I trail off. My throat feels tight.
“You can’t ever really trust anyone but yourself, can you?”
I hear Sully take five steps closer, but something recoils inside of me, and I take two more steps away, toward that back door.
“Iona, you cannot judge the world based on one sick and twisted man. The world is full of good, honest people.”
“Then why was I so unlucky to find the worst of the worst?” I ask. I look over my shoulder back at him, daring him to give me a logical answer.
He doesn’t have one.
So I push the back door open, and walk outside into the snow.
It was so hot that all the food was drying up.
Mom’s potato salad was almost ruined. Cressida’s baked beans were looking more like mush. Sweat dropped off of Jack’s brow, narrowly missing the grill.
But everyone was in good spirits as we wrapped up the day with dinner, before we would watch the fireworks from the back patio, just like every year.
“How come you aren’t spending Independence Day with your family, Jack?” my mother asked as she finished setting out the dishes.
A long table had been set up on the patio, about a dozen different dishes lining the tablecloth. Around was gathered all of my family, my sisters, Cressida’s husband Harold, and their three kids. And, of course, Mom.
“My parents passed away when I was at NYU,” Jack said as he flipped the burgers. “And being from Canada, they wouldn’t have been celebrating today, anyway.”
He gave a charming laugh, looking over his shoulder at me and giving me a wink.
But the moment just turned awkward, and no one knew what to say.
“What about siblings?” Mom probed. “Surely they’d like to see you at some point.”
“Only child, ma’am,” Jack said as he scooped the cooked meat onto a plate. “My parents tried for years to have more children, but I guess it just wasn’t in their future.”
“Must have been an awfully quiet childhood,” Cressida said as she helped Fiona, her oldest, detangle a pinecone from her hair. The second she was done, my beautiful niece took off, chasing after her brother once more.
Jack nodded, removing the last of the patties, and shutting down the grill. “It was. My parents were…involved in their lives. They sometimes kind of forgot that I was there. But they were good people.”
It surprised me a little, to hear Jack talking so openly about his childhood with my family. He rarely opened up about it, even with me. I suspected there were some resentful scars there, coming from a family who always seemed dissatisfied that there weren’t more children, so their reaction was to pretend there wasn’t even the one of them.
None of my family seemed to quite know what to say to that, so instead, Mom just declared that it was time to eat.
I settled down with my plate, cozying up to Jack, who placed his hand on my knee under the table. I leaned in, pressing my lips to his as his dazzling eyes met mine.
Sparks ignited in my chest when he kissed me. Strings of connectivity wound between us with each and every one, drawing me closer to him.
“I love you,” I whispered against his lips, smiling.
“I love you, too,” he said in a growl that was hungry and possessive.
“I better see you eat every bite on that plate,” Cressida’s voice cut into the intimate moment. “If you lose one more pound I’m going to start force-feeding Jonah’s breast milk down your throat until you put that weight back on.”
I forced a little laugh, despite the violence that sparked in my blood. Cressida and her big, bossy mouth, always telling everyone what to do.
I tentatively scooped a bite of the potato salad and put it in my mouth.
It didn’t taste like anything, and I wanted to push my plate away, but I looked up at my sister across the table, and smiled.
Jack leaned in, tracing his nose up my cheek, igniting another storm of desire, instantly.
“Don’t let her get to you,” he whispered. “You’re beautiful, any way you are.”
So I did as he said. I ignored my sister, and I relished Jack’s hand running up and down my thigh underneath the table.
A shiver works its way down my spine as the wind blows through the crooked and bent trees, and I stare down into the open grave. Not a flake of snow makes its way down to the exposed dirt, six feet down.
The two skeletons lie side by side. Clinging together, refusing to be separated, even in death.
I shiver once more, letting out a long, slow breath, clouding the air before me.
Chapter Forty-Five
SULLY
I knew I should leave her be, let Iona deal with her grief and anger in private. Which she obviously wanted, considering she’d walked out the door and away.
But considering all of her recent behavior, considering it was involuntary, I didn’t dare let her roam around a town like this on her own.
So I’d waited three minutes before I hauled my aching, sluggish body out the door, following her small footprints through the deep snow and out into the gray day.
Down the road, turning at Penny Ozwaltz’s house, and down the lane to the grove of crooked trees.
And then she just settles there, looking down into the grave of the lovers.
And I just watch her, standing there, lost in that head and the past, for two hours.
Chapter Forty-Six
IONA
“How much time do you think we’ll have this go around?” I ask Sully as he greets Simone, Sharon, and Joanne.
“The second time is always longer than the first,” he says. “Though, I suppose this is technically the third.” He looks around the room, listening for a moment.
“Joanne says she’s determined not to be shoved back until we have things figured out,” Sully says. “Though I’ll remind her that she doesn’t really have a choice.”
It’s so strange, being so outside on all of this. Relying on him to relay every aspect of the conversation. Not being able to see the faces of these other women, when his eyes are tracking all around the room.
