Arrowood (19 page)

“You know you want to.”

“Okay!” the girl yelled. “When I say ‘Go,' wrap your partner up like a mummy. You have to use the whole roll. Whichever team finishes first wins a Jäger Bomb!”

“Is that really a prize?” Josh hissed in my ear.

“You wrap me,” I said.

When the girl said “Go,” Josh started at my ankles, loosely winding his way upward, careful not to touch me too intimately. The paper slid down as he went, coiling at my feet.

“You suck at this,” I said, grabbing the roll. I wrapped him as tightly as I could, reaching my arms around his back as I got to his chest. We were face-to-face, his breath sweet with schnapps, a strange energy buzzing between us. The eighties girl hollered for everybody to stop, and behind us we heard the high-pitched screams of the girls who won the Jäger Bomb, but we didn't bother to turn around and look. Josh and I stood there staring at each other as the music started back up.

“Do you want to go?” I asked. My hand circled his wrist and I could feel his pulse shuddering through my fingertips.

“I don't think either of us should drive right now.”

“Let's walk,” I said, tearing the paper off of him and letting it fall to the floor. “It's not that far.”

“Won't you be cold?”

“I want to. Come on.”

I pulled him back through the house to the door, not saying goodbye to anyone, and we stepped out into the night, shedding the last of the toilet paper as we went. The wind whipped my dress and wig, and I turned to face it head-on as Josh retrieved my bag from the van. The numbing chill felt good against my skin after the heat of the house, and I inhaled the crisp scent of frost and dead leaves. I chucked the schnapps bottle toward a garbage can and missed, nearly twisting my ankle in the process.

“You sure you're okay?” Josh asked.

“Why did you invite me to come tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you ask me to come here with you?”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. Everything he was holding back burned clearly in the way that he looked at me.

I grabbed his arm and ran. We made it to the end of the next block before my lungs seized up and I had to slow down. Josh brushed hair away from my face, and I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his, pressing our palms together, wanting to feel his skin against mine. He exhaled slowly, heat radiating from his body, his breath turning to smoke in the cold air. By the time we reached his apartment, I was shivering and my feet had blistered in my secondhand heels. I pried off the shoes and staggered to the bathroom to pee as soon as we got inside.

I heard Josh put on music, something brooding and instrumental, and when I looked up from washing my hands, my reflection startled me. So much blood, caked in the tangled blond wig, staining my face, snaking down my neck, saturating the bodice of my dress. I looked like someone the worst had already happened to. Someone with nothing to lose.

Josh was standing barefoot in the living room. I walked toward him, and he watched me intently, with no trace of his previous uncertainty as I leaned in to kiss him. He kissed me back, softly at first, the heat of his touch spreading over my skin, and then I was unzipping his jumpsuit and tugging at the sleeves to get it off, sliding my hands under the T-shirt he wore beneath it. Josh took me by the wrist and led me into his dark bedroom, where he undid the back of my dress and let it slide to the floor. I imagined us as our costumed selves: the broken prom queen, the charismatic killer. I pulled him down onto the unmade bed and wrapped myself around him, pressing my face against his throat to feel the warm thud of his pulse.

When I woke up next to Josh hours later, daylight slicing in through the shades, I felt like I'd been struck in the head with an ax. I eased myself out of bed and crept to the bathroom naked. My wig had come off as I slept, leaving my hair a matted mess, and the fake blood on my skin had begun to flake and peel. I turned on the shower, and while I waited for the water to heat up, I dug around in the medicine cabinet and found some Advil for my headache. I scrubbed myself in the shower, trying to remove the pink stains left behind by the blood, and washed my hair with Josh's dandruff shampoo.

When I finished, I wrapped myself in a towel and returned to the bedroom, digging quietly through Josh's dresser to find a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of pajama pants. I knew it would probably be easier to leave before he woke up, to avoid any awkward discussion of the previous night, but I wanted to lie down for a few more minutes, just long enough for the Advil to kick in.

Josh lay curled on his side, snoring lightly, the covers bunched up around his waist. I tugged the bedding loose to pull it over me, and something caught my eye. His T-shirt had ridden up to expose a line of black script on his lower back. A tattoo.

I carefully slid his shirt up to get a better look. It wasn't one line of script, as I had initially thought, but many, twisting together and branching upward like vines. I couldn't pull his shirt up any farther for fear of waking him, so I couldn't see the whole thing. The lettering was intricate, the words ornamented with leaves and thorns, and as I tried to make them out, I saw that they were not words, exactly, but names.
Paul Andrew Kyle 1996
. His brother, the one who had run away.
John David Gosch 1982. Eugene Wade Martin 1984.
Marc James Warren Allen 1986
. The Des Moines paperboy abductions.
Heather Leigh Campbell 1989.
The girl from Burlington who was never found. All unsolved cases, children who had gone missing without a trace. Then, along his spine:
Violet Ann Arrowood 1994. Tabitha Grace Arrowood 1994
. My sisters' names etched into his flesh. I let go of his shirt, and he stirred in his sleep, burrowing deeper into his pillow.

