Dwellers (8 page)

Why did I dream about this?

“Damn it Mona,” says the girl in the shirt, and Ivy puts a hand on her mouth. Ivy has recognized the voice. Who is it? We still can’t see their faces. “You’re no
fun.”

Mona is crying too hard to even get a word out. “I don’t— I don’t want—”

“But you enjoy this!” She throws an arm back and slaps Mona across the face. “You’re the one who came to
me.
You wanted me to hit you as hard as I can, isn’t
that what you said that first time?
”

Mona cries. “I want to go home.”

“God
damn
it,” the other girl says, frustrated.

We hear a man laughing. “Good Lord, you two,” he says. His voice sounds familiar.

Mona turns to the voice, somewhere off-camera. “I didn’t want to come here anymore, but she threatened to upload the videos. She’ll ruin my life!”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says the girl in the shirt, who slides off the bed and disappears from the frame. “I am so done with you.”

“I’m not,” says the man, not laughing now, and I watch a pre-accident Jonah enter the frame, naked and erect, his legs whole and woundless, and pin a struggling and crying Mona
to the bed.

There is no scream, no shocked interjection, just the three of us staring at the video. Seconds later, years later, I hear the rustle of Ivy’s clothing as she stands up. “I
think,” she begins.

Denials go through my mind.
The person in the video is not me. I am not Jonah. I am not a monster.

I am not going to hurt you.

“I think I have to go now,” Ivy says.

I am on her left. Louis is sitting on the armchair on her right. Everything feels slowed down. “Ivy,” I say, a warning both to her and to Louis, who is literally sitting on the edge
of his seat, ready to move.

Ivy bolts, moving to her left, dodging Louis’s hands. The mug lurches and falls to the floor on the carpet. The coffee spills. She hits my injured knee. I shout in surprise and pain, the
edges of my vision turning gray. When the nausea passes, I see Louis and Ivy thumping across the living room floor and out onto the rain-soaked porch.

“Help!”
Ivy screams into the storm as she runs on the driveway, but her voice is swallowed by the rain. I hear her still, a tiny sound:
“Help me! Help!
Help!”

I wheel myself to the door and notice someone standing beside the television.

A little girl in a white dress and a blue-and-gold falcon mask.

It’s the girl from across the street. What is she doing—

I stare at her. She lifts a finger to her mouth.
Quiet now.

I start to cry as I recognize her. How can I be so stupid? How can we be so stupid, letting anyone enter the perimeter?

“Louis!” I scream, my arms pumping as I turn the wheels. I reach the porch and feel the spray of rain on my face and body. “Louis!
Louis!”
Then I start screaming
his real name.

This gets his attention. I see him turn around, an unconscious Ivy in his arms, and my wheelchair tips over. Is she doing this? Is she punishing me now? I put my arm out to brace my fall. I land
hard on the porch, banging my knee again, my ruined knee, and black out for I don’t know how long.

When I open my eyes, Louis is standing between me and—

“Auntie,” he says. “Auntie, you need to let us explain.”

Auntie.
Leonora, but we have always known her as auntie. Grandfather’s cousin from the branch of the family tree that got slaughtered during the war. She was a survivor, and she was
a constant. She was terrifying.

I see her in her true form in front of Louis, a full head taller than him, the skirt of her long black dress glistening with gems—the blue and gold of the little girl’s falcon mask.
There is no little girl. There has never been a little girl, just a spy from the estate.

“Please,” Louis says. “He’s already hurt.”

Auntie doesn’t say anything. After a moment, she raises her hand and Ivy floats up from Louis’s arms and into the house. “Hurry up,” she says, following the levitating
girl.

LOUIS RIGHTS THE wheelchair and helps me up. “Louis,” I say. “We’re—”
Dead,
is what I want to say, but I have to grit my teeth against
the pain as Louis pulls me up and onto the seat. I can imagine my broken bones grinding loosely under my skin. I feel like throwing up right there on the porch, but I end up coughing instead. My
face and arms are slick with sweat despite the cool air and the heavy rain.

“Are you all right?” Louis asks.

“Louis,” I say again. My voice sounds like it’s coming from a deep well.

