White Picket Fences (31 page)

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He pried open the lid. “Mom’s secret stash of cash. She thinks no one knows about it, but I do.”

The lid came away in his hands, and Chase turned the tin upside down. A small wad of bills and a folded piece of paper spilled out. Chase frowned at the note. “Great. She probably knows I know. Probably a note telling me not to take what doesn’t belong to me.” He reached for the note and opened it.

The moment he began reading, Tally could tell the note wasn’t what he thought it was. Chase’s expression began to change, to twist in anger as he read.

“Chase?”

He finished reading, his face a mask of troubled thoughts.

“Chase, what is it?”

But he said nothing. Chase tossed the letter toward her with one hand and grabbed the gym bag with the other. He spun around to leave, stuffing the money into his pocket.

“Chase!”

He stopped and turned, and for a moment she thought he might change his mind. “I have to know what happened that day.” A quick pivot and then Chase was in the kitchen. Tally grabbed the letter and followed him. Chase opened the door to the garage.

“What am I supposed to tell your parents?” Tally yelled from the threshold.

Chase was at his car, opening the door to the backseat. He threw in the gym bag. “Tell them whatever you want.”

“I’m going to tell them the truth!”

He opened the driver’s door. “Fine. Do it.”

“I will!”

Chase slammed the door shut and started the engine. Tally watched him back out. She stepped into the garage and walked to the spot where his car had been. He glanced at her as he swung the car around to face the street. Then he reached up to the remote, and the door began to shimmy down in front of her as he drove away.

In the semidarkness of the garage, which smelled like the deep woods, Tally stood, unsure of what to do. She was aware of the letter in her hands. Chase had expected her to read it. He wouldn’t have thrown it to her if he hadn’t. As she walked back into the kitchen, she opened the note and read.

Neil,

I never dreamed I would write a letter like this one. I would rather tell you this face to face, but we don’t talk anymore
.

I can’t live like this. I can’t keep pretending that everything is fine. It’s not fine. It’s far from fine. And we’re becoming strangers to each other while pretending that it’s fine
.

I didn’t realize how far we’d drifted apart until this thing with Chase. When he told us last night about the fire at the warehouse, I knew he was trying to tell us he remembers the fire. He remembers it, Neil. I know it and you know it. And you walked away from him. You’d rather let our son suffer in silence than admit he may have started that fire. You say you’re keeping silent for him, but you’re really doing it for you
.

All these years you’ve gotten exactly what you wanted. What about what other people want? What about what Chase wants? What about what I want
?

What about

Tally stepped back inside the kitchen, pacing the tiles, the unfinished letter hanging from her fingers. She stopped pacing, pulled open the drawer below the kitchen phone, and fished out Amanda’s phone book. Matt’s phone number was listed. Tally punched in the numbers on the cordless phone. Matt might mistake her call for a sudden change of heart. But only for a moment. When she explained the situation to him, he’d help her find Chase, date or no date. But Matt’s phone went to voice mail almost immediately. Then she remembered that he had a soccer tournament that day. She didn’t leave a message.

There was nothing else she could do but call Amanda. She picked up the phone again and dialed Amanda’s cell phone. The number rang five times.

“C’mon,” Tally whispered. But she knew if Delcey was in the middle of her dance competition, Amanda had probably set her phone to silent. That call went to voice mail too.

“Aunt Amanda, it’s Tally. Can you call home when you get this? I…I need to talk to you about Chase. It’s important. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up. Her head pounded with fever and troubled thoughts. Tally opened the cabinet above the dishwasher and found the vitamin C and an assortment of cold and flu remedies. She popped two capsules in her mouth and swallowed them with a full glass of water.

Amanda’s letter lay on the granite counter where Tally had set it down to make the phone calls. She didn’t know what else to do but put it back. Tally reached for it and walked into the laundry room. She folded the note, placed it into the empty tin, and screwed the lid back on. She put it back on the shelf, already imagining her aunt asking her if she knew where the money was that had been in that tin… and if she’d read the letter that was hidden there.

