All Fall Down

  What were they going to do?

  Later, when the children had been put to sleep, Sunny again snuck from her room to travel the dark corridors on silent feet. Not to hunt for snacks this time, not to linger in front of her dreaming father whose touch was too familiar even though she thought he didn’t mean for it to be, and she knew he minded what happened far more than she did.

  No, this time she ran from the house, knowing she had to get out or bring down the walls with her screams. She looked over her shoulder at her father’s house, where she wasn’t supposed to be a child. Lights bloomed in the bedroom windows. They looked so warm, and she was cold. Shivering. She’d come out without a coat, hat or gloves, and the boots her mother had given her were still too big and not very warm. That was okay. She deserved to be cold. Sunny tripped down the deck’s wooden stairs and into the snowy backyard. Cold wetness went up over the top of her boots and inside, burning first before it numbed. She ran down the sloping hill and slipped in the snow, going to one knee before catching herself.

  Where was she going? Where could she go? There was a street and beyond that another. The highway. A town. At some point, she could find her way back home to Sanctuary. The thought made her shudder. Her family was gone and without them, it was just a place.

  Liesel had said there was no silent room, not here. Sunny could understand why Liesel had been appalled by the thought of it; it had been a cruel place. Sunny herself still shuddered with memories of the few times she’d been forced into it.

  For the first time, Sunny understood exactly what Papa had meant when he said sometimes everyone needed a little silence.

  She tried to find some now, but though she tried hard to push aside the world around her and focus on the one within, she couldn’t manage to block out anything. She thought about how she’d floated. Too many misdeeds weighed her now. Too many sweet treats, no matter how she’d told Liesel they didn’t need to eat them. Too many hours of television programs. Too many hot showers when she ought to have bathed quickly but had luxuriated instead.

  Up in the night sky, stars didn’t twinkle. They just shone. The night her mother had pushed her out the door, Sunny had looked up at those very same stars, but they looked different now. Farther away. They didn’t seem the same as the ones that had watched over her in Sanctuary; although she knew they had to be the same because though there were millions of them in the sky, they didn’t change.

  She’d only been out here a few minutes, and already she couldn’t feel her feet and fingers. Her children were in that house, so she needed to go back inside if for no other reason than that, but it wasn’t as if they weren’t safe there. Liesel and Christopher wouldn’t let anything bad happen to the children. Bliss would probably be crying for her by now, and Sunny’s breasts ached, full with milk that let down when she remembered it was long past feeding time. It wet the front of her blouse all the way through her sweatshirt.

  At the bottom of the hill, the house looked somehow even bigger than when she’d been right next to it. Here were trees, small ones with cages around them. Maybe the kind that grew flowers. Someone had planted them on purpose, not like the big trees in the woods that grew there all on their own. These were for show, and though they were of the earth, were still material. Still fancy, just for decoration. Not quite as much a waste of resources as some of the other things Liesel and Christopher had in their house, but not as useful as a fruit tree.

  A figure loomed up out of the darkness. One hand raised. For a horrifying, wonderful moment, Sunny thought it was her mother and had taken two or three steps toward it before she knew it couldn’t be. By that time she’d reached the woman offering her hand to the darkness, and she discovered it was…a statue.

  The barest caress of light from the house illuminated her, but Sunny’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, so she could see it was a woman’s shape. Kneeling, not holding out her hands as she’d thought, but with wings. The woman knelt, her face buried in one arm against a pedestal. She was weeping.

  Weary of casting herself in stone the way this woman had been carved, Sunny wept, too.

  Her tears were scalding hot, but only for seconds before they froze and plucked at her skin when she swiped them away. She touched the stone woman, who should’ve been covered with snow but wasn’t. The stone was smooth, not rough like Sunny expected. What was she doing here? Why a stone woman in a little grove of trees, set in someone’s backyard?

  Then it struck her. More decoration. No purpose, no point, no use. Just for show.

  Sunny laughed out loud, the sound sort of raw and painful, which was also how it felt. Did it matter what Liesel and Christopher did? If they were wasteful or fancy, even if they raped the earth and used fossil fuels and didn’t recycle? If they stuffed their vessels solid full with corn syrup and chemicals? What difference did any of that make, really? It had made none to her mother.

  “I miss you,” Sunny said. “Mama, I miss you so much, and I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Everything will be all right, Sunshine. Listen with your heart, and you’ll be okay.” The voice, soft and sweet and purely feminine, whispered like a tickle in Sunny’s ear.

  She stopped laughing, stopped crying. She gulped down snot and tears, thick and nasty, then spat another mouthful to the side. She touched the stone woman again. She closed her eyes. She listened.

  It wasn’t Papa’s voice, the way Sunny had always thought it would be, and it wasn’t her mother’s voice, the way it hadn’t quite been before. This time she thought she recognized it.

  “Everything will be okay, Sunshine.”

  It was her own voice.

  “What will we do?” she said aloud. “What will I do?”

