The Safest Lies (17 page)

I found my old notebooks, the recipes written in my own handwriting as I watched my mother.

“Kelsey? What the hell is all this stuff?” He was holding a container of one of the chemicals in his hand, frowning at the warning label.

“Chemicals,” I said. “From when my mom taught me science.”

He put it down, opened the box beside it, pulled out some wires. “And this?”

“Electronics. That was physics.”

I started making a pile of everything I needed while keeping an eye on the security screens, searching for signs of movement.

“See if you can find something called potassium nitrate,” I said. “That’s the only thing I’m missing.”

“Kelsey. This isn’t normal. You get that, right?”

I shook my head. “I used to be homeschooled. We needed all this.”

He shook his head again. “This isn’t like making homemade play-dough. I didn’t learn any of this in chemistry. Or physics.”

“I know. That’s why I tutor.”

“Kelsey, stop. Look at me.
This isn’t normal.
”

None of my life was normal, that was nothing new. I heard my mother’s voice, standing over the kitchen table, materials spread over top.
You’re trapped in a basement, and this is what you find. How do you get out?

This was my education.

“This stuff isn’t safe,” Ryan said. He backed away from the boxes. “Your entire basement is combustible.”

“What?” I stepped back from the boxes I’d been rummaging through so haphazardly just moments before.

“Flammable. Combustible. Take your pick. All of the above.”

Like all it would need was a single spark and the whole house would go up in flames.

The lock at the top of the staircase made more sense now.

“Kelsey, they make us take hazardous materials courses as part of our training. This. Isn’t. Safe. This shouldn’t be in your basement.”

This isn’t safe.
Surely my mother would’ve known that. Surely she wouldn’t have let me play with this as a child if I was truly in danger.

“Well, right now it’s our chance.”

There were fire extinguishers throughout the house. A precaution. A fear. But maybe something more. How safe was I really, sleeping above this?

He nodded, “Okay. But careful. We have to be careful.” And I heard an echo in the basement, my mother’s words, warning me. Ryan started moving with purpose again, tearing open the tops of all the boxes in this section, taking things out, putting them back.

Finally, I pulled out a familiar container. “Potassium nitrate,” I said, heading back toward the steps. “Come on.”

Ryan followed me out, but paused at the bottom of the steps to look behind him.

I didn’t like the way Ryan was looking around the basement, like it was something to fear. This was my mother.
My mother.

But now I was thinking about that hidden compartment under the floor of the safe room. The passports.

Her, but not her. Me, but not me. Both had felt like strangers.

—

Ryan checked the windows once again as I set the stove in the darkened kitchen. I heard the click of the gas, took out a pan, and started mixing the ingredients. Ryan watched me from across the room, looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of me—the way Annika sometimes did, like our worlds were so far apart they almost circled all the way back around again.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

“For what?”

“You shouldn’t even be here. I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. Took a step closer. “I’m not.”

I choked on tears. “You should be. I’ll get you out, I promise.”

“Us,” he said.

“Right.”

“You held us up with nothing but your fingers,” he mumbled. “I have no doubt.”

I looked up at him, at the way the light from the stove shone in his eyes, like a flame, and wondered what he saw in my own.

“I’m going to watch the monitors in the office,” Ryan said. He backed away, the smallest smile on his face. “I can’t believe your mother taught you to make a bomb,” he said, like he was impressed.

“A smoke bomb,” I corrected. A little lie. A white lie. The safest lie.

I
willed my hands to be still as I poured the contents into paper towel rolls and inserted the fuses—a length of my shoelace for each—my hands hot against the cooling mixture.

I moved on instinct. Muscle memory. Everything she taught me, second nature.

My mother taught me many things that I knew she didn’t want me talking about.
Careful,
she’d tell me whenever I left the house—and I knew she wasn’t just talking about staying safe. But it was all a symptom of her paranoia. See it on the news, teach me to evade it.

Know the exits,
she’d instruct after a news report of a fire death. She’d have me stand in each room of our house, eyes closed, and she’d ask, “Where’s the closest exit?” And I’d list them off—which window, which door. “Most deaths happen because you’re still trying to get out the way you’ve always gotten out,” she said, which was probably some warning fact she’d read on a website.

A news report of an armed intruder, and then came the lessons on
how to disarm someone.
Which joints to bend so that, muscle or no muscle, the wrist would cave, the weapon would fall. I wondered if things would’ve gone differently for her if she’d known this herself. If this was her way of making up for it.

Fear cannot hurt you,
she’d promised. I learned
from
her fear, so I would not become a victim, as she had been.

If you are trapped inside a car trunk.

If you are kept in a basement.

If you are lost in the middle of the woods.

I grew up understanding all the horrible things that might happen to me. The things we could plan for and the things we could not.

I could be hurt.

I could be taken.

There were a thousand things that could kill me.

There were a million places I could be hidden.

But I thought I understood her biggest fear: I could leave one day as she had, disappear, and finally return—completely unrecognizable.

So. I never built anything more than a smoke bomb. But I did know how to create an explosion.

I was trying to remember the
if
that got us there, to trace it back. My mother sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, the materials spread out in front of her. “This is where the chemicals would go, and then all you need is a fuse….And
voilà!
” Secrets passed down from mother to daughter, like the perfect way to apply liquid eyeliner.

—

“Kelsey!” A shout from my mother’s office as I tested the material in the holder.