“It’s okay,” he says. “We’ll be okay.”

Auntie is standing by the windows looking at the rain when we go in. Louis wheels me back to my earlier spot and sits on the armchair beside me. Ivy is on the couch, still unconscious. There is
clotted blood on her hairline.

With her back still to us, Auntie raises her hand, and several things happen at once. The door closes, the curtains are drawn, the mug and the spilt coffee rise from the floor and return to the
table, the couch carrying Ivy moves until it is behind us in a dark corner of the room, and the armchair across from us pulls itself back to make room for Auntie. She walks across the living room
and sits down, folding herself into the chair, gracefully, like a dancer. Like water. And like water, her gaze flows from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. She turns her gaze to Louis, who
does his best not to look away. I look away.

True beauty inspires awe and fear. It incapacitates. It knocks the air out of your lungs. And Auntie is beautiful.

“Lovely house,” she says, sitting back, her hands resting on the arm rests, just a visitor enjoying the night’s conversation. She looks at Louis. “Lovely perimeter. It
gave me pause, I have to say. Forced me to make sure. I truly appreciate the effort. It was flimsy, though. And useless, in the end.”

Louis takes a deep breath but doesn’t say anything.

“My lovely boys,” she says. “But I prefer your old faces. I suppose your discarded bodies are already buried?”

We don’t answer. We don’t know.

“What do you call yourselves now? Jonah? And Louis?”

Silence, ominous and heavy, hangs over us, until I can take it no longer and I nod my head. Louis turns to stare at me as though I have betrayed him.

Auntie places an elbow on the armrest and cups her chin. “The names of the brothers you have murdered.”

The last word makes me jerk. “Auntie—”

“Tell me about body-snatching,” she says, cutting me off.

“It is,” I say, my heart hammering in my chest, “it is illegal.”

“It is
immoral.”
She is not shouting—she never shouts—but my ears are ringing. “You have killed two young men in order to take over their bodies and their
lives, and what right do you have?”

Words from our childhood. “We have no right,” I say.

She nods. “You have no right.”

“But Auntie—” Louis begins.

“No exceptions,” she says, and in my head I hear an annoying uncle saying,
It is ‘thou shall not kill. Period’, not ‘thou shall not kill, unless
–’.

Unless you meet a charming young college instructor who sexually assaults his students.

“You need to hear why we did it,” I find myself saying.

“I am not interested,” she says. “It doesn’t change what you have done.”

“If we didn’t do it, you’d kill us anyway.”

“Then you should have just faced death.”

I wipe my eyes. Is there no mercy, no mercy at all? “And Celeste?” I say.

“Celeste is dead,” Auntie says, as though everything is that simple. Just black and white.

“I wish I can see the world your way,” I say.

Auntie leans forward, crosses her legs, and folds her hands on her knee. I brace myself for a sharp rebuke, or better yet, a flick of her finger that will break my neck.

But instead she says, “The family wants you back.”

What?

“What?” I say. “That’s impossible. After everything that’s happened, Father would never—”

“Your father is dead.”

I fall silent. I feel Louis’s hand on my shoulder. For a moment I feel nothing—my father and I had never been close—but I remember my mother, alone now in that big house, and I
feel an ache in my chest, the sting of tears behind my eyes.

“It was his heart,” Auntie says and I think,
Pain is bad for the heart.
That night, my father must have suffered an insurmountable amount of pain.

“With your father gone, you are now head of the estate.”

I can’t imagine facing the family, facing my mother, with my new face, my new name.

“Do they know,” I say, “what we did after we left?”

Auntie stares at me for a few seconds and says, “No.”

“Maybe you should tell them first.”

“Your mother wants you back. I suppose a pardon is in order.”

“And you’d allow that.”

She stares and stares. “My opinion bears no weight in this matter,” she says.

“Whatever happened to ‘no exceptions’?” I say, brave now, but not brave enough to push it when she doesn’t rise to the bait.

I ask, “What will happen to Louis?”

She still doesn’t reply, but I can deduce enough from her silence.

“If we went back with you,” I say, feeling an ugly need to spell it out, “Louis will be put to death.”