  What would she do, to stay here with her children? To protect and provide for them. What choices could Sunny make?

  The answer came, not in words but in a smooth burst of understanding that dug into her core, husked her out and left her empty…but lighter. So, so much lighter. Light enough to float, maybe even someday to fly. What would she do?

  Whatever she had to.

  Chapter 24

  Working from home wasn’t working.

  Liesel had spent the day with her laptop, roaming from room to room to find a quiet spot to work and finding none. For children who were so wonderfully well-behaved, those kids made an awful lot of noise. Add to that the fact Sunny seemed too scared to lift a finger to do a damn thing without asking permission, and Liesel had been interrupted ceaselessly.

  Christopher, on the other hand, had arrived an hour later than expected, bright-eyed and smelling of sweat because he’d taken the chance to stop off at the gym on the way home. It might’ve been a fight, but Liesel was just too freaking tired to raise one. That was, until her husband, who’d been listening to her list of complaints, decided he had the solution.

  “I don’t see any other way to do it.” Christopher’s voice was muffled from inside the fridge. He came out with beer in one hand and a container of chip dip in the other.

  Liesel always bought Heluva Good French Onion Dip for him, but after the debacle with Sunny throwing out all the food, she’d made the concession of trying to make her own with sour cream and French onion soup mix. It had been nearly impossible to find a prepackaged mix that didn’t contain corn syrup or any of the other half-dozen ingredients Sunny had said would kill them. She’d ended up mixing together a random assortment of spices and dried-onion flakes instead.

  “Of course you don’t.” Liesel leaned against the kitchen counter, watching as he went to the cupboard for a bag of potato chips. “Why would you? You’re not the one who has to quit.”

  Christopher settled himself at the bar and tore open the chips. He opened the container without even looking at it, dug a chip in, ate it. Grimaced and muttered a curse. “What’s this? This isn’
t Heluva.”

  “Does it say Heluva?”

  He gave her a narrow-eyed look and dug another chip into the sour cream. Tasted it more slowly. “Why didn’t you get Heluva Good?”

  “I did,” Liesel told him. “Your daughter dumped it in the garbage, remember? She told me to make my own, it would be healthier for you.”

  Her husband took another bite. “Tastes like ass.”

  “Don’t eat it, then.” Liesel made to grab the container and toss it in the trash, but Christopher pulled it out of reach before she could. “You could take a leave of absence. Family leave. Something like that, part-time, and—” Even as she said it, she knew he’d never go for it.

  He did, indeed, look at her like she was nuts. “Liesel, I make over a hundred grand a year and have terrific benefits, including four weeks’ vacation.”

  That was all he had to say. She made far less than half of what he did, worked part-time, no benefits, no vacation. The only thing they’d lose if Liesel quit her job was the free T-shirts and mugs she sometimes brought home from overruns. Oh, and her dignity.

  “You don’t even like your job,” he told her.

  “It’s not about liking it!” she cried, surprising herself. “It’s about having it!”

  Christopher gave her an implacable look. “You wanted this. Now you have to deal with it, Liesel.”

  “This is nothing like what I wanted.”

  “Well,” her husband said, “it’s what you got.”

  That he could be so casual left a sour taste on her tongue that made her want to turn her head to the side and spit. He didn’t get it, she saw that clearly enough. And she didn’t even want to try to explain. “I’m going for a run.”

  He looked at once toward the ceiling. Everything was quiet upstairs, Sunny and the kids not making a peep. “What about…?”

  “You’ll be here in case of an emergency.” Liesel ignored his grunt of protest and didn’t even go upstairs to change, just grabbed her running shoes from beside the door, tugged on a cap and mittens and went.

  She ran.

  Liesel had always been a working girl, just like Melanie Griffith in that cheesy eighties movie. She got her first job at fifteen, scooping cones in an ice-cream parlor that was only open during the summer. She worked for minimum wage plus tips and never gained a pound because she had to be on her feet for her entire shift. She’d worked in retail, food service and had tended bar. She’d landed her first office job just out of school, a paid internship at a great design firm in Philadelphia that had made much out of its “hiring from within” program. She’d had to start from the absolute bottom, but there’d been the promise of moving up.

  She’d done that, too. She didn’t just have a job, she had a career. She had an apartment, a car, nice clothes. Then she’d met Christopher. She’d fallen in love and married him, and they’d moved out here to follow his job, which just happened to be closer to his family and where he’d grown up. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. The cost of living was much lower in Lebanon County than it had been in Philadelphia, and his commute would be shorter. They could afford a nicer house, better cars and vacations. The fact she’d had a tough time finding work hadn’t seemed so important right away.

  Not until six months had passed with Liesel sending out résumés and going on interviews, only to be at home the rest of the time, twiddling her thumbs. She didn’t like to cook and discovered she wasn’t very good at cleaning, either. Finally, she took the job at Roy’s Printing and Design because even though the money was crap and she wasn’t doing anywhere near as much design work as she’d done in Philly, it was better than not working at all.

