Amity (8 page)

“I was having rose hip tea,” I said. “But there’s also ginger, and some other stuff.”

Ro’s eyes lit up. “You read my mind, Gwen.”

In Ro’s case, I knew she meant it literally.

I DIDN’T HAVE TO READ RO’S MIND
to know that she was taking in every last inch of Amity as we made our way through the house to the kitchen—and that she wasn’t exactly liking what she was seeing. Her eyes skimmed over the wainscoting, the pocket doors, the crown moldings … but registered no joy, as my mother’s had on moving day.

I couldn’t completely ignore Ro’s pallor, or the vague caution with which she regarded the

(bones)

beams and floorboards of the house. She was actually looking a little queasy, running her fingertips over the flocked floral patterns in the kitchen wallpaper, pressing into the raised texture like a foreign language, a Mayday appeal in Braille.

“Lemonade from scratch.” Mom pulled a glass pitcher from the refrigerator and set it down on the table. She turned to pull three glasses from the cabinets, calling over her shoulder, “I was feeling very ‘country.’ Rural living suits me, surprise, surprise.”

“Mmm,” Ro murmured, her lips pressed into a line. “And Hal?”

Mom smiled, bemused. “You’ll love this. He’s been looking at secondhand boats—”

I felt a shock down my spine at the thought of the boathouse,
that banging door reverberating like a death knell in the night.

Ro took a delicate sip of her lemonade and coughed. “Excuse me.”

“Do you need sugar?” I asked. “Mom didn’t put much in.” I preferred things sugarcoated, saccharine to the point of cloying; not everyone shared my tastes, I knew. Still, I pushed the chipped ceramic bowl toward her.

Ro shook her head, patting at her chest as her coughs subsided. She looked at me, the gold flecks in her eyes catching the sunlight.

“Sugar just covers up the natural state of things,” she said when her throat had cleared. “It takes away from what’s most innate about a substance.”

She traced a circle along the surface of the table and, beneath the tabletop, I felt the pressure of her foot tapping lightly at my own.

“Personally, I’ve never seen the point in that.”

MOM HAD
things to pick up at the market; she and Dad had come home from returning the van later than expected, and their grocery run to Concord was cut short. So I was tasked with giving Ro the grand tour of Amity mostly by default. But I was glad to do it anyway. Ro was livelier after the lemonade, but still not back to her usual self. It unnerved me.

“Should we go down to the river? It’s cooler down there.” I placed our empty glasses in the sink. Maybe the air would do her good. “Luke’s been cleaning out the boathouse, I think.”

I regretted the suggestion almost instantly, the insistent rattle of the boathouse door creeping again, stomping along my rib cage.

(go away)

As though she could hear the banging herself, Ro swallowed hard. That greenish tint rushed back into her cheeks.

“Maybe in a bit.” She fingered at her handbag, a fringed, tribal-looking satchel bursting with clumps of folded-up paper and a plastic water bottle, half-empty, peeking out at an angle. She took a quick sip from the bottle and stuffed it back into the bag. “Why don’t you show me the house?”

“Or I could always take you to your room,” I offered quickly. “If you want to lie down? The house will still be here when you wake up.”

Her eyes darted back and forth, like a small animal’s. I thought back to that rust-colored flip of a tail I’d seen out my window last night. “Once I lie down, there’s no telling when I’ll be up again.” She forced a short laugh, setting her bag on the table and patting it as if it were a household pet, some living, breathing familiar. “I’ll leave this here. Why don’t you show me around now, while I’m still at least semi-alert?”

In fact, she seemed acutely alert, almost like she was poised for an unexpected catastrophe.

I could relate.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

RO NOTICED
the dining room wall right away. The hollow nail holes Luke made left the wall looking scarred. Her eyebrows twitched as we passed through the room, but she remained silent. She had been likewise still when I’d pointed out the door to the cellar on our way out of the kitchen. “Basement,” I mumbled. “Boring.”

Now, still eyeing the wall warily, Ro took a deep breath, the large, colorful beads of her necklace rolling against her freckled skin. “You burned the sage down there?”

