The Safest Lies (5 page)

On the one hand, I wasn’t a mouse.

But I remembered, just as Jan must have, when she took me and Emma to that nail salon while the back rooms were being worked on, and all the hairs on my arms stood on end from the scent of the cleaning fluid, and I threw up my burrito all over the cheap linoleum floor.

The scent of caustic cleaners,
Jan wrote in that paper. Though this was a violation of our privacy, we had too much to lose.

Careful, always careful. The word like an echo, always there, always a warning. There were too many ways she could lose me.

R
yan drove a Jeep with a soft top, and doors he could remove in the nice weather, which I’d seen him do when he pulled up to the Lodge in the summer. I could tally the ways my mother would deem this car unsafe. Then again, mine was over a cliff, and his was not.

“Where do you live?” he asked as he opened my door.

“Do you know Sterling Cross? It’s this neighborhood at the end of—”

“Yeah,” he said as he shut the door. “I know it.”

His phone chimed in the space between us as we exited the parking lot, but he ignored it.

“So,” I said, “firefighter, huh? Aren’t you a little young?”

“I turned eighteen last month, but I’ve wanted to do it my whole life. My dad just retired. My grandfather was a firefighter before him, too. The department is practically my family. We were all just waiting to make it official.” He smiled to himself. “It’s in my blood.”

His phone chimed again.

“Are you going to check it?” I asked. If it was my mother, and I ignored it more than once, she’d start to panic.

His hands tightened on the wheel, and his eyes slid over to me for a fraction of a second. “Not while I’m driving. I’ve seen enough accidents, thanks,” he said.

And then I was back there, hanging, my fingers scrambling for purchase….“I wasn’t texting, in case you were wondering,” I said. I picked up his phone, felt him cut his eyes to me again. “A Holly wants to know if you’re going to the party at Julian’s tonight.”

He shifted in his seat. “Uh.”

“She says she really hopes you’ll be there. The
really
is in all caps, by the way. So I think she means it.”

“Kelsey?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“Just a few scratches. More than I can say for you.” I caught myself staring at his bandage.

“No, I mean are you
okay
?” he asked.

“Oh.” I put his phone back. “I don’t know.” We drove through the mountain pass, and I concentrated on the floorboard instead of the double yellow line, and the narrow shoulder of the road, and the dark night stretching out below us. “Ask me tomorrow.”

“Put your number in my phone, and I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

“My phone is gone,” I said.

His thumbs were drumming on the steering wheel, all nervous energy, and it was starting to catch.

He’s asking for your number, Kelsey. Don’t be a moron.

“For when you get a new one, then,” he said.

Meaning: I lived in Sterling Cross, I could afford a new phone. And I
would
get a new one soon, because it was doubtful I’d be let out of the house without one.

“Okay.” I added my number to his phone, like he asked.

“Where to?” He pulled into the entrance of Sterling Cross, which was one windy road you had to travel a few miles down until it forked off in several directions, each road leading to a single lot with a stand-alone house. There were only ten houses in the neighborhood, and most were some type of mansion trying to disguise itself as a humble log cabin—
mountain chic,
Annika called it, when I’d pointed this out to her.

Mine was the only one that didn’t follow the trend. Cole and Emma used to call my place the House of Horrors when Jan would pick me up, and after, I couldn’t see it without looking at it the same way. The house was white and clean and boxy—an exterior that looked slightly industrial with its perfect, hard angles, like cement blocks. The windows were sleek and tinted, and it was set down a slope, so you couldn’t really see it from the road. There was nothing really scary about it, once you were inside. But the metal fence was high and spiked and covered in ivy—and that’s not even counting the wire running along the top—and you could see the bars over some of the windows, which was I guess how they got the
Horrors
part.

“Here’s fine,” I said at the turn for my road.

Ryan laughed. “Pretty sure you don’t have to be embarrassed about where you live.”

We weren’t rich, like he thought. My mother came into a lot of money, once upon a time, and she’d used up most of it to buy this place, set it up, set
us
up. She worked from home as a bookkeeper, and we got by just fine. But we lived there not because of the prestige of the houses or the property. We lived here because the houses themselves were all set far apart, and there was only one road in or out, funneled down a finger of land with steep, treacherous terrain on both sides. And people left us alone. Everyone here kept to themselves. It was safe.

“Okay,” I said. It was dark on the drive in, and the lights would’ve been off if Mom hadn’t been waiting up for me. “Turn right here,” I said. But now the front of the house was lit by big spotlights, exposing everything.

It was exactly as I feared. Spikes illuminated, the top of the house—the steep slopes and sharp angles of the roof—just visible from the street, making it look larger than it was. And the camera over the gate, the keypad awaiting my thumbprint.

Ryan looked from me to the house and back again. He unbuckled his seat belt and twisted in his seat, the engine still running.

“Well, thanks for the ride.” I raised my hand to wave, and his eyes narrowed.

He reached out and grabbed my wrist, his gaze searching my palm. No, he was staring at my fingers. I balled them up, but then he grabbed the other hand. “Jesus,” he said. I followed his line of sight to the deep red crease across my fingers. The indentation from the metal. The only thing that had kept us from falling. He ran his fingers just below the raw skin, and I shivered.