Tally crossed the hall into her room and collapsed onto her bed. The minute they came home, she would tell her aunt everything. Everything.

That Chase had read the letter.

That Chase remembered the fire.

That Chase remembered that a baby girl died in it and that he was haunted by that fire and what it had done.

Haunted by its ghost.

She drifted off to sleep with heavy thoughts of a fiery devil swirling above her head. She dreamed of Chase’s ghost, felt it
saunter into her room and spread its ashen cloak over her body. In her dream Ghost was a man, and when he spoke his breath came out in smoky blasts of fire and ash. She couldn’t make out the words, even though Ghost shouted them. Then Ghost put his hot hand over her nose and mouth, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to call out for help, but there was no air.

A screaming staccato whine filled her ears, and she awoke. A sea of smoke. Alarms punched the thick air with warning.

She staggered out of the sewing room and felt a rush of heat and danger. Her back against the wall, she stumbled to the kitchen. She had left the door to the garage open. Through its rectangular opening, she could see that the garage was an inferno. Fire was spilling into the kitchen and grabbing at cabinets, curtains, and light fixtures. Something exploded in the garage, and flames shot into the kitchen, as if reaching for her.

Ghost.

thirty-nine

T
he dancers, in a mirage of blue and yellow and bright green, moved like wheat in the wind—bending, twisting, undulating to the sounds of synthesized strings. Then, with a burst of synchronized movement, they sprang forward with kicks and punches and heads thrown back. Ribbons erupted from within their sleeves, swirling about them as they danced across the gym floor to music that had risen to a fever pitch.

Delcey moved among the flashes of color. As Amanda watched she sometimes found it hard to distinguish her daughter from the other dancers. They looked alike and danced in unison, having practiced these moves for weeks.

If she wanted to believe they were all her daughter, she could. It was that easy. And that hard.

The music came to a crashing end, and the dancers arranged themselves across the floor on one another’s shoulders and backs, arms stretched to the heavens as if in supplication. Next to her, Neil began to clap lightly.

He turned to Amanda as applause echoed off the high walls of the gym. “Which one is Delcey?”

Amanda searched the arrangement of girls below. All of them? None of them? She didn’t answer.

The girls raced off the floor to await their scores and make way for the next team of dancers.

“They did well, right?” Neil asked.

She nodded. For hours she and Neil had sat on the bleachers, watching routine after routine as Delcey’s dance team advanced. But she and Neil barely spoke to each other.

Neil looked at his watch. “How many more teams go before we know if Delcey’s team has won? It’s after six.”

She didn’t answer him.

“Quite a few?”

Amanda would never be able to explain what happened next. Something sharp and hard inside her snapped, and she felt the shards splinter in a thousand directions. She turned suddenly toward Neil, raising her hand and placing it flat across his mouth to silence him.

“Stop,” she said.

Neil slowly reached up with his own hand and took hers, folding his fingers around her hand as he glanced about to see if anyone had noticed what she’d done. Anger and shock shone in his eyes. He pulled her hand away from his mouth and let go.

Amanda sprang to her feet and began to climb down the bleachers. She had to get out.

Out.

She heard Neil say her name, but she kept climbing down, a few stray tears now beginning to distort her vision. If she stayed she really would explode, and there’d be fragments of her everywhere. A few parents she knew from the school looked up at her as she passed them, first smiling, then looking at her with wide, concerned eyes.

“Amanda!”

Amanda hopped down the last two bleacher steps and began to race for the long row of double doors that led to the gymnasium parking lot. She could sense Neil right behind her, rushing to catch up with her. She ran from him.

She hit the crash bar and emerged into the spreading twilight, infant sobs of despair, shame, and disgust spilling out of her. She wiped at her mouth, wiping, wiping, to rid herself of the memory of Gary’s kiss.

