Dead Beautiful

  My grandfather corrected my table manners at dinner, eyeing my ripped jeans and tank tops with distaste. My posture was terrible, he said, and I held my fork like a barbarian.

  Tonight was no different. I scowled at him, wanting to fight back, but I had quickly learned to pick my battles and I didn’t have time for an argument. I glanced at the clock. It was eight. I had to get out of the house. Everything—the plates, the silverware, the roll of paper towels hanging over the sink, the jar of coins sitting on the mantel—reminded me of my parents, of the way they died. But if I wanted to leave, I had to do it soon, because for the first time in my life I actually had a curfew. Ten o’clock.

  “I’m going out tonight,” I mumbled.

  Dustin stood in the corner of the room in an antiquated suit, his hands clasped behind his back as he gazed at the ceiling, pretending not to listen. I stared at him uncomfortably.

  My grandfather put his fork down. “Please, try to enunciate.”

  I repeated myself, this time louder and more annoyed.

  “Better,” he said, and checked his watch. “It’s getting late, though. You should stay in tonight.”

  Outside, the sun was setting over the houses that lined our street. “But it’s still light out,” I protested.

  “I don’t feel comfortable with you going out at night by yourself. It’s not safe.”

  “I won’t be alone. I’ll be with... Annie,” I said, improvising.

  “I’d rather you not go,” he said firmly.

  “Then I should probably go upstairs, where I can sit alone in my room for the rest of my life, because that would be the safest thing to do.” Picking up my plate, I stood.

  Dustin moved to collect my setting, but my grandfather waved him away, and I felt slightly victorious as I turned my back to them and carried my dishes to the kitchen.

  “Renée,” he called out to me, “may I ask you a question?”

  I ignored him and turned on the faucet.

  “How did you find your parents?”

  It caught me off guard. The sponge slipped out of my hand and sank into the soapy water.

  “I already told you.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “you did. But I think there’s more.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I know we haven’t talked about your parents; I wanted to let you mourn them in your own way, without my interference.”

  The kitchen was cramped—a tiny room of appliances just off the dining room—and I could feel my grandfather’s eyes on me through the doorway.

  “I haven’t been present in your life up until now, but I know how difficult it is to lose someone you love. Your mother, Lydia, was my daughter. Her death was no accident. We both know that. After all, you were the one who found them.” He paused. “Please, humor an old man.”

  For the first time since he’d moved in, his words seemed reasonable. I turned and raised my eyes to his. “We were driving back from the beach when I told Annie to take Prairie Creek Drive instead of U.S. 101.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought it would be faster,” I said, not revealing the true reason, which was that I’d felt inexplicably pulled in that direction.

  “What happened next?”

  “I saw their car on the side of the road. We pulled over and I went into the woods. Annie waited for me.”

  “And then what?”

  Scenes of the redwood forest flashed through my mind.

  “I just kept running. I... I didn’t know where I was going;

  I just knew I had to go deeper.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I saw the coins.”

  The faucet was still running. I watched the water cascade over the dishes.

  My grandfather’s voice broke the silence. “And then what happened?” he said gently.

  I turned to him. “That’s it. I found them. They were dead. Do you want me to relive the entire night? You know what happened. You read the police report. I told them everything I know.”

  I turned away and wiped my eyes over the sink.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I know it’s difficult for you with your parents gone, and now with me here. It’s strange and unexpected that the fates should bring us together again after all this time. But think. Does it not seem odd to you that you happened to stumble across your father’s car on the side of the road, and that you were then able to locate the bodies of your parents, which were a mile north of their car? The redwood forest covers more than three hundred square miles, yet you were able to find them within half an hour.”

  “Maybe it was a...a coincidence.” That was what the police had called it.

  He raised a white, bushy eyebrow. “Was it?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” he assured me. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “I don’t know how I found them. I just did. I didn’t even think about it; I just started running.”

  My grandfather looked like he was about to say something, but instead he leaned back in his chair and rested his chin on his fist. “You need new shoes. The ones you have on now are far too juvenile for a girl your age. We’ll get you a pair next week.”

  Baffled, I looked down at my Converse sneakers. His remark shouldn’t have made me angry, but it did. Here he was with his questions and rules and ten o’clock curfew, making me get rid of my favorite sneakers, forcing me to relive the one moment in my life I wanted to forget, and generally ruining my already ruined life.

  “I don’t want new shoes,” I screamed. “I want my parents back.” I ran upstairs, slammed the door to my room, and slid to the floor in an angry heap. Without thinking, I called Annie. She answered on the third ring.

