***
Dinner that night was silent. The house grew dark as the sun set; no one could summon the effort to turn on a light. And despite the rather impressive spread of more than a dozen casseroles, the food just sat there, cold and mostly uneaten.
Uncle Mort sat in his dead niece’s chair and poked at the grayish lump of goulash on his plate. Racked with guilt, he had not said much of anything since the day Cordy died. Lex, who hadn’t left his house until it was time to drive to the city, had tried to reassure him that there wasn’t a thing he could have done, that Zara’s powers had grown so strong it wouldn’t have mattered. For some reason, Lex gathered, this made him feel worse.
As the night wore on, the silence grew heavier and heavier, until it threatened to collapse into itself and form a black hole right there on the dining room table. When eight o’clock rolled around, Uncle Mort slowly rose from his seat.
“I should get going,” he muttered.
“Take some food,” Mrs. Bartleby said flatly.
“Sure, sure. Just let me grab the car.”
The screen door banged on his way out. Mr. Bartleby picked at his plate. And as the roar of the Gremlin’s engine ripped through the walls of the house, Lex stood up.
Her parents looked at her in abject terror. “What are you doing?” her mother asked.
“I’m going back,” she said softly.
“You absolutely are not!” Fresh tears sprang to her mother’s eyes. “We just lost one child, if you think for a second we’re going to let the only daughter we have left just . . . just leave . . .” She collapsed into a fit of sobbing.
Lex’s father just stared.
But her mother fought on, gasping for air. “You selfish little—we already told you no! School starts in two days!” she choked, her face a hopeless mess of fury and grief. “And leaving your family at a time like this—how dare you?”
Lex looked away, unable to look into the eyes of the mother whose heart she was breaking all over again. “I know who did this,” she said even more quietly. “And I have to go back.” She looked up. “I have to go back and finish it.”
Her mother, now too overcome to speak, wept. Yet her father was watching her with a strange expression on his face.
“You know who did this?” he repeated blankly, stealing a glance at her bandaged hands.
Lex nodded.
He stood up from his chair, walked over to his sobbing wife, knelt down beside her, and took her into his arms.
“Go,” he told Lex.
“What?” Her mother wailed frantically, struggling against her husband. “No! She can’t go! How could you let her—”
“Shhh . . .” Mr. Bartleby breathed, stroking her hair. Exhausted, Mrs. Bartleby finally crumpled into her husband’s arms, emitting strangled moans of agony.
“Go,” he rasped once again, gazing at Lex, his own eyes now filling with tears. “Go find the monster who murdered my baby girl, and you kill that son of a—”
He broke off as a sob choked his throat.
Lex left the table and noiselessly went upstairs. She grabbed Cordy’s empty backpack and began stuffing various items into it, hurriedly stripping the contents of the room where she and Cordy had once built a spaceship out of a cardboard box and flown all the way to the Planet of Infinite Jungle Gyms. She took a few clothes out of her closet, a pair of heavy boots, several books, Captain Wiggles, a handful of photos, and—
She stopped. A sliver of light glimmered from the bookshelf. She moved aside a photo to reveal the girls’ two Sparks, sitting there just as she had left them. Lex’s was still glittery and flickering, the small glints of light whizzing around the globe and crashing into the glass, making them shine even brighter.
But Cordy’s no longer contained any luminous embers. Instead, it shone white and clear, a brilliant beacon against the darkness of the room.
Like the flash of a soul, Lex thought.
She grabbed both Sparks, threw them into the bag, and zipped it up, shaking slightly. She had gotten what she wanted, she was returning to Croak—but for all the wrong reasons. This was not how it was supposed to happen. And even though Lex knew she was making the right choice, even though she wanted nothing more than to take up the fight that now rose before her, still she glanced back and took one last look at her room, wondering if she would ever see it again.
She went back downstairs. Her mother and father still clutched each other, now grieving the loss of not only one, but both of their children. Heaving the bag onto her shoulder, she made her way into the dining room and bent over her parents.
“Goodbye, Dad,” Lex whispered, gently kissing him on his shiny head. She did the same to her mother, brushing a tuft of matted hair aside, distant memories of lullabies humming softly through her memory. “Goodbye, Mom.”
That was how she left them as she walked out of the house, slammed the screen door, and sank into the seat of Uncle Mort’s car.
And that was how she would remember them for the longest time thereafter, even in the bleakest of moments: her two loving parents, clinging to each other in the dark, crying long into the night.
Gina Damico grew up under four feet of snow in Syracuse, New York. She received a degree in theater and sociology from Boston College, where she was active with the Committee for Creative Enactments, a murder mystery improv comedy troupe that may or may not have sparked her interest in wildly improbable bloodshed. She has since worked as a tour guide, transcriptionist, theater house manager, scenic artist, movie extra, office troll, retail monkey, yarn hawker, and breadmonger. Croak is her first novel. She lives outside of Boston with her husband, two cats, and a closet full of black hoodies.
www.ginadami.co
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Gina Damico, Croak
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