Don't Breathe a Word (35 page)
So the game of make-believe was going to continue. Phoebe understood—it hadn’t been just for Lisa’s benefit but for Phyllis’s as well. It was a trick Phyllis had no doubt learned growing up in her own family: when things look grim, rewrite the story. Blur the line between reality and imagination.
Then Phoebe looked at poor, logical Sam, wondering how on earth he’d managed to be born into such a family. Sam gave her a desperate look. Then a shadow crossed his face and he looked away.
He’s thinking of our baby
.
It was a funny thing to think that she had resisted the idea of having a child because it would continue her own screwed-up family line, and now here was Sam with the same dilemma.
Maybe they truly were meant for each other after all.
Phoebe reached out her hand to his, and to her surprise, he didn’t pull away. He grabbed it and held on tight.
“They can do DNA tests,” Sam said. “Go see the room in Hazel’s basement. They can dig up the bodies in the orchard—Lisa, Gabrielle’s baby, the other babies Lisa had.”
“Are you so sure, Sam?” Phyllis asked, her voice mocking. “Are you sure they’ll find anything at all?”
Sam’s hand went limp in her own.
Phoebe thought about everything that had happened at the cabin—how when they got back, it was cleaned up, all the evidence gone. How easily they’d turned Sam and Phoebe into the criminals.
Phoebe looked from Sam to Phyllis.
“We all just did the best we could,” Phyllis said.
Sam let his hand slip from Phoebe’s, shook his head, and staggered backward toward the door, like a man who’d been shot making one last-ditch effort at a getaway.
Something That Goes On Forever
If you have read this book all the way to the end, you know the truth. We are here, walking among you. We are stronger, faster, smarter. We walk with silent footsteps. We can see into your dreams.
And we lie.
Always remember that we lie.
Phoebe
February 3, Present Day
T
he panic phone was ringing.
Phoebe hated to call it that, but she smiled because that was the name Franny had given it. The panic phone. The secret cell phone they used only for communicating back and forth with Franny and Jim—their one remaining connection to their old lives.
“Hello,” Phoebe said, almost out of breath from hurrying to the phone but chirpy, excited that Franny had called. Franny had been calling a lot lately to ask, “Any baby yet?” And tonight, Phoebe would tell her, “Soon, Auntie Franny, soon,” because she’d been having little contractions all day. Practice contractions, her obstetrician said. Phoebe waited for Franny’s oh-so-predictable first question, but it didn’t come.
“Hello?” she said again. “Franny?”
“Phoebe? It’s Evie.”
Impossible.
Phoebe glanced at the door, praying Sam would walk in, tell her what to do, what to say. He was out picking up some last-minute things for the baby.
Should she hang up? Hang up, then smash the panic phone, using her regular cell phone to call Franny, to say it was panic time for real?
Phoebe took in a frightened breath, rubbed her enormous belly. She’d been hanging a mobile in the nursery, above the crib. Stars and moon that moved in a circular pattern and played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
“How did you get this number?” Phoebe said. “Where are you? We didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”
Sam and Phoebe had gone to the police with everything they knew, but it had done little good. Hazel and Phyllis denied the story completely and expressed tremendous worry over Sam and Phoebe’s mental health, even suggesting to the police that they suspected the young couple might be using drugs.
“Poor Sammy,” Phyllis said. “He never got over the loss of his sister. It’s damaged him so badly that now he’s making up wild stories.”
There was no sign of Evie. When the police went to the basement apartment near the university, they discovered it hadn’t been rented in months. Becca had quit her job at Price Chopper and left town. And there was not one shred of evidence to prove the existence of Gabrielle, Gene, or the baby. The cinder-block room in Hazel’s basement had been turned into a root cellar. The secret room was full of bookcases and a reading chair.
“A library,” the cops explained. “Not exactly the bogeyman’s secret hideout.”
The police had found no graveyard behind Hazel’s house, only a badly neglected patch of tomatoes.
“I told you so,” Phyllis whispered to them once, as they watched two cops poke halfheartedly at the dirt. She smiled so warmly, lookers-on would have thought she was soothing them with words of love.
“What now?” Phoebe asked Sam when they were alone.
“We leave. We get as far away from my fucked-up family as we can.”