I flushed, somehow ashamed, despite the suggestion—the order, really—having come from Ro herself in the first place. “In the corners,” I confirmed. “Or as close to the corners as I could get. It’s kind of a maze down there.”

She rapped against the wall, just beneath one thick web of cracks left by Luke’s hammer. Again, that round, hollow sound drifted toward us, the noise that had so puzzled my mother earlier.

“Yes,” she said. “I see.”

As we passed through the doorway toward the staircase, she ran a finger along the plaster archway. “Amity is an old house, Gwen.”

I nodded. “A hundred years, at least. A thousand. A
million. I don’t know, exactly.
Old
. It’s been around—in one form or another—forever.” The realtor must have told us as much; how else would I know?

“Forever. Yes, that sounds right.”

One hand steady along the banister, Ro led the way upstairs. Her color was still off, uneasy, but her gait was sure, steady in the way I thought my aunt herself intrinsically was. Usually.

“The drive down was … Well. The roads around here are unreliable.” Ro’s words floated past her shoulder, toward me. “Did you all notice? Was it like that for you yesterday? When you came down?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lots of roadblocks and detours, the closer I got to Concord,” she said. “Roads that didn’t show up on any maps. The directions your mom gave were practically useless. I had to reorient myself every five miles or so. Very unsettling.”

I shrugged, even though she was walking in front of me, and couldn’t see it. “I didn’t notice. Nobody mentioned anything like that.”
Not to me
.

(they wouldn’t)

“Right, and”—Ro seemed to be talking to herself as much as to me now—“I’m you’re first visitor. And you just moved, don’t know the area. You haven’t met the neighbors yet, I’m assuming.”

“Neighbors? We’re out in the wilderness.” The house sat alone on a hill, after all.

Ro’s spine stiffened briefly, her fingers tensing against the banister. At the landing, she turned to me, her features arranged
too cautiously to be entirely sincere. “Well, I hope you’re not
too
isolated out here. It’d be nice if you could make some friends.”

Nice
. Because relationships were hard for me, connections were sometimes difficult, due to my

(hysterical)

sensitive nature, which so many of my peers found off-putting.

I stood beside Ro at the top of the staircase, taking in the twists of the house from above. It felt less surreal to see the sharp, unexpected angles of Amity from this vantage point, a little calmer.

“Have you tried the phone yet?” she asked.

I sucked in my breath. “No,” I said shortly. “Why?” There would be check-ins, updates with the doctors at some point, but not yet. And I was

(slept like the DEAD!)

fine right now.

Wasn’t I?

I squeezed my hands into tight fists, dug my fingernails into the healthy, unmarked flesh of my palms.

I was
fine
.

I
am
fine. I am
.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” Ro said, speaking slowly, thoughtfully. “Just that I tried to call yesterday, to see how things were going. But I kept getting a busy signal, like there was something wrong with the line. I wasn’t sure if the problems were on my end, or on yours.”

“Huh.” Had I used the phone yesterday? Had anyone? Had it rung at all? I wasn’t sure. “Maybe the phone service
isn’t hooked up yet. Sometimes things take longer than you expect, I guess especially, you know, out here in no-man’s-land.”

“Right.” Ro shrugged. “But, still. I thought your parents made a point of getting those things taken care of,” she said. “For … your …”

(slept like the dead)

“I’m
fine
,” I insisted.
Fine
.

Her eyes darted toward my palms, then back to my eyes.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad.” She tilted her head. “But you could tell me if you weren’t, you know. You can always tell me.”

“I know.” I swallowed. My hands pulsed, unseen, throbbing with a ghosted tinge of pain. I shoved them into my back pockets. “But I’m okay. I promise. Come on. I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

THE SECOND STORY BEHAVED ITSELF
for Aunt Ro. The bathroom Luke and I shared betrayed none of the eerie images I’d seen last night, though the mirror was still cracked jaggedly through the middle. If Ro noticed, she didn’t mention it. The bedrooms, though still storing pockets of unexpectedly cold air, were unremarkable. Ro commented on the closet space and the original detailing of the claw-foot tub, but beyond that, she was subdued.