Auntie looks at Louis, looks at me. Still, she says nothing.

“Either we will both be put to death, or we will both be allowed to live,” I say. “Because if I was pardoned and Louis was not, how will that look to the rest of the
estate?”
How can I be head of the estate if I have a face nobody can recognize?

“You have to go back to tell Mother,” I say, “and ask her how she wants to proceed.”

“I am hoping you can go back with me so you can tell your mother yourself.” She nods at the couch behind us. “But I see that you have loose ends to tie.”

Ivy. Meryl. I wonder if Auntie knows about the basement, if she can read my mind, right now. As children we believed she could do that, which made her more terrifying in our eyes.

Right now, I can’t say for sure.

She stands, and Louis stands with her. I would have done the same—I actually leaned forward, only to feel my legs tying me down like boulders—because old habits die hard.

“Tomorrow,” she says. We nod. She looks at Louis. “Your father is grieving.”

“I know,” he says.

“I will need to tell him, as well.”

“Yes.”

She moves as if to turn to the door. At the last moment she pauses, steps forward, and places a finger on my knee. She puts no pressure on it—it is so light her finger could have been
hovering—but I nearly scream.

“I can mend your bones,” Auntie says. Louis has taken a step forward with his hands slightly raised, as though planning to tackle her.

I nod, but in my head I am screaming
take your finger off take it off take it off take it off—

“I can,” she says, “but I won’t. Do you understand why?”

They were nearly the same words she told me when I fell from Grandfather’s tree when I was eight.
Your mother has told you several times to stop climbing this tree. I can fix this, but
I won’t. Do you understand why?

I do. I nod.
Because I don’t deserve it.
She turns without another word and steps out the door, the imagined weight of her finger like a brand on my knee, the sound of the rain
spiriting her away like a black cloak.

LOUIS SITS DOWN again. I can hear him cursing under his breath. I have no anger left; in a strange way, I am relieved. What was bound to happen has happened. Now I can move on,
now I can stop hoping. Hope is a fragile thing, but it is a heavy thing, and the pain in my bones is heavy enough as it is.

Ivy begins to moan, first like a person awakened from a dream, then like a person injured. Louis stands up, goes to his room, and comes back out with a pen and a notepad. Ivy touches her
forehead and sits up. Louis starts to draw something, but I touch his arm, shake my head. This is mine. I take the pad, draw the necessary symbol, and tear off the page. Ivy screams, tears flowing
down her face (
Help help help me please help)
, and abruptly falls silent when I hand her the piece of paper. She takes it and sighs, shoulders slumping, muscles and mind starting to
relax.

“You raped Mona,” Ivy says. No hysterics. No anger. No fear.

“No,” I say. The calm is a welcome change. “I’m in Jonah’s body, but I am not Jonah.”

Louis sits beside Ivy with the first-aid kit and begins to clean her wound. She doesn’t flinch.

“I loved Meryl, you know,” Ivy says.

“I know.”

“But I didn’t tell her because I didn’t think she was interested in me that way,” she says. The tears fall again, but she no longer sobs. She looks at me. “I should
have told her.”

I take her hand. “I’m so sorry, Ivy.”

She frowns, thinks. “You’re not Jonah?”

I need her like this, slow and vague, but receptive. Or else she’ll be clawing out my eyes, running screaming into the rain again.

“No,” I reply.

“Are you sure about this?” Louis says. The lid of the first-aid kit clicks shut.

“I don’t know,” I say. But I do know. Either we tell her or we kill her.

I decide to tell her.

Let’s say my name is Jonah and he is Louis.

Even here, in this story, I can’t make myself tell you our real names.

15

I WAS NINE years old the first time I saw someone die.

It was a bright February morning, very early, very cool, the morning light just beginning to touch the trees.
Bring the children so they’ll learn
, Father said, and so we went. The
whole family—aunts and uncles chatting, yawning, shaking their heads, arms draped over my younger cousins—stood in a secluded garden just outside the estate cemetery. I could see our
home, the main mansion, in the distance, luminescent like a pool of water. My grandfather had his hand on my shoulder. The day had a festive air.