“Oh. Thank you! Thank you!”
At last you process what is happening, and why Saralinda is being friendly to Spencer, and though you think it’s a waste—the woman is the enemy, and this helpless sweet veneer is for show—you’re thankful that Saralinda is suddenly fully present.
She was robotic earlier, as she described to the police how her mother dived out the window. (It was a stroke of luck that her testimony and yours were corroborated by on-street witnesses, including one of the paramedics.) Saralinda insisted on going to the hospital with you to wait for news about Evangeline—not that you’d have left her. Here at the hospital, though, she has barely moved. She clutches her cane compulsively. So now you exhale in relief and watch as she moves with Spencer to the reception desk. After a few moments it is obvious that Spencer is being given an update on Evangeline’s condition—the update that the hospital personnel refused to give any of you.
Next to you, Kenyon stares at Spencer. You put an arm around her and she leans on you, trembling. You look at her vulnerable bare neck and for the first time are able to read in full the sardonic words of her tattoo. Why be happy when you could be normal?
Indeed.
A vulnerable expression flits over Spencer’s face as she listens to the nurse at the reception desk. Her left hand clutches the back of her neck, and her ring catches the light. The nurse glances at Saralinda and then back at Kenyon and you, obviously reporting on your vigil. Spencer nods, the nurse steps away, and then Spencer listens as Saralinda says something to her. To your surprise, Spencer walks determinedly back to Kenyon and you—with Saralinda two steps behind—and says without preamble:
“They’ve got her stabilized. They’re going to let me see her.”
You look from Spencer to Saralinda, whose eyes remain bleak, shocked, and haunted.
Kenyon asks Saralinda, “Is she breathing on her own now? They had her on oxygen in the ambulance.”
Spencer is the one who answers, her jeweled hand making a compulsive movement to her throat. “They’ve put in a tube to help her.”
“A tube?” Kenyon gasps as if she cannot breathe either. Spencer reaches out toward her, but Kenyon flinches before asking bluntly, “Is she dying?”
Spencer’s beautiful eyes close. When she opens them, tears shimmer on their surface. “They don’t—I don’t—it’s serious. But there’s always hope!”
You take on all of Kenyon’s weight.
“What about the thermos?” Kenyon says. “Are they checking it out? Running tests?”
Kenyon had snatched up the thermos on her way out of Saralinda’s apartment and thrust it upon the medics, along with a demand that Mrs. Dubois be hunted down.
Spencer’s brow wrinkles. She looks at Saralinda.
“We think Evangeline was poisoned,” Saralinda says. “If they can determine what she drank, maybe they can find an antidote.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re checking it out,” says Spencer. “This is an excellent hospital.”
“Mrs. Song?” It’s a woman in pink scrubs with teddy bears on them, standing nearby. “You can come in now.”
Spencer nods. Kenyon starts forward as well, wresting herself away from you. But the woman in pink scrubs makes a stop motion to Kenyon. “Just family.”
Spencer blurts, “Oh, but she is family. She’s her sister.” She turns to Kenyon. “Come along.”
You stand dumbfounded with Saralinda as the door to the forbidden hospital zone closes behind Spencer and Kenyon.
“What was that?” you say.
Leaning on her cane, Saralinda sinks down into a chair. You sit as well and put a hand on her shoulder, but she shakes it off and begins rocking, back and forth, back and forth. People stare, covertly. After a minute or so, somehow, Saralinda manages to stop, and then she does let you touch her. You rock her.
There is silence between you.
You think of Saralinda’s mother, her body splayed and smashed on top of a Lexus. All I ever wanted was to be a mother, she had said. You think of your mother, smiling, hopeful. Your father has asked me for a divorce! You think of Kenyon’s grandfather, sneaking under Antoine’s car. You think of Antoine and his mother. You think of Evangeline’s money. You think of that third buttonhole on Spencer Song’s shirt. Finally you think of your father’s psychiatry practice, of his powerful personality, his ability to influence, to mesmerize, to lead.
