The Killing Jar (3 page)

Blake stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. His expression was adorably stern, like a little boy pretending to be a drill sergeant. “Come on, Kenna. You spend all this time making me listen to other people's music, when your stuff is just as good, and you hoard it away like it's some shameful secret. No matter what else happens tonight, just be proud of yourself for two seconds.”

I gritted my teeth to keep the truth contained. I would never be like him. Blake drew his quirky, deranged comics and posted them on his blog without a second thought. The comments people left ranged from fanatical praise to troll scum vitriol, but when I asked him if the belligerent comments bothered him, he just shrugged. “It's not personal.”

But the songs I wrote, the lyrics, the mournful, funereal, guilt-drenched melodies … those told the truth I guarded so carefully. The truth I could never admit, or I might see the answering candor in the eyes of someone I cared about.

Condemnation. Disgust. Revulsion.

He doesn't understand
, I thought,
because he doesn't know his best friend is a murderer. He doesn't realize that if you do something bad enough, it follows you for the rest of your life.

I didn't get a chance to answer his question. We were interrupted by Erin's voice shouting my name.

“Kenna! There you are!”

I turned, and saw my bespectacled twin waving, our mom at her elbow. I gasped as Erin darted into the crowd, weaving past a grouplet of hipsters and hippies.

I sped to Erin's side and snarled at the few jolly festivalgoers who didn't get out of her way quickly enough.

“Are you okay?” I asked, looking her over as though she'd been in a car accident. Anyone who didn't know Erin was my twin would never have believed we were even the same age, much less two halves of the same egg. Erin was so small and scrawny she could have passed for a malnourished, little-girl version of Keith Richards. There was no official name for the condition that forbade Erin from thriving in the body with which she'd been born. Whatever it was, it kept my mom and me in a constant state of alarm. Erin's bones were so brittle she could trip on a crack in the sidewalk and fracture her ankle, and her blood so thin she was liable to pass out if she had to stand too long. She had a bad heart along with asthmatic tendencies, but where my asthma seemed to manifest only during moments of stress, hers was exacerbated by pollution, exercise, dust, and a hundred other things I could list from memory.

“When do you go on?” Erin asked, pushing up her comically thick glasses, which had slid to the tip of her nose. “Are you freaking out? I'm freaking out! Did you know Lorde was only seventeen when she won a Grammy? That could be you!”

“If I ever win a Grammy, it will be because of you,” I told her.

Erin was the only person I never turned away when I was working on a song. I let her sit in the basement and listen to me play as long as she wanted. She may have had a broken body, but her mind was sharp and analytical. If my entry for Folk Yeah! had impressed anyone, it was partly thanks to Erin's critical ear.

Our mom wrestled her way through the crowd to reach us. She must have come straight from her bakery, Knead. Flour powdered her jeans and her shoulder-length, blond hair, which she always cut at home with a pair of scissors that needed sharpening. I had a vague childhood memory—my first memory—of my mom's hair long as a horse's tail, of sitting on her lap and wrapping myself in it like hiding inside a curtain. I would have thought I was imagining this version of my mom, but for the huge, intricate tattoo of a moth on her back, stretching across both her shoulders like a shawl. Whoever Mom had been before she had Erin and me, she must have been a lot more interesting than she was now. There was also the matter of our father—or lack thereof—and how Mom told us she didn't know his name. But Erin and I had done the math, and we knew our mom had been only eighteen when she gave birth to us. Much of her passion for life must have been lost to the stress of having one daughter who'd been knocking on death's door since she was born, and another who had
sent
someone through that door.

Mom took Erin's chin in her hand and tipped her head up to face her. “I told you to stay right next to me,” she said as though she were speaking to a five-year-old who'd wandered away in the grocery store.

Erin rolled her eyes, but redness crept into her pale cheeks. She was used to our mom treating her like a baby in front of me, but in front of Blake it was another story.

“Give her a break, Mom,” I said.

“A break is what she'll get if she falls or gets knocked down out here.”

