House of Thorns, page 3
Avery.
She’s right behind Diya, close enough that I could push her to the side and reach out and touch my sister’s cold skin, her hair. Her fingers list limply at her side.
Avery wants me to go to her. I’ve seen her.
Everything smells like fish.
I can’t gag; I can’t even breathe. My lungs are in a vise grip.
And then: “Lia?”
And I’m coughing and sputtering, and Diya’s hand is around my upper arm, her fingers indenting on my skin as she holds me up. “Lia, talk to me! What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a—”
She stops abruptly, the words colliding in midair, dropping like stones. We stare at each other, long and drawn out.
“I’m fine. Just go back to class, Diya,” I say, my voice scratchy and low. The skin in my throat is burning. “I have to go. Text me after school.”
Diya is silent, and I can’t read her face. Then she sets the bag of squashed cupcakes on the asphalt at my feet and hurries back inside.
The smell of rot and brine in the air is gone.
And she’s gone too, as if she was never there at all.
THREE
The house is heat-soaked when I get home. It’s one of the squat brown-stucco houses that line most of the streets of Daley, with a clanging metal screen door and no AC. The front hallway is tiled with dull reddish squares, and the rest of the house has beige carpet. It’s a bland, basic house and my mom has rented it ever since we left Brier Hall. We rent so we can leave if we have to. We’ve had a house turn on us before, and we won’t be eaten alive again.
There’s nothing at all wrong with the house in Daley. It’s a house no one can get lost in, where the rooms don’t change or move and doors don’t lock of their own accord. A house of tiny proportions, a house only ten years old. There has been no time for any ghosts to accumulate in its walls.
There are no ghosts inside at all, unless you count us.
But the weirdest thing? It doesn’t feel like home. I’ve lived in it for five years and the walls still feel unfamiliar, the layout strange. Everything seems off, as if the house senses that there’s something wrong with us and doesn’t want us getting too comfortable. Maybe Brier has seeped into our skin, branded us as its own.
The weirdest thing? Sometimes I miss Brier Hall.
This is the thing I can never, ever say. Because you’re not supposed to miss a thing that tore your family apart. You’re not supposed to love a place that’s haunted. But sometimes I remember Brier at the beginning. How excited we were to have rooms upon rooms upon rooms to explore. The musty smell when we first opened the front door, like the house had been holding its breath and was now sighing with relief that we were here, we were here! The garden with its waist-high grass, the orchard with its rows of gnarled crab apple trees, the crumbly path winding down the cliff to the tiny sliver of private beach. The tower that overlooked everything with its watchful eye. The crunch of the gravel on the long driveway, the creak of the wrought iron gates that kept us in and kept everyone else out.
Brier Hall, those gates said. Brier Hall belonged to the Briers, and now it belongs to the Peartrees—and no one else.
And I felt it. I was just an eleven-year-old kid when we arrived, but I felt that this place was mine. It watched us—watched over us—and it was ours.
The Daley house is not like that.
When I open the door and sidle in, I’m fatigued. Having a panic attack the first few moments of class and then talking to Ali… simply speaking with her in general exhausts me because I spend so much time just trying to focus on breathing. And then afterward… seeing her…
No, don’t think about that. My hands curl in on themselves involuntarily, pressing in hard. It wasn’t real, none of it was real. You’re home now. You’re safe.
How I got home is a blur. It happens sometimes, where I’ll suddenly find myself driving home from the coffee shop and have barely any memory of what I did there. Or during school when I’d blink and class would be over.
When I’d pulled my Volvo into the driveway, I noticed my mom’s used car was there too, looking a lot like mine: worse for wear. That seems to be our entire life post-Brier. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. We studied that Yeats poem in English Lit last year and I know it’s about the end of the world, but all I could think about was Welcome to the Peartrees. Welcome to my life.
“It’s me,” I call as I come in and shut—and lock—the door behind me. My mom, Ali, and I still introduce ourselves each time we open a door, because there was a time when doors opened and other things entered. There was a time when hearing the creak of a door from somewhere in the house didn’t mean it was one of our hands on the doorknob.
“Hi,” my mom calls back from the kitchen. She sounds more tired than even I am, which before this moment I thought was impossible. My whole body just feels like slouching, not walking. Walking upright is for people who don’t see their missing, maybe dead sister.