I scooted backward out of the bed and gathered up my things, closing the bedroom door softly behind me so as not to wake him. In the living room, his orange jumpsuit lay on the floor where it had fallen the night before. I leaned against the desk for balance as I strapped on my Goodwill shoes, my hand resting on a pile of folders. The one labeled
ARROWOOD
sat on top. I wanted out of the apartment, but I couldn't help myself. I flipped the folder open and shuffled the papers aside to get to the pictures, the ones he'd shown me to prove Singer's innocence.

I felt a weight in my chest, as though my heart had been filled with wet sand. There were the twins, exactly as I remembered them on that very last day, brought into focus in the one photo where I was a blur. I picked through the smiling close-ups of me with my sweaty bangs and missing tooth, the shots of my eight-year-old body, my end-of-summer tan, my thin arms hanging loose and relaxed.

Below those were other pictures that Josh hadn't shown to me. School pictures of me over the years, from elementary on. I wasn't sure where he had gotten them. Part of his research, I supposed, getting close to his subjects—scouring the Internet, looking for people I knew, finding out what he could about me and my family, details for his book. At the bottom of the stack was a yearbook photo from my freshman year of high school in a windswept corner of Nebraska, where my dad was swindling farmers by selling them unnecessary insurance. I wore a lavender button-down blouse with a warped collar, and there were hollows under my eyes, as though I hadn't been sleeping well. I remembered how the wind had kept me up night after night, rattling a broken windmill in the yard of our rented farmhouse. My hair was tucked behind my ears and I was frowning, as I always did when my picture was taken
after,
so that if anything happened to me, people would see my face on a poster or on the news and know that I had seen it coming, that I was not one of those smiling kids who thought the world would not hurt them. I imagined Josh examining these photos of me long before we met, thinking that he knew me, how I felt, what I wanted; that he understood me from studying two-dimensional portraits of my pain.

Josh had no claim to my sisters or my grief. He had no right to wear their names on his skin, to obsess over someone else's loss, to group it in with his own as though we all suffered equally. We had loss in common, a thread that had drawn us together, but my story didn't belong to him. I grabbed my bag and walked out of the apartment, taking the pictures with me.

The temperature had dropped overnight, the last day of October bringing frigid winds. Frost etched my windshield, and I scraped it off with the edge of an empty cassette case that had been sitting on the floorboard since the tape player had broken years ago, that last mixtape permanently wedged inside. I felt light-headed, like I might throw up. I hadn't been hungover in quite a while, and it was worse than I remembered. I cracked the window to let in the cold air and drove down the river road, which was littered with newly fallen leaves. I wondered what Ben was doing, if he lay next to Courtney in his half-finished house, which he still hadn't invited me to see. He had warned me that there was something off about Josh, and I hadn't listened.

The sky and the river were two shades of gray, winter colors. As I cut around the bend nearing the town of Montrose, a flock of starlings scattered from the trees and swept into the air, turning and wheeling in fluid formation and then swooping over the car like crashing surf, their maneuvers beautifully synchronized. In a manner inexplicable to humans, the birds were connected, in tune to an improvised master plan. Each bird knew from moment to moment what would come next, without having to think, without having to be taught. I envied them, their ability to connect to those around them, to move through life with unstudied ease, never looking back. As I pulled away from the starlings, my hands tight on the wheel, the flock spun and each bird spun with it.

As soon as I got home, I stripped off the clothes I'd borrowed from Josh and tossed them into the laundry sink, along with my bloody costume. I wondered if he'd be surprised when he woke to find me gone; if he'd expected me to stay, make conversation, eat breakfast. I'd assumed the night before that we were acting in silent agreement, pretending to be people we weren't, indulging a mutual need. I couldn't deny there had been a connection between us, though it was different from what I'd felt for Dr. Endicott—the carsick feeling that was better than being alone—or my nostalgic longing for a version of Ben that no longer existed. It was something all its own. I couldn't quite name it.

I put on some sweats and turned up the heat, imagining the utility bill escalating with each degree. I'd have to go to the store later to buy candy for the trick-or-treaters, though all I wanted to do was lie on the couch until my stomach stopped its ominous churning. It didn't help that the last day of the month was winding down. I knew it was irrational, but I was dreading November first. As a kid, the days after Halloween were always a letdown, but it was more than that for me. I had never liked the beginnings of things—mornings or Mondays or the start of a new month or year. The hours before midnight were never as empty and lonesome as the ones that came right after. Single-digit days were too bare and new. I was aware that it was all in my head, that each day was simply a continuation of a long line of days marching into winter and back out again, their numbers meaningless and repeating. January first was no different from the day that came before. Still, I could feel it. Tomorrow November would arrive, and soon, a new year. I had been at Arrowood for more than a month, and it hadn't turned me back into the person I used to be.