  “I have to get out of here,” I told her. “Can you pick me up?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  We drove to the marina. I’d barely seen Annie since the day we’d gone to the beach. When I hadn’t come out of the woods that night, she’d called the police, then went in to find me. After they discovered me with the bodies of my parents, and brought me home, she hadn’t asked about what I’d seen or how I’d felt. I was relieved that she didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t either. How could I explain to her that I had died that day in the forest too, that nothing had meaning anymore? The things I used to love—lacrosse, the beach, books, history, movies—they all seemed pointless now.

  And then there were the people—the neighbors, the girls from the lacrosse team, the relatives, people from town —constantly stopping by the house, telling me about how they’d known my parents and how much they would miss them. For the first time in my life I was actually glad that my parents hadn’t let me have a cell phone, because it was one less thing to answer. The police came. They had questions. Did I know why my parents were in the forest that day? Had they behaved unusually in the days prior? Did they have any enemies?

  “No,” I answered. “No.”

  But the hardest part was making sense of it all. The cause of each of their deaths was a heart attack, which could have been reasonable had it not been for the circumstances. It was too much of a coincidence that they’d both suffered from a heart attack at the exact same time. Yet the medical report confirmed that everything else inside their bodies was intact and healthy, and that there were no signs of violence, struggle, or anything out of the ordinary, with one exception: autopsies revealed that soil and ribbons of white fabric were found in the mouth of each of my parents. Was there anything strange about the fabric? “No. Just ordinary gauze you might find in any hospital,” the police told me. But no one knew why it was there.

  The police deemed that the heart failure had been brought on by a “hiking accident,” but to me it was anything but resolved. “How could it be an accident?” I’d shouted at the police officers, the doctors, the nurses. “Do you actually expect me to believe that they both died of a heart attack at the same exact moment? That’s impo
ssible. They were healthy. They were supposed to be at work. They had gauze in their mouths! How is that natural?” They gave me sympathetic looks and told me I was going through a rough time and that they understood. They were going to keep the case open. But I knew there wasn’t enough evidence to base a case on. Was it murder? I wasn’t sure. Why would anyone want to kill my parents? And why the forest, the coins, the cloth? If someone had killed my parents, it was intentional, and that meant they were still out there. But then there was the way my mother had looked unexplainably older than she had the day before. How could that be? Maybe they were hiking and had heart attacks. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe I was losing my mind.

  When Annie and I got to the marina, we took off our shoes and walked down to the rocky beach, beside the dock on the far side of the bay. The pier and the boats, which were so colorful by day, were now shadowed in shades of blue.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” I said, dipping my toes in the water.

  “Any time.” She sat down on the rocks. “So I ran into Wes the other day.”

  I looked up at her expectantly.

  “He asked about you. He wanted to know how you were doing...with everything, you know. He said he’s been calling but you haven’t called him back.”

  “He called me?” I was surprised. I hadn’t thought about him at all in the past week, and it never crossed my mind that he could have been thinking about me. Since the night in the woods, it seemed like the phone had been constantly ringing—friends, neighbors, the police, insurance companies. Eventually I just stopped answering, letting my grandfather deal with it.

  “He said he left messages on your answering machine. He was worried. He just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  “It feels like years since I saw him,” I said almost to myself, and smiled. For the first time since my parents died, I felt the inkling of something other than numbness. Thinking about Wes—about the stubble on his chin, his smooth, muscular arms, his curly brown hair, and the way he had run his hand down the back of my neck when he kissed me—it was almost as if nothing had happened and I could return to the life I’d had before. I hadn’t felt anything since that night in the woods; I hadn’t allowed myself to. Instead I’d spent the last week in a trance—my body wandering around the house as if it were alive, when inside my mind was with the dead.

  All of a sudden I felt an incredible urge to feel something more: pain, happiness, it didn’t matter. In front of me the water was tenuously still, as if the night air were weighing down on it with immense pressure.

  I didn’t have a bathing suit on, but it didn’t matter. The far side of the marina was always deserted at night. I tore off my clothes and jumped into the bay. My lungs constricted at the shock of the sudden cold, and the salt water stung my eyes.

  When I surfaced, Annie was wading in, holding her hair above her head with one hand. I splashed her, and she let out a shriek. Diving underwater, I swam deeper. The boats around me bobbed idly in the water, their reflections stretching into the horizon. I looked to the shore. Annie was near the rocks, floating on her back and staring at the sky.

  And then I saw something rise to the surface.

  It was round and long, and had what looked like a train of tattered clothes hanging off of it, lolling in the ripples of the water. Its surface was a sickly white.

  I screamed and swam back to shore, my arms thrashing wildly in the water.

  “What happened?” Annie said frantically.

  I pointed to the bay. “There’s someone floating out there.”

  Annie stood up and looked. “The buoy?” she said finally.