Mom is sitting at the kitchen table. It’s a cheap, flat-pack piece of furniture, and it’s five years old. Everything in our house is only five years old—basically, everything is new. I think my mom decided this new, unhaunted house needed to be filled with new, unhaunted items. All our possessions stayed behind in Brier Hall the night we left. The night we fled is more accurate, I suppose, but that night is still blurry and hazy in my mind. I wonder what Brier Hall looks like now. Has the house righted itself? Has it unspilled Ali’s milk and set all of Avery’s books back on the bookshelf? Has it washed writing off the walls?
Or is it frozen in time, everything the same as it was the moment we stumbled out the front door?
I don’t know. I guess I will never know.
“Mom?”
There’s a short pause, and in the quiet I hear the slightest, tiniest exhale as my mom breathes out. Her hair hangs in a curtain over the side of her face I can see as she tilts her head forward; once blond, it has grown out at the roots until there is a choppy color change midway down. When she lifts her head, she’s smiling with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, not even nearly, and her eyes are red and rubbed raw, as if she’s been crying.
“What’s wrong?”
She doesn’t answer me for a long time, then says, “Why are you home?”
“I felt sick,” I say, a half-truth, but I know that I look terrible enough post-encounters with both my sisters to pull it off. “The school let me come home.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie,” my mom says. “And on the last day too.” Her sigh could knock me off my feet. “I was about to leave for work.” After we moved to Daley, my mom got a part-time job as a secretary at an insurance company. Boring. Quiet. Safe.
She doesn’t mention my birthday, and I’m about to bring it up, to give a little reminder. But then she continues, “Have you heard from your sister?”
“I—no.” The no is out before I can stop it. Because if I say yes, then our entire conversation the rest of the night will revolve around Ali. Ali, and what she said, and how she looked, and can I text her again, please, and can I call her, and Ali Ali Ali until her name doesn’t even sound like a real word anymore.
“I haven’t heard from her in almost a week. I’m worried—”
This is what I mean. How our world revolves around Ali now. I might as well be a ghost for all my mom talks to me. People only have so much brainpower to use during the day: Ali makes sure that she has all my mom’s. Always.
“I don’t want to talk about Ali,” I say, my voice trembling. Mom’s staring down into her mug of black coffee now and doesn’t reply. It’s like she doesn’t even hear me. Can you hear me, Mom? I want to scream. I scream it in my head, pushing the words through the air. Do you even remember it’s my birthday? Do you even remember me at all? She doesn’t look up.
“I wish you would try harder with her,” my mom says faintly. “She needs us. She needs you.”
“She doesn’t need me.” I get the words out through clenched teeth. She doesn’t need me, but I need my mom. I want her to hear my voice, loud and uncompromising, and not interrupt to ask about Ali. And if she did, I could find the courage to tell her the truth: how I lost one sister to Brier Hall, and how Ali’s been trying to follow in Avery’s footsteps ever since. How I can’t breathe when Ali looks at me. How I can’t stand to be near her.
How Ali told me she wished I was dead.
She half-apologized a few days after she said that to me; a silly, shruggy apology like Yeah, it sucked, but sorry. Shrug shrug. Not Sorry that your entire worldview shifted with just a few words. Sorry you’ll hear me screaming that at you for the rest of your life. She blamed the house and said she didn’t mean it, and would I just forget it?
I wish you had been the one who died instead of Avery. Little girls don’t forget stuff like that. Can anyone, really? Things like that sink inside and grip tightly and won’t go.
She blamed Brier for everything. She said that’s why she does what she does—to forget. She said Brier is an evil place. Not a place with evil, but an evil place. As if evil hung from the chandeliers and walked across the floorboards and smiled out the glass panes of the windows.
Can a house be evil?
Can an inanimate place be evil? According to Ali and my mom, the answer is 100 percent, without a doubt, unequivocally: yes.
But I’m not so sure.
I think Brier Hall loved us.
I think Brier Hall loved us so much. Too much, insidious and strong. It loved us enough that it just couldn’t bear to let us go.
FOUR
I text Ali because my mom makes me, and she peers over my shoulder until I’ve complied: Mom says she hasn’t seen you in a while. Text her.
“You could be a little friendlier to your sister,” she says, her tone disapproving, and I suck in air and squeeze my lips together before my words come out as flames.
No, I can’t be.
“Okay,” I murmur. I mean it as a throwaway word, an all-purpose sound. It’s a question, a response. Most of the time, it’s armor. I say it when there’re other things I want to say but can’t, or won’t. Your sister stole my wallet—okay. I read about you. You Peartrees are freaks—okay. No one believes you, you know, everyone knows you’re lying about what happened there—okay. It’s a little ironic that the least-okay girl in the world throws up okay like a shield. But my mom doesn’t have to know I don’t mean it. “How’s work going?” I ask, veering to hopefully safer ground, but by the sharp look I get in response I can tell that I’ve said the wrong thing.
