The Killing Jar

  There was a chair next to Erin’s bed. I dropped into it before my watery knees gave out. Erin had terrible eyesight. When she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she tended to squint like a mole. But her glasses were gone, and her eyes were wide open.

  “What do we do now?” I asked the room.

  My mom and Erin shared a furtive glance.

  “Plead ignorance,” my mom said, keeping her voice low in case anyone was listening outside the door. “No matter what they ask, we don’t remember anything, all right? Kenna, it’s especially important that you remain vague.”

  I turned to Erin and saw her clear, bright eyes fill with tears and her chin begin to quiver.

  “Do you remember?” I asked softly.

  She licked her lips and swallowed. “You brought us back,” she whispered. “I was outside my body, just sort of drifting. Then I felt this tug, like I was a balloon on a string, and you were the one holding the end.” She smiled sadly and wiped her eyes as the tears dripped down her nose. “You saved us. You saved me.”

  I wanted to tell her no, she was mistaken. I hadn’t saved them. I had damned them. I was the reason Thomas Dunn did what he did.

  I was the reason they had died in the first place.

  Then the door opened and the detective stepped inside. He was middle-aged, graying, twenty pounds overweight. His tired eyes pinned me down. “There you are,” he said. “I’m the detective handling your family’s case. I need to take your statement.”

  “Can we do it here?”

  He shook his head. “Just you and me.” He gestured impatiently for me to follow. “It won’t take long. Come on, let’s talk in the cafeteria, get some coffee. Your boyfriend can come, too,” he added with a half smile, as though he were trying to be charming.

  Reluctantly, I stood and followed him, my fever ramping up a few degrees. I wanted to take off Blake’s jacket, but it felt like a layer of armor, a protective shell. I curled my hands inside the sleeves.

  Blake waited in the hallway outside the room, pacing restlessly. When I emerged, he stopped pacing and moved to my side. He tried to take my hand, but I folded my arms and stuck my hands in my armpits.

  “I’m Detective Speakman, by the way,” the detective said. He held his hand out to me. I ignored it.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked. “You already have your man and he’s dead. What’s left to investigate?” What was left that didn’t call for an episode of The X-Files?

  He raised his eyebrows at me, but lowered his hand, gazing at me with a blank expression. “I just need to get all the facts.”

  IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN

  I spent the next hour sitting at a table in the cafeteria, sipping and cringing at incredibly bad coffee and picking at a stale Danish as I told Detective Speakman the abridged version of my story. Blake backed me up on all the parts for which he’d been present. The rest was mine to alter, since there were no witnesses to contradict my account.

  Finally, Detective Speakman closed his notebook and stashed it in the inside pocket of his suit coat. “So that’s it. You came home. You found your mom and sister wounded, blood everywhere. Thomas Dunn trapped you, and then you fell and blacked out and you don’t remember anything else.”

  “That’s right.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Blake studying me, trying to decide if I was lying, just like Detective Speakman was doing openly.

  The detective put his hands facedown on the table. “Well, I suppose that’s all then.” He pulled a card from his wallet and passed it to me. “If you or your family miraculously remember anything, be sure to give me a call.”

  “We will,” I said, and the detective rose to leave. He started walking away from the table and then paused. “One more thing. Thomas Dunn’s son, Jason, the one who died seven years ago … you were the last person to see him alive?”

  I nodded, trying to keep my expression neutral. Under the table, I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. Sweat gathered in my palms, making them slick.

  “When they found him, his body was desiccated, looked like all the moisture had been drained out of the tissue, just like his father’s after … well, after whatever you don’t remember happened to him. I find that to be a strange coincidence. A very strange coincidence. In my line of work strange coincidences usually have a connection. I just haven’t found it yet.”

  I tried to swallow but my throat had gone dry. “Maybe it runs in the family, like a genetic disorder.”

  “Maybe so,” the detective said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

  When he was gone, I exhaled and wrapped my arms around myself, bowing over the table and resting my forehead on the surface.