As we wound our way to the third floor, a familiar sense of vertigo crept over me. The dimensions of the stairwell seemed to morph and shift the way space had expanded and folded over for me down in the basement. I was woozy as we approached the third-floor landing, and—though it may have been my imagination—Ro appeared to teeter, too. At the top of the staircase, I grabbed the knob of the banister and shut my eyes, willing the floor to steady beneath me. When I opened them again, I painted as bright an expression on my face as possible.

“So.
Ta-da
.” I pretended to curtsy, ignoring the dizziness.

“That was a climb.” Ro’s face was pale, her upper lip beaded with sweat.

I nodded and winced. “I know, sorry. There’s not even much to see up here anyway.” The sewing room was behind
me, and I gestured to it. “This is the only room we’ve really used, and just for storage, you know. Stuff we won’t need to unpack for a while.”

Ro pressed her eyes shut tightly and swayed, leaning against the wall for support.

I moved toward her, tentative. “Do you need to sit down? Are you sure you don’t want to rest for a little?” She clearly wasn’t quite herself.

Roadblocks, detours, useless directions …
the phone line being so finicky. It had to be coincidence, all of it. Bizarre, but completely random.

Didn’t it?

Ro raised a hand to her mouth. She whispered something, a string of softly breathed syllables I shouldn’t have even been able to make out.

Except they’d come from my own lips, too.

“She was shot in the head.”

My blood ran cold.

NOW I FELT MORE THAN DIZZY
, more than faint. Now I felt as though the floor were slipping out from underneath me, as though Amity’s very foundations were crumbling to dust, to ashes, to a gray, papery silt.

Maybe I’d heard her wrong. Maybe the voice had come from inside my

(crazy)

head.

“Did you say something, Aunt Ro?” I was quiet, almost as though I didn’t actually want her to answer.

Almost.

She whirled to face me, her eyes bloodshot, lined red like road maps. “This house is old, Gwen,” she said. Her voice was strained and hoarse. “Very old. It has …” She seemed to be struggling for just the right words. “… history.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re telling me you’re feeling good these days? Because I promise, it would be okay if you weren’t.” Her eyes searched mine. “Your parents, they think the country will be so relaxing, therapeutic.… I’ve heard all of their arguments for moving out here. But being so isolated, it’s not for everyone.”

“It’s quiet,” I said.

Quiet out here in the country, that was.

Inside my mind was a different matter entirely. But even with Ro’s gaze so imploring, I couldn’t admit that.

I had heard my parents’ arguments, too. I
was
the argument.

But I was better now. I was.

Because I had to be.

Whatever Aunt Ro’s suspicions were—however they might have collided with my own nightmares, my own

(insane)

fears—I
needed
them to be misguided. Mistaken.

I didn’t want to hear any more about Ro’s intuitions. Not right now.

Not when it came to me, or to Amity.

RO PAUSED
at the door to the sewing room.

I tried not to wonder why, gathering bravado and pushing past her, into the room. I moved—one foot, then the other—and then I was fully inside, just past the threshold. I felt a surge, a twinge of something active and electric, as I stepped in. The air around me seemed to shimmer.

Then I heard the buzzing.

“Gwen?” Ro’s voice wobbled, and when I pivoted to look back at her, her eyes were wide and bright, her skin a dull, ashy shade, runny and clammy like something soft left out for too long in the sun.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.

The buzzing was louder now, more insistent. I brushed a hand at my ear to no effect. The hum swelled, almost soothing me, lulling me.

“Gwen …,” Ro said, her voice watery, unlike anything I’d ever heard from her lips before. “Gwen, I think you should come out of there.”

“There’s a beautiful view of the river from the window,” I insisted, even as the buzzing deepened, twisted, thickened. I moved toward it, waving to her.

Why did it seem so vital, so
crucial
, that Aunt Ro come inside with me? So urgent that she view the Concord River
through Amity’s windows, through her heavy-framed eyes?