You make a list in your mind of all the times Mr. Hyde—supposedly—did something, and you try for each one to figure out if it might have been a lie.
Time passes. There is no news. The nurse at the reception desk still won’t respond to questions, but she shows increased compassion.
You don’t think that’s a good sign.
At one point, you pull out the phone. It’s cheap, but it works well enough to track what’s happening in cyberspace. Which—joined with the news of how Saralinda’s mother jumped to her death—is not nothing. Video shares are growing steadily across all media—on Facebook alone there are 434 shares—and while the first ones were exclusively students from Rockland Academy, by now those names are greatly outnumbered by people you don’t know. There’s a growing list of comments on the YouTube page as well, many of them nasty. It’s a good thing Saralinda isn’t reading. Some of the comments say she probably pushed her mother.
Thank God there were witnesses.
You’re hoping the video will perform its intended task of providing insurance. From Irina, you obtain and upload the video of Kenyon’s grandfather sabotaging Antoine’s car. You link the two, along with some commentary.
Saralinda doesn’t ask what you’re doing with the phone. You have no idea how much more time has passed when your attention is caught by Saralinda’s indrawn breath.
Spencer reenters the waiting room from the ICU at last. She is alone.
She does not look at the two of you. Her face is streaked with tears, she is staggering on her heels as if she’s never worn them before, and her voice is high and frantic as she speaks into her phone. “Where are you? I need you! Where are you, Caleb—” She elongates the name an extra beat, the same way she said it when she spoke to you earlier.
The next second, your father strides into the waiting room, using the exact center of the parting double doors, as if he needs the entire space.
Like Spencer, he has his phone at his ear. When they see each other, he stops walking. Sobbing, Spencer rushes forward to fling her arms around your father.
“Oh my God, oh my God, she’s dead!”
Against his back, where Spencer clutches him, the emerald and the diamonds on her new engagement ring catch and reflect the harsh fluorescent hospital light.
You catch your breath as suddenly, you get it.
Your father pulls Spencer close and lowers his face to whisper in her ear.
By your side, Saralinda goes still.
As for you, you turn away.
You have no idea when your father and his rich, beautiful, young fiancée leave.
Chapter 54. Saralinda
In the time following Evangeline’s death which followed my mother’s death, I speak and move and see and hear almost as if I were normal but afterward all I have bridging from there to here are some moments of disconnected memory. They keep no order when they lurch up inside me, but I present them now in chronological order for the sake of documentation.
• • •
As Caleb and I watch, Caleb’s father and Evangeline’s stepmother embrace like lovers because they are lovers engaged to be married. After they are gone Caleb presses his mouth to my ear and chokes out: Oh my God, all along it was about Evangeline’s money—he made other people kill for him, puppets every last one of them, and us too. I don’t follow all of this then (later Caleb will lay it out for me and Kenyon) but I feel its truth in my marionette bones, and as Caleb shakes, so do I.
 
; • • •
We wait I don’t know how long for Kenyon, who finally exits intensive care slowly small shriveled. We go to her and she says starkly, They made me leave her. They made me leave Evan. They took her away. She doesn’t cry, she is wooden in my arms. In days to come she will tell me of a dream she has one night about Evangeline disassembled into parts on an autopsy table. Like a chicken, she says and gags, and I recall Evangeline throwing up in my bathroom, already dying of poison only we didn’t know she would die, we still thought we could win.
• • •
Two police officers want Kenyon to come with them (something to do with her grandfather) but she throws herself to the floor of the hospital waiting room, chanting No no, I won’t go and of course Caleb and I do it with her. There is a big scene, I try to hit an officer’s knee with Georgia (only I flinch away from following through), and Caleb records everything on his phone. Kenyon tweets and then yells about a lawyer, and people come running, they mill around us but nobody dares touch us because they would have to drag us kicking and screaming, and the police freak out and call for backup—only then suddenly Dr. Lee is there.
