The Bargaining (25 page)

I'm almost to the end of the hall when I hear the faintest groan of a door on a hinge.

I look up, squinting to hear better, a habit I'll never be able to break myself of. As though seeing what I can't see will help me hear better.

After another several seconds of silence, I hear it again, this time more pronounced. And this time, I'm positive it came from the room at the end of the hall, the one with the boy Jack on the wall.

I enter the room with new caution, my experiences in this corner officially making me wary.

Jack's eyes are on the closet across the room, the mattress tunnel still destroyed, the random furniture and blankets and papers that were once strewn everywhere now piled in semi-organized columns in corners and against the walls.

April must have been doing a little cleaning up in lieu of
the real work she can't have done. I heard her moving around again last night. Even though all my stuff is still upstairs, I only sleep in her room now, which means I'm acutely aware of when she sleeps. Or when she doesn't sleep, which I'm finding is often. I wonder how long she's been an insomniac. Not ever having lived with her before March, I don't know if she goes through spells like this, but thinking back to the spring, I never remembered hearing her shuffling around in my dad's house in the middle of the night.

Now as I watch the boy on the wall for clues, I hear the creak of the door up close, turning abruptly to see the closet door sway slowly on a breeze that can't possibly exist in this room with all the windows upstairs shut tight.

But there it is, plain as day, groaning open with such patience, I swear it's waiting for a reaction from me. I shift my gaze cautiously to Jack, but his stare is as fixed as ever.

So I try something new.

“What else is there? What are you trying to say?” I ask him. I cram my heart back into my chest before it can creep up in my throat. “What?”

I hear a creak of floorboards behind me and spin, releasing a tiny shriek before I can catch it.

“Don't shoot!” April jokes, but I know she's not kidding exactly. Her eyes are bouncing between me and the mural.

“April! Seriously, your new name is Creeper.”

“Who were you just talking to?”

I hold up my phone, the lies coming more easily now.

“Boys. Cryptic messages. I'm sure you don't miss those days.” I laugh what totally doesn't sound like a nervous laugh.

“No, no I don't,” she says, still looking at the boy in the wall. “So you weren't just, you know, talking to . . .” She looks more nervous than I do.

Great. I've officially made her afraid of me.

“The wall? Wow, what is that, the third symptom of cabin fever?” I say, turning from the mural and April to text Miller back.

“Can I borrow your car?” I ask.

“Hmm?” April is nibbling at the dry flakes of skin that have begun to form on her normally glossed lips.

“I need to run out to the store,” I say, not entirely lying this time.

“Uh-huh,” April says, and it appears I've finally grasped her distracted attention. “The store. Got it. Need to go buy a little clarity then, I take it?” she says, and suddenly I'm embarrassed for us both. Guy talk isn't exactly an area we've ventured into yet.

“Right,” I say. “Are your keys . . . ?”

“On the table downstairs,” she says, rolling her eyes.
But she looks worried, and I wonder if she really is concerned for my sanity. I might actually find that comforting if not for the fact that I'm a little worried about it myself.

“You okay?” I ask. Suddenly I'm the one embarrassing us. What would I know about the kind of stress she's under with the hefty weight of this expensive mistake?

“Oh, sure,” she says. “Nothing a pint of Ben & Jerry's and two hundred thousand dollars won't fix,” she says, and we swirl in the wake of her massive admission for a second before I pull myself from the water.

I slide her keys from the table and leave the Carver House with April in it, wishing the woods would leave me a little more breathing room than the house does, even though I know they won't. I wonder if April's slept more than one full night total since we moved in.

19

T
HE BELL AT
S
COOT'S GREETS
me on entry, and I search its sound for some of the comfort it brought me the first time I heard it. But all I can locate is the tiniest flicker of anticipation at seeing Miller, and that seems a poor substitute for the quiet that I was actually hoping to find. In fact, I haven't felt this much noise crowding my head since those blurry months following that night in the desert.

Or that day at the rest stop.

“I know you don't want to be here,” I hear his voice say from somewhere at the back of the store. Why is it his voice always precedes him when we're here? I suddenly want nothing more than to be in his cozy trailer where I can see from one end to the other from the front door.

And then, as though divining my thoughts, he says, “I was just about to close up. Will you come back to my place with me?”

I find him now, crouched behind the register. He slides the drawer closed with a click, the chime of the machine filling all the spaces of this store with an echoing
ching!

I watch his face change as he finds me, too, and he follows quickly with “I mean, I just want to show you something.”

Now I understand his embarrassment, and I cross my arms over my stomach because he hasn't made it much better by saying that, either.

“I mean, I . . . look, you don't have the whole story, and I just want to be sure you do, okay?”

I'd managed to shove aside the real reason he asked me out here in favor of the sliver of a chance he just wanted to apologize, and we could go back to being people who maybe, possibly, might have enough in common to be comfortable around each other, maybe more than comfortable. I thought that there was a speck of hope we might be able to pretend something horrible hadn't happened to both of us. But I should have known the minute I left The Washingtonian that I was kidding myself to think that. This is a small town, and from what I've heard, word travels at light speed in these places.

Besides, what else do we have in common but our respective secrets?

Miller finishes locking up the register and flips the sign on the glass door of Scoot's before switching the light and bringing the entire store to a shocking darkness. He holds the door open for me and walks me to April's jeep before climbing into his own car. Even though I know where I'm going, I let him pull away first, content to lag a ­little behind. I'm in no hurry to discuss more of the story Margie started.

