As Night Falls (20 page)

“Enough,” Nick said irritably.

He flashed out a hand, but Sandy ignored it. She crawled forward, stopping only when Ben twisted sideways, scaly pain covering his face.

Sandy sat back, and cold air filled the space between them. Ben lay with his legs as heavy and motionless as pipes. Only his back moved, curling in on itself.

Nick's shoulders hitched, and he took a restless look around. “Come on. It's freezing. And we've been down here long enough.”

“Take care of Ivy.” Ben spoke into the blanket pooled beneath him. “Can you do that? Can you keep her safe now?”

The question struck Sandy with the force of a slap. Ben was asking many things. Not only whether she could protect Ivy from Nick and Harlan, but whether she could do better by their daughter than she had for Ivy's first fifteen years, teach her honesty and bravery and truth.

She nodded once, then again.

Ben let his eyes close.

Sandy didn't see anger or even betrayal any longer in the dusky pools before they fell shut. Instead, Ben looked terrified. As if for the first time in his life, something was coming for him, and he was helpless to get away.

I
vy trudged up the stairs, hearing Harlan breathe behind her. Harlan. What a stupid, hick name. She hadn't thought much about it until her mom had said it out loud. Nobody called Harlan belonged in their lives.

Ivy couldn't believe how he and Nick had so thoroughly laid waste to her life. What was she supposed to do at school now when she saw Cory?

Something squeezed deep below the place her furious thoughts resided. Something sickly scared that anger couldn't touch. Would she even go to school again? What was going to happen tonight?

She stooped and snatched up the hoodie she'd abandoned. How dumb she had been to take it off. What she'd done to Cory was a million times worse than wearing something lame.

They made it down the hall to her bedroom. Harlan pushed the door open—a panel of wood so heavy Ivy herself had to apply muscle to budge it—and it flew backward, striking the wall with a
thud
.

Inside, Ivy flopped facedown on her bed as she'd done so many times when she'd been angry at her mother or father or both. All the fights they'd had seemed so stupid now, bits of dust and vapor that blew away as soon as you focused on them.

“You did good down there,” Harlan told her.

Ivy lifted her face from her pillow. That disgusting tuft of fake fur sat beside it. She rolled in the opposite direction. Harlan was sitting on her wheelie desk chair. You couldn't even see the seat beneath him.

“I bet Nick is glad,” he said.

“What do I care if that bastard is glad?” Ivy muttered.

Harlan's brows drew down. “Don't talk like that.”

“Like what?” Ivy said, just as angry.

“Like that,” he replied helplessly. “So ugly. You're a girl. Girls don't talk like that.” A faint smile took hold of his mouth, lifting it like a hot air balloon.

“What kind of paternalistic crap is that?” Ivy said into her mattress. “
Free to Be You and Me
much?
Girls Can Be Anything
?”

“Patern…” His voice trailed off.

Suddenly Ivy hated herself. Playing mental games with someone whose mind she knew was…compromised. Ivy only knew these things because back in better days, her mom used to talk to her about the seventies and women's liberation. And now Ivy was no better than Darcy, darting like a butterfly around the special kids who were mainstreamed into their classes.

She got out of her sulky plunge, and sat with her legs crossed on her bed. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm a—” She stopped before she cursed again. Hanging out with convicts was having an effect on her mouth. “Do you really think girls talk nicely?”

Harlan shrugged huge shoulders, and the gesture looked shy. “My sister did.” He paused, then let loose with the longest burst of words Ivy had heard yet. “She used to always ask me first if she needed something, and she'd say please and thank you. I was pretty happy to have my kid sister around.”

“Really?” Ivy said. “I like being an only.”

He looked at her, a crevasse appearing on his brow.

“Child,” she supplied, noting his confusion. “It gives my mom a lot of time to spend with me. We come from a long line of just one girl,” Ivy added. “My mom's an only child, too.”

