Before I Wake (21 page)

Daniel crossed through the kitchen to the dining room, the rifle butt pressed painfully into his shoulder, the barrel shaking like hell. The floor under his boots creaked; he flinched at the sound.

To the left were the curved stairs that led to the second floor.

He glanced out the front porch window, then moved forward to the guest bedroom.

The door was open. He cocked the .22, then swung into the room.

Two people. Sleeping. A curly-haired guy and a girl with short, jet-black hair. She was clutching a small stuffed animal under her chin.

Light, smooth skin. Pale mouth, with a gold ring on her bottom lip. Normally he hated those damn things, but this one was thin and delicate. Nice.

She let out a heavy sigh.

He jerked—and immediately realized he was aiming the gun at her head. He lowered the barrel, confused.

Did they have anything to do with his sister? Or were they just moochers traveling through, looking for an empty house where they could get some food and crash?

He backed silently from the room.

He went upstairs, keeping to the right, close to the wall.

In high school, he’d sneaked in late a lot of nights, and he knew how to avoid making the steps creak.

The place smelled stale and musty. Like death. Rodent death.

Shortly after the funeral and Arden’s bleaching, Daniel had closed up the house and walked away. The more time that passed, the harder it got to go back. Until he’d decided maybe he could never do it. Maybe it would hurt too much.

He approached Arden’s room. If she was around, he had the feeling that’s where she’d be.

Empty.

On the narrow twin bed, tossed to one side, were blankets. The pillow held the imprint of someone’s head.

He moved down the hall, to the room he really didn’t want to see.

The gun barrel entered first. He followed it around.

Someone sat on a little stool in front of his mother’s dresser with the big round mirror.

Arden, he realized with a shock.

She looked up at him, not appearing surprised. Even less surprised that he was pointing a rifle at her.

It was light outside, but the room was dark because the curtains and shades were pulled. It also faced west and wouldn’t get the good sun till afternoon.

The bed had been stripped and the mattress removed. He vaguely remembered the crime-scene investigators taking it. But there was still a stain on the box springs. The blood had soaked through the layers to puddle on the floor under the bed.

He could see it in his head. How the blood had looked. Like chocolate pudding.

On a farm, you saw a lot of disturbing life-and-death events—and you got used to them. But nothing he’d ever seen had prepared him for the day he had to look at his parents’ dead bodies.

“She wore this all the time,” Arden said.

Wore what? What was she talking about?

Then he noticed she was holding something in her hand.

A perfume bottle.

“We’d get her different scents. New scents for Mother’s Day and her birthday. She’d use them once or twice—just to make us feel good. Then she always went back to the violet perfume.” She lifted the bottle. The lid was off. “Want to smell it?”

She was crazy.

All along, he’d been blaming her for not being there for him. Blaming her for not being the big sister and taking care of her little brother. But she was the one who needed help.

“I was in bed and thought about her perfume.”

She had dark circles under her eyes. Her straight, red hair was stringy, parted in the middle, chin-length.

Her face was thin. Really thin.

“I smelled her perfume.” She thought a moment. “Suddenly I could remember being five years old, gripping her skirt and trying to hide when she introduced me to people. And later, riding in the car, windows down, the breeze carrying the flowery scent to every corner. We were going to a party. Some kind of mother-daughter thing.”

He was still holding the gun. He was still shaking. It pissed him off that she was trying to reminisce.

“But I can’t remember it all… I can’t remember
exactly
where we were going.”

“Maybe you should drink it.” A childish thing to say, spoken in a childish tone of voice. How easy it was to fall into old roles. “Maybe it will unbleach you and you’ll remember.”

Her eyes narrowed in puzzlement.

He’d gotten her attention.

“The perfume.” He waved the gun barrel at the bottle. “Maybe you should drink it.”

They were all sick. All fucked up.

She lifted the bottle. She eyed the pale-lavender contents through the clear container. “You think?” She raised it to her mouth.

What was she doing? What was she trying to prove?

He lunged, tossing the gun across the bed, slapping the bottle from her hand. It crashed to the wall, shattering.

The air was instantly saturated with the scent of their dead mother.

He let out a sob.

Don’t let her see you break.

Emotions he’d kept in check for so long came tumbling out. Rage and grief. But mostly rage. “Do you remember
me
?” he shouted, pounding at his chest with an open hand. “Do you remember anything about me? Your brother? The one you deserted?”

“I’m sorry, Daniel.”

She did look sorry. Sorry and sad and sick and messed up. He felt himself begin to weaken and fought it.

She’d brought a storm down on their family, on their lives. And then she’d run away.

“You’re a coward,” he said, his voice rough, his lips trembling. “A weak coward.”

She tipped her head, and her expression became even more sorrowful. “I know.”

He wanted her to fight. He wanted her to argue, to try to justify herself. How could he fight someone who wouldn’t fight back?

He heard shuffling behind him. Before he could turn, someone grabbed him, twisting one arm behind his back. A hand encircled his throat and squeezed, cutting off his air.

The room turned black and Arden disappeared.

Someone screamed.

That was followed by the sound of things falling over. An impact from the side sent him tumbling, crashing to the wall.

Franny woke up with a jolt.

Plummeting from dream to consciousness, she let out a gasp. Her muscles spasmed violently, shaking the bed. It felt as if she’d been dropped from the sky.

From somewhere above her head came the sound of scuffling. Like shoes against a wooden floor. Rattling and banging, and things hitting a wall so hard the house shuddered.

Next to her, Eli shot out of bed.

Later she might think about that. About how funny he looked, bleary eyed and half-asleep, yet moving at the speed of light.

“No!” someone shouted from above their heads.

A female voice.