But still, he holds my hand tight, my ring in his other hand.
Not my ring. Our ring.
It was never just my ring.
If anything, it is Sharon’s the most. She probably picked it out.
“We have our timeline established,” I say, pushing this along, because as Sully said, we don’t really have a choice on how long they can stay. “You each briefly mentioned how you and Jack met. I guess we should just figure out how things went from there.”
Sully’s eyes slide away from me, going to the same corner he kept looking into this morning. The room is darker than ever, the hour creeping past eleven.
“I fell in love with Jack nearly as soon as I met him,” Sully speaks, but the words don’t sound like him. They sound young and honey sweet. Sharon, I know from our discussion earlier today. “I talked to him twice while taking my sister to him. And I just…I couldn’t get him out of my head. I just wanted to be with him, talk to him.”
I nodded. It might not have happened quite so fast for me, but eventually, that’s how I was, too.
“Once he asked me out on an official date, it was everything,” Sharon’s voice says through Sully. “And it seemed like it was for Jack, too. He was always coming by to call on me. We spent every weekend together. It just all…clicked so fast.”
Sully’s eyes shift, tracing back and forth, as if following someone who is pacing. “I kept thinking to myself that it was weird, how enamored I was with Jack.”
It’s Joanne.
“We were so opposite. Really, we had nothing in common. But I just wanted to be with him. All the time. And he was so insistent. So…attentive. It was like he’d put his sights on me and he wasn’t going to let anything change either of our minds. And I liked it for some reason. Even though I had never been like that with another man. There was a reason that I was twenty-seven and still single. I didn’t buy into the notion o
f obsessive love and settling down because everyone else did it. But there I was, fully sunk in love with Jack.”
“How long?” I ask, my stomach knotting. “Until you knew you loved him?”
Sully’s eyes slide over to mine, but I swear it’s not him I’m seeing. It’s a raven-haired woman with sharp cheekbones and a narrow nose. “Four weeks,” she says. “But I’d been fighting it, lying to myself for at least a week. By the time I said the words to him though, it had been four weeks.”
Not that quick, but still alarming considering what Joanne knew to be true about herself.
“I told Jack I loved him after just one week.” Simone’s voice fills the Sunday School room. “After the day we met, we spent every single day together.” The longing in her voice, the desire, the love, it opens a familiar ache in my chest, and I have to stop myself from recalling our own first few weeks together when everything was magic and beautiful. “And it was like nothing I’d ever heard of before. Better than books. Better than the movies. He was magic and life and I loved him from that first day.”
The crack in Sully’s voice is spot on. I look at him, really seeing him instead of the dark, beautiful woman I have pictured in my mind, and I see it. When he opens the gate, Sully is a conduit. He is a puppet and the dead are the masters.
What a gift Sully has. What a curse.
“And that’s the part that I hate the most,” Simone says. “That I don’t know if that first week was him, or me. Because I think that I genuinely fell for Jack. He didn’t force me into anything in the beginning. But how can I really know that, considering everything that followed after?”
“So is that the first symptom of what he’s done?” I ask, once more propelling this forward, when all I want to do is spend hours mulling this over, absorbing and studying. But time is short. These moments with the dead are limited. “Obsessive love? Because that’s exactly how I felt after the first few weeks. He was all I thought about. All I wanted and needed.”
Sully looks around, and the three women seemed to concur.
I pull a fresh sheet of paper into my lap and write at the top obsessive love.
“Everything seemed perfect from there on out,” Joanne’s voice comes through again. “Until the very end, I thought everything was perfect, and that everyone else just didn’t understand.”
A moment of pause, and then Sharon. Sully even nods. “At first everyone was supportive of me and Jack being together. And then they kept saying things weren’t healthy.”
“And I was just angry at everyone,” Sully becomes Simone. “And I never wanted to spend time with my friends and family. It was all about Jack, Jack, Jack. But that’s exactly the way I wanted it.”
I look back down at my paper again. I underline the word obsessive.
“My family kept telling me that I was getting in too deep with Jack, that it was okay to be in love,” I explain. “But that it wasn’t okay that I was letting him occupy every day of my life. I thought they were just overreacting and had forgotten what it was like to be in love.”
“But looking back, you see that he was there, planting little seeds of isolation in your head.” Joanne, once more.
“Did any of you also get really, really thin?” It’s Sharon, now.
Sully’s eyes shift around and he actually nods. “I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes after a few months,” Simone comes through. “Everything just fell off. And I couldn’t afford to buy new ones, so Jack stepped in, buying me a whole new wardrobe, telling me I was beautiful no matter what.”
“I didn’t even notice, it felt like.” Sharon. “People were telling me that I didn’t look healthy, but…I don’t feel like I even heard them.”
I nod, as something bites at the back of my eyes. I actually feel angry. “I feel sick every time I take a bite. Like…my body has been trained to recoil from all food.”
I swear I can feel it when each of them nods, too.
Loss of appetite, I write next on my paper.