Now Harlan looked even more confused.

“Anyway…” Ivy twisted the fringe on one of her decorative pillows. “How old is your sister?”

Harlan didn't answer.

Ivy set the pillow aside, and scooted forward. “I guess she's a grown-up. Unless she's a lot younger.” She realized she wasn't really sure of Harlan's age. It could've been almost anything.

Harlan lifted his head slowly. It looked like it took effort to do it.

“Is something wrong?” Ivy asked.

“I just don't get…”

“Get what?” Ivy asked. She felt like when she was babysitting and the game had gone on too long.

“How your mom can be an
only
—” He broke off. “I like that word.”

Ivy nodded.

After another moment or two, when Ivy was back to fiddling with the fringe, and almost back to lying facedown, contemplating the mess of her life, Harlan finally finished his question. “—when she has a brother?”

“My mom doesn't have a brother,” Ivy said.

Harlan nodded. That huge head jogging no less effortfully. “Sure she does.”

Ivy looked down at her finger. It'd gotten cocooned in a length of fringe, and the skin was purpled and pulsing. “No,” she said. “She doesn't.”

“Then who's Nick?”

All the jagged edges, the pieces of her life that had never entirely added up, speared Ivy. She brought her head down into her hands, clenching her skull as if she could drive out this new knowledge. Even though it made everything suddenly make sense.

How her mother never talked about where she grew up, although from her dad Ivy knew it was a town just a little north of here. So why had they never visited? Ivy's mom didn't refer to her family either, even though Ivy had started to ask about them. As far as Ivy knew, she had no grandparents on her mother's side, but how was that even possible? It was like her mom had been dropped from the mother ship. Yet she knew this place, Wedeskyull, so well, and sometimes certain people in town seemed to know her. Ivy lifted her face out of her palms, and looked at Harlan sitting in her desk chair, and she knew he had told her the truth.

And hadn't Ivy sensed it for a while beneath the watery surface of their lives? The realization had finally broken through tonight, when Ivy hurled her accusation. Her mom had been lying all right. In a million years, though, Ivy wouldn't have guessed it'd be about this.

Harlan was making a weird noise, almost like he was holding back laughter. As Ivy stared at him, the laugh broke free, throaty and wild.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I know it's not nice to laugh. It's just…I never…never…” He began to wind down, perhaps realizing that Ivy wasn't laughing, or even smiling. “You didn't know Nick was your uncle? Why did you think we came here tonight?”

Ivy shook her head. She was stuck on the uncle part. No wonder something about Nick had seemed familiar to her. They were
related
.

She shuddered.

She'd never had many relatives to speak of, just a grandfather she barely knew—he'd been sick for a long time before he died. And now the one she did have was a psychopathic convict. Who knew what he'd gone to prison for? Maybe for taking families hostage. Or worse.

Ivy's skin went crawly and angry hairs stood up along it. It wasn't just her uncle who had done that; it was her
mother's brother
. What made Ivy suspect that her mom was keeping a secret? She still couldn't say what had given it away. Little kids accepted whatever they had or didn't have, but as soon as Ivy had begun asking her mom questions about the past, there were holes that never got filled in.

She'd fallen into one of those holes, her and Cory.

And it was all her mother's fault.

Ivy went hollow, a husk with no creature inside it. The blankness her mom had put between them, everything unsaid and unrevealed, was all that she had left. She wasn't even mad at her mom. The frightening thing was that she didn't feel anything toward her at all.

After a while, Ivy became aware that her bed had sunk and Harlan was now sitting beside her. She turned chalky, dead eyes on him.

“Know why I was laughing before?” he asked.

“Haven't got a clue,” Ivy said flatly.

“It's 'cause I never know anything first,” he said. “Before someone else, I mean. Once someone told me, ‘Even the dog knows what's going on before you do, Harlan.' ”

Oh, how Ivy wanted her dog. Was Mac okay down there? She didn't want him to be hungry, or thirsty, or have to go and not know what to do if he wasn't let out. It occurred to Ivy that Mac was the only member of her family she could really count on.

