White Picket Fences (21 page)

“Go back to bed,” he said softly. “I’m fine.”

His cousin hesitated. “You scared me,” she finally said.

“Sorry.” He turned, moved past her, and headed for the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

He turned. “Is it okay with you if I get a drink of water?”
He didn’t wait for her to respond to his sarcasm. Tally followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen. The clock above the stove glared an emerald 3:10 a.m.

“I told you to go back to bed.” He wrenched open the fridge, pulled out a blue-capped bottle of water, and twisted off the top.

“I don’t have to do what you say.”

He took a long drink, never taking his eyes off of her. He pulled the bottle away from his mouth. “What do you want?”

“I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I told you I was fine.”

She took a step toward him. “You’re covered in sweat. You were having a nightmare about the fire, weren’t you? I heard you.”

He took another drink, a shorter one this time. “Heard what?”

“You were saying you couldn’t breathe. You were, like, crying. You were saying, ‘Hot, hot, hot.’”

“So?”

“You were in the hallway! You weren’t even in your own bedroom!”

Chase shrugged. “I’m not the first person to walk in his sleep.”

“You were calling for your parents.”

Chase looked away as his face grew warm. He heard the voice in his dream, his voice.
Mommy! Daddy!

She took another step toward him. “I think you should tell your parents how much you’re starting to remember.”

“I don’t have to do what you say,” he said, mimicking her tone from seconds before.

“I didn’t say you had to; I said I think you should.”

He took another drink and wiped his mouth with his hand. It was shaking slightly. “I already told you. They don’t want to know about this.”

“I think you’re wrong about that.”

Annoyance began to fill the spot left by retreating alarm. “When did you become such an expert on parents?” he said. “Where are
your
parents? Huh?”

Tally drew back as if dodging a slap.

“Let’s get something straight, okay?” Chase went on. “I live in the real world.
This
is the real world, and you don’t know anything about it. You’ve been here a couple lousy weeks. And, I might add, you’re not staying. After you leave, I’ll still be here. I have to be here. So I’m the only person who gets to decide what part of my personal life I share with my parents and what part I don’t. I don’t have the luxury of a single parent who treats me like a college roommate.”

“Like a
what?”
Tally challenged.

“You heard what I said. You don’t even know where your dad is. He doesn’t know where you are. Apparently, that’s no big deal to either one of you. You haven’t heard from your dad in a month. That is
not
the real world, sister.”

Several seconds passed before Tally responded, “I’m
not
your sister.”

Chase nodded. “My point exactly.”

The two of them stood silent in the lustrous moonlight that
washed in from the expansive window over the kitchen sink. Sammy the dog had wandered in from Delcey’s room and now sat between them, wagging her tail.

“I want my lighter back,” Tally finally said.

For a split second, Chase regretted having been so harsh. He was about to lose the lighter. But the dream had opened a door, and he had seen a shape. He had seen the fire’s writhing body. Finally, after all these years, he had seen Ghost
face to face.
Maybe he didn’t need the lighter anymore.

“Fine.” He placed the water bottle on the counter and swept past Tally. He took the stairs two at a time and headed for his bedroom. He could hear Tally behind him.

His room smelled of the sweat and tension of his nightmare, and he hesitated before he stepped in. Behind him, Tally hesitated too, as if she could also sense the nightmare’s peculiar odor. He clicked on his desk lamp and knelt by his bed, noting that his sheet and blanket were a jumbled tangle. Chase reached under the bed for the state quarter box and placed it on top of the chaos that was his bedcovers. He spun the combination lock and opened it. The lighter was on top. He grabbed it and extended it toward Tally, who stood several feet away.

She took a few steps toward him and closed her hand around her father’s lighter. She lifted it slowly from his open palm. When Tally had it in her hands, he snapped the lid on the box shut and stood.

“There. Happy now?” he said.

Tally slowly raised her head to look at him. “No. Are you?”

“You wanted it back. You have it.”