  Working gave her a sense of purpose and worth she would never admit to needing. It defined her as a woman who didn’t stay home to rely on her husband for everything, even if the truth was she’d never have been able to afford their lifestyle on her own. Without a job, what would Liesel do?

  Who would she be?

  Liesel pushed herself a little faster. Harder. Her breath burned in her lungs as she pushed herself up one of the steeper hills in the neighborhood. She usually ran the other direction, but today she was heading for the outer limits and the woods beyond. There was no through road back here, though an east-west rural highway was close enough to glimpse through the trees at the edge of several backyards. There were, however, a number of footpaths worn by runners like her, as well as bikers and hikers and the occasional hunters and horse riders who frequented the game lands that pushed up against the neighborhood.

  She took the path through the woods, looking at her feet as she leaped a gnarled tree root that could’ve sent her onto her butt. She didn’t need that again, not with her bruises just barely healed. She’d bought those sneakers with her own paycheck. Swiped the credit card in her name and paid the bill when it arrived with a check from her personal account, the one she’d had since before she got married. She’d added Christopher to it, just as he’d added her name to his, but he never added or took money from it.

  “Her” money had always been for special things. Gifts at holiday time, weekend trips, that new pair of running shoes she didn’t need but really wanted. Losing her money wouldn’t mean they had to give any of that up, but it meant a whole lot more than simply switching which account she paid the bills from.

  Below her, cars and trucks whizzed by on the highway as she kept up her run along the footpath through the trees. At one point, the path dipped to road level and she crossed to take a series of paths on the other side of the highway. There’d been a quarry here once, now filled in with water, and lots of talk about building an indoor water-park resort around it with, so far, no progress. A bunch of new houses here, too. Bigger than hers, with longer driveways and gates at the end. Fancy houses she’d toured during the annual Parade of Homes. She and Christopher had marveled at the things people spent money on that seemed so frivolous. Small, odd-shaped rooms with limited functions, extravagant closets and bidets and pot fillers and potting counters.

  Liesel ran past them all, not even looking to see if anyone stared out at her from the windows. Her sides hurt and so did the knee she’d twisted. She pushed on anyway. She ran and ran, sweat streaking down her back.

  And then, she stopped.

  Panting, bending to put her hands on her knees, Liesel blinked away the black-and-red spots in her vision. She’d forgotten to bring water. Stupid. She stood too fast and had to bend over again to keep herself from fainting.

  When at last she caught her breath, she stared across the highway at the high metal gates that had once closed in the place where Sunny had been raised. She called it Sanctuary, but there were no signs to label it that way. Lots of no trespassing and private property notices, though.

  She’d been so close, always so close, and Christopher had never known.

  Liesel crossed the highway. She ignored the signs—the gates weren’t locked and there wasn’t any police line tape to worry about. She jogged more slowly this time, down a long gravel driveway that became bare dirt. She stopped far away from the buildings, though. The entire compound was deserted and creepy.

  People had died in that building. Four stories and built of gray concrete, it looked more like a barracks than a house. She supposed that was probably what it was more than anything. There were a couple barns and some greenhouses, too, but she kept her eyes on the gray building. That’s where Sunny and her kids had grown up.

  There weren’t any clues in it.

  Not in looking at it, anyway. If she’d gathered the courage to snoop around, who knew what she’d find. But Liesel had never been a fan of horror movies, and she wasn’t stupid enough to go inside looking for ghosts. She shifted from foot to foot, cold now that she’d stopped running and the sweat had begun to dry. She didn’t even really know why she’d come here, unless it was so
mehow to prove to herself that it was as awful as she’d imagined. She didn’t have to go inside to see that.

  She ran home, but at a much slower pace. It took her twice as long, and by the time she’d stumbled out of the woods and onto the street, every part of her felt sprung and sore. Night was falling. She couldn’t push herself to run, so walked the rest of the way home.

  Christopher had left the lights on for her. There was that, at least. She let herself in through the front door and followed the sounds of childish laughter into the kitchen. Peace and Happy sat at the table, playing Candy Land with Christopher, who got up when he saw her.

  “I was getting worried,” he said.

  She let him hug her though she was covered with sweat and desperately wanted a shower. She felt, as she always did after a good long run, wrung out and sort of jittery. She kissed him, then went to get a cold drink.

  “How were things here?”

  “Good. We played games. Sunny is upstairs with the baby.”

  Liesel nodded. “I’m going to shower. Did you make anything for dinner?”

  “Grilled cheese. I can make you one, if you want.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll grab something when I’m done.”

  She didn’t think about kissing him again before she went upstairs, but some impulse moved her feet toward him instead of away. He’d just flicked the spinner with his finger to make it land on a new color, and he looked surprised when she bent to press her lips to his forehead.

  Upstairs, she heard the murmur of Sunny singing in her bedroom, and Liesel paused in the doorway to peek inside. “Hi.”