Harlan's face bunched up. “That was my daddy. He was the one who told me that.”

Ivy frowned. That was mean enough—coming from a parent—that she figured she should say something even if she was still so mad that every muscle had clenched up inside her. But she couldn't think what.

From downstairs came a voice that should've been familiar, but sounded like it belonged to a total stranger. “Ivy! Come down here right now!” called her mother.

B
arbara caught a glimpse of herself, reflected in the window as she wrapped a scarf around her head. Perhaps it was the scarf—or more than that, the whole of what she acknowledged was a rather bygone look compared to the shoulder pads and mannish suits all the smart ladies were wearing these days—but Barbara's appearance took her by surprise.

How old she looked.

She paused for a moment, one hand halted in tucking up a tuft of hair. Was that really her face, as crenulated as a walnut, beneath its chiffon wrapping? Barbara had actually been feeling rather jaunty, setting out on errands by herself. She'd chosen her prettiest scarf, a recent birthday gift from Gordon, to wear. Yet the image in the window looked unsettlingly like her own mother, who'd always said that raising Barbara and her five sisters had destroyed her, hollowed her out until there was nothing left inside.

“Nicholas!” Barbara called in an unsteady voice. An old woman's voice. “I'm on my way. Make sure to keep an eye on things here. And do your homework.”

Her son's voice sounded strong and sure where hers was not. “It's Nick, okay? And I always do, don't I?”

A smile lifted Barbara's mouth, imparting a feeling of restored vigor. This was one part of her life that had grown easier at least. She had time on her own now, and the ability to move about unencumbered. Nicholas—
Nick
—was fourteen, one of the cool kids at school, with friends who gave one another nicknames. He was more than responsible enough to hold down the fort.

“Yes, you do,” she called back.

She looked at her reflection again, and felt a jolt of relief. Now she appeared almost girlish, flushed beneath the scarf, the pink fabric trembling on a current of air. Raising her son made Barbara feel young again. How sad for her mother that she'd been saddled with so many daughters, rendering motherhood a blood sport, girls trampling over her in their haste to grow up and become women themselves, one by one beating her into the ground.

Barbara went to the grocery store, she went to the post office, then on a lark, she poked her head into the beauty parlor in town.

“Help you?” the woman behind the desk asked as the bells on the door jingled.

Barbara nearly backed right out again. She didn't recognize the woman now working here. She was young, not much more than a girl, and she had one of those terrible new hairstyles, scalp-short on one side, brushing her chin on the other.

But she gave Barbara such a bright smile that Barbara hesitated, and the girl let out a laugh. “Don't worry. I had my asymmetrical done downstate.” She wrapped a piece from the longer side around one finger. “Shelia's here today and she'll cut your hair perfectly normal.”

Barbara began unwrapping the scarf from her head. “I suppose I could do with a freshening up.”

Shelia looked up from a chair where she was styling another customer.

“Want to wash her for me, Tiffany?” she asked, and the new girl stood up. She led Barbara back past the customer whose hair was being wound around curlers, and shook out a smock as she waited for her to sit down.

Until her hair had been trimmed and she was sitting underneath the dryer, Barbara didn't realize who the other customer was.

Once she did, she deliberated whether to pretend she hadn't seen, continue flipping through out-of-date pages of
Family Circle,
or if she should say something.

There was no reason not to be friendly, she concluded at last. They had fallen out of touch, but that wasn't Barbara's fault, was it?

“Glenda,” she said, leaning over to touch the woman on her smock. “How nice to see you.”

The pastor's wife turned her head inside the plastic bubble. “Yes, Barbara, you, too,” she replied in a way that gave Barbara the sense she might've known all along who was sitting beside her. “I hope you've been well?”