“Can you guys please not talk about me like I'm not here?” Erin said, her voice small and barely audible over the buzz of the crowd.

Mom and I shared an anxious glance, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: if Erin's doctors were to be believed, Erin
wouldn't
be here much longer.

My twin was dying, and she had been all her life, ever since she was born blue and cold and with a hole in her heart. Our mom, too, had nearly died during childbirth right along with her. Afterward, she told us in a rare moment of openness, she went through a period of postpartum depression so vicious that she'd considered suicide. She probably would have gone through with it if it weren't for the fact that we would have become orphans without her. But Mom's postpartum depression had never really ended, and I thought I might have inherited my own depression issues from her. Then again, we both had plenty of practical reasons to be depressed, the first of which was the constant threat of losing the person we loved most.

When she was a baby, Erin's doctors said she probably wouldn't make it to her fifth birthday, but she had. Then they told us she wouldn't make it to her tenth birthday, but she had. Then they said she wouldn't make it to fifteen, and here she was, seventeen and still alive. But the thing I didn't tell Mom—that I hardly dared admit to myself—was that I had begun to sense a change in Erin. I couldn't explain it, but when I was near her, I felt her diminishing fast, the life hissing out of her like she'd sprung a leak.

But Erin didn't live like she was dying. She hadn't attended school since an accident on the playground in fifth grade, but Mom had homeschooled her and Erin had already gotten her GED and was taking online college courses. One would think she'd prefer to spend her time enjoying herself, but her nightstand and desk were stacked with books that made my brain hurt just to look at them. Historical biographies, Victorian novels, anything by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, or Neil Degrasse Tyson. I was in awe of her. If I'd been the one in her situation, I probably would have spent the majority of my time locked in my room crying and cursing God or whoever for dealing me such a crappy hand.

Most of the time I tried not to think about Erin's condition, but with the stress of my first live performance bearing down on me, and Erin and Blake looking at me with such hopeful expectations, it was all too much. Tears burned the backs of my eyes, and my mind whirled like a top about to spin off a table.

“I can't do this,” I muttered, but no one heard me because I couldn't get enough air into my lungs to make myself heard. How was I supposed to sing when I couldn't breathe?

Then someone in a Folk Yeah! T-shirt was calling out my number, beckoning me toward the side entrance to the stage. Blake pushed my guitar case into my hands and whispered, “You're going to be great.” Erin clapped and squealed with excitement.

My mom shocked me by reaching out and brushing a lock of gray hair back behind my ear. I couldn't remember the last time my mom had touched me, and I sucked in a breath as I felt the promise of energy restrained beneath her skin. My immediate impulse was to reach for it, to pull that energy into me, but I set my teeth and refused to comply. Mom withdrew her hand quickly.

“Go on,” she said, her smile sad and anxious and twitching a little at the corners. “Show them what you can do.”

I swallowed a fist-sized lump in my throat and nodded.

It happened fast and achingly slow at the same time. A festival liaison briefed me, then a sound technician miked my acoustic guitar, and before I knew it I was walking up a short flight of steps and onto a stage, looking out at hundreds of faces.

I searched for Blake and my family, but didn't see them. My eyes stopped on a middle-aged man with gray at his temples. He looked out of place with his brown hunting jacket and his dead, black stare. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn't decide who. And was it my imagination, the hatred and rage he projected toward me from those cold eyes of his?

My heartbeat thundered. I began to tremble and panic and reached automatically for my emergency inhaler, thinking,
One person in the audience already hates me, and I'm supposed to sing?
But my bag was gone, and I had a vague memory of handing it to the festival liaison to hold until I was finished. Could I subtly hint for her to bring it to me? Leave the stage for a second to retrieve it?

I tore my gaze from the man in the hunting jacket and my eyes finally landed on Blake, right in the front row, just off to the side so I hadn't been able to spot him right away. He stood with my mom and Erin. Erin was smiling so wide her jaw would probably be sore tomorrow. She had never in her life been allowed to attend an event like this, and she probably never would again.

