The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (40 page)

R
HONDA STOOD WATCHING
until Peter crawled into his tent with the gun. A few minutes later, she saw Tock cross the yard, open the canvas flap, and join him.

Rhonda left the window and got into bed beside Lizzy. Lizzy’s back was to her. Rhonda put her arm around Lizzy’s stomach, curled her knees up into Lizzy’s, their bodies making one giant question mark under the sheet.

“Remember the story our moms used to tell all the time?” Rhonda asked, not sure if Lizzy was asleep. “How we once had our own language? We were the only ones who understood each other.”

Rhonda felt Lizzy’s body stiffen then relax. Then she felt the quiet motion of Lizzy starting to cry.

“I wish,” said Rhonda, “that I could remember some of those words now.”

But she couldn’t. So she just held Lizzy as tight as she could, rocking her gently, until they were both fast asleep.

O
NCE UPON A
time,” Lizzy began, “there were two little girls who told everyone they were sisters. And they were, for all intents and purposes. They looked alike, talked alike and had this weird way of finishing each other’s thoughts and sentences. They loved each other very much.”

So far, this story, their story, sounded like the beginning of a fairy tale. Hansel and Gretel. Two innocent children who were somehow doomed from the start.

The trail beside Tock and Peter’s house took them through the woods that had been logged several years before Peter and Tock bought the land. All around them was evidence of the forest reclaiming itself: paper birch, pin cherry, and poplars mixed in with some old sugar maples that had been left alone during the logging. The path took them down to the stream that fronted the property. It felt like a good ten degrees cooler by the water.
The banks were covered in ferns. Around them grew birch and sassafras with the funny lobed leaves that reminded Rhonda of mittens. When they were kids, they’d broken off sassafras twigs and chewed them, pretended they were root beer–flavored cigarettes.

Lizzy lay down in the bed of ferns on her stomach and Rhonda joined her, gazing down at the quietly burbling stream, which was clear as a magnifying glass. Water striders skated at the edge. A green frog hopped from a nearby rock and Rhonda watched it glide underwater. She thought of frogs she’d dissected. The drawing in her living room. Then, she thought of metamorphosis. Change. What did the frog remember, Rhonda wondered, from its life as a tadpole?

“The thing is,” Lizzy continued, “one of the sisters had a terrible secret. Something she was afraid to tell the other. Are you paying attention, Ronnie? ’Cause here’s where things get tricky.”

Rhonda nodded, studying Lizzy’s face, noticing the tiny lines around her eyes and lips.

Does the frog trust its own memories? Does it think nothing of them? And what, Rhonda wondered, of the frogs who are kissed and turn into princes? What do they remember? What do they know?

Rhonda suddenly felt seized with panic. She didn’t want Lizzy to tell this story, whatever it was. She’d been searching for the truth for weeks, but now that she was on the cusp of finally understanding everything, she wanted to go back. But it was too late.

When Lizzy spoke again, she was direct, no more fairy tale musings.

“When I was ten years old, my father began coming to my room at night. He’d say he’d come to tuck me in. Maybe it actually began before then. When I look back, I remember him visiting me in the bathroom for years. Washing me all over in the tub,
asking to wipe me after I’d gone to the bathroom. It was only when I was ten that he came to me in my room. It was only then that he not only touched me, but had me touch him.”

Rhonda bit her lip.
Not Daniel
, she wanted to gasp, but that was against the rules. And besides, she knew it was the truth, didn’t she? She felt it deep in her bones, in the tingle of the scar on her forehead. It had been there all along like a sleeping tiger, the dark secret in the back of her brain.

“He called me his special girl,” Lizzy continued. “His star. He said we had a secret bond between us, something no one else could touch. He made me promise never to tell because if I did, it would be ruined and he would be very angry. He told me no one would believe me anyway. No one would believe that I was such a lucky girl. They’d think I was making it up.”

Rhonda gazed down into the water. The sand at the bottom of the stream sparkled where the sunlight hit it. She remembered once how she, Peter, and Lizzy had panned for gold with an old aluminum pie plate at one of the creeks that led into the lake. Lizzy thought the mica they found was real silver. She saved it all in a little box and said that when she got big, she was going to have it turned into a mirror.