His cousin looked down at the lighter in her hands. He expected her to turn around, leave his room, and go back to Delcey’s.

“What happened at the nursing home today?” she said instead.

“What do you mean?” he asked. But he knew.

“When Josef was talking about the escape from the concentration camp. You… you went pale. I thought you might pass out.”

“You thought wrong.”

She looked up at him. “So what happened?”

He didn’t think he could explain it to anyone. He didn’t think there was a way to describe what it felt like when a memory returned to you in jigsaw pieces. “Nothing happened. A little more returned to me, that’s all.”

She turned to go, and Chase reached out and gently grabbed her arm. “Tally.”

Tally turned her head back around. Her eyes looked sad. He let go of her arm.

“Look, I’m sorry about what I said in the kitchen,” Chase said softly. “About your dad. I’m really sorry about that. I was angry. I shouldn’t have said it.”

She looked down at the lighter in her hands and was silent for several long seconds. Then she extended the hand that held the lighter.

“I don’t want Delcey to find it.” Her voice was expressionless.

Chase hesitated and then reached for the lighter. “I won’t let anything happen to it.”

She turned and walked silently out of his dimly lit room, into the hall where she’d found him minutes before, and finally back to Delcey’s room where his sister’s soft snores whistled like a spring breeze.

twenty-six

M
orning sunlight fell around her as Tally entered the kitchen. Uncle Neil stood at the counter, perusing the newspaper as he sipped coffee. He turned a page, carefully avoiding the half-full bottle of drinking water Chase had left there the night before. Behind him Amanda stirred eggs in a pan on the stove. Delcey was still upstairs. Chase apparently hadn’t come downstairs yet either.

Tally yawned silently and wondered if Chase had had as much trouble falling back asleep as she did. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind of him crumpled in the hallway and whimpering like a lost child. That was no typical nightmare.

“Good morning, Tally,” Neil said, not looking up from the paper. Her aunt turned and smiled at her. Amanda looked tired.

“Morning,” Tally said. She didn’t know if it was a good time to ask about Matt’s request to take her out on Saturday, but she knew he’d ask her about it at school. And she certainly didn’t want to ask with Delcey and Chase as spectators. Best to ask about it now before anyone else joined them. “Matt asked if he could take me out on Saturday night.”

Neil and Amanda both turned to face her.

“On a date?” Amanda asked.

“Just the two of you?” Neil tipped his chin.

They both looked a little shocked.

“Yeah.”

Neil cast a glance at Amanda and then motioned Tally toward the table. He sat down next to her. “Do you want to go?”

Tally hadn’t really given that much thought. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I don’t think…,” Amanda began.

“What do you think your dad would say if he were here?” Neil interjected.

Tally’s eyes fell on the half-full bottle on the counter. “I don’t know what he’d say,” she said. “Maybe he’d think it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

Tally shrugged. “Are you saying no?”

“Did you think we would?” Neil sipped his coffee.

Tally pulled in her lower lip. She did think they’d say no. She nodded.

“How come?”

Tally thought for a moment. “Because I’m only visiting here. And my dad doesn’t know Matt.”

“Good reasons?” Neil asked.

She nodded. They were good enough. Besides, she really had no burning desire to be alone with Matt.

“Probably best to just stay friends for now, don’t you think?”

Again she nodded.

“I think you’re being very wise.” Neil sipped his coffee and picked up the newspaper. Amanda set a plate of eggs in front of her.

“I think so too,” her aunt said. But Amanda barely looked
at her. Delcey entered the kitchen and asked what her parents were talking about.

“Nothing,” Amanda said as she handed her daughter a plate.

Tally ate her breakfast and waited for Chase to enter the kitchen. Seconds before it was time to leave, he appeared in the kitchen, tossing out a “hey” to the room in general. His backpack rested on one shoulder and his camera bag on the other. He said nothing as he grabbed an apple off the counter and the water bottle from the night before. He headed for the garage and called to Tally to follow.

“We’re going to shoot the cemetery shots today,” he yelled as his hand turned the doorknob to the garage.

