Dwellers (11 page)

Celeste herself looked like she had not been taking care of her own house. Jessica’s skin and hair looked dull, and there were dark circles under her eyes. “I have not slept for nine
days,” Celeste said.

Up to this day, I still don’t know whether she had been joking then or not.

“What’s with the basket?”

She smiled, and for a split-second I saw my sister’s eyes in Jessica’s face. “I thought I might bake a cake with the twins,” she said. Her smile dissolved and she looked
suddenly tired, suddenly old. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I miss them, you know.”

I left her to set up in the kitchen, empty now of the family cook and her assistants, and fetched the twins. “Cake! Cake! Cake!” Paulo and Samuel chanted through the corridors. We
found Celeste sitting by the kitchen table, her hands on her knees, looking pale and sick in the yellow glow. She was humming a song. The ingredients were arranged on the table, perfectly, as
though they were going to be photographed: flour, milk, eggs, butter, sugar.

“Help me?” she asked when the twins approached her, and of course they wanted to help. Celeste took a handful of flour and blew a white cloud at their faces. The twins laughed. They
pushed me out, playfully, tickling me as I walked backwards, and closed the door.

“We’ll call you when it’s done,
Kuya!”
they said.

I WENT TO my room, planning to read a chapter or two from a book, but I ended up falling asleep. It was already dark when I woke up.

CYANIDE KILLS BY preventing the cells of the body from using oxygen. Because of this, its effect is greater on organs which use the most oxygen: the heart, the brain, and the
lungs. Exposure to a large amount of cyanide, by any route, can lead to respiratory failure and cardiac arrest within minutes. Victims scream in excruciating pain before dying.

The twins’ bedroom was empty so I headed straight to the dining room, imagining them eating their slice of chocolate cake and drinking their milk, imagining their reaction when I say,
faux-heartbroken,
Why didn’t you wake me up?
I imagined this as I walked down the stairs, despite the silence, despite the overwhelming silence that should have told me that something
was wrong.

The dining room was empty. They must still be in the kitchen, I thought, they must have decided to eat at the kitchen table right after the cake popped out of the oven. And that was where I
found them, Paulo and Samuel, curled on the floor, their chairs overturned.

I have visited this scene so many times in my head—the chocolate cake sitting like a bomb on its glass plate, the half-eaten slices on the table, the flour dusting the counters like ash
fall—and I kept going back to those overturned chairs. They felt it immediately. The twins, my little brothers. They felt it all at once. They screamed in pain, they suffocated. They placed
their hands on their chests and their necks and tried to stand, but they fell to the floor, overturning their chairs. They felt it and they were gone before they could even understand what was
happening. That was how they died: scared, confused, and in immense pain.

I should never have left them with her. I still have these terrible dreams, where instead of allowing the twins to push me out of the kitchen, I push back and wrestle the cyanide out of her
hands. Then I wake up and I realize—

If only I had pushed back. If only I had stayed.

I would never forgive myself, for as long as I live.

YOU’D THINK A person like that would want to die himself. And yet here I am. Here I am.

I NEED TO finish this story, Louis.

22

I REMEMBER NOT full scenes but fragments:

The twins’ bodies—they still feel soft and warm, so
alive
—pressed against my chest on the floor.

The maids arriving at the kitchen, hands over their mouths.

My knee hit the floor in the hallway as I fall in my haste and grief. I stayed there for a minute, as the panic escalated in the kitchen, until I remembered what I was supposed to do. I stood up
and ran out of the mansion and across the field, screaming Celeste’s name at the top of my lungs.

Whoever heard me probably thought that I had lost my mind. At the back of my head, a small voice whispered that Celeste was gone, I should be shouting Jessica’s name instead.

I remembered the burial place my sister made for herself. That was how I ended up crossing the garden and entering the cemetery. Someone was howling. I followed the sound, and found Jessica in
her black dress, her clothes stained with soil and flour and weeds, kneeling beside the grave. The grave had been dug open, and Celeste’s body—face and limbs mangled by maggots and
decomposition—lay visible in the hole.

