wouldn’t it be best to just let it end, to go where the dead go?

But she couldn’t, and the reason was Livvy, holding on to her so tightly that she could feel the outline of every one of her daughter’s fingers against her back. And Teddy, out there somewhere. She would give everything for her children. She would find the strength; she would find the courage.

“We’re going to get out of this,” Tanya said, finishing the sentence that Jen had started.

“I’m sorry,” Livvy wailed. “It’s my fault. I thought Jakey would tell you to call the police, I never thought that you would—”

“He did, honey. He did exactly what you asked him to,” Tanya said. “You both did perfect. It was me...it was my fault. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just making things up, trying to get out of homework. But I’ve been calling you guys, I called your mom’s cell yesterday, and I kept getting voice mail on the house phone, and, well, I just thought... So I left Jake next door with Mrs. Bassett and then I came over here.”

Jen put her hand over her sister’s and squeezed. Their eyes met and Tanya nodded faintly, letting her know it was okay. She was taking care of Jen even now, even after all these years.

Somewhere along the line, Jen had lost faith in Tanya. But Tanya had never wavered in her faith in Jen.

“I’m here now,” Tanya said, squeezing Jen’s hand back. “I’m here, and that makes three of us, three brave strong women. Now tell me what the hell’s going on, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

* * *

Jen told the story quickly, leaving out the details she didn’t want Livvy to hear. Tanya winced when Jen told her about Teddy, her eyes darting to the window wells, inky dark now.

“And you think he’s at your friend’s house?” she asked softly. “If he got away when you were at the bank—I mean, honey, that’s more than twelve hours. Wouldn’t she have come over here by now to see what was going on?”

“She’s probably called a bunch of times.”

Jen told Tanya about the bank account, the money she kept sitting there in a vain attempt to feel safe, a notion that now struck her as so ridiculous that it was no wonder Ted had teased her about it all those years.

“But I don’t understand what happened to the money,” Tanya said when she got to the part about the bank visit. “It was just gone?”

Jen nodded. “It had to do with the construction,” she lied, aware of Livvy watching her. “He had to cover the cabinetry and...all those expenses.”

Jen could tell that Tanya knew she was lying, but she played along for Livvy’s sake. “Yeah, that makes sense. And then you got the transfer lined up, so tomorrow...”

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess...in theory we could still do it like we said we would. Me and Dan could go back to the bank. We could get the money.”

Which would mean leaving Livvy here with Ryan. And Tanya, yes, but all Ryan had to do was take her daughter upstairs again and do whatever he wanted. He would be angry now, frustrated, vengeful, brimming with whatever poisoned brand of bile he carried.

He and Dan were unpredictable. Really, what were the odds that they could pull off a trip to the bank tomorrow? Even if Dan let Jen fix herself up, even if she could disguise her emotions with makeup and clean clothes and pull off a convincing performance...it would never work. There was a wildness in Dan’s eyes, a grim realization that everything was fucked up.
Fucked up
on a cataclysmic scale, and what did guys like that do in situations like this? You only had to turn the TV on, any of those action movies Ted liked, to understand that when the chips were down the bad guys cut their losses, they left their dead, they got the hell out of Dodge.

“If I were them, I would be figuring out what I could take with me,” Tanya said. “I’d be looking around the house and taking everything that was worth anything that could fit in the cars. And I’d be doing it fast.”

“Because the longer you’re gone...”

“Yeah, for all they know I have a husband at home, people wondering where I went. Maybe I told my husband I wouldn’t be gone long, and now he’s worried about me. Or maybe I really did call the cops.”

“So maybe they’ll just go,” Livvy said hopefully.

“Honey.” Jen gently stroked her daughter’s hair. “Maybe you’re right—maybe they’ll decide that this has gone far enough and they have to look out for their own best interests, and they’ll leave. But we have to be ready for the possibility that they won’t. That they...”

“That they come down here and kill us,” Livvy said flatly.

