Winter (Four Seasons #1) (37 page)

If Amanda
really did burn those films, then I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m
reckless enough at this point to fantasize about burning down her
pristine brownstone, a justice in symmetry, but just as the flames
are establishing themselves in my mind, another image comes to me.
It’s the young officer at Brandon’s, winding those Super Eight
films and placing them in the evidence bags. Of course. They would
have taken my dad’s films, too. They must have done. But they
hadn’t found anything on them, otherwise I would have heard about
it. So where were they now? Where would they have put
them?

I scramble to
my feet and charge from room to room until I’ve exhausted every
avenue. They’re not in the kitchen, in the lounge, nor any of the
bedrooms or the storage closets. I’m beginning to lose hope when I
spot the door leading from the kitchen down into the basement, the
basement where the indoor pool is located.

I was never
supposed to go down there without an adult. It’s funny how I still
feel like I’m breaking the rules as I twist the round brass door
knob and jog down the stairs, my dad’s voice warning me in the back
of my head:
it’s not safe to be down here
without me or your mom, little monster.

I throw the
light switch and only the floor lights in each corner of the room
flicker to life, casting a cold blue hue over the tiles, the walls,
the ceiling. Another jolt of surprise relays though me when I see
that the pool is still filled. I’d expected it to be empty, but
instead a dark blue pool cover gently bobs on top of the water. At
the far end of the room, in front of a wooden rack still complete
with folded towels, are cardboard boxes stacked high. A spark of
hope—have I found what I’m looking for? That spark of hope
transforms into relief when I rush over and find that, yes, they’re
exactly what I’m looking for. I open the flaps on the box and my
dad’s blocky, neat writing greets me, taped to canister upon
canister of film. I could cry with how happy I am in that
moment.

I waste no
time in lugging the first box back up the stairs, leaving the place
lit in case I need to come back down for more. I have the projector
switched on and prepped in under thirty seconds, and a random
canister opened, the film threaded up just like my dad showed me
when I was a kid. The old thing sputters into life, making a
familiar, comforting, whirring sound as the film flies through the
feeder. Images, stilted at first, develop on the far wall and my
heart rises up into my throat.

My dad’s
smiling face grins out at me, laughing as he swats the camera away
from him, the camera I’m holding. He reaches out and takes it from
me.

“
I’m not the
star of the show, Monster. That’s you. Come on, tell me the story
again.” The camera spins and suddenly I’m on the wall, eight or
maybe nine years old me, missing two front teeth, hair tied into
braids on either side of my head.

“
Well,” I say,
tipping my head to one side. “It’s about Icarus. He lived in a
prison with his Daddy.”

“
A prison?” my
father asks, off screen.

“
Yes, a
prison.” I screw up my face in concentration. “Kind of a maze
actually, a maze his daddy built, but they couldn’t get out so it
was a prison, too.”

“
Uhuh. And
what happened in the maze?”

“
Well,
Icarus’s daddy wanted to escape the prison, but he couldn’t. There
was water all around.” I gesture wide with skinny arms, making my
dad chuckle, the sound close to the camera. “And so one day,
Icarus’s daddy realized the only way to escape would be to fly
away. He collected all the feathers he could find, and he made two
pairs of wings.”

“
And how did
he stick all the feathers together?”

“
With wax! He
used candle wax,” I say.

“
And what
then?”

“
He gave a
pair to Icarus and kept a pair for himself. He flew away, but
before he left he told Icarus to follow him. He said, “don’t fly
too close to the sun, otherwise the wax will melt and all the
feathers will fall off the wings!”

My dad laughs
at me shaking my finger, pretending to be Daedalus, Icarus’s
father, warning him. “And what did Icarus do?”

“
He flew too
close to the sun, Papa!”

“
Oh no!” he
gasps. “Did the wax melt?”

I nod sagely.
“Yep. He fell out of the sky. But he was okay in the
end.”