I woke up on the couch early in the evening, as the sun was starting to fade. I had a voicemail and a text from Josh. The text was brief:
Make it home okay?
I didn't listen to the voicemail. My head felt much better, and my stomach growled, though I still wasn't hungry. I made my way to the study at the front of the house and peeked out the window. Already, little fairies and goblins and ghosts were making their way down the street. No time to run to the store for candy. I wasn't sure that I could face them anyway, all those happy children spilling onto the porch, their bright chorus of trick-or-treats and thank-yous. Instead, I headed up the stairs past the third floor to the tower.

I hadn't been out on the widow's walk since I'd moved back, and had never been allowed up there as a kid unless someone went with me. It took some muscle to scrape the door open from the tiny tower room, and then I stepped out onto the roof. The wind lashed my hair across my face, and I closed my eyes, listening to the rustle of dead leaves, the muted voices of children far below, the ghostly call of a train as it cut between the river and the bluffs.

I remembered trick-or-treating as a witch the year after the twins were born, going up and down Grand Avenue to all our neighbors' houses while Grammy stayed with Violet and Tabitha. I was secretly giddy to have a night alone with my mother. She held my hand as we walked the moonlit sidewalks together, leaves crunching underfoot, my little plastic cauldron slowly filling with Hershey bars and Tootsie Rolls. She told me stories about soaping windows and toilet-papering yards with her friends on Halloween, talking to me like she used to, when I would sit at her dressing table, when I was her only child. Mom used up a whole roll of film taking pictures of me that night, the first time I'd been photographed alone since the twins were born, and I had a furtive thought:
What if it could be like this all the time?

I opened my eyes and leaned against the wrought-iron railing, where Arrowoods had long ago watched for barges bearing timber, my pulse quickening. If the railing gave way, a fall from that height would easily kill me. The sky was rapidly darkening, the air sharp and clear, and as I looked out over town, I could see porch lights blinking on and the warm glow of jack-o'-lantern flames. It seemed a miraculous thing: The town was dying, yet the people who remained kept on living, like there was no other way around it.

When it was completely dark, I went back downstairs to the kitchen to fetch some matches. It would be a shame, I decided, to let Halloween pass by without at least lighting the jack-o'-lantern. I crept carefully out the front door, not wanting to turn on the porch light and attract trick-or-treaters with a false promise of candy. The jack-o'-lantern wasn't at the top of the steps where it had sat the night before, and I wondered if someone had stolen it. A group of kids shuffled by on the sidewalk, trailed by a lone parent. None of them glanced in my direction. I moved to the edge of the porch, and there at the bottom of the steps were the pulpy remains of the pumpkin. I had never understood the fun in destroying other people's things. I told myself it wasn't personal, that whatever teenage jerks had done this had likely smashed every pumpkin on the block.

I tucked the matchbook into my pocket, and as I turned to go back in the house, something caught my eye. Beneath the branches of the mimosa tree, two shadows moved up the moonlit walkway, footsteps silent on the brick. I watched in disbelief as two platinum-haired girls emerged from the darkness, standing side by side. They wore matching baby-doll dresses, their hair tucked behind their ears and held in place with barrettes. In the dim light, I couldn't make out their faces, only the hollows of their cheeks and eyes.

“Trick-or-treat!” they said in unison, their voices high-pitched and screechy, like a record played too fast.

I couldn't move. It took me a minute to push words up from my throat. “I—I'm sorry. I don't have any candy.”

“Arden?”

“Who are you?”

The girls looked at each other and giggled. “Can't you tell? We're Violet and Tabitha. The Arrowood twins.”

“We saw a light on upstairs, in our room,” one of the girls said, pointing up and to the right, toward my sisters' room.

The other girl nodded, and they slid closer. They were older than I had first thought. Taller. They looked wrong in their little-girl dresses and hair clips. I took a wobbly step backward, and another, a tingling sensation rushing up my spine to the base of my skull and prickling over my scalp.

“What's the matter?” one of the girls said as they glided up the steps and onto the porch. “Did you think we were dead?”

I reached the door, panic fumbling my fingers so that I could barely turn the knob. The girls were laughing, terrible shrieks ribboning out of their mouths. Once I managed to get inside, I sank to the floor and sat on my shaking hands. I leaned back against the door and then flinched as a loud thud, and then another, struck the other side. It sounded like they were trying to kick down the massive door. I waited for them to give up and go away, and after a minute of pounding, it went quiet. I got to my feet and listened. A thin, scrabbling sound pricked my ears, like fingernails scratching at the window. I sucked in a few rapid breaths, telling myself how ridiculous it was that a couple of teenagers had me cowering in my own house. I yanked the door open, ready to chase them away. There was no one on the porch. My heart thudded as I scanned the yard. Dead leaves scuttled along the walkway, the empty sidewalk, whispering. My skin itched like someone was watching me, but I couldn't see anyone in the dark. I shut the door and stood there in the center hall staring at it, willing my heart to slow down.

Bam-bam-bam-bam
. A rapid-fire knock. “Go away!” I screamed, the words tearing my throat. The knob rattled and turned, and before I could think to run, the door pushed open and there was Heaney, dressed in Carhartts and a stocking cap, wielding a hefty flashlight the size of a thermos. My breath wheezed in and out, my hands trembling.