“Oh, sweetie, no,” Jen protested, both her and Tanya pressing closer, protecting her the only way they could. “Not that.”

“But it’s true, Mom. Dan’s DNA is all over the house, but Ryan knows where it all is, and if they clean it up, they can still get out without leaving any proof it was them. But if they let us live we can ID them.”

“Baby, no...” But Jen knew it was true.

“Like Aunt Tanya said, they have to be worried about someone knowing she’s here. They’ve already killed Dad—” Livvy’s voice caught as she said it, but she swallowed hard and continued, her words running together fast. “And Ryan’s, like,
crazy
so you have to figure they aren’t going to think twice about killing anyone else.”

“So we have to be smarter than them now,” Tanya said grimly. “And stronger. It’s all or nothing time.”

“All or nothing,” Jen repeated, the words tasting like metal.

They had no reason to hold back now. And whatever shred of decency she’d thought she’d detected in Dan—the evidence that he was human, that he still operated from some moral code deep inside—she didn’t trust it now.

“Well, what are we going to do, then?” Tanya said, standing. “We aren’t just going to sit here and let them come to us, Jennie. There is no fucking
way
we are going to do that.”

She paced in front of the sofa. She reached in her pocket and pulled something out, something narrow that glinted in the dim bulb, something...familiar. It had a round loop at one end, a metal key ring, and she stuck her finger through it and twirled it around her finger nervously as she paced.

“What...” Jen said, but the more she stared at the thing the fuzzier it got, the twirling arc of it making her dizzy, making her vision swim.

“Oh, honey, you know what this is,” Tanya said, stopping in front of her. “Come on. Sid’s knife? I’ve carried it with me ever since that summer.”

Jen stared, trying to fight through the swirling haze of memory and forgetting, of the past reaching out for her. It pixelated and scattered, grains of sand swept by the wind, leaving only what Tanya held in her hand. Near one end, something winked in the burnished metal, a coin of red, before Tanya jammed the thing back into her pocket.

“Mom!” Livvy hissed, grabbing her wrist so hard that it hurt, yanking her back. “I hear them. They’re walking around again.”

“We have to be ready,” Tanya said grimly.

“But how?”

“Well, we’re not just going to sit here and wait for them to come get us.” Tanya grabbed Jen’s hand and pulled her up.

Livvy stood, too, the quilt falling from her shoulders to the floor. She put her hands through her mother’s and aunt’s arms, linking them all together.

“I think I know what to do.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

After Kate and her friend left, Teddy waited for Livvy, but she never came. Eventually the family he’d seen through the window came out of the restaurant, and one of the boys waved at him. Teddy followed them for a while, keeping his distance, but at the corner they crossed the street when the light was yellow, and by the time he got there it was red.

He walked in the other direction, where the girls had gone, hoping he could find them. But the streets were almost empty. An elderly couple got into a car and drove away. Teddy decided that if someone asked him if he was lost, he would say yes now. He would nod his head and if they still didn’t understand, he would try to use his words.

But no one else came along. Teddy walked down the empty street, passing all of the shops that were closed for the night. When he got to the corner, there was a store whose entrance was shielded from the wind and cold. For a long time Teddy stood in the entrance, hoping someone would come along. Finally he got tired and sat down, pulling the coat’s hem over his knees and shrugging his hands inside the sleeves to keep warm. But the tiled floor was too cold even with the coat, and Teddy started to cry. The mucus from his nose froze and became crunchy and painful. He wondered if Livvy and Mom and Dad were all looking for him now, unable to find him, and the thought made him cry harder.

After a while he stopped crying and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of the coat. He tried the door to the store, but it was locked. He looked in the windows. Inside, a few lights were on, illuminating window displays. One mannequin wore a dress and black boots and a jacket and a purple scarf. The scarf looked like it would be really fuzzy. Her plastic wrists held several bracelets. In the other window was an orange purse with a big tag sticking out of the top. There were other things, too, shoes and socks and jewelry. Things his mom might like.