Ryan’s face glowed a pale white from the glare of the monitors he was staring at.

He turned to face me, his eyes wide, like the moment we fell. “They’re inside the gates,” he said.

Something tightened around my throat, like a noose, and I gulped twice before I could get any air, my hand at the base of my throat.

“Where?” I finally said, moving to stand beside him. The screens were too grainy—I couldn’t see anything. But then the clouds shifted outside, the moon shone, and a nondescript shadow passed in front of the camera—up against the house now. And then all the shadows felt too close, like spiders across my skin. I could feel them, just on the other side of the wall, searching for cracks. An involuntary noise escaped my throat.

My hand found Ryan’s, and his fingers laced between mine, and I started moving us backward, until we were out of that room, in the open area in the middle of the house. He slowly turned to face me, and I held a finger to my lips, wondering if he could see me. I moved his hand to mine so he’d feel what I was doing.

His were trembling, along with mine.

I listened for any sounds in the stillness. In the dark, behind the walls, the shadows could be anywhere.

And then I heard it, my head whipping around to the front of the house. Someone pressed on the front door, tried to turn the handle, testing for weak spots. I felt the resistance of metal on metal all the way down to my bones as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

If someone gets in…
It was so outside of the realm of possibility to me growing up. Not this house. Not with the three layers of protection and the locks and the bars over the windows. Not with alarms and cell phones and landlines. Not with my mother always here, who would know exactly what to do.

“How much longer until it’s ready?” he whispered.

“Soon,” I said, testing the tops of the two different containers I’d poured. Almost dry.

He held up his hand, showing me the black object inside it. “I found your mom’s phone.”

I ran my hands along it, to make sure I was seeing it right. It was bigger than my cell, and bulkier, and it had a stubby rubber antenna on top and a thick button on the side. I shook my head. “My mom doesn’t have a phone. Where did you find that?”

“In the back of a desk drawer,” he said.

“Did you try it?”

“Yeah, I tried it.” He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s dead.”

I ran my fingers along the side, where I felt a large button. I pressed it, but nothing happened. I ran my hand along the back and found a lever that opened a compartment.

My hands tightened around the device. “This isn’t a phone. It’s a walkie-talkie.” I had the other half of the pair somewhere buried in my room, from childhood. Whenever I went outside alone back then I brought it with me. “Batteries,” I said, pulling out the back square. I rummaged through the top kitchen drawer, feeling for the right-sized batteries. I grabbed an assortment and blindly started fitting them into the compartment, searching for the right one. I felt one click into place, and added another of the same size, flipping them around until the polarity lined up and the static faintly crackled.

I depressed the button on the side, and the device clicked once. I stared at Ryan.

“Do that again,” he said.

I found a dial with my thumb and pushed it up, in case it was the volume.

I pressed the side button again and spoke quietly into the receiver: “Hello?” I released the button, listened to the static crackle back.

“Is anyone there?” I asked again.

That crackle again, like static, but, underneath, something more—like there might be voices, straining to be heard.

I twisted another dial, and the stations switched with each click of the wheel—static, static, static. Higher pitched, lower pitched, the squeal of interference, the whispers underneath. I waited until I hit a station with silence, and tried again. “Please. If anyone’s out there, please answer. I need help.”

Dead air. Silence. Nothing.

I changed stations again. “Please. If anyone’s there, my name is Kelsey Thomas, and I live on Blackbird Court in Sterling Cross, and I need help.
Please.
Call the police. There are men trying to break in, and we’re trapped.”

Ryan stepped closer. “It’s a long shot,” he said.

“Everything we’re doing is a long shot,” I whispered.

There was a sharp whistle from outside, like something cutting through air, and a dull thud behind the curtains in the living room—the impact vibrating in the stillness. “What was that?” Ryan asked.

“A rock?” I asked, mostly to myself. I pictured a man on the other side, hurling stones at the glass, testing for weaknesses. One of us was going to have to check. One of us was going to have to peel back the curtain….

And of course it would be Ryan. He was already kneeling at the corner—he kept his head beside the wall and pulled the curtains back, then jerked himself away from the exposed window. He let them drop again, pulled his head away, and sat back on his knees, still staring at the spot.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Come here.”

I knelt beside him, and he moved the curtains in a wave again: the dark trees, the bright moon, and tiny fractures in the corner of the window, radiating outward like a spider web, frozen around—

“Is that a
bullet
?” I asked.

His wide eyes met mine. “That’s what it looks like to me, too.” He recoiled from the window. “You have bulletproof glass? Why the hell do you have bulletproof glass?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “My mom…”
She’s paranoid,
I wanted to say.

But I didn’t know anymore. The power was cut. The window was shot. My mother was missing. Someone was attempting to break in. There was nothing paranoid about this house any longer. And there was no place safer.

“They can’t get in,” he said, his face incredulous. He started to laugh, unexpectedly, like I had when I was hanging in the car, realizing some kid from my math class intended to rescue me with nothing but a harness and some hope. He grabbed my hand, pulled me closer, so I could feel his heart racing against his rib cage. “They can’t,” he said.

A fortress,
Ryan had said, and maybe he was right. Maybe my mom knew exactly what she was doing. Maybe, all those years I felt like I had to hide and protect her, she was waiting, waiting for
this,
and she knew exactly how to keep me safe. Right now she was doing it.