More laughter.
The image shakes as my dad puts the camera down, and then it
becomes stable again. He walks into frame and sits down beside me.
He pulls me onto his lap, and I lay my head against his shoulder,
the camera recording us now completely forgotten. “What do you
think the story means, Iris?” he says softly.

“
It means to
always listen to your daddy,” I reply confidently. This earns me a
smile from my father, who gives me half a nod.

“
Yeah, you
should always do that, I guess. But what else?”

I frown,
thinking hard. “That if you go too high, you have a long way to
fall?”

“
Uhuh. But I
like to think of it like this. Icarus couldn’t help flying so high.
He was trapped in such a bad place for a very long time, and he was
so happy when he was free that he just had to go up and up and up.
He dreamed big things, of touching the sky. He wanted to reach his
goals so badly that he forgot what his daddy said.”

“
So I
shouldn’t have big dreams, daddy?” My heartbeat thumps in my
throat, my eyes furiously burning as I listen. The tender look in
my father’s eyes breaks me, breaks me so badly I don’t think I’ll
ever be whole again.

“
No, baby
girl. I’m saying the exact opposite. You should always reach for
your dreams.”

“
But won’t I
fall?”

He shakes his
head. “That doesn’t matter. Fly high, little Icarus. I’ll always be
there to catch you, I promise.”

I’m sobbing by
the time the film blisters and cuts out, the projector still
chugging through the reel. I hurt so bad inside that I want to
crawl into a ball and cry until I can’t feel anything anymore. I
know from experience that’s not how this works, though. I’ll still
feel everything, all the pain and sorrow and misery, regardless of
how many tears I shed.

I’ll always
be there to catch you, I promise
. Except
he’s not here to catch me. Why would he say those words as he
died?
Fly high, Icarus
. Why would that be his last message to me? The only thing
I’ve been able to think of is that he wanted to tell me that wasn’t
going to break his promise. That he was never going to leave me.
Not really. And in some ways, he hasn’t.

The opening
chords of a song startles me from my tears. My head whips up, and
I’m shocked by the new image that has taken shape on the wall. It
seems the film wasn’t done after all.

Luke. Luke
with a much too big guitar balanced in his lap. He can’t be more
than eleven or twelve, I’m guessing. His hair is longer than I
remember it, and there’s a heavy, haunted look in his eyes. My dad
walks around the camera and sits next to him, smiling. “Are you
ready?” he says.

Luke looks up
at him hesitantly, hands hovering over the guitar like he’s worried
to handle it. “I….I don’t know.”

“
Yeah, you do.
Come on, I know you can do it. You’ve played it for me already.” My
dad’s smile grows. “It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake or two,
Lucas. Making mistakes is part of learning. And I’m right here. I
can help you.”

My hands fly
to my mouth. Luke cautiously peers down at the neck of the guitar,
carefully placing his fingers over the frets. After one more
hesitant look to my dad, he strums his other hand across the
strings, pauses, reforms the shape of his fingers over the frets,
and begins to play. Blackbird.

My dad taps
out the rhythm with his foot, humming gently as Luke stumbles, then
finds where he needs to be. Luke and my dad sing the lyrics
together, and what was left of my heart fractures into tiny
pieces.

I should have
listened to Luke, heard what he wanted to tell me earlier in the
kitchen, no matter how awful it was. I look at the twelve year old
before me, and all I see is how much pain he’s in. No matter what
my mother says, I can never imagine that this poor, broken boy did
anything malicious to anyone, sexually or otherwise. It doesn’t
matter that he didn’t deny it, I just simply can’t believe it. The
scared little boy on the screen in front of me was learning to live
again, and my father was trying to help him. My father was trying
to help both of us—to give us both wings so that we could learn to
fly. The wings he built for me, and the ones he wanted to fix for
Luke. I turn the projector off and wrap myself up in the comforter
in my dad’s La-Z-Boy, and I cry myself to sleep.