  “I thought”—I said between breaths—“I thought it was a person.”

  Annie looked at me, worried. “It’s just a buoy covered in seaweed.”

  Embarrassed, I blinked and forced myself to look at it. Leaning over, I let out a sigh of relief. She was right. “I’m sorry. I must be losing my mind.”

  As if on cue, a light turned on and flashed into the water. “Who’s there?” someone called from a boat harbored in the bay.

  “Oh my God,” I said, not wanting to be seen in my underwear. “Let’s get out of here.” And in the light of the moon we ran back to shore.

  After Annie dropped me off, I snuck through the back door, hoping that my grandfather had gone to bed. I’d just barely made it through the kitchen when a figure loomed in the doorway.

  I froze. “Crap,” I muttered.

  “I see you’ve gone swimming,” my grandfather said sternly. Even at this hour he was still wearing an expensive tweed suit and dinner jacket.

  “I was feeling a little stuffy.”

  My sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. “Do you think this is funny?” he said loudly.

  I jumped at the sudden sharpness in his voice.

  “You could have gotten killed. Do you think my rules are arbitrary? That I enforce them just to punish you?”

  “Killed. Like my parents? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if it meant I didn’t have to live like this anymore.”

  He studied me. I clutched my sweatshirt against my chest and waited for him to say something. It was so quiet I could hear the water dripping from my hair onto the linoleum floor.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “It wasn’t my intention. Go dry off and get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  The next morning I woke up late and tiptoed downstairs. For the first time since he’d moved in, my grandfather had let me sleep through breakfast. It should have felt like a victory, but was so out of character that it made me suspicious. My grandfather was in the living room, sitting in my father’s reading chair, a newspaper resting in his lap. Dustin was clearing a cup and saucer from the side table. I entered the room cautiously, trying not to draw too much attention to myself.

  “Renée,” he said, almost warmly, “come in.” He motioned to the sofa across from him.

  He was outfitted in trousers and a dinner jacket, with one of the French-cuffed shirts that Dustin starched and ironed every night. His thinning white hair, which was normally impeccably groomed, was tousled on the side, from leaning his head on his hand, I guessed. He took a sip of water, and I braced myself for punishment.

  “Please sit,” he said.

  Dustin pulled out a chair for me and produced a napkin and place setting.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about your situation,” my grandfather continued.

  I fidgeted with my shorts while he spoke, and studied his large, ruddy nose—a nose so massive that it seemed impossible for it to have ever existed on a younger person’s face.

  “And I have decided to send you to school.”

  I shook my head. “What? But I’m already in school.”

  “This is a boarding school. And an elite one at that.”

  I stood up in shock. My entire life was here: Annie, my friends, my teachers, the people I grew up with. They were all I had left. I was about to begin my sophomore year, and I had just made the varsity lacrosse team and gotten into AP History, which was normally closed off to sophomores. And of course there was Wes....

  “But you can’t!” I cried, though I wasn’t so sure. How could he make me leave when my life was just beginning?

  He clasped his hands over one knee. “It’s high time you got an actual education. A classical education. I’ve seen how schools these days operate, letting young people choose what they want and don’t want to study. It’s an ineffective method that has been disproven over and over again. Gottfried Academy has been around for centuries. I’m sure it will provide you with the same strong foundation that your mother had.”

  I meant to interrupt him, but when he mentioned my mother, I went quiet. I didn’t know that she had gone to boarding school. She had told me stories about her childhood, about high school, and about how she met my dad, but she’d never told me that she went to boarding school, or that it was prestigious. My dad had to have gone there too, since they’d met in English class. Why would
she omit those details?

  “I’m not going,” I said defiantly. “You can’t make me.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “On the contrary, I can. Your parents entrusted me with your safety, as stipulated in their wills. As your primary guardian, it’s my responsibility to do what I think is best for your future.”

  “But they hated you. Even when they were alive they wouldn’t let you see me. So how can you possibly think you know what’s best for me? You don’t know anything about me.”

  “That may be the case,” he said quietly, “yet the fact still remains that I am your grandfather, and you are a minor. I know more about you than you know about yourself. Now, sit down. Please.”

  I cringed and sank into my seat.

  “Whether you like it or not, I am your legal guardian, and you’re going to Gottfried. Now, I’m going to speak plainly and clearly. You are not safe here, Renée.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your parents died. I don’t know why or how or by whom, but it certainly was not by natural causes.”

  “But the police said—”

  “The police believe that they both had some sort of heart attack. Do you think that’s true?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “So … so what, then. You think someone murdered them? That someone chased them into the woods and killed them?”

  My grandfather shook his head, his jowls quivering. “I don’t know, Renée. I only know that it wasn’t an accident. Which is why we have to leave.”