My twin met my eyes, reading the distress on my face, and mouthed one word.

Breathe
.

I did.

Everything after that was a blur.

 

W
HEN
THE
M
USIC
'
S
O
VER

I rested my forehead against the chilly glass of the passenger-side window and watched the road slide by beneath Blake's 4Runner, a fast-moving conveyor belt carrying us home.

But I didn't want to go home, because then this night would be over.

“Can we keep driving?” I asked. To my bass-numbed ears, my voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a lake. My mom and Erin had left the festival shortly after I played, but Blake and I had stayed to hear the rest of the bands. For hours we'd lost ourselves in music and voices, in black night and white stars. I forgot to care if I won the contest. I'd played and that was all that really mattered. Erin was the happiest I'd seen her in years, and my mom had hugged me. Actually
hugged
me. It was a brief embrace, over almost the instant it began—before I could even acknowledge the hunger that raised its voice at contact with another person—but it was enough to tell me that something had changed between us tonight. Maybe the apprehension she'd held toward me since Jason Dunn's death was finally starting to fade.

And then there was Blake, who kept staring at me when he thought I wasn't aware, smiling like he was reliving a happy memory, who'd told me a hundred times already how great I'd been, how the audience had loved me, how they'd gone still and silent the moment I started playing and hadn't seemed to breathe until I was finished.

Blake, who made me feel good about myself, made me feel like I deserved to feel good.

He stretched his fingers on the steering wheel, like a racecar driver about to jam the pedal to the floor. “Any particular destination in mind?”

“No destination. Let's just keep moving forward.” I leaned back in my seat and let my head loll toward Blake. The glow of the dashboard gauges created a rim light that traced his profile. “This is probably going to sound dramatic, but everything seems different now.”

“Maybe it is.” His smile faded and he looked at me for a moment, nodding seriously.

Heat crept into my cheeks and gathered in my stomach. My will to resist Blake was weakening, and I wasn't sure I cared anymore.

Ahead, I saw the turnoff to the long drive that cut through several hundred yards of forest before reaching my house. An unfamiliar brown Bronco was parked on the side of the road next to our mailbox.

“Whose truck is this?” Blake asked, slowing into a turn and then pulling up next to the SUV.

Both of us peered into the cab, but saw no one inside.

I shrugged. “Maybe the driver broke down and didn't have a cell phone to call a tow truck.”

“Who doesn't have a cell phone?” Blake asked. He'd moved to the midsize Oregon town of Rushing from a pristine Connecticut suburb, where I imagined no one ever abandoned a broken-down SUV next to his mailbox, or if they did it would be promptly hauled away.

Blake accelerated slowly and continued down the gravel driveway to my house.

“What happened to driving all night?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.

Blake glanced over at me. “You were serious about that?”

“Nah,” I lied, and forced a laugh. “You know me. Spontaneity is my mortal enemy. Pull over here, okay? I don't want my mom to hear your car and wake up.” I was supposed to be home by midnight. It was almost two.

Frowning, Blake slowed and steered onto the shoulder, under a canopy of trees. He was probably counting the number of points he'd lose with my mom for keeping me out past curfew, respectable young man that he was.

“Relax,” I told him. “I'll sneak in through the basement window so she won't hear the front door. I have a whole system.”

“You do this often?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, I probably shouldn't tell you this because my order has a code and everything, but I'm a vampire slayer, which involves a lot of late-night outings.”

I was relieved when he chuckled and let the subject drop. I didn't want to tell him what I really did at night when I couldn't sleep. Didn't want to admit how often I snuck out and went to the place where I'd buried Clint Eastwood and her kittens. I brought my guitar, sat with my back against a nearby tree, and I played to the pile of smooth stones and sang so softly I was almost silent. I did it because sometimes it was too much temptation to be in a house at night with two helpless, sleeping people—two people who could provide the same thing Jason Dunn had provided, a way to be free from myself for a little while.