The Safest Lies (16 page)

Ryan peered out the front window. His car was somewhere out there, around the bend, parked outside the gate on the side of the road. He glanced at me, and back to the gate, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.

If both people were at the back gate, could we make it?

Could we get through the gates undetected, start up his car, and make a run for it, leaving the abandoned house to them while we went for help? Or would they follow, drive us off the road before we could call for help—

My breath started coming too fast, and I steadied myself against the wall.

“We should’ve left, the second we thought something was wrong,” Ryan said. He balled up his fists again. “That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what I’m
trained
to do.” I felt the tension leeching from his body, filling up the room.

Really he must’ve been thinking,
I should’ve stayed at the ceremony. I should’ve gone back with Emma and Holly and that other girl. I should’ve decided to call the police for myself,
before
we heard the car.

Really he must’ve been thinking,
My life is in danger
again,
because of you.

I stared at the windows, at the doors, at the black iron gates, and I saw them all through his eyes. They were not his protection, like they were for me. He was nothing more than trapped here. With me. For no reason.

Hanging from the car, tumbling past me, tethered by a rope—his fate tied to mine.

I had to get him out of here.

“What’s that guy even doing out front?” he continued. “Why not help the other one, out back. It’s like…” He swallowed. Shook his head. Changed his mind.

“Are you ready?” I asked, before he could give voice to the thing I realized too:
It’s like they’re watching for us. Making sure we don’t leave.

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Yes. Open the door.”

I flipped the lock and put my hand on the knob. Paused.
This house will keep us safe.

No. We weren’t safe. We were trapped.

I turned the knob and the front door cracked open, a cold gust of air pushing through.

I listened to the warning beep, and then, ten seconds later, the alarm started flashing. The light from the display flashed red, over and over, and there was a low, periodic buzz coming from the panel.

That’s it?

It wasn’t loud enough. It was only enough for us in this house—to wake us, or warn us. My alarm clock was more obnoxious than this.

It was only a warning—a call to action. But just for us.

And now I was wondering how safe an alarm truly kept us if it didn’t call for help.

—

Ryan leaned into the door, shutting it, turning the locks, like he’d done it a thousand times before. “Turn it off,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

The buzzing of the alarm kept sounding, and we had to talk too loudly. “I don’t think anyone can hear that,” Ryan said.

But if I turned it off, it felt like we were doing nothing. “If someone drives by, they might hear it. Maybe someone out for a walk. I don’t know, it’s something, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “I can’t think.”

“Do you have a car alarm? Where are your keys? Do you have a panic button?”

“My car doesn’t even have doors sometimes—it definitely doesn’t have an alarm.” He hit his palm against the door. “What do they want?”

I couldn’t think, like he said, with the buzzing of the alarm. I couldn’t concentrate.

Useless. Everything in this house was useless.

It couldn’t save us. Only we could do that now.

My fingers shook as I entered the alarm code. Then silence…and something more. The sound of metal on metal—something happening in the backyard.

I had this image in my mind of men sneaking through my bedroom window, taking my mother—but to do that, they’d have to get through the gate first.

The alarm had been off. The alarm was
never
off. They could’ve disguised themselves as a delivery service, gotten buzzed in, snuck through the window, convincing her to disarm it, threatening her life, if they thought it could somehow trigger the police.

Or.

Or.

She could’ve let them in.

But no. She wouldn’t. She’d
never.

I remembered the day social services came for me. How she seemed to know, even before they rang the bell at the gate, what they were here for—so different from the first time they stopped by. She’d asked for their ID numbers, and she’d called the home station to double-check, to be sure of who they were first. And even then, there was a long moment when I thought she wouldn’t do it. A moment where she turned around and pulled the curtains shut, her back to the door, a deep, steady breath. A moment where she grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall—I’d said, “Mom?” because she was hurting me.

She stopped. Dropped my arm. Put a hand out to steady herself against the wall. And she didn’t look at me when she said, “Kelsey, go let the nice people in.”

Even then, she couldn’t do it herself. Everything in her body screamed
no.

I shook the thought. It didn’t matter. Ryan was in the dark kitchen, banging cabinets around. Right now there were men outside, and we were inside, and we needed help.

Nothing about this house was set up to call for help. My mother had lied. We were not prepared for anything. We were not prepared for
this.

The House of Horrors,
Cole and Emma called this place. Steel-reinforced walls and spike-topped gates. And for what? For
what
?

It was as if we were an island. An island, cut off from the rest of the world.

I walked to the back window, pushed the curtain aside, and stared out into the darkness.

I felt the darkness staring back.

R
yan was opening and closing kitchen drawers, rummaging through them with the flashlight gripped in his teeth, pulling out anything he could use. Knives, the fire extinguisher, an aerosol container that I thought probably only held olive oil.

He paused to look up at me, removing the flashlight from this mouth. “Is there
any
way out of here, other than through the gates, Kelsey? Anything you can think of?”

“No.”

Think, Kelsey.
We needed light. We couldn’t call, and we couldn’t run, but light could be seen for miles….

“I have an idea,” I said.

He placed his hands on the counter, and I could tell, even in the dark, they were pressing so hard into the marble that his knuckles were turning white. “I’m all ears,” he said.

“I can make a smoke bomb. I can make it colored. It will be bright. People will see it over the trees. People will come.”

“You can make a smoke bomb?” He almost smiled before remembering where we were, why we had to do it.

