The Safest Lies (31 page)

T
he voices stopped as we stumbled down the steps. From this angle, I only saw shadows elongated across the basement floor from the spotlights set up in the corners. Like ghosts stretching across the distance.

“Look who I found,” Eli said, pride in his voice.

I couldn’t see the people yet, but someone saw
me.
“No.” My mother’s voice, echoing across the concrete, off the cinder blocks, cutting straight through the chill.

“Mom?” I shook out of Eli’s grasp at the bottom of the stairs, barely registering the two other shadows, unable to see her clearly through the tears as I raced across the room to where she stood. I fell into her arms, felt her inhale suddenly as her arms came around me, one hand over my hair, a face buried close to my ear.

She was so slight, and cold, but she was standing and here and
alive.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” Her whole body was trembling, and I fought to hold her still.

It was only when I pulled back slightly that I noticed the bruises on her face, the cuts on her hands, the dried blood caked under her nails as she reached for my cheek, her fingers resting on the spot Eli had hit me.

Eli had me by the back of my shirt again, tugging me out of her grip.

“What did you do to her?” a low, calm voice asked from the corner. He stepped forward, into the light, and I recognized him from that night. Large frame, down-turned mouth, eyes that were the same as mine, like looking in the mirror. Samuel. Samuel Lyter, his name humming through my blood. Was it possible to want to come face to face with someone while also wanting to wipe him from existence? To bury him in a dark room of my mother’s mind, and let him stay there?

His eyes darted from Eli to me and back again, and he stepped closer. “I said, what did you do?” His voice, I now noticed, had the faintest hypnotic drawl to it. Something that pulled you in, made you want to lean a little closer, hear a little better.

“Nothing,” Eli said. His hands were held up as if he were surrendering. “I caught her. She was inside the house, and she tried to run, and I caught her this time.”

Samuel grabbed my chin in his hand, turning my face from side to side. His hands were rough and callused, and I wanted to move back, wanted to smack his hand away, but I held my breath, held myself perfectly still. He smelled of leather and something sharper, a faint whiff of gasoline, and my instinct was to jerk back.
Careful,
I thought.

“You did more than
catch her,
” he said. I felt the burn on the side of my cheek, the constant throbbing, the ache in my head.

He pressed his lips together, gave Eli a look that made even me wither, but then he refocused on me and smiled. “Kelsey, then. So nice to finally meet you.” He spoke through his teeth, the smile firmly planted, a cat with a bird caught between his teeth.

Whatever I’d been fighting against, the hum in my blood, it was here now. The truth. The mirror. A tangle of lies, my entire existence, the dark basement from which I grew. The lies that were woven into my bedtime stories, the fears that were planted to keep me safe, the truth staring me back in the face. And now rage, clawing its way to the surface, balling my hands into fists.

“Let go of her, Samuel,” my mother said, and I noticed her fists were clenched as well. Sometime during the conversation, Martin had grabbed my mother around the shoulders, restraining any further movement. He was a little shorter than Samuel, and he had a scar over his lip. But the similarities were otherwise too strong to deny. This was his brother, and this was my origin. An entire family of bad blood, currently coursing through me. If fear could be inherited, couldn’t this, too? It was not a random turn of events, but a thread running deep inside the both of them, and so it could in me as well. I felt sick, and it wasn’t the fear. Not this time.

Samuel listened to my mother, dropping his hand from my face. But he didn’t move. “Tell me, Kelsey. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling the taste of acid rising in the back of my throat.
The other half of me.
“You’re the man who held my mother.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Amanda, is that what you told her?”

He turned back, his gaze lingering on my chin, my nose, my hair. He faced my mother again, gave her half a smile. “She looks more like me.”

My mother frowned. Of course she knew that. She saw it in me always. What else did she see, that she felt the need to hide? Did I act more like him, talk more like him? Did she teach me to be more like her, because she saw what else I might become?