Dr. Lee our Head of School is there.
• • •
Later I discover that Caleb texted Dr. Lee: Help, he said, please come help us. He sent it like a prayer, like jumping off a cliff into black water. Only it turned out Dr. Lee was already on his way—he saw the video we uploaded from my apartment, he knew my mother was dead, he knew Evangeline was hospitalized, so he came. This stranger—he is not truly a stranger—this stranger came.
• • •
A fragment a quote a poem from someone somewhere: If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. It sounds so good, so laudable, but I think it is sort of unrealistic. Because no matter how strong you are sometimes you do lose your head, you have nothing left, you don’t know what to do. That’s how it is. However if you are lucky there will be somebody who wants to help you. I always thought my mother was that person and Caleb told me that he never ever had that person, and how odd that now a stranger would be that person for him and me and Kenyon. This is my watch, is what Dr. Lee says that night when I try lamely to express something about this.
• • •
Like orphaned ducklings we follow Dr. Lee out of the hospital after he tells the police officers that he is taking responsibility for us and we are all underage and that is that. For now. About Dr. Lee, he is a medium plump man with big ears and (I am afraid) a hairstyle perilously near a comb-over, which is to say you would never pick him out in a crowd and say: He’s the man. Later I ask Caleb how he knew to text Dr. Lee, and he says he didn’t really imagine it would help but he was throwing everything he could think of at the problem and Antoine had liked Dr. Lee.
• • •
I slump in the backseat of a car with Georgia, stuffed between Kenyon and Caleb. Dr. Lee drives the car. In the front passenger seat is a woman who says to call her Shoshanna. It seems as if Caleb already knows her. She asks many questions, mostly Caleb answers and as for me I only remember that she asks me about my blood sugar. Because my world can crack in half, my mother dead Evangeline dead Antoine dead, Kenyon devastated, my love (I call him that in my heart) tortured by his father, my foot hurting, but still there is the need—there will always be the need—to test my blood sugar.
• • •
We end up back at Rockland Academy at Dr. Lee’s house and it turns out Shoshanna is his wife and also a social worker and Kenyon and I are going to stay in their twin sons’ old room with Caleb down the hall on the living room sofa. Shoshanna says we will think about everything in the morning because now it is late and we should try to sleep. Dr. Lee makes warm milk which I force down but Kenyon and Caleb refuse. Shoshanna Lee sort of stands over me while I test my blood sugar which not uncreepily reminds me of my mother.
• • •
Mrs. Dubois is dead, the green smoothie again. She drank it in front of Evangeline. It might have been that night or it might have been the next day that we learned this, I don’t remember. What I remember is Kenyon saying: My grandfather won’t give up so easily, he’s not going to kill himself.
• • •
As one by one days begin to trickle past we do not discuss Dr. Colchester. We also do not discuss Spencer Merriman Song, who is now in Bermuda “mourning” her stepdaughter’s death but really we figure she is waiting for Caleb’s father to get divorced and for the media attention to die down.
• • •
At night I lie flat on my back in the strange bed in the dorm room that apparently is now where I live, listing the dead and wondering if there was any possible way we could have saved Evangeline, at the very least we should have forced her to throw up that smoothie right away.
Also sometimes I wonder and I know I shouldn’t she was crazy but still I wonder if I could have saved my mother—lunged across the room for her at the end—or just been a better daughter beforehand so she didn’t hate me and want me dead.
In the other bed Kenyon is usually wakeful too.
Eventually comes gray light outside with an entire day ahead to get through. I often reach out a hand silently and Kenyon grabs it and holds it, then after a while we get up and get ready and finally find Caleb and try to eat some breakfast.
