I imagined the call. Mom, I’m . . . somewhere. I need help. I’m trapped with a supernatural being who apparently thinks he’s some sort of judge, jury, and executioner. Get me out of here. Wherever here is.
I saw a memory of her then. Perhaps a memory of a picture. That simple gift, the ability to remember my mother’s face, however imperfectly, filled me with emotion and made swallowing difficult.
I did not want to cry in front of Messenger, but I needed to cry for so many reasons. I needed to cry for Liam and Emma and the dog they had killed, and even for whoever might own and love that dog. I needed to cry for Samantha Early—I needed to scream at heaven for what was coming to Samantha Early.
And, in unworthy self-pity, I needed to cry for myself, because surely whatever I had done to deserve this, whatever had wrung soul-searing sobs from me, it must surely have been a mistake, an accident, like Liam and Emma. For surely whatever I had done, it was nothing that sank to Kayla’s level. I didn’t believe I was capable of true wickedness.
But I would learn that we don’t always know ourselves.
I would learn that and more.
IT WAS WITH THE GREATEST RELIEF THAT I SAW we had moved on, leaving poor, doomed Samantha Early to read the 140 character mocks and insults and false expressions of disgust.
We stood outside a house perched just below a narrow, one-lane, poorly blacktopped, and winding road. My house? For a moment it was almost as if Messenger had read my thoughts, my search for my own roots, and was taking me to a familiar place. There was a familiarity about the place, but no, of course this wasn’t my house, it couldn’t be.
“This is Kayla’s home?” I asked, and received no answer. I was becoming accustomed to Messenger’s taciturnity, to his grudging release of any information, as though truth was a poison that must be taken with the smallest of spoons, over time, allowing immunity to build up.
Kayla’s family had money; that much was clear. The home was large, six bedrooms, with a pool to the side and a view of a stand of woods that might be inviting on the sunniest of spring days but now felt sullen, dense, and silent.
The slope behind the house was quite steep, even more sharply declined than the steps from the road down to the front door. That rear slope led down to Sleepy Hollow Creek. White alders, willows, and buckeyes grew tall, and the deck at the rear of the house was in the midst of those trees, so that sunshine only rarely struck the cedar planks and . . .
I blinked in confusion. I had not been to the back of the house—I was still standing on the road, looking at the house between parked cars. Was I now acquiring information without even the need to pose a question? Was I a fish swimming in a sea of information to which I had now, by virtue of my incredible situation, become entitled?
We stepped into Kayla’s room, as though walking from the one-lane road directly into her room was a matter of course. There was an architecture, a geography to this sphere I now inhabited. I thought that eventually I must come to understand it if I was ever to free myself from an existence as a helpless appendage.
I could only wonder what my own home was like. The brief flashes of memory I’d enjoyed had given me very little to work with. I still had no idea what my room was like, but I felt sure it was not as nice as Kayla’s.
She had a queen-size bed with an antique-white headboard detailed with a blue stripe that picked up the color on one of her walls. The other walls were lighter, avoiding the heaviness that can come from too much blue.
The furniture . . .
Wait a minute. I knew the furniture. That was a Restoration Hardware bed. The dresser and desk were both antiques. How did I know that? Why did I know that? I was too young to be some kind of interior decorator. Was this an interest of mine? That would be an embarrassing bit of knowledge if it turned out I was a student of home furnishing.
I had felt from the start that I cared about words. Cared maybe too much, but that at least felt organic to me, part of me. This unusual knowledge of furniture must come from some personal experience. Maybe my own room had been redecorated?
I tried to force a picture to appear, but it would not, and my attention was drawn to Kayla, who was doing homework on her laptop, tapping, dragging her finger across the touch screen, tapping, glancing at a book, tapping some more.
Above her desk was a cork bulletin board, squeezed in between posters of pop stars and actors and a wistful travel poster from Venice. I moved in to see the bulletin board. A course list. A shopping list—very organized was our Kayla: eyeliner, socks, moisturizer, scrunchies.
My eye was drawn then to a ribbon, a blue satin rectangle with the letters “NaNoWriMo.” I knew what it meant, which was both reassuring and unsettling. National Novel Writing Month. Kayla had participated, even won some sort of recognition.
The door opened. I fought back the instinct to hide. We were invisible, of course, except when Messenger decided otherwise. Through the door came a woman. She was pretty in a chrome-and-glass kind of way, cold, face unnaturally smooth, hair a glossy black, very different from Kayla. I was sure that black hair should be at least touched with gray, might have been so touched at some point in the past.
She was dressed in a too-short skirt and too-tight blouse over too-ambitious breast-enhancement surgery. She had the aspect of a woman trying very hard to be other than what nature had meant her to be.
“We’re going out,” the woman said.
Kayla didn’t turn around. “You’re supposed to knock.”
“I don’t need to knock in my own home.”