My eyes burned. Everything burned. I wanted to step outside my skin, become anyone other than who I was.

He took a step closer, the light behind him, as if he were the moon eclipsing the sun—and all that remained was darkness. “Your mother is a thief and a liar,” he said, his voice like music, though it dripped with acid. “Don’t listen to what the papers said. She came with us because she wanted to.”

“Because I didn’t
know
!” she yelled from behind him. “I didn’t know who you really were!”

He shook his head. “You knew exactly who I was,” he said. “We were together for months before I offered to bring you with us.
Months.
We are the same, you and I. I was the only one who understood you. I
saved
you from your life of misery. And this is how you repaid me? By leaving and taking our money? I loved you, Amanda. I really did.”

“You did not.
You did not.
I was young and naïve and you preyed on me.” She pointed to Eli. “Same as you’re doing to him.” She shook her head, pleaded with Eli. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t. You can go back home. Your home is better than this, I
promise.
It’s not too late—”

Eli jerked back. “You know nothing about me.”

“I know
everything
about you. You’re a kid who was looking for a way out of a bad situation, and they took you in, am I right? And the way they live, the things they do, the things they ask
you
to do, they just seem like little things at first.
Just watch the doors,
I bet they told you.
Just keep the car running.
Let me tell you, kid. It’s going to change.”

Eli shook his head, but he didn’t disagree.

“It already has, right?” she asked.

Eli slid his battered fist behind his back. Set his feet, and his jaw. “I know all about
you,
Amanda Silviano. You took their money, and Sam’s
kid,
and let the world think you were their victim.” His spine straightened, and his voice grew more assured now. “They took me in. I ran away and they took me in when nobody else would, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Samuel smiled. “See? Eli is nothing like you. He is not so weak. He would not betray us.”

“Want to know what they’ll do to you if you change your mind, kid? When you find out what they’re really doing, and want to leave?” She pulled her shirt over her shoulder, exposing her scars. Leaned toward Samuel, and yelled, “You burned my back when I tried to leave! Poured it on me one drop at a time! You kept me locked up in a basement after! For months. With nothing but the cold and the containers of cleaning fluid you stored in the corners. And the spiders. The goddamn spiders were everywhere.” Her face broke at the memory.

“It was your own fault,” Samuel said, and he was losing his composure now, his features hardening, the lines around his eyes deepening. “You don’t get to change your mind whenever the hell you feel like it.”

My mother was shaking her head. “We just needed a little money to get by, you said. Just one thing, to get us started. It was all a lie. You had no intention of stopping. I hadn’t realized you’d been
hurting
people. I didn’t know that I…” She raised her hand to her mouth, her eyes watering over, the words stuck inside.

“That you were just as guilty?” He smiled. Crouched so he was at her level. “I don’t know what you think would’ve happened if you had left back then. What, would you have gone home, said you left on your own and had been involved in a little crime spree, no big deal? You would’ve given us up, because it was the only thing you could’ve done. I couldn’t do that to my own brother. You left me with no choice.”

Martin jerked to attention.

“You took something from us, Amanda,” Samuel said. “And you will give it back now.”

“I didn’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to.”

“And yet, here we are,” he said.

He turned to me. “She took our car,” he said. “She took everything inside of it, all that money. And you know what she first said she did with the money? That she buried it. Can you believe that, Kelsey? She is
such
a talented liar, your mother. But then, you must know that already. Now, of course, she sings a different story.”

His words, circling into my mind. They were weaving a spell, digging in and refusing to let go. “The police have it,” I whispered, and Martin let out a string of curses. I pointed to the safe room. “It was in there, and the police took it.”

“How much?” Martin asked, his voice growing louder. “How
much
?”

“Twenty thousand,” I said.

“Where’s the rest, Amanda? What have you done?” Samuel asked.