  “You don’t look so good,” Blake said.

  Now I was both shivering and sweating, and my stomach felt like it was filled with broken shards of glass, jabbing and slicing at my insides.

  “I’m fine,” I said, but I wanted to shred my skin with my fingernails. The crawling sensation came and went in waves, and I was currently surfing a bad one.

  “No, you’re not,” he hissed, low and frustrated. “You need to see a doctor.”

  He stood and took me by the arm, trying to haul me out of my seat. I wrenched violently away. “I told you never to touch me!”

  The cafeteria went silent, all eyes turned toward us. Blake glanced around nervously, licking his lips, eyes as wide as they would go.

  “I’m only trying to help,” he said. “Why won’t you let me help you? What’s going on?”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. My control was slipping, and I was afraid, so afraid of what I might do to him if I lost control for even a second.

  “What the detective said about that kid and his dad dying the same way…” He lowered his voice another octave. “Do you know how it happened? Did you … did you have something to do with it?”

  “You need to leave now,” I responded, my voice sounding flat and dead. “I can’t explain anything. Please, Blake, just do what I ask this one time and leave me alone.”

  “But Kenna—”

  I shoved my chair back and stood to face him. I dragged a breath down my throat. It was getting harder to breathe. My lungs were filling up with cement, hardening, and I was shivering so violently it felt like I would make the building shake.

  “Just go! Leave me alone!” I ran from the cafeteria and didn’t look back to see if he was following me. I hoped he wasn’t, because a part of me hoped he was. That part wanted to get him alone and then let my aching, trembling, rebelling body have what it wanted. The rushing, throbbing, fluttering in my ears was so loud now, it was like standing next to an industrial fan as its blades whacked at the air. I needed to be alone. I needed to be locked away somewhere safe. I needed to get out of this hospital before I did something terrible.

  But I couldn’t think straight. The pain in my guts and the fever chills and the shuddering vibration in my ears drove away all rational thoughts. I wandered. I walked the halls. My vision blurred around the edges and turned gray in the center. The people I passed looked like ghosts, their faces chalky blurs. I kept my head down and tried not to see them because I knew that any of them could fix me. The life inside a single one of them could end my agony. These people were walking bottles of medicine, living, breathing panaceas for my unique affliction. But the medicine I needed came at too steep a cost.

  I was trapped. Trapped in a body that had become hostile territory, a private war zone, and I was the enemy under attack by my own cells. How long before I had no choice but to surrender and give them what they wanted?

  I didn’t know where I was going. Everything moved past me in a rush, like I was on a high-speed train. Nothing seemed real. I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the floor. There was only the clutter of knives in my stomach and the wings in my ears and the terrible, sucking emptiness that was everywhere. Everything.

  I blanked out for a while. I wasn’t sure how long.

  When I came back, I w
as standing next to Erin’s bed.

  My twin was sleeping, and when I glanced behind me I saw that my mom was too.

  I shouldn’t be in here, I thought. But I didn’t move. I wanted to see my sister, remind myself that even though I was in hell, even though I was dying, she was alive and healthy for the first time in her life.

  She was going to live a long, long time, and her life would be beautiful. My brilliant sister would do amazing things.

  A year ago, Erin almost died. She got a bad cold, and that was all it took. Her body gave up, tried to shut down. Mom and I checked her into the hospital, where she remained for ten days. On day seven, we were alone, and she said, “I need you to do something for me, Kenna. I need you to say goodbye to me now.”

  I remembered how the blood drained, not only from my face, but from my entire body down into the floor, leaving me cold as a corpse.

  “No,” I had told her, shaking my head. “No.”

  “You have to,” she insisted. She told me she was tired of fighting. She tried to convince me it was okay, that she was ready, that this was no life, being trapped in this body, that I should let her go. She asked me to make her a promise. She asked me to live for her after she was gone. To stop hiding from the world and let myself be happy. She tried to take my hand. She had tears pouring down her cheeks as she begged me to be happy. For her if not for me. But instead I broke down sobbing, and I ran from her, from her touch, from what she wanted from me, because it was impossible. Impossible.

