House at the End of the Street (15 page)

T
wo weeks later, Elissa loaded the last of their boxes into the back of the SUV. The day was cooler than normal, the wind coming through the trees. She and her mother were starting over…again. Going back to Chicago, to a two-bedroom apartment three blocks away from their last one. Elissa would return to her old school, to Luca and her old friends. Sarah would work at the hospital in the city. But nothing would be the same—nothing could ever be the same again. It had turned out Elissa’s grandmother was wrong. A place
could
change you.

Elissa watched as Sarah locked up the house and started down the front porch. She held onto the wooden railing, taking each step one at a time. She still struggled to walk, even though the stitches had already been taken out. Elissa
had promised she’d do all the driving during the two-day road trip, even though Sarah winced whenever she took left turns.

Across the lawn, the Jacobsen house was roped off with police tape. In the last weeks it had served as a constant reminder of what had happened there. Ryan, who’d survived despite his serious injuries, had been institutionalized. The house had yielded up one last terrible secret of the Jacobsen family: videotapes from the years following Carrie Anne’s death, with old family movies. In them, Ryan was dressed in Carrie Anne’s clothes. He was wearing a wig, and blue contact lenses. After the accident, his parents had used him as a replacement for their daughter, addressing him only by her name.

For years they’d kept him locked in her room, alternately celebrating family events with him and abusing him. Psychiatrists concluded he’d turned violent from the stress of the abuse. He eventually snapped and killed them both. Afterward, he’d gone back to his role of Ryan, the estranged brother, but he kept up his parents’ charade, kidnapping girls and turning them into Carrie Anne. He’d kept them in the secret room, locked up, treating them in the same way his parents had treated him. He kept repeating the cycle, and probably would have for many more years, if Elissa and Sarah hadn’t discovered his secrets.

Even now, in the institution, under the influence of strong sedatives, he still called out for his sister.

Elissa’s gaze fell on the tree at the edge of the state park—the same one Ryan had showed her weeks before, as they sat on the boulder. Sarah walked up and rested her arm around Elissa’s shoulder. It felt good to feel her mother there, right beside her. For once, Elissa could look at her mom without thinking about what Sarah had and hadn’t done—about the past, the divorce, or the tumultuous years that had followed. Elissa now thought of Sarah only as the person who’d saved her.

“What are you looking at?” Sarah brushed a few strands of hair away from Elissa’s face.

Elissa pointed to where the tree stood. She tilted her head, but the face didn’t appear to her now. She wondered if it had ever been there at all, or if in Ryan’s presence she had somehow imagined it. “What do you see?”

Sarah was quiet for a long time. “A tree?”

Elissa smiled, squeezing her mother’s hand. “Yeah, that’s what I see too.”

Sarah furrowed her brows, as if she wasn’t quite sure what the significance was. Elissa wanted to tell her she was sorry, that she knew how wrong she’d been. In the past days those words had never made it past her lips, though they ran on a constant loop in her head. What mattered now though, she realized, wasn’t whether she said it or not. For the first time in her life, she and her mother were beginning to see things the same way. It was in everything they did—how they cooked together in the kitchen, how
they settled down on the couch together every night. Elissa always picked up when Sarah called.

“Ready to go, Liss?” Sarah asked, starting back toward the car.

Elissa didn’t let go of her hand. Instead, she let herself be pulled along behind her mother, their arms stretching out but still linked.

“I’ve never been more ready for anything in my life.”

Thank you to the amazing people at Relativity, FilmNation, and Poppy.