“Very well,” Barbara replied. “And you? And the boys?”

Glenda glanced down at the no-less-out-of-date pages on her lap. “Well, thank you. Everyone's doing just fine.” Then, as if she couldn't help herself, she added, “Adam's finishing up seminary this year.”

“How nice for him,” Barbara murmured. She waited for Glenda to inquire in kind, but the silence went on until it bordered on rude.

Finally Glenda asked, “And your own two? How is your son and how is the darling Cassandra? I do get to see her from time to time. She's taken such an interest in youth group.”

“Has she?” Barbara replied. Her mouth had gone tight, as if she were trying to hold a pebble between her lips. “Well, Nicholas is doing wonderfully. Nick, I mean,” she added with a merry trill. “We finally found a school that can keep up with him.”

They had kept Nicholas out of both nursery school and kindergarten in the end—too constraining—and when his first and second grade teachers had proved lackluster at best, hunted for a facility that would provide what all the scholars called for these days. Child-centered education. Curricula that acknowledged each student's unique gifts, instead of trying to place them in a set mold.

“Yes, I heard,” Glenda murmured. “That military school in Wedeskyull.”

“Prep school,” Barbara corrected. “It's been wonderful. Expensive—but then, we only have the one child who really requires an enhanced education.”

Glenda set her magazine aside, and twisted around to lift up the hood. Curls clustered like grapes on her head, each glistening with moisture.

Shelia hurried over, administering a quick pat. “You're still a little damp, hon,” she said. “Give it ten more minutes?”

“No,” Glenda replied. “I don't believe I will.” She pressed a fold of bills into Shelia's hand and walked out of the shop.

At the house, Barbara began lugging in her purchases, tossing her new, lighter sheath of hair as she set things down. She had run late in town, meandering around after her appointment at the beauty parlor, and darkness was already starting to fall. Barbara was just returning for the last, considering calling out to Nicholas for help, when she heard raised voices that made her hurry back out to the car.

Best to leave the children to their argument. Gordon was always saying that Barbara intervened too much and that kids needed to be allowed a fair fight.

Inside again, she nudged bags with her knee from the hallway toward the kitchen.

“Do 'em better than that,” came her son's voice, loud enough to carry. “Mama'll ream you out if you leave all that grease on 'em.”

There was a reply that Barbara didn't quite hear.

“See that speck?” said Nicholas.

Barbara felt a clamp of annoyance. Could the child not even learn to keep house?

“Here,” Nicholas said helpfully. “Try this.”

There was a scream, so high-pitched and sudden that Barbara knew she could delay no longer. She stooped to pick up two of the heaviest bags, before making her way into the kitchen.

“Nicholas?” she called out. “Nick, I mean? Look at me, I got my hair cut—”

Nicholas spun around at the sink. “I don't know what happened, Mama. She was doing the washing and then she just started screaming.”

Barbara's gaze flicked to the sink. Cassandra was standing on a stool, arms thrust out before her. They were as stiff as a length of rebar, flaming a livid red. Cassandra clawed at her skin as if she intended to peel it off, still letting out those frightful shrieks. Barbara walked closer. In addition to a bottle of dish soap on the porcelain surround, there was an open jar of lye.

Barbara turned off the hot water and moved Cassandra's arms underneath the cold, taking care not to touch the skin until it was rinsed clean. Whether from the effect of the lye, or because the child really had stripped off her own skin, the pieces had a blotchy, bubbled appearance.

“Nicholas,” Barbara said. “Get me the butter out of the fridge.”

Nicholas had been leaning back against the counter, but did as he was told, turning and bringing over a tub. Barbara tried to smear the fat on the reddened flesh, but the skin was loose in places, and the child's screams began anew. Barbara had to settle for dabbing pieces of butter on wherever they would stick.

“Why ever did you think to use lye?” she asked after she had done the best job she could.

Cassandra raised her face. The skin on it appeared almost as red and swollen as that on her arms. “I—I didn't, Mama.”