If his mom was here, she would rub his fingers and his toes between her warm hands and they would tingle as they warmed up. She would make cocoa on the stove and let him put in the marshmallows, as many as he wanted. She would wrap him up in the soft green blanket and say “Where did your arms go, Teddy? Oh, no!”

Teddy lay down inside the coat. He pulled the hood more tightly around his face and closed his eyes. A little while later he put his fingers in his mouth. He had promised Mom he wouldn’t do that anymore, but he was very sad right now, and sucking on his fingers made him feel a little better. Inside the hood, his face was warm. He had drifted off to sleep when he heard people yelling.

Teddy sat up and saw three teenage boys across the street, sitting by the bushes at the end of a parking lot. One boy was on a skateboard, rolling it slowly back and forth, and the others were sitting on the curb. One of them had leaned a bike against a light pole, a trick bike with a low seat and thick tires. Teddy decided he wanted a bike like that when he got old enough.

The boys were smoking, which Teddy knew was one of the worst things you could do. Also, none of them were wearing helmets. Teddy wondered if their parents knew that they were riding around without helmets.

A police car pulled up across the street with its signal casting a strobe of blue light. The boys leaped up and scattered. One of them jumped on the bike and pedaled away, and the other two ran, leaving the skateboard behind. They made it around the side of the building, dodging trash cans, and disappeared.

Two policemen got out of the car, not hurrying. One of them picked up the skateboard and said something to the other policeman and they laughed. Teddy stood up uncertainly. His mom had always told him he could go to a policeman for help anytime he was lost or scared. She said he didn’t need to be afraid of them, and that he could tell a policeman anything. She had shown him how to talk to a policeman. Teddy pretended to be a police officer, and Mom pretended that she was lost and afraid, and she practiced saying her name and their address. She said he could practice, too, and they had switched and then Mom got to pretend to be a police officer. She was good at it. Teddy thought she would be a really good policeman.

Teddy walked slowly toward the policemen, his heart pounding. He was a little bit afraid of crossing the street, even though there were no cars. He looked both ways, left, right, left again. He started across the street, and one of the policemen noticed him.

“Hey,” the policeman said, looking surprised. “Hey, what have we got here?”

When Teddy got close, both officers bent down so they could look at his face. The light on top of their car was still lashing the street with its light, making Teddy blink.

“Hey, where’d you come from? One of those guys your brother?” The policeman pointed in the direction where the boys had run. But Teddy didn’t have a brother, and even if he did, his mom would never let him come out here at night.

“You out here by yourself?”

“Where are your parents? Are you lost?”

The officers took turns asking questions, and Teddy pushed his lips together and tried not to start crying again. He hoped they would let him get in their car. He wondered if they had the heat on. The sleeves of the borrowed coat dragged along the ground and, too late, Teddy wondered if they would think he had stolen it.

“Did someone bring you here?” The policeman was talking slower now. He was starting to look worried. “Hey, listen, son, what’s your name?”

Teddy opened his mouth and made the shape of his name. There were two clicks with his tongue, for the ‘t’ and ‘d’ sounds. He had practiced it many times before with Mrs. Tierney.

“I can’t hear you, little guy. Can you tell me your name?” The other policeman seemed nice. His nose was pink, and he had ears that stuck out from his head, and he was smiling encouragingly.

Teddy shook his head. He didn’t think he could say his name right now.

But he was so cold, and maybe, definitely, those guys that came to the house were gone by now, and Teddy just wanted to be home with his family. Teddy pushed out his breath the way Mrs. Tierney showed him to do when he was feeling scared.

“Do.”

Teddy was surprised. Mrs. Tierney said the words were in there when he was ready to use them. At home, with his family, he never thought about where the words came from. But with other people, they stayed stuck inside.

He tried it again. “Do.”

“Do?” the first cop said, like it was a question.

Teddy pushed out his breath again and then he said, “Do you know my mom?”