“It got bad, Rhonda. Real bad. When he was drinking, when the coffin thing wasn’t taking off and he was home all the time, he was always after me. He’d take me into his shop and make me do things. Tell me stories about things his father had done to him, how fathers carried this special kind of love inside them. He gave me these coins, these silver dollars. They were my prize for staying silent. But you know what I kept thinking? About the ferryman. You know, the guy who takes people across the River Styx to the underworld in his boat? I’d read about it in some book of Peter’s. He was paid by the coins stuck in the eyes of the corpses. I felt like my father was paying the ferryman. But I was the one who kept making the trip.”

Rhonda thought of the bag of coins, how it grew all summer. Lizzy’s pirate treasure.

“I was so scared, Rhonda. And it was more than fear. I felt alone, and crazy, and just sick. I couldn’t protect myself. I tried turning into Captain Hook, thinking that would do it. I thought if I didn’t wash, if I was filthy and said horrible things, he would stop. But it didn’t matter.”

As Lizzy went on, Rhonda felt as if she were falling; falling down deep into the rabbit hole of her dreams. The place where memories dwell. Where the truth lay buried and guarded.

“It took me a long time to gather up the courage to say anything,” Lizzy explained, “but I knew I had to—I couldn’t go on carrying the weight alone. You were my best friend, my secret gypsy twin, and I longed to tell you. I tried. The only time I came close was the night of Peter’s birthday when you slept over—do you remember?”

Rhonda nodded.
I have a secret.

What if Rhonda hadn’t turned away then? What if she’d done what a better friend might have, and actually listened?

“Finally, I decided to go to Peter,” Lizzy told her. “If I expected help from any of you, it would have to start with my brother. He was older—I thought he’d get it, know what I was talking about.

“But he was furious. He said it was a lie, and that I was fucked up—it was the first time I heard him say
fuck
, I think—making up a crazy story just to get attention. That I was jealous of Tock, jealous of you, and just a sick little girl making up lies. I told him
everything
. And it was hard, Rhonda, hard to talk about what Daddy was doing to me. What I had done. I mean, I was eleven, for Christ’s sake. But I did it. Every fucking sordid detail and still he didn’t believe. ‘Not Dad,’ he said. ‘Dad would
never
do that.’

“I was crying, begging him to believe me. Peter said he needed proof. And then, he came up with a plan. He wanted me to bring
Daddy out to the stage that night after the play. He wanted to see it with his own eyes.

“So the night of the play, just like Peter planned, I showed him. I made him believe.”

Lizzy paused for a moment. She pursed her lips, gazed out across the stream into the dense and tangled woods. Rhonda looked too. Through squinted eyes, she saw Daniel dressed as the white rabbit, leading the children deep into the woods between their houses, separating them. Lizzy was the last to come back. Rhonda had been so worried. Had she known then? Suspected?

“My father went with me gladly,” Lizzy continued, taking Rhonda back to the evening of the play, speaking in a dull monotone, no expression on her face. “He’d had a fight with Clem and was eager to leave the party. He was more than a little drunk. I led him down the path through the woods to the stage and he sat down on the edge, pulling me in front of him. He started touching me, unzipped his jeans and put his hands on my head, knocking the pirate hat off, guiding me down to him. I was used to it by then in a way. I could just make myself tune it out, you know. I could go places, think about other things. Sometimes I would go over all my lines from the play. It was dark in the woods by then, but the moon was out and Peter—he was hiding behind a tree—could see what was happening.

“Peter was crazy when he got to the stage. He came at Daddy, hitting his back as hard as he could with that stupid toy sword of his—broke it right in half. He was just screaming, no words, just a sound like some kind of battle cry. He jumped up onto Daddy’s back, wrapping his arms around his throat, still just howling. Dad lost his balance, fell, and they started rolling around on the ground, grunting and thrashing, knocking over folding chairs. Dad got Peter pinned down under him and was like, ‘You like to spy? Huh, boy?’ just livid, spitting, red in the face.

“I thought, that’s it, he’s going to kill Peter, then there’s this
pop-pop-pop sound and Daddy’s slapping at his back, cursing and screeching and I see Tock at the foot of the stage aiming her BB gun like a fucking sniper.”

Lizzy’s tone changed as she described how Peter and Tock came to her rescue. Her voice was more animated, almost excited as she told this part of the story.

“When she ran out of ammo, she charged and threw herself on him, and just the sheer momentum knocked him off of Peter. Peter snatched up one of the chairs and started hitting Daddy with it.

“My father was pissed off then, but I don’t think he was scared. He finally grabbed the chair away from Peter and struggled to his feet. He knocked Peter flat on his back and held him there, his arm across Peter’s throat.

