But, really, what were you supposed to do? Massacre all of them?
You couldn’t have done that. You see in your mind an image of the children at daybreak, all dead, Emily, too, their throats cut as they bled to death in the woods-their parkas and sweaters forever stained red. You see it all in your mind with the sun overhead, the sky the same breathtaking summer cobalt it had been on August 11 over Lake Champlain. But this was never supposed to have been a slaughter of that magnitude: three fifth-grade girls and your wife. This had been about a playmate. A single playmate. You kill a child and then you kill yourself. That was the bargain.
But Ethan is shaking his head.
She deserves friends.
Was it always a plural? Friends? He nods. It was, it was.
You kneel and paw at the dirt floor until you have recovered the knife. There you notice little Ashley, sitting with her legs crossed, her eyes sadder than you have ever seen them. Does she understand what she is asking-what it means?
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
You gaze at Ethan. No, you want to say aloud, no, but for some reason you are afraid to speak in this dark and crease the blackness with noise. But you do think to yourself: No. Absolutely not. That is asking too much.
Upstairs, Emily searches for you. You can feel the way she is moving up the steps to the second floor; the house- it -is telling you. Meanwhile, the girls huddle around the kitchen table, Molly alone on the deacon’s bench. Desdemona is prowling on that rickety staircase behind the kitchen, the existence of which is, like so much of this house, an absolute mystery. And you? Once again, as you did one morning in the pit of despair on the other side of this basement-Harry Harlow’s vertical chamber apparatus, reconfigured for a house on the fringes of madness-you curl your knees into your chest and try to lie there, unmoving as an egg.
H allie glanced at Garnet, but she couldn’t quite make out her sister’s eyes in the dim glow of the lantern. She sensed that Garnet had retreated into one of those places where she was gazing at nothing. She wondered if Garnet was about to have one of her seizures-or whether she was in the early stages of one already. She heard their mother call out their dad’s name again. Her mother was upstairs now, going from room to room along the hallway. Hallie guessed that she would head up to the third floor and her and Garnet’s rooms next. She might even pull down that trapdoor to the attic.
“Where do you think he is?” Molly asked, her voice strangely small on a girl Hallie usually thought of as so very big.
“I don’t know.”
The girl looked at Garnet. “Garnet?” she said, but her sister didn’t respond.
“She’s okay,” Hallie said, shrugging.
Upstairs they heard a crash, a small piece of furniture toppling over in Hallie’s mind, and Hallie watched Molly flinch. She knew that she herself had been startled also. But Garnet remained oblivious.
“I’m okay, girls,” their mother called down the stairs. “I knocked into the end table by your father’s and my bed, that’s all!”
“Okay, Mom,” Hallie called back.
“I hope my mom gets here soon,” Molly said.
“Yup.” Hallie didn’t know what else to say. A moment later she heard her mother pulling down the door to the attic, just as she had expected she would, and Molly, unfamiliar with the lengthy groan the hinges made as the door descended, looked a little ashen in the lantern light.
“What was that?” she asked.
Hallie reassured her that it was only the door to the attic, adding, “I know. It sounds really creepy.”
Eventually Emily pounded her way back down the stairs, and Hallie asked her, “Did you really go into the attic?”
“No, I just, I don’t know, I called and shone my light up there.”
“You checked our rooms?”
“Yes, I did check your rooms,” she said, opening the basement door. “Chip?” she yelled down the stairs and bent over, peering underneath the wobbly banister and shining the flashlight into the void. “Chip?” When he didn’t answer, she slammed the door shut and swore, finally succumbing to the fear and frustration she had been experiencing since they lost power and her husband-and, briefly, one of her daughters and their friend-disappeared into the dark. “Damn it! Where is he?” she asked aloud, clearly not expecting an answer. Hallie feared that her mother was on the verge of tears. Normally she would have told her that Garnet might be having a seizure, but she didn’t dare. Besides, what really could her mother do? Most of the time, you just had to wait them out anyway.
“You girls really haven’t seen him?” her mother asked, her voice helpless.
Hallie shook her head but then wondered if her mother could see her and said, “No, Mom.”
She watched her mother go to the wall where the phone usually hung, running her hand along it. It was as if she had forgotten she had a flashlight. “I can’t find the phone!” she was saying. “It’s not in the cradle. I want to call the power company, and I can’t even find the goddamn phone.” A moment later Hallie heard a crash and her mother swearing again, and she knew by the sound it was the casserole dish in which her parents had baked the enchiladas they’d eaten for dinner. But then her mother must have found the phone, because they heard her pressing the buttons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to work because there was no power. Hallie could have told her that. It was electric. And, as they all knew, there was no cell coverage in this corner of Bethel, which was why her mom had been searching for the regular phone in the first place.
“Fuck!” her mother swore. Hallie had never heard her mother say that word before. “Fuck!”
“Want me to go upstairs and get another flashlight?” Hallie asked. “It would make the kitchen a little lighter.”
“God, no! I want all three of you to stay right here with me,” her mother said, trying to regain a semblance of maternal composure. “I’m sure the power will come back on any second now and your father will reappear-he’s probably outside in the woods this very minute looking for you-and so let’s just stay right where we are. Okay? We’ll stay right here in the kitchen and wait for him,” she continued, and she had barely finished her sentence when, indeed, the lights returned and the refrigerator started to hum and below them the furnace rumbled back into life. Hallie heard the classical music their parents must have been listening to on the public radio station when they were cleaning up the kitchen.
“See what I mean?” her mother said, and she extended her hands, palms up. She looked disheveled, her hair wild, as if she had been awakened in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Garnet sat perfectly still, absolutely unmoved or unaware or uninterested in the fact that the power had been restored. She was indeed having a seizure, and, given the blackout and their dad’s disappearance, Hallie hoped it would be a short one. She looked to see if her mom had noticed yet that Garnet was in her own private world, but her mother was staring down at her feet. She was still wearing only her socks, and they were sopping wet and streaked with mud.
“I guess I’ll need to throw these away,” she said, looking up, and Hallie thought she might have been about to offer a small smile, but she looked over Hallie’s shoulder and gasped, and a second later Molly pushed away from the table and stood, screaming, a ululating, sirenlike wail of terror. And so reflexively Hallie turned around, too.
There in the doorway at the top of the stairs to the basement was their father. His shirt was awash in blood, a great stain spreading from the left of his navel with the speed of toppled house paint on tile. And there in the center of that red tsunami was-and now Hallie started to scream, too-the pearl handle of a carving knife. Her father rolled his eyes up into his head so they looked like golf balls and groaned. Then he fell back against the doorframe, pulled the knife from his abdomen with both hands, and sank slowly to the floor, leaving a long swash of blood against the wood.