“Chase! That’s not enough to eat,” Amanda said. “And I don’t know whose water that is!”

“Watch the cedar chest as you back out,” Neil called.

Chase disappeared into the garage without a verbal reply to either parent.

Tally reached for her book bag by her feet.

“What cemetery shots is he talking about?” Amanda asked her.

“The opening intro to our sociology project. We’re going to have Matt walking through a cemetery like he’s looking for the headstones of relatives he lost in the Holocaust.”

“Matt
so
doesn’t look Jewish,” Delcey said.

Tally turned to her. “Just his feet will show.”

From the garage a car honked. “Gotta go,” Tally said.

She walked quickly into the garage, closing the door behind her. She stepped carefully around the woodworking projects in
progress and got inside Chase’s car. She’d barely closed the door when he threw the car into reverse and sailed out of the garage. “Nice looking out for the cedar chest,” she said.

Chase reached up to the visor above his head where the garage door remote was clipped. He pressed the button and the door closed. “I knew where it was,” he said. He pressed his foot to the gas and punched his way out of the driveway and into the street.

“Are we in a hurry or something?” she asked.

“I overslept.” Chase shoved the gearshift into first and took off.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t sleep that great either.” Tally stared out the window at the quiet houses on the street. Several sprinkler systems were fully engaged, dousing the already-green lawns and landscaping with diamond droplets of water.

“We’re not talking about it.” Chase didn’t look at her.

She turned to him. “What?”

“We’re not talking about what happened last night.”

She shook her head. “You act like such a little kid sometimes. Can’t you just say, ‘Hey, I’d rather not discuss what happened last night’?”

“I’d rather not discuss what happened last night.” His tone was clipped.

Tally turned her head to face the road ahead of them. “I don’t even know why I’m nice to you.”

Several seconds went by before he opened his mouth. “I don’t know why you are either.”

Tally turned to look at her cousin. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

Another long pause. “Because I don’t understand it yet.” Chase slowed for a turn and took a swig of the tepid water. He made a face. “I’m missing some minutes.”

“What do you mean? What minutes?”

Chase hesitated before answering. “I can remember being in Keith’s room before the fire started. I remember escaping the master bedroom after it had filled with smoke… And now I finally remember seeing the fire in the corners of the room. But I don’t remember the time in between.”

“Maybe you were asleep. You were supposed to be asleep.”

Chase shook his head. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“How do you know?”

He looked at her. “I just do.” He turned back to face the road. “And there was someone else in the room. I could hear crying.”

“The other little boy.”

Chase paused. “Besides him. Maybe. I don’t know. That’s why I don’t want to talk about it right now. It frustrates me.” He took another drink of the water and then capped it. “This water’s disgusting.”

Tally thought for a moment. “Do you know when the fire was?”

“I told you that already. When I was four.”

“I mean the date.”

Chase shrugged. “A few weeks before Delcey was born. May or June, maybe.”

“And where was it?”

“What?”

“Where? What city?”

“Where I was born, I guess. Laguna Hills. What are you getting at?”

“If you know the date and the city, you can probably look it up on some kind of online archive. Wouldn’t a major house fire, especially one at a day-care provider’s house, get in the newspaper?”

Chase studied the road ahead, but he appeared deep in thought. “Yeah. Yeah, it probably would.”

“Maybe you could look around on the Internet. Maybe there’s a news story out there or a public record that would help you fill in the missing minutes.”

Chase tapped on the steering wheel with his thumbs. “I’m surprised I didn’t think of that myself.”

They rode for a few minutes in silence.

“You’ll tell me if you find out anything?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’ll tell you.”

“Chase?”

“What?”

“I’m not going on that date with Matt.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause that’s how I want it.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

twenty-seven

A
manda rinsed the breakfast dishes and watched the remnants of scrambled eggs slither down the drain. Next to her Neil filled a travel mug with coffee, the business section of the newspaper under his arm. Dior Homme wafted in subtle waves toward her.