Chapter 55. Caleb
Two weeks later the media storm about the parental conspiracy still occupies a respectable portion of the national news cycle, not to mention social media interest. On Dr. Lee’s advice, you, Saralinda, and Kenyon have refused all interviews. So has Kenyon’s grandfather, Lieutenant Kelly. Though he hasn’t yet been arrested, he awaits a grand jury summons to testify about Antoine’s death, the collapse of the carriage house, and what he knows about Mrs. Dubois and Ursula de la Flor. He’s lawyered up, and the only communication coming from him so far is “No comment.”
It’s your father who largely drives the interest in this story, and you almost feel a tiny bit sorry for Kenyon’s grandfather. He surely believed he was the one with the power, he was the one in control. He might not fully understand yet that his true status was Lieutenant Tool.
You don’t think much of the man’s chances. Your father’s spin won’t hang together unless the lieutenant is responsible alongside the dead Mrs. Dubois and Ursula de la Flor. In a face-off—Kenyon’s grandfather’s word versus your father’s—you know who will win. Your father will have planned meticulously, and so the police lieutenant is going down. You’d bet your life on it.
Your life, which now matters to you. Which is part of why your father and his wealthy, lovely fiancée are going to get away with it. If you and Saralinda and Kenyon—and your mother—will be able to live without his interference, you will accept it. You will take his devil’s bargain. You will sell your soul.
He is too dangerous an adversary to face. Even in your dreams, you know it. They are not dreams, actually, but nightmares. In one you were facing him, confronting him. You said, I’m not a monster! You lied to me—there’s nothing wrong with me! I never killed that squirrel, or started that fire, I’ve done nothing! It’s all you—you’re the monster! And then, in a small voice, you added: Why? Why did you do it?
He didn’t answer. Instead he smiled and looked down.
Saralinda was lying in a curled-up heap at his feet, trembling—and he had his foot on her neck.
That day after the nightmare, Saralinda asks you and Kenyon, “Shouldn’t knowing the truth give us at least some sense of . . . something? Closure? But I don’t know what I feel. I mean, I’m angry, but I don’t have any place to put my anger. I’m sad, and I’m—I don’t know what.” She makes fists in her lap. “I’m still scared. Are you guys scared? Even if Dr. Lee and Shoshanna become my guardians for the next two years, well—I can’t imagine not still being scared.”
You think of her in that heap on the ground with your father’s foot on h
er neck.
Kenyon shrugs in response. It’s rare for her to speak these days. But yes, she’s afraid too. It’s written all over her. She startles at every sound, her nostrils flaring. Also, she reaches constantly for her phone, compulsively checking Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, though the feeds are often as vile as she once predicted they would be.
You say at last, “I’ve always lived scared. My mother too. You just do it.”
“Um,” says Saralinda, frowning.
“The point is that we get to live at all,” you say urgently. “Right?”
“Only I don’t actually want to,” Saralinda says quietly.
“What? You don’t want to live?” Panic fills you. She can’t—
She looks directly into your eyes. “No,” she says. “I mean that I don’t want to live scared.” She leans forward. “Caleb? Wouldn’t you rather do something?”
You catch your breath.
There it is, suddenly. Your choice. To go on the way you always have, frightened, but masking it as well as you can. Or to fight . . . which you now realize you never did before you met her.
And Antoine. And Evangeline. And Kenyon.
For a very long, very tempting moment you struggle. You imagine grabbing Saralinda by the shoulders, shaking her, yelling into her face: You don’t understand! You don’t know him like I do! We can’t do anything! He’s smarter than us! He’ll crush us! He’ll crush you! But if we crawl away and hide, he might leave us alone. He’ll torture somebody else, if we’re lucky. If we don’t make him mad.
You swallow hard. You breathe.
You do not say those things.
“Do you have any ideas?” you say instead, and you are surprised at how steady your voice is.
Saralinda shakes her head and nods at the same time. “Well, couldn’t we brainstorm? One idea I had, just to start, is that we talk to Kenyon’s grandfather. Maybe he’d be willing to help us now. Join forces. Kenyon? Do you think he might?”