I'm nearly out of the dirt parking lot before I see Ripp's face hovering in one of the many panes of glass that face Scoot's, as though the building was designed especially to watch over the one it neighbors. We lock eyes before I turn to see Miller's taillights disappear around the corner.

For maybe the first time in my life, I turn down coffee. Since I was a kid, I've always loved the taste of it. Mom must have thought it was just strange enough to let slide because she never kept me from drinking it, despite the warnings of stunted growth and other dire consequences.

But maybe it's the memory of Ripp's face in the window of his own coffee shop, clearly wishing he could somehow teleport me back to wherever I came from, that's making my
stomach turn against it. Or maybe it's the fact that I haven't been able to keep my hands still since talking to Margie, no matter how many times I tell myself it couldn't possibly be true that these parents did the horrible thing Margie implied to right the horrible wrong that was done to them.

Without a word—and without taking a cup for himself, either—Miller walks straight to the artwork tower and reaches to the top of the stack, lifting from it the tiny canvas that fell and marred his carpet the last time I was here.

He places it on the little folding tray to the side of the recliner where he's insisted I sit.

I stare at the painting and unsuccessfully fight the urge to pick it up. The tiny bits of carpet fuzz have been plucked from the once-damp pools of color, and new brushstrokes smooth the surface where they'd once stuck. The sky, the trees, the dip and curve outlining his brother's face—all of it is so perfect, I want to drag my nail across it. Just to chip away at the edges a little bit. I think about the streaks of paint frantically slapped against the old walls of the corner room at the Carver House. Their uneven smears and colliding images, detailed and intricate, but painted in a frenzy. There's so much more about that mural that feels so real.

Maybe that's because it keeps changing.

“I know you've been wanting a closer look at some of
these,” Miller says, but it sounds a little more insistent than an offer.

“Miller, I'm sorry if you feel like I was prying. I know what happened to you and your family isn't any of my business. I was just—”

Miller starts shaking his head, clearly tempering some frustration. He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them, and says slowly, “I just need you to know what you heard, okay?”

His eyes are on the miniature painting like he's afraid to let it out of his sight. But after I've been looking at him for a moment, he finally finds me, and for the first time since that night in his car, I think maybe I wasn't imagining that thread connecting us.

“Can I show you a different one?” he asks, sounding needier than I think I've ever heard him sound.

“Miller, really, you don't have to. It's none of my bus—”

“No, I—” He cuts himself off, stifling a hot burst of impatience that closely resembles anger. He takes a quick breath before saying, “I need to show you.”

And even though Miller's never said anything like that to me before, someone else has, in a dream that couldn't have been a dream but couldn't have been real, either. It suddenly feels very cold in his once cozy trailer.

Miller is in front of me again, and this time he's holding a slightly larger canvas. He carefully extracts the palm-size portrait from my hand and replaces it with the new canvas. I grow even colder at the sight of this one.

“I just finished it the other day,” he says, not so much with pride as with relief. Like he's been holding his breath for days and finally found a reason to exhale.

The painting is a nearly perfect replica of the little wooden shed just past the clearing in the deepest part of the woods I've been to. The fine brushwork even manages to depict the age of the wood somehow, with tiny splinters fringing rusted nails.

The only difference between the shed in real life and the shed depicted on this canvas is the little green door, the one I couldn't manage to open the night I chased the girl through the thicket before Rae chased me all the way back to the Carver House.

In Miller's painting, that door stands ajar. And though the shed's interior is shaded, I get the impression it's shaded on purpose. Miller has no desire to illuminate the inside. Not yet, and not for me, not that I'd want him to.

“Why are you showing me this?” I ask him. It doesn't come off mean, I know that. But part of me wishes that it did, just so he wouldn't continue this confession. I know how unfair
it is for me to not want to hear this after my meltdown in his car, but after the horrors Margie relayed, I'm not sure I can bear to hear any more.

“You've seen the mural,” he says, eyeing me closely. Too closely. Like he can read something deep and dark inside of me. And I thought I'd already shown him all my darkest corners.

“You've seen it . . . you've seen how it . . .”

It's the first time I've watched Miller struggle for words. He always seems to know exactly how to land a sentence, his words sketched out before making their way to the canvas. He wants me to finish, and I almost do. But he can't possibly mean for me to say what I actually see: that the mural changes. He can't possibly mean for me to say that because he can't possibly know that. I don't even know that.

When I don't finish, he sets it aside. Not giving up exactly, but it's obvious I've disappointed him again. Still, he tries a new direction.

“Kids went into those woods all the time. They went on dares, you know? Mostly just because some of the parents told them not to. Probably afraid they'd get lost or something. Some of us just went because we knew we could get away with it . . . because no one would come looking.” His eyes lose their
hold on mine for a second, and that's all it takes for me to understand which category his parents fell into.

Then his eyes are back. “Nobody really believed the stories. I knew my brother used to go out there. He never let me come with him, but I knew where he was going. So one time, I followed him, and I found him at this shed.”

I hold my breath because I get the sense Miller would prefer to be doing that too. Except he can't because he's confessing to me, the same way I had to confess to him in his car that night it poured so hard we couldn't see the road from behind the windshield.