Sully’s hand suddenly tightens slightly around my left one. I look up into his face, and I see the message clearly there: the gate is wanting to close again.
“About a month before I died, the dangerous behavior started,” Sharon’s voice suddenly cuts out of Sully. “Most of the time I didn’t even remember doing it. I didn’t think about it, I would just do these insane things. And again, my family was concerned, but it was like I didn’t even realize, and Jack didn’t even seem to notice, either.”
“I broke my left leg and got seventeen stitches after I tried to jump from the roof of my house,” Joanne affirms. “It just kept escalating for another week and a half. Until finally, I took a gun from a passing police officer and put it to my temple and pulled the trigger.”
I flinch, my eyes squeezing closed as the sound of a gunshot gives me an instant headache.
“It was almost like…like a relief, doing all those things,” Simone concludes. “It just felt right, is the best way I can describe it. With every dangerous, insane thing I did, I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to. Like…fulfilling my destiny.”
It makes me sick, but she’s right. With every crazy thing I’ve done so far, it’s felt…good.
Dangerous behavior, I write next.
My hand shakes a little as I move down to the next line, and write
Death.
“Once the dangerous acts start, how long was it until…” Again, Sully can’t quite say it.
Until you killed yourselves, is what he wants to ask.
“One month,” Sharon restates.
“Two weeks,” Joanne condemns.
“Four weeks,” Simone says, and every syllable tells me the horror she dealt with in those four weeks.
“Three days,” Sully says, looking over at me. “It’s been three days since I found you standing on the roof in the wind.
My eyes widen a little.
Sharon was right. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. Until this moment, I hadn’t thought of that as a dangerous act.
“So, does this mean I have one to three weeks left before I suddenly kill myself?”
And there the words are.
Out.
Finally confessing that this is the end that somehow Jack is leading me to.
Chapter Forty-Seven
SULLY
The cracks in my ceiling have grown two inches in the three days that I’ve been away from Roselock. The cobwebs have grown thicker, more intricate.
I stare up at the ceiling in my bedroom, one arm lying across my forehead, the other hand on my chest.
Three days.
How has it possibly been only three days since I left Roselock for the first time in two years? How has it only been a week and one day since I first met Iona, standing on the front porch of the church?
I close my eyes, hearing the voices of three dead women in the back of my head, and praying that a fourth does not join them soon.
Heat barely makes its way from the fireplace to my room, but the cold is the furthest thing from my concerns at the moment.
The ticking of the clock on the wall sounds every passing second.
For the first time in nearly a week, I am reminded that those ticking seconds are now limited for me.
My death is still coming, one day at a time.
At thirty-three years, three months, and three days.
The faint tug of sleep pulls at the back of my brain when the clock on the wall reads twelve-thirty-one and the sound of footsteps softly pad down the hall toward me.
My door opens with the faintest squeal and I lift my head slightly.
Iona’s tiny frame steps halfway in, her big eyes searching through the dark. I can’t really see her features, but I feel it when her eyes lock with mine.
She doesn’t speak a word. She just stands there for eight breaths.
And then she steps inside, her bare feet not making any noise. She crosses the room. She lifts the blanket and climbs inside.
Not
a breath of hesitation, she curls up, tucking herself against my side, her knees pressed into the bare skin of my ribs, her lips and nose pressing against my shoulder.
I adjust the blanket, making sure it’s tucked up to her chin, never moving away from the contact of her.
She wraps one hand around the crook of my elbow, pulling my arm a little tighter to her. Without a single word spoken, she closes her eyes.
I lie there in silence, just listening. And not two minutes later, her breathing grows even and calm.
My eyes slide back open, fixing on the ceiling. But every nerve in me is aware of the tiny woman lying beside me, fast asleep.
I wake long before Iona does, but I don’t dare move, don’t want to wake her. I lie there, utterly frozen. She sleeps with one leg thrown over mine, her arms still curled around mine, clinging tight.
When she stirs as the sun begins to tear through the clouds, I close my eyes and focus on making my breathing even. She slowly detaches from my side, and gently climbs out of the bed, trying not to disturb me.
I keep lying there, feeling the warm spot in the bed beside me until long after I hear her footsteps retreat to the living room.
When I hear her start a bath and the splash when she climbs in, I rise and dress myself.
The pruning sheers on the dresser still hold a little slash of my blood, left there from the day the fawn knocked on the front doors. I retrieve them and walk outside.
The sun breaks out from behind the retreating clouds, promising a warmer and sunny day. Stepping in the snow that is growing glossy as it begins to melt, I make my way to the back corner and begin clipping green stems.
Thorns cut my hands as usual, leading to two small streams of blood dripping down my hand. But twenty minutes later, with an arm full of red roses, I head into the graveyard.
A rose for my neighbor. A rose for my friend, Agatha. A rose for Ben and his wife Karen who used to babysit me. And roses for my grandfathers and their wives. Roses for my father, my mother, and my sister.