Thirty

Escape Part
Two

MY HEART slams
against my ribcage with a fierce thud. It takes a moment for my
head to clear, to figure out why I’m panicked. A sound, the sound
that woke me, comes again, loud and clear: breaking glass. I
scramble forward in the chair, kicking off the comforter, my ears
straining to hear what’s happening downstairs. More shattering. The
sound of a heavy boot kicking against wood. My first thought is
that it’s Luke, come to try and talk to me, but the logical part of
my brain is working faster than the conscious part. Why would he be
smashing a window to get in?

Another
heavy
thunk
from
downstairs has me out of the chair and fumbling in my pockets for
my phone. But I don’t have it. Damn. I run three paces across the
room and snatch up the landline, my heart racing even faster now. I
dial Luke’s cell phone and hurry to the window. There’s a huge
black SUV with tinted windows parked up behind the beater, blocking
it in. In my sleep I didn’t hear it approach.

The phone
rings.

Rings.

Rings.

He doesn’t
pick up. “Come on, Luke.
Come
on!
”

A strange
whirring sound downstairs makes me freeze, statue-still, and my
thumb hits the
end call
button.
Holy hell,
what
is
that?
I tiptoe out into the hallway
and lean over the handrail, holding my breath. The whirring grows
louder, and I suddenly place the sound. It’s the garbage disposal
unit on the sink, churning, churning, churning.

Every single
horror movie I’ve ever seen plays out in about ten seconds flat,
and I know with every part of me that I should
not
go downstairs. Instead, I clutch
the cordless phone to my chest and soundlessly make my way down the
hallway, creeping into the spare room. The walk-in closet beckons,
but I don’t make that mistake. I’ll have nowhere to go if I shut
myself away, and it’s probably the first place someone would look.
No, the reason I picked this room glints in the darkness behind the
door, right where my dad left it. A baseball bat, for this specific
purpose.

I wait behind
the door, the handle of bat growing slick from sweat in my hands,
trying hard not to breathe too loud. Eventually I hear the sound
I’ve been waiting for over the grunting and groaning of the garbage
disposal: a creak in the stairs. Whoever’s in the house is
coming.
Shit, shit, shit.
I peer through the slim gap where the open door to
the room meets the frame, squinting into the dim lighting to see if
I can make out who is it.

A black head
emerges like a specter, followed by black shoulders and a black
torso—a person dressed entirely from head to toe in black, a ski
mask covering their face. I bite down on my bottom lip, desperately
trying to keep from breaking down into tears. The figure reaches
the top of the stairs and pauses, head swiveling up and down the
hallway, clearly trying to pick which room to enter. I see a flash
of silver in the tall person’s hand, and I have to rail against the
urge to make a dash for it when I realize it’s a knife. A five-inch
long, curved, wicked blade made for hunting, skinning, gutting. I
hold my hand over my mouth, counting to five. Count to five and
calm down, that’s all I can think.

The figure
moves stealthily to Dad’s study, where light still pools out into
the hallway. He disappears inside. I panic then; should I run down
the stairs? Try and make it for the door? My legs are trembling,
half ready to bolt of their own accord, when the cordless phone I’m
still gripping hold of starts to ring.

“
Shit!”

I drop the
phone like it’s stung me and recoil into the corner of the room,
fear taking hold, locking every single one of my joints frozen. The
phone keeps ringing, echoing around the house from the other
handsets dotted throughout the different rooms. But there’s only
one handset up here on the first floor. And it’s in here with me. I
clench hold of the baseball bat with both hands, holding it out in
front of me.

Just breathe,
Iris. Just breathe. It’s going to be okay so long as you stay
calm.
My dad’s voice is strong and
confident inside my head. It’s precisely what he would say, and
it’s enough to help me edge forward so that I’m back behind the
door again. The ringing is cut off by a loud beep downstairs. The
answer machine.