  I could not say goodbye. I never did.

  Now it was time for me to ask of her what I couldn’t give. I was dying, and I needed her to live for me.

  I stood by her bed, holding myself because I felt like, at any moment, my skin might open up and pour my dying guts out onto the floor. I gazed down at her sleeping face. She looked like me now, almost identical. We’d never looked alike, not one day in our entire lives. She’d always been a shrunken, distorted version of me. A homunculus. But now we were the same. She was me, and I was her. But there was so much life in her now, more than she needed. I could feel the life radiating off of her like heat off of a sunburn. I had given her too much, I thought. I should have kept a little of that life for myself, because now I was the one dying. What if I could take just a little of what I’d given to keep us together?

  I reached a hand toward her arm but didn’t touch her, stopped within an inch of her. Still, I could sense the flow of energy trapped beneath her skin. The delicious medicine inside her, of which she now had an excess. My skin seemed to stretch toward her, strands of me unraveling as they had done in the basement. I looked down at my hand and saw searching threads of light emerge from my palm. I tried to will them to shrink back into me, but my stomach lurched and the invisible pincers snapping at my skin bit deeper, and I couldn’t stop. The pain drove my rational mind into hiding, so all that was left was need and desperation.

  Erin’s eyelids began to flutter. She whimpered and I startled back from the bed, gasping, curling my hands into fists. The spell I’d been under was temporarily broken. The filaments of light that had emerged to connect me to my twin were gone, but I could feel them struggling to break free. I tightened my fists until my fingernails dug into my palms.

  Erin’s brow furrowed tightly, creating a row of wrinkles between her eyes. Her eyelids twitched rapidly. She whimpered again and muttered something under her breath. I leaned closer to hear.

  “Don’t hurt her,” she cried softly. “Please stop it. Please don’t hurt my mom! No, no, no, NO!”

  Erin began to thrash wildly on the bed, arms flailing, fighting against some unseen enemy. But I knew the enemy’s name.

  Thomas Dunn.

  Trapped in her dream, my sister screamed.

  “Erin. Erin, it’s okay. It’s just a dream,” I tried to tell her, but she was still caught between waking and dreaming.

  Footsteps pounded toward the room. The door burst open, and a frantic nurse with her hair falling out of a ponytail charged inside.

  “What’s wrong?” my mom asked, awake and sitting up now, climbing out of bed.

  “She’s having a nightmare,” I said quickly, guiltily. “It’s okay. It’s just a nightmare.”

  As though these words reached her through sleep, Erin’s eyes flashed open, huge and alarmed. Unfocused and confused. And then they found me and her face crumpled. A howl of misery escaped from her throat.

  “I want to forget. I want to forget all of it, Kenna.” She choked on the words and began to cough and cry at the same time. She curled into the fetal position and hid her face in the pillow as her body was wracked with sobs, each one a tiny, desperate shriek.

  I swallowed a taste like acid from my mouth.

  The nurse administered a sedative through Erin’s IV, and a moment later my sister’s torment faded as she slipped back into unconsciousness. I hoped she wouldn’t dream again. I hoped she’d find some way to forget, even though I knew that was impossible.

  The nurse left with an admonition that I needed to let Erin rest, and I turned to face my mom. I felt exposed, a hunted animal that has run out of cover. Sweat beaded on my forehead, slicked my spine, but my teeth chattered and my skin shriveled against the air, like I’d stepped inside a freezer unit.

  My eyes found my mom’s, and I saw in them the knowledge of what I was about to say.

  “It’s happening again.”

  Her expression showed no surprise, only dismay. It was like she’d been waiting for me to say the words. Still, it shocked me when she ripped off the tape keeping her IV needle flat to her wrist and then carefully slid the needle from her arm.