He had kissed her. And she had let him.

When she had fled to his house last night and told him what Chase had done and said and how Neil had vanished into the garage afterward and how useless she felt as a wife and mother, Gary had done exactly what she knew he would. Embraced her, soothed her. Made her feel important. Wanted.

A cry of frustration escaped her as she remembered Gary’s arms around her, his soft voice telling her he’d help her talk to Chase if she wanted him to.

And then the kiss… Gary had apologized. Over and over. But she knew he wasn’t truly sorry he had kissed her. His distress didn’t spring from kissing her but from the realization that he had morphed into what his ex-wife had been, married but powerfully attracted to someone else. He had wanted to kiss her. And she had wanted him to.

She had fled from Gary’s house like she’d fled from her own.

Everything was not fine.

Everything was disintegrating.

A stifled cry of anger boiled up within her. A man smoking a cigarette on a bench outside stared at her as she stomped past him.

The words she had written that morning in a coffee shop convened in her head, taunting her. She’d started the note with every intention of giving it to Neil, but she hid it in the laundry room that afternoon to wait for the courage to finish it and tell him she was leaving him.

But she didn’t want a new life with Gary. She wanted her old life restored to her, the one that was slipping away like water through her fingers.

Amanda reached her car and realized she didn’t have the keys. Neil did. She pounded on the roof of the car and then spun away from it, greedy for escape. A way out.

Neil wasn’t running, but he was closing in on her, still calling after her. Anger no longer echoed in his voice. Fear crouched in the three syllables of her name as he shouted it.

“Amanda!”

She moved away, and her purse fell off her arm. She let it hit the pavement and kept sprinting down the rows of parked cars. He was right behind her. She heard him stop for her purse, and then he was at her side, pulling at her, turning her toward him.

“Amanda! What is it? What?”

“I can’t do this anymore!” Her voice took on a strange and frantic pitch she didn’t recognize. She broke away from him, and a second or two passed before he had her in his grasp again. He dropped her purse at his feet.

“Stop it!” he yelled, shaking her.

Amanda raised her hand and slapped his face. Her fingers stung. “You stop it!” she screamed. “You. Stop it. Stop it!”

As soon as she said it, she knew she wanted nothing more
than for all of it to stop. The pretending. The distance. The silence. The shattering.

She let her head fall against Neil’s chest, her voice now a whisper. “Stop it. Stop it.”

His arms went around her, and she could feel his heart pounding beneath his shirt. But he did not embrace her; he kept her from dashing away again.

“Stop it,” she whispered.

“What? What do you want me stop?”

“Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel it happening?”

“What? What’s happening?”

She looked up at him, wanting to slap him again, slap him awake. “Do you still love me, Neil? Do you still love us?”

She heard him quietly gasp.

“What are you saying? Of course I do.”

“Then can’t you feel what’s happening between us? Can’t you feel it? We can’t pretend everything is fine. We can’t!”

Neil said nothing.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he said a moment later, and his voice was pinched and hesitant.

“I don’t want you to pretend anymore. I don’t want to pretend anymore.”

His arms loosened. “Pretend what?”

“That everything is perfect! That Chase is fine, that our marriage is fine.”

“You think I’m pretending?” Neil dropped his arms. “You think everything about our life together has been an act?”

“That’s not what I said. You know what I’m talking about, Neil. I’m talking about Chase and the fire. I’m talking about us!”

Neil took a step back, and his eyes glistened with disappointment. “All I’ve ever wanted was to make a good life for you, for our kids. What is wrong with that?” He punctuated the last five words with force.

Amanda looked up at him, into his eyes. “You did make a good life for us, Neil, but bad things happened anyway. Even while you were doing your best! It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

He looked away from her, and in the glow of the streetlight, she could see that his eyes shimmered.

“I did everything I could,” he said.

“That’s all any of us can do. You’re no better than the rest of us!”

Neil scanned the parking lot as if searching for a lost car.