The sight of my sister’s body, green and black like rotting fruit, deflated my rage. I fell on my knees and burst into tears.

“This is what happens in the end,” Jessica—Celeste—said, turning to me. “All bodies end up like this. The victim and the wicked decay the same way. Like they
don’t differ at all.”

HER FACE, TEAR-STREAKED, shone pink in the moonlight. “There has got to be something better after this life, don’t you think? Where we get our due? Otherwise,”
a sob gave her pause, “what’s the point?”

“You poisoned the twins,” I said, and a grief so great fell on my head that I felt rooted to the spot, even as I saw her move her hands, revealing Uncle Pedro’s gun that had
been there all along.

“I was going to shoot them,” she said, “but I can’t shoot them at the same time. That would mean turning to Paulo or Sam first while his brother watched. It was cruel. I
couldn’t do it.”

“So lacing a cake with poison makes it less cruel?” I said, the rage returning, growing.

“The twins love cake.” She smiled through her tears.

“You have lost your mind.”

“There is something better,” she said, “after this life.”

I lunged at her and placed my hands on her neck. She pulled the trigger in surprise, but the gun was aimed at the steel-colored sky, sending the bullet into the atmosphere. My ears rang. Her
grip on the gun loosened as my hands around her neck tightened. The gun fell to the ground now, liberated, but I focused on her neck. My own enraged scream sounded strange and foreign to my ears. I
watched her claw at my hands, watched her face change color, watched her eyes bulge. She believed in something better after this life but still fought the hands suffocating her. The body wants what
it wants.

It was Jessica’s body, Jessica’s throat, Jessica’s hands trying to pry my fingers loose, and right now Jessica was a stranger who broke into our home and killed my defenseless
brothers.

Someone was calling my name, but it was background noise, a whistle under the roaring current of my anger. I ignored it until I felt arms slip under my armpits and try to pull me away.

It was Louis. He had to pull several times before he was able to yank me away. We staggered backwards and landed on our sides, on the ground, the impact sending a tremor up my elbow, the soil
coating my arm and cheek. Later, I would find out that Louis was sent back to the main mansion because the talks fell apart and the workers were getting restless. He ran out when he thought he
heard the sound of a gunshot.

I could hear Celeste cough; I could hear Louis saying something, over and over:
The twins are dead.

Celeste, still coughing, was crawling toward the gun. I saw it sparkling like an oasis in the grass.

I sat up as if electrocuted. I was about to dive for the weapon when an explosion rang in the distance. Celeste and Louis turned their heads.

An LPG tank exploded in one of the houses in the farmers’ housing complex. My father’s guards, in their panic, thought it was the opening volley of an assault. They opened fire. Five
were killed and twenty-three were injured in the ensuing stampede. I learned about this after the fact. The family was not able to completely keep the media out of it this time so there was
coverage. I saw articles about it on the front page, but they were quickly pushed to the inside pages before disappearing completely.

That night, I didn’t look back. The explosion gave Celeste pause, and gave me a split-second, a chance, to reach the gun first.

In the next moment I had the gun pointed at her.
There is something better after this life.
My sister believed that, in her heart of hearts, in her infinite sadness. I lifted the gun but
did not pull the trigger. I don’t know if I did it because I wanted to punish her, or because I still loved her.

But she reached for the shovel on the ground beside her and stood up to swing it, aiming for my head. I had no time to think. The gun was still in my hand, the barrel pointed at her head. I
turned my eyes away.

I heard a wet, gurgling sound coming from Jessica’s body. I had hit not her forehead or her face, but her neck. Celeste was choking on her own blood. I couldn’t tell you how long I
stood there, frozen in place. Louis came over, took the weapon from me, and stood over her. Before long, the gurgling sound stopped, leaving us with the aftersound of gunfire.

23

LOUIS DROPPED THE gun as though it burned him. He turned to me, and later he said the expression on my face reminded him of how my mother sometimes looked at the dinner table.
Like I had no more fight left in me. Like I no longer cared what happened next.