“I did bury it,” she said. She looked at me, lowered her voice, like it was just me and her and this was a bedtime story. “I escaped on a Friday—they came back drunk and celebrating, and didn’t check on me. Didn’t know I’d finally gotten free of the restraints, had used a mattress rail to pry the bolts from the door hinges. The key was on the kitchen table, and they were in the next room, and I took it.” Martin jerked her head back, his fist tightening in her hair, but her mouth stretched into a smile instead, at the memory. “I drove that car as far as I could, until I’d nearly run out of gas. I popped the trunk, because they used to bring gasoline with them”—she started shaking, and I realized what they must’ve used that gasoline for—“and I saw the money. There was stolen money and the car had my prints, and I didn’t know what to do. I was near the woods, so I ditched the car, and I buried the money. And that’s where I was found, running down the side of the road….I was so scared, being alone for the first time. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t.”

Then she turned back to Samuel. “After Kelsey was born, when I was sure nobody was watching, I went back for it, just to check. And it was still
there.
I told you: I buried it, and then I took it back. That’s not a lie.” She looked to me, pleading. “What choice did I have?”

But what she didn’t say, what only I knew, was she had also taken his registration, as proof. A trail leading to his car, wherever it was abandoned. A trail leading to everything she had done, and everything that had happened to her. A way out, if ever she needed it. There was always a way out.

She started to laugh then. Raised her arms. “You want that money? I told you I’d bring you to it. Here it is. You’re looking at it.”

The walls of concrete, the gates of iron, the bulletproof windows…all of it could be traced back to them. This house was never ours. This house had always been the lie. We had been living in this place built on blood money.

Martin jerked her head back by the hair again, but Samuel held out his hand. “Martin,” he said in warning.

“No,” Martin said. “She’s always been a weakness for you. You said they’d have the money. You
said.
”

But Samuel looked unaffected. The others may have been here for the money, but I had a feeling Samuel was here for something more. I’d heard him from my hiding spot upstairs: that there was no way my mother could get him what he truly wanted. He was here for something more. For us.

“You are so small,” Samuel said to my mother. “I always underestimate you.”

He slid a knife from his back pocket as he walked toward her. I saw a gun tucked into the waistband of Martin’s pants. And Eli…what did Eli have? The scent of cigarettes…

I didn’t have to overpower them. I didn’t need muscles and doors. There’s a way out of everything. She had taken it, once. It wasn’t perfect, maybe wasn’t even
right,
but she saw the chance, and she took it.

She built our life out of blood money, and I existed because of it. Everything that sustained me, from the walls that surrounded me to the blood running through me, came from darkness and lies.

But this is what nobody else understood except me.

She had built herself a cage, with bars and concrete and locks. She had been serving time for it. Seventeen years’ worth. A life sentence.

For me.

Stories take on a life of their own, but this one was mine.

—

I lunged for Eli, my hands going around his waist, dragging down his body, trying to force us both to the ground. There was yelling—someone calling for Eli to stop, someone calling for
me
to stop, but I didn’t. He stumbled, braced himself against a wall, and he fought me off easily. But he didn’t hit me, wasn’t too rough, and I thought it was because Samuel was watching.

From the ground, I saw Samuel and Martin exchange a look. A frown. The room filled with tension, but I stayed curled up on the ground, trying to catch my breath. I kept my hand tucked against my stomach.

I needed one thing. Just one. And now I had it.

“What are you doing?” Samuel asked as I pushed myself to standing. His face twisted in confusion.

I let out a noise that sounded almost like laughter.

I felt the dust and grime from the basement floor like a chill on my skin. Felt the bruises like a challenge, the fear like something whispering my name, urging me on.

“Find something to bind her arms,” Martin barked at Eli.

“Wait,” I said, and everyone froze. I felt their eyes shift from my face to my hand—at what I was holding out in front of me, over an open box. My hand was trembling, but I didn’t know if it was from the fear or something else. Something stronger, simmering in my blood.

“Do you know,” I said, “what you’re standing in the middle of?”