And so, with the help of Franny and Jim, Sam and Phoebe just slipped away. They sold their house and went to Colorado, where Jim had some friends with a farm outside of Boulder. There was an old carriage house they could stay in. Sam worked on the farm for room and board.
“You’ve got to stay under the radar for a while,” Franny had insisted. “If you really don’t want to be found, you’ve gotta work under the table, don’t get your own apartment or put your name on anything. Ditch all your credit cards. Use only cash. If you have to get a library card or anything, use a different name.”
A name like Mary Stevens
, Phoebe thought, remembering the girl who had come to them with only chalk, a key, and a library card. Now she was just a few steps away from becoming that girl, a girl on the run with little more than the clothes on her back.
Phoebe could hear Evie breathing on the phone.
“I’m not dead,” Evie said.
“So I gathered. Where are you?”
“Where are
you
?” Evie asked.
“What do you want?” Phoebe asked.
There was a pause. More breathing. Then, at last, Evie spoke. “I’m calling for Lisa. Because of Lisa. Because what happened . . . it was my fault. I couldn’t save her. Couldn’t save her baby. But maybe it’s not too late for you.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asked, irritated as hell, about two seconds away from hanging up on Evie.
“Your baby’s in danger,” she whispered.
“What?” Phoebe said.
“It’s all a lie,” Evie said. “You know that, right?
“What is?” Phoebe said. The baby moved inside her, turning. She was a gymnast in training, this little one.
“There
is
a Dark Man, Phoebe. A real Teilo. Everything they’re doing is for him. Phyllis, Hazel, Gene. They’ve all given themselves over to him. You can’t stop them. My father tried and look what happened to him.”
“Are you talking about David?”
“Yes.”
“Phyllis said he wasn’t your father. And besides, he killed himself.”
“A hell of a coincidence, though, right? Before we went away to Cape Cod, he told me and my mom that he was tired of the secrets. He was going to put a stop to it—tell the world about Teilo and poor Gene in the basement. He wanted to take me and my mom away from all of it. He said he’d never stopped loving her.”
“So what? Are you saying someone drugged him? To keep him quiet and stop him from leaving Phyllis?”
“I don’t know,” Evie said. “But something happened while we were gone. Teilo found a way to stop him. There was this drawing my father had done in his sketchbook—a man without a face. Teilo paid him a visit, all right.” Evie caught her breath before continuing. “And then, that last night before his second overdose, he tried once more to put a stop to all the craziness. I told him I was worried they were going to take Lisa and he tried to call the police. The next morning, when we woke up, he was being taken away in an ambulance.”
“But there is no Teilo, Evie! It was Gene all along,” Phoebe said. “He was the one in the woods. He got Lisa pregnant. They were just trying to protect Gene. To keep all their dirty little family secrets hidden!”
“Listen to me. The secrets they’re keeping are way bigger than that. Lisa wasn’t pregnant that summer—not yet. They chose to take her, Phoebe. Gene didn’t pull her out of that hole. My mother and Phyllis did.”
“But Gene . . .”
“Gene may have started it, but once Lisa got her period, Phyllis knew she was ready. Ready to be Teilo’s bride. So she used the work Gene had already done to abduct her own daughter.”
“Evie, for God’s sake. I don’t know if you believe this shit or if you’re still playing their game, or what. There are no fairies, no Teilo—it’s a pack of fucked-up lies!”
“If you want to save your baby, you’ve got to believe me: Gene is not Teilo! He’s Teilo’s son. But Teilo is so much more. And you know that. Just . . . stop for a minute. Think. You’ve known him all along, haven’t you?”
Phoebe shivered.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a trapdoor under a bed opened and there was a clawlike scrabbling sound as something let itself out.
“I’ve heard them talking,” Evie said. “They say Teilo chose you to give him Sam’s firstborn.”
“But that’s impossible. How—”
“He wouldn’t choose just anyone. You know that, right? You know who you are.”
“Who
I
am?” Phoebe stammered.
“Haven’t you sensed it your whole life? That you’re different from other people. You don’t fit in, no matter how hard you try. You know things you shouldn’t. You see things other people don’t.”
“I don’t understand what this—”
“You’re his daughter. Teilo’s flesh and blood. Half human, half fairy. You walk between the worlds.”