My hands started to shake again, and I replayed that moment, my elbows losing their grip, my fingers grasping for anything, and I pulled them back, balled them into fists. “See you in math,” I said, my voice shaking, along with my hands.

“Kelsey, wait—”

But I couldn’t wait. I needed to be inside, with my mother. Behind the gates, behind the walls.

“Thank you, Ryan,” I said as I stepped out of the car.

His eyes locked on mine as I stood before the gate, awaiting my fingerprint. I didn’t want him to see this part. I didn’t want him to
know
this part.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I called.

I waved goodbye, and eventually he caved. “Okay, tomorrow, then,” he said. I waited until he was around the first curve before letting myself inside the gate.

—

My mother was standing in the foyer, in front of the common area and between the hallways that snaked out into the two wings of the one-level house. She kept touching her shoulder through her loose shirt—an old habit—and she’d been crying. I’d barely had time to lock the door behind me, and she was pulling me to her, gripping me tight, and then holding me back by my shoulders. “Oh, thank God!” She took a quick breath, almost like she was gasping for air. Then pulled me to her again. “Imagine my surprise to turn on the news and see my daughter’s car
over a cliff.
Kelsey,
God.
” I felt her fingers pressing into my spine.

“It looks worse than it was, Mom.”

I waited until she slowly released me. Her long blond hair moved over her shoulders as she shook her head, her eyes closed. “I knew it was too soon. I shouldn’t have listened to Jan. You’re too young to drive.”

You’re too young to be living like this,
I wanted to say. She was. So young. She looked young enough to be Jan’s daughter, even.

“Mom. Look at me. Mom, I’m fine. Nothing’s broken. Nothing hurts. See?” I needed to get out of this room before she had me walking her through it all. “I just want a shower,” I said. “And a nap.”

I handed her my hospital forms, knew she’d spend an hour looking over everything, researching the hospital coding on her own, reading up on potential head injuries—an outlet for the fear. But she didn’t, at first. She stared at me, picking me apart, her hand brushing over the chemical burn scars on the back of her shoulder again. I grabbed her hand to get her to stop.

She has no memory of her abduction, just the fear that came with her when she left. Taken from her home just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of her junior year of high school, she escaped from wherever she was held more than a year later, with no memory of her time there.

An entire year. Gone.

Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me, like she was trying to see something more. Pick me apart, like she could read the fabric of my existence.

Nobody knew anything about the man who had held her. Well, that’s not entirely true. We knew some things. We knew he was most likely white, with brown eyes, and taller than average.

This was what I could deduce from the fact that my mother had blue eyes and I did not. And from the fact that I was paler than her, even though I spent a lot of time out in the sun in the backyard. And I already towered over her. Maybe he had freckles, too.

So. There were some things we knew.

Subtract the half of me that was her, and what was left?

“Don’t tell me it’s
not
that bad,
” she said. She put her hand to her mouth, shook her head, pulled me toward her. “I don’t know what I’d do,” she said, hugging me for eternity. “The car is
gone.
It could’ve been—”

“I’m safe,” I said, my chest constricting.

—

Back in my room, down the opposite hall, I tried to take comfort in the four walls, and the bed, neatly made. The mountains out the window, which used to keep us safe.

The car was
gone,
my mother said—it fell. It fell, and it was gone, like I would have fallen, like I would’ve been gone, had Ryan not pulled me out.

I peeled off my clothes, and I stood in the shower, bracing myself against the wall, and I began to cry.

I remembered how peaceful it had been, the emptiness. The quiet of the unthinking mind, at rest. Listening to someone else’s words, and believing them, before I became myself again. Before my mind started working overtime, beginning the vicious cycle. I latched on to fears, the beautiful familiarity of them. And they crawled like spiders across my skin, until the only solution was to give myself over to them, in stillness.

And now here I was, revisiting the fall, as I would be all night, relentless and unstoppable.

Maybe it was ingrained in my DNA, and I had no hope of overcoming these moments, and everything Jan said was pointless. Maybe I learned it from my mother, the way we locked our doors, remained behind walls, constantly demanding confirmation of our safety. Maybe it was her fault I’d be up all night, staring at this wall.

Not like Ryan, who I imagined going out with friends, celebrating his daring survival with underage drinking, and Holly and other girls draping themselves over him, calling him a hero, and him being all
It was nothing. Just some trigonometry. A little muscle, that’s all.

And me, staring at the empty wall, like it was the darkness over the edge of the cliff. Just me and my breathing, replaying it over and over, seeing how close we’d come—one missed grip, one second of slipped concentration. The crease across the skin of my fingers, throbbing and raw.

The thought would circle and dig and circle some more, until I felt empty without it.

How close we’d come.

How close to gone.

I
stayed home from school the next day, which wasn’t my mom’s idea, exactly, but I didn’t get out of bed Thursday morning, and she didn’t ask me to. We had to wait for the insurance money before replacing the car, and Jan was looking into the bus situation—but in the meantime, nobody mentioned anything about me and school. It seemed to be an agreed-upon decision, especially since I didn’t have a new phone yet, which meant Mom couldn’t track me if she wanted to.