  “We need to get out of this hospital,” she said. “Is Blake still here?”

  I averted my eyes and shook my head. “I told him to leave. I was afraid I would—” I didn’t finish. Didn’t need to.

  “Call him,” she told me. “Tell him to come right away and pick us up. Not at the front entrance, though. We need to leave without being seen. There’s an exit along the side of the hospital.” She set the IV tubing aside and plucked at her hospital gown. “And ask him to bring me some of his mom’s clothes.”

  THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE

  I peeked my head out the side exit and glanced left to right in the alley where Blake had parked. There were some delivery guys at a loading dock farther toward the back of the building, but they weren’t paying attention. Other than them, we were alone.

  “Are you okay?” Blake asked, climbing out of his 4Runner, his brow so deeply furrowed I thought he might develop permanent worry lines by the time this was all over—if it were ever over. At least he seemed to have forgiven me for yelling at him in the cafeteria and sending him away.

  “Not really,” I admitted. I was past the point where lying would do me any good. I met his eyes. It wasn’t easy. “Thanks for coming back,” I said.

  He nodded, and I held the door open for my mom, who still wore her hospital gown and a white bathrobe.

  “Blake,” she said in greeting.

  “Hi, Anya,” Blake said, an uncomfortable smile flickering on his lips. My mom insisted Blake call her by her first name, even though Blake was a staunch believer in calling all adults Mr. or Ms.

  Blake looked past my mom. “Where’s Erin?” he asked.

  I hadn’t had time to explain much to Blake over the phone.

  “She’s staying,” my mom answered curtly, ending the inquiry. She’d left a note for Erin with a vague explanation that we’d gone out to “get a few things.” Our sudden departure was sure to raise alarms among the police and hospital staff, but Mom assured me that it was imperative we leave as soon as possible, and I couldn’t disagree with her.

  “Where to?” Blake asked when Mom and I were huddled in the backseat beneath a blanket so the reporters wouldn’t spot us as we drove away.

  “Take the Alta Highway into the mountains,” Mom said. “I’ll tell you where to go once we reach the summit.”

  “Okay…” There was unce
rtainty in his voice, but he did as he was told.

  When we were a mile away from the hospital, Mom threw back the blanket. I sat up and rubbed my temples. The sound in my ears had abated slightly now that we were out of the hospital. I wondered if it was the presence of so many people that made it worse. The fever chills and stabbing stomach cramps and prickling on my skin continued, but were also slightly less intense than they had been inside the building.

  Blake handed my mom a paper grocery bag. “I brought some of my mom’s clothes. I’m not sure they’ll fit, but it was the best I could do.”

  “Thank you.” Mom opened the bag and pulled out a pair of sneakers with balled-up socks stuffed inside, yoga pants, a university T-shirt, and a gray hoodie. Blake kept his eyes trained carefully on the road as my mom changed. When she pulled her hospital gown over her head, exposing her naked back, I got the first good look at her tattoo I’d had in years. She kept it carefully covered, never wearing tank tops or bathing suits. Now I took the opportunity to examine the tattoo carefully while her back was to me. The inked drawing was intricate, obviously created by a gifted artist. I saw now that the wings on her shoulder blades were only a part of the tattoo, that there was an entire mural covering her skin. There was a depiction of a large house on her lower back, and forested mountains in the background. The phases of the moon stretched the length of her spine, transitioning into the moth’s thorax and head. The moth itself had black eyes and perfect black circles in the centers of its wings. It seemed to tell a story, one that my mom had certainly never told to me.

  She pulled the T-shirt over her head, ending my scrutiny. “That’s better,” she said, wadding up the hospital gown and shoving it into the paper bag. She turned her head toward the window and gazed out at the dwindling houses now being overtaken by forest as the highway wound into the foothills of the Cross Pine Mountains.

  “Mom, where are we going?” I asked, and then, lowering my voice, even though there was no way to keep Blake from hearing, “Are you taking me to the … the same place as last time?”