Phoebe leaned against the crib, holding on to it.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
My father was just some guy my mom met in a bar. A drifter. He picked fruit and tobacco.
She thought the words but couldn’t say them. The air felt suddenly thin. The walls were closing in, making Phoebe feel as if she were in a tunnel. And there, at the end, was her Dark Man, waiting for her.
“We all have our destinies, Phoebe. And you know, you understand, don’t you, that the child you’re carrying belongs to him?”
Phoebe disconnected the call and flung the phone across the room, just as a strong contraction rolled through her, bringing her to her knees.
“B
reathe, baby! Breathe! You’re doing great. We’re almost there.” Sam stood beside her, flushed and expectant. Behind him, the doctor and nurse worked.
“Push now,” they said.
Phoebe heard them through the thick haze of pain and medication, heard them, but wasn’t entirely sure she had any control over her body. But she tried.
“Good,” they said.
“Oh my God!” Sam said. “There’s the head!”
“Push, honey,” the nurse said.
O
nce the idea sunk in, Sam had fallen in love with the idea of being a father. Once he understood he’d promised his firstborn to his invisible cousin, not to some terrifying supernatural being, he seemed downright joyous about fatherhood. He threw himself into it with a fury, reading books on parenting, coming home with organic unbleached cotton diapers and onesies.
He painted the nursery with environmentally friendly nontoxic paint and stenciled Humpty-Dumpty borders.
Phoebe watched him up on the ladder, hand painting all those fragile, smiling little eggs in short pants sitting on a wall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
But what if there really was a Teilo?
What if she really had been chosen—if the very reason she’d even been born is because Teilo planned it, seducing her mother, watching over Phoebe her whole life, waiting to bring her to Sam.
The idea gnawed at Phoebe. She told Sam about the phone call from Evie when they were on their way to the hospital.
“She said I was Teilo’s daughter,” she told him.
“She’s a nut,” he said, putting his hand on her belly. “You know that—she was victimized by my psychotic mother and aunt, and I pity her, I truly do. But in the end, she is just as crazy as they are. All this foolish worrying isn’t good for you or the baby, Phoebe. We’re done with those people. Let’s just focus on us. Us and our baby, who we’re going to be holding in our arms very, very soon.”
“D
oing great, Mom,” the doctor said through his blue surgical mask. “One more big push and you can meet your baby.”
Phoebe closed her eyes, concentrated on the entire lower half of her body, which she couldn’t really feel but trusted was there. There was the faintest sensation of pressure, and the pain. There was always the pain. Even through the drugs, she felt like this baby was splitting her in half like an overripe seed. She pushed. She pushed with all the strength left in her, making a low, guttural, whalelike cry.
“Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking.
I’ve given birth to something inhuman,
Phoebe thought.
A lamprey with row after row of teeth.
The baby squalled. Phoebe opened her eyes.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor announced. “A beautiful baby girl.”
Phoebe looked up to see a tiny form, covered in mucus and blood, all arms and legs, the tiniest tuft of wet, matted hair.
And there, behind her baby girl, the doctor, nurse, and Sam, a figure hovered in the doorway. Just a silhouette—a tall, dark shadow, watching.
“Who is that?” Phoebe asked.
“It’s our baby,” Sam said, coming to take her hand, kiss her. “Our daughter.”
“No,” Phoebe said, “in the doorway.”
Sam turned. “There’s no one there, babe.”
“Do you want to cut the cord, Dad?” the doctor asked. And Sam was gone again down to the other end of the bed. When he reappeared, he held their infant daughter in his arms, cleaned up, swaddled in a fuzzy flannel blanket. He leaned down and carefully placed the baby on her chest.
“I think she’s hungry,” Sam said, as the baby pecked and snuffled at her breast, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut. Sam helped guide her to the nipple. Phoebe stroked her damp hair, breathed her in while she sucked and gulped, latched on determinedly.
“Willa,” Phoebe said. “She’s definitely a Willa.”
Phoebe closed her eyes. Smiled. Her daughter. She was here. Healthy. Perfect. Ten fingers and ten toes.
“I love you,” Sam said. Then he kissed the baby’s hair. “You too, little Willa,” he said.
The doctor and nurse hovered, then drifted out. Another nurse came in.
“You rest now,” she said.
Phoebe let her eyes close, holding the baby to her chest, Sam beside her.