“Tock was standing at the edge of things now, just screaming this incredible string of profanity, ‘You motherfucker cocksucking sonofawhore dipshitfucker get the fuck off him or I’ll fucking kill you!’ kind of thing. I thought everyone in your yard would hear her and come running. But they didn’t. I guess the music was up too loud. And Mom had gotten bombed and set the table on fire.”

Lizzy stopped to take a breath, and when she continued, her voice was the flat, familiar monotone once again.

“Daddy had Peter pinned by the throat and Peter was gasping, choking, struggling to get a breath. I knew it was up to me to end it. If I could just hit my father hard enough, he’d black out. I think I had an idea from cartoons that he’d get amnesia, too—and it would be like it never happened, you know? So I went back behind the stage to where we kept the toolbox and grabbed a hammer, then crept up behind my father and Peter. Tock was still screaming. Peter and Daddy were sweating, shaking, glaring at each other. I raised my arm high, swung, and hit the back of my father’s head as hard as I could. He went down, just like that. But
I hit him again, anyway. Then again. Then it was like I couldn’t stop. Everything he’d ever done to hurt me came back in a flash and I put all those months of lies and pain into each swing of the hammer. It was like that day I killed the bogeyman. I just kept going.

“Peter finally took the hammer away. Tock led me away, up onto the stage, wrapped her arms around me, holding me as tight as she could, rocking me.”

Lizzy looked over at Rhonda for the first time since she began her story. Lizzy’s forehead was glistening with beads of sweat. Her eyes, which had seemed to lose their focus as she spoke, now gazed at Rhonda with pinpoint clarity.

“Peter and Tock dragged Dad’s body up on the stage and rolled him into the hole, closing the trap door on top of him. Then Tock came back to hold me again.”

“And that’s what I walked in on,” Rhonda said. She’d been silent long enough. It was as much her story as theirs from that point on.

“None of us ever knew how much of it you’d seen,” Lizzy told her. “I always wondered how long you’d been watching, maybe too scared to make a move, if you knew what I’d done, hated me. Peter said you hadn’t seen anything, that you would have done something. Try to stop it, run back for help, something. But I was never sure. And after a while, I guess Peter and Tock wondered too.”

Rhonda shook her head.

“No, Peter was right. I had no idea. I thought you all had had a fight. I thought maybe something was going on with you and Tock and Peter was pissed. I couldn’t tell.”

Lizzy nodded. Blinked hard and continued.

“Well, you were there for the rest of it. Peter decided to tear down the stage; turn it into a pile of rubble and busted lumber that no one would ever think to look under. So we dug out the
rest of the tools in the box and tore apart the stage in a crazed frenzy. We were all kicking and smashing the boards apart. You and Peter got hurt when the back wall came down and it was good because later it explained the blood on our clothes.”

The mosquitoes had found them now, there in their place in the ferns. Lizzy swatted at her bare arms.

“You wrapped your jacket around my head,” Rhonda remembered. She shivered to think that that jacket had already been splattered with Daniel’s blood.

“I got rid of my clothes that night—or actually, I guess your mom must have gotten rid of them. While I was in the bath Justine took them away. I never saw them again.”

“And you stopped speaking,” Rhonda said.

“Peter said we couldn’t tell. We could never speak of what had happened in the woods that night. Of course, Tock and I listened to him—he was the leader, right? Always. He went over it again and again—if we said nothing, it was like it had never happened. Nobody would ever know. I was afraid. Afraid that if I opened my mouth, everything would come pouring out. Words seemed dangerous. Does that make sense?”

Rhonda nodded.

“When Mom started to well and truly lose her shit, it was even harder. She was never too tightly wrapped, but thinking Dad had left her was the last straw. And I knew it was my fault, all my fault, no matter what Tock and Peter said. Eventually, not speaking wasn’t safe enough. I had to leave. Get as far as I could from what had been done to me; from what
I’d
done.”

“What made you come back?”

Lizzy shook her head. “It’s silly, really. Peter had been after me for months to come and I was too scared. But then, remember that whole thing with that little girl in Virginia?”

“Ella Starkee,” Rhonda said.

“Yes, Ella Starkee. I saw her on TV. When she talked about her
kidnapper being dead and how she thought it was sad. She said, ‘Sometimes, what a person needs most is to be forgiven.’ That’s what brought me back, really—that one sentence. It was a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It felt like, after all these years, it was time to forgive my father; time to forgive myself.”