Arden’s? It hadn’t sounded like Arden, who was always pretty laid-back.

In dirty white socks, Eli ran from the room. He grabbed the wide wooden railing, taking the stairs three at a time. Franny tried to keep up.

They followed the shouting into a large, dark bedroom.

At first it was hard to decipher what was happening. At first it just seemed a tangle of people, rolling around on the floor, all arms and legs and backs.

Arden was slapping Harley in the face, screaming at him.

Kill her
, said a man’s voice in Franny’s head.

Franny blinked.

Kill her.

She imagined a knife slicing across a throat. Hot blood spilling over her own hands. And the smell… Metallic and bitter. She could taste it on her tongue.

Franny had demonstrated in peace rallies. She’d been arrested for chaining herself to the front door of a university veterinary building to protest the experiments they were doing on rats.

But for one brief second, she’d transformed into something else. Someone else. For one brief second, she’d wanted to see blood. She’d wanted to see a life snuffed out.

She’d been here before. In this room. In this house.

Suddenly she vaguely recalled watching a video about the Davis murders. And what about the voice? Who did the voice belong to? A murderer Dr. Harris had introduced her to in the tank? Had Noah heard the same voice? Had it gotten into his head?

Eli joined in the fight.

Was he helping? Franny couldn’t see.

He fell back, bringing Harley with him. They crashed to the floor; a chair skittered into the wall.

The room reeked of perfume. Something Franny had smelled before. Something floral. Something one of her foster mothers may have worn.

There was someone else in the room. A man. Lying on his back on the floor, Arden bending over him.

Harley and Eli scrambled to their feet. Eli kept a hand on Harley’s chest, as if expecting him to attack again.

Franny was surprised and rather impressed that Eli had been able to overpower Harley. Under normal conditions, if Harley hadn’t been weakened from the tank, the outcome probably would have been different.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Arden kept saying over and over.

It seemed weird to see her so upset.

Nothing seemed real, and for a moment Franny wondered if maybe she was still asleep. If maybe she’d been asleep for a long time, maybe ever since Noah had died.

The man on the floor let out a gasp. Then another.

She couldn’t see his face. He was wearing jeans, faded, dirty jeans, and brown, leather work boots.

“He was hurting her,” Harley said in that monotone voice that gave her the creeps. “He was yelling at her and hurting her.” He pointed to the bed. “And he had a gun.”

Lying across the box springs was a rifle.

It was the bed where Arden’s mother had died.

Franny thought about Noah.

Even though she hadn’t witnessed it, she could picture him tumbling from the window. Falling gently and beautifully and gracefully to the ground.

In her mind, he always got up. Always jumped to his feet and brushed himself off, a smile on his face.

Just kidding!

She remembered how she’d taunted him about his family. She thought about how they’d argued.

None of that should have mattered. Not the stuff about his family. None of it should have meant anything or had anything to do with their relationship.

The man on the floor was sitting up now, breathing hard, a hand to his throat. He raised his head, confusion in his face.

He’s young
, she thought with a jolt.
Hardly more than a boy
.

His gaze went from Arden, to Harley, to Eli, to Franny. Then hesitation before he looked at the gun on the bed.

She was much closer to it than anyone else in the room. Suddenly mobilized, she pounced, grabbed the rifle, and swung the barrel at the boy-man.

Arden put out a hand. “Franny—”

The barrel swung to Arden.

Arden froze.

“That thing’s loaded,” the boy on the floor croaked.

“No more fighting,” Franny said calmly. “I don’t want any more fighting.”

“The fight is over,” Arden said. “Over.”

In a split second, the focus of the room had changed. Franny was the star. Franny was in charge.

She’d been invisible since Noah had died. Nobody had asked her what she thought. What she wanted to eat. Where she wanted to stop. What radio station she wanted to listen to. It was just, “We’re doing this. We’re doing that.”

“I’m not invisible,” she said, her voice trembling.

Arden gave her a pleading look. “I know. We were giving you space. We didn’t want you to be more burdened than you already were.”

“That thing’s cocked,” the kid on the floor said, the words a whisper directed at Arden.

“Nobody has even mentioned his name. In the past two days, nobody even said, ‘I miss Noah.’“ A shuddering, trembling sob escaped Franny. She sniffed and wiped her nose with her upper sleeve. “Don’t you care? Don’t you even care? What are we doing here? We should be at Noah’s funeral, not rolling around in some awful house in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t even know why I’m here.”

She had the butt of the gun against her shoulder, her left hand supporting the barrel, her right moving for the trigger.

She didn’t like it here. It was wrong. An ugly place. A bad place. And it was Arden’s fault. “You talked us into coming, but it’s none of our business. It’s not about us.”

“I’m sorry,” Arden said.

She seemed to mean it. And she didn’t seem scared. Why wasn’t she scared? A gun was pointed at her. The kid said it was loaded.

She feels it too. The despair. The hollowness. The loss of self, of who she used to be.

“We’re ghosts,” Franny whispered.

The gun was incredibly heavy. The muscles in her arms began to twitch. “That’s what we are, isn’t it?” Franny asked. “Ghosts.”

Arden’s eyes glistened with tears, and Franny could see she understood, that she agreed even though she didn’t want to give validation to such a heartbreaking verdict.

The distance between Franny and the room seemed to grow and expand, the edges blurred.

She felt someone remove the rifle from her hands.

It was the boy. The boy-man.

For a second, his eyes came into sharp focus. Brown. A very dark brown. Direct. Not a boy’s eyes. Not a boy’s eyes at all.

Her hands dropped like deadweights to her sides. Then Arden was there, wrapping her arms around her, rubbing her back. “Not ghosts,” Arden whispered. “We’re just resting. Just sleeping.”