Louis said, “We need to get out of here,” and that snapped me out of it. All we wanted was to get away from the bodies. As we drove away in his SUV followed by the noise of the
stampede, and with the flames of the burning houses visible in the rearview mirror, we wondered if it would be better to burn all of our bridges.

At first, we thought we could make up a story. Wanting to avenge her father, Jessica killed and buried Celeste and poisoned the twins. She was poised to kill me as well, if not for Louis’s
help.

But would our family side with us? Would Auntie? Would Father, who found God and believed that murder is murder is murder?

If we were forgiven, are we strong enough to deal with the fallout? After what was revealed after Uncle Pedro’s death, Louis had spent more time outside the estate, as though trying to
distance himself from what happened. I didn’t have the choice or the luxury. Now, the twins and Celeste were dead. I couldn’t imagine surviving a day in that near-empty house with an
inconsolable mother and a father who would very likely respond to his grief by killing himself or killing his one remaining child.

I felt considerable relief as we drove away from the estate and the miles dropped behind us.

We drove for hours. We stopped thrice: once to strip the SUV of its plate number, once to eat, change our clothes, and sleep, and once to argue. About what to do. About where to go next.

But we both know what the next step was going to be.

We started drinking. It was stupid but we needed something to dull our fears. It had been ten hours since I shot my sister. The road was nearly deserted until a sedan shot out of a side street
and appeared in front of us. I remember laughing. I remember saying,
Step on the gas and catch up to them before we lose our nerve
.

We did not have time to see that the road feeds into a cul-de-sac.

I COULD START again
, I thought, as we tailed the car. It was an amazing feeling.

24

“AND,” I SAY, “here we are.”

The rain continues. I feel extremely warm inside my shirt, but my hands are cold. While I am telling the story, Louis zips from one room to another, paces in the living room, looks out the
window. He doesn’t want to listen.

Louis stands beside me now. I hear the jingle of keys. He has the keys to Jonah’s apartment in one hand.

Ivy is coming to, in a fashion. She still looks shell-shocked but her eyes, alive and aware, can now focus on mine.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“You didn’t know.”

“Your poor brothers.”

Louis turns away, walks to the window, walks back. Twice. Thrice. I wish I could do the same.

I have not told her everything. I have not told her about Meryl. I don’t know if I want to, if I have to.

Louis leans forward and hands Ivy the incriminating disc back in its box. Ivy takes it calmly enough, but her lower lip trembles and her eyes glisten.

“Jonah is dead now,” she says. She places the box on her lap and rests a hand on top of it. “The real Jonah. So I suppose justice has been served. But what about—What do
we do
now?”

Justice has been served.
Maybe it’s better if Ivy didn’t know about the basement.

“I’m afraid we have to disappear for a little while,” Louis says.

“I want to know what really happened,” she says.
“She
can’t get away with this.
I want to kill her.”

We don’t hear the doorknob when it turns, but I feel a draft on the back of my head and suddenly the front door is open and there is someone standing there.

“You didn’t ask for your key back after I finished house-sitting,” says our visitor, locking the door behind her, “so I kept it.”

The girl in the shirt, Jonah’s partner.

Leslie.

25

SHE STILL HAS not seen the tableau in the living room. She turns, shrugs off her raincoat, and drops it on the floor with her bag. She bends to pull off her rain boots and
that’s when she sees us staring at her. She hesitates. Her eyes flit from Louis to Ivy, then to me. She smiles. She decides not to take off her boots. She tracks muddy boot prints into the
living room, slinging her bag again over her shoulder.

“Ivy!” she says. “I didn’t know you were here.” She sees the DVD player hooked up to the TV set and the box on Ivy’s lap, and her smile hardens like
frost.

Ivy lunges at her, growling like an animal. Louis swears in surprise. I hear slapping, high-pitched shrieks, then a stunned silence as Ivy and Leslie stand up. Leslie, face red from exertion,
lips bleeding from a cut, is holding a gun.