Barbara flinched.

Nicholas took a step away from the counter. He'd stayed here all this time, concerned for his sister.

Barbara sent him a small smile. “Next time, perhaps, you'll do housework as I teach you.”

“I tried,” Cassandra whimpered. “Nick said it wasn't good enough.”

“That doesn't mean you should use lye.”

“I didn't,” Cassandra said again. “Nick—”

Barbara turned on her so suddenly that Cassandra slipped off the stool. She fought to regain her balance without use of her arms.

“Mama,” she cried. “My arms don't look right, do they? Do they look okay to you, Mama? They hurt so bad.”

“It's okay, Cass,” Nicholas said. “They'll get better.”

Cassandra's shoulders sank, and after a moment she nodded.

Barbara followed Nicholas' gaze. “Your brother's right. They just need time to heal.”

There was a heavy beat of footsteps, and Barbara, Nicholas, and Cassandra all looked up at once. No one had heard Gordon arrive.

“Darling,” Barbara said. “I'm afraid I don't have dinner on just yet—”

“What happened?” Gordon demanded. He took a single step forward and lifted up Cassandra, his big hands wrapping her waist so that her arms could stay thrust out, untouched. “Oh sweet Lord, baby, what happened to your hands?”

Cassandra began to screech once more, sounds that made you clap your hands over your ears. Barbara barely heard Gordon begin to comfort Cassandra in singsong.

“Okay, it's okay, baby. We're going to get you help.”

Car keys clamped between his teeth, Gordon held Cassandra aloft as he ran with her toward the front door.

“It hurts, Daddy!” came a bracing cry, like cold water thrown.

“I know it does, baby. I know. But it's always worse at night. Trust me, this is going to be much better in the morning. Things are always hardest at night.”

It was two a.m. when Gordon returned from the hospital in Wedeskyull. Cassandra hadn't required specialized treatment at another unit, or even overnight observation.

“Only second degree,” Barbara said, once Gordon had come back downstairs, having gotten the girl settled. He sat down in his chair, across from Barbara on the couch. But he didn't speak or even look at her, and Barbara felt compelled to go on. “It could've been worse.”

“Grease,” Gordon said. “It's the worst thing you can do for a burn.”

“Imagine that,” Barbara said, robotically.

Gordon's forearms lay along his thighs, his hands fisted. He lifted his head and regarded her in the lampless dark. “How did it happen?”

Barbara looked away. “I don't know why she decided to use the lye.”

“She did,” Gordon said. “Cassandra?”

“That's right,” Barbara replied. “Well, I wasn't there, of course. I had about a million errands to run today,” she added merrily. “But Cassandra was the one washing dishes. Nicholas—did you know we are to call him Nick now, darling?—said something about trying to get off some very tough grease.”

Gordon looked down at his lap. After a long moment, he nodded. “I think I've figured out what to do.”

Barbara was barely listening. “What to do?” she repeated.

Gordon linked his fingers together. “We've got to give Nick an outlet for his aggression.”

Her husband said the name as if he had long since made the switch, as if somehow Barbara had missed something essential in their son's growth and development.

She responded less rotely. “Nicholas isn't aggressive!”

She couldn't see enough to make out the expression on Gordon's face, but she sensed her husband sitting there in the dark, his hunched-over form and fast, irregular breathing.

“It's what my father did when I was a kid, getting into fights, not caring much about anything.” Gordon braced his hands on his knees and stood up. “Funny as it sounds, it was probably the thing that gave me the most reverence for life.”

Barbara felt suddenly consumed by a pressing need to see. She leaned over and flicked on a lamp, and the room flooded with brightness. The bulb illuminated pieces of furniture, the walls that contained them, and each shadowed entry into other parts of the house.

Shielding his eyes against the sudden flash of light, Gordon said, “I'm going to teach Nick how to hunt.”