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple, actually. My mom taught me a few years ago, in science. She used to homeschool me.”

“I thought you moved here last year.”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve always been here.” I was just invisible. Trapped behind these walls without even realizing it. I could’ve disappeared and nobody would’ve noticed.

I started shaking, opening the pantry door, looking for the baking soda and sugar. “Everything else is downstairs,” I said.

I spun to leave and he reached for me, just like my mom had earlier today in this very room. “Kelsey, please stop for a second.”

I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, I’d feel the momentum picking up, the air rushing by, like we were falling, and there was only one inevitable outcome. “What?” I asked, stripping the paper towels from the tube. I’d need that, too.

His arms went to my shoulders. “What do they want?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He started to say something, but stopped. He was still staring into my eyes.

“I don’t
know,
Ryan,” I said. I thought my house was built out of paranoia. I thought it was because of what had happened, not what
might
happen.

“What are they after?” he asked. “Is there something here?”

I shook my head too fast. And Ryan kept staring, like there was something he wanted to say, but didn’t. “What?” I asked.

I noticed his throat work as he swallowed. “Why do you live like this?”

I had to tell him. I had to explain—we lived like this for a reason. And now that reason had found us.

“My mother,” I said on impulse, even though I knew that wasn’t what he was asking. I blew out a slow breath, telling him the thing he was really asking. “My mother was taken years ago,” I said. “Kidnapped. When she was my age. She was taken from her home, and she doesn’t remember it.” I shook my head again, clearing the thought of the similarities. Men at the house. Again. “She escaped a year later, and then she had me, changed her name, and moved here. And nobody’s bothered us since.”

He looked at me, like he was trying to work something out.

Don’t ask,
I thought.

Don’t do it,
I thought.

“Where’s your dad?” he asked.

A dad. Like the man who stood beside him at the ceremony, straightening his tie. Like the person who taught you to ride bikes, who protected you. “I don’t have one,” I said. And from the wince in his expression, I knew my tone told him everything he was asking. The way his eyes snapped closed in impulsive response, as if he saw too much suddenly in my face—like my mom sometimes did.

His mouth opened, and I thought,
Don’t say it. Don’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but I’d already turned away, shrugging as I did. I knew nothing of it. I did not exist without this horror of my mother’s life. Sometimes I thought she couldn’t move past it, couldn’t break free of the fear, because of me. Always here, always a reminder—look what happened. Look.
Look.

I did not look like her.

But I could be like her.

I
needed
to be like her. Because if I was not, if I was the other half of me, what was I then? The half of me that could destroy her? I was either scared most of the time, or I was a monster. Those were my options.

“Ryan, I can make the smoke bomb, but it’s going to take time, and we’re running out of it. I need to keep moving.” I needed to, before the fear caught up and worked the other way around, paralyzing me instead.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

—

Down in the basement, I dragged two battery-powered lights into the corners, illuminating the room in a faint, uneven glow. I pointed to the boxes against the wall. “The chemicals we need are somewhere in the boxes for school stuff. Somewhere in that pile.”

Ryan stood near the entrance to the safe room, eyes glued to the screen, his jaw moving slightly side to side, like he was having a conversation with himself.

“Anything?” I asked.

“They’re still out there.” He turned back to me, watching me like I was going to save us.

I could do this. I could get help for us.

There would be deliveries—Mom had scheduled the groceries for tomorrow. The mailman would come tomorrow. Help would eventually arrive.

But those things wouldn’t happen in time.

We lived in the middle of nowhere. The entire night stretched in front of us, in empty silence, like the expanse of cliff below us. I felt us hanging once more—

“Won’t your parents worry?” I asked.

“Eventually,” Ryan said. “But maybe not.”

“Is this something you do often?” I asked, and I felt a sting of jealousy, though I had no right.

“I spend a lot of time down at the station. They’ll probably think I’m there—and like I said, they’re practically family. The other firefighters will think I’m home. I’m eighteen. I kinda…fought my parents for some freedom. As long as I get my work done and I don’t get into trouble…I’m an adult.”

“Don’t you live with them?”

“That was their argument, too,” he mumbled.

But he won. I couldn’t imagine trying that argument with my own mother. What she would say. What she would think. I couldn’t even get her permission to go to Ryan’s award ceremony.

The downside to independence—nobody came looking for you.

I grew frantic, trying to find the right box. But so far the boxes were mostly old school supplies, trinkets from my childhood, and pictures in albums, printed from the digital copies she stored on her computer, in case of a virus that wiped it clean. She didn’t trust the Internet, didn’t want our pictures anywhere that could be traced. I think she’d read an article about that once, too. How nothing was truly untraceable online. All this print was cluttering our lives. Like living with our own past, boxed up and waiting.

“Can I help?” he asked, just as I let out a breath of relief, finding the stack of boxes I’d been looking for.

“Here,” I said, gesturing toward the collection of boxes in front of me, the ones we’d used for school experiments.

Ryan came closer as I pulled out the different chemicals—simple things, my mom had told me. Everyday things, from when she taught me. Textbooks and printed-from-the-Internet how-tos. She’d clear off the table upstairs and we’d cook at the kitchen stove, like we were making breakfast. Science was just a list of ingredients, she’d said. Science
creates.
I remembered dancing around purple smoke in the backyard, thrilled that we’d created this ourselves, watching until it fizzled and burned itself out.