“Terribly,” she replies, flat as the sidewalk outside. She grabs her bag from the hook by the door and jangles her keys between her fingers.
I wince. When my absent father died, we were left a lot of money as well as Brier Hall. My mom got to leave her three jobs, got to freelance, got to craft pithy copy for magazines and blogs. After we left Brier Hall we were flooded with interview requests and book deals, but my mom declined them all without even looking at them. Deleted every email. Screamed at the reporters, hoping for an exclusive scoop, who camped on the dead, dry patch of grass outside our temporary motel room as far from Brier Hall and the tiny town of Eastwind as my mom could get before we ran out of gas. She sat us down on the edge of the sunken motel bed and crouched in front of Ali. Morning was breaking slowly, creeping through the cracks of the dusty blinds, and the harrowing dark night when we’d left the house was turning into something worse. I remember the first thing out of my mouth was, “Where’s Avery?”
I remember recoiling at the look they both gave me.
“Don’t talk to anyone about what happened last night,” she said. “Don’t think about it.”
I can’t think about anything else.
“It wasn’t real. Do you hear me?” She gripped my chin, made me look into her bloodshot eyes. There was a cut on the side of her forehead from where one of the very real doors had slammed shut on her all by itself. “None of it was real.”
It was real. Avery being gone is real.
“Whatever they offer us, we won’t take it. We have more than enough money.”
And that’s the thing. Because back then, Ali and I nodded solemnly, scared of what we remembered, confused by the fact our older sister wasn’t sitting next to us. We believed my mom. And maybe back then it was the truth.
But it’s not the truth now, even with my mom’s secretary job.
It’s a touchy subject. Of course I would bring it up now, at the worst possible time.
“I’ll see you later, Lia,” she says from the front door, eyes sliding to mine and then quickly away again, as if she can’t bear to look at me for longer than a second. “You know, I feel sick too. Maybe what you have is catching.”
Maybe it is. The door closes behind her, and I imagine strands of my soul, blackened with hate and grief, following her out the door. Catching her. Wrapping around her arms and legs. Then I get up from the table and whatever I have that’s catching comes twining itself back around my ribs.
My room is dark and quiet when I shut myself inside, with the blackout blinds leaving only a thin sliver of sunshine. I don’t flick on the light—there’s the air of someone sleeping, lying undisturbed, and I don’t want to wake them from their slumber. I edge myself onto the bed. Come on, Lia, relax. My own voice sounds false in my head, like it’s not even me anymore. Relax. You’re okay. But I’m not. None of us are. Maybe I could believe it if someone else other than myself was saying the words, but there is no one else.
I get out my phone and, in the darkness, I flick through my messages. There are many from Diya, some frantic and all caps—ARE U OK???—and some making an attempt at sympathy—I know it must be hard for you but I’m here if you wanna talk! and I want to understand.
I don’t want to talk to Diya. I don’t want to have to explain; I want someone who already understands.
There’re only a few people who do though. My mom: a nonstarter. Ali: would make things worse. And Avery: too late.
You know who to call. All of a sudden, I can see him in my thoughts: not the way I know he is now, when I looked him up online and stared at his longer hair and half smile until my eyes blurred. I see the way that he was when I first met him, thirteen years old and the same height as me too. A mop of untidy dark hair and sparkling, considering green eyes. Running through the grounds of Brier Hall through waist-high grasses, screaming with laughter. Skinned knees and muddy jeans and skeletal trees just made for climbing. The good ol’ days that morphed as seamlessly as a dream into the days I try to block out of my thoughts. The past that eats up my present.
And the whole time, he was there. He would understand, and he always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better.
I lift my phone back to my face, the bright screen making me squint. I don’t have his contact info saved, but I know his number by heart. It’s the number for a slow, old phone his parents gave him only for emergencies. He doesn’t know my number, of course—that was part of leaving everything behind. We left Brier Hall, sure, but we also left the community of Eastwind, and the beach, and… him.
We also left behind ourselves.
After all this time, can I really call him? I know I shouldn’t, that after so many years of radio silence I should just let things rest. But it’s like I’m not in control of my limbs: Here I am, typing in each number carefully. Here I am, pressing talk.
The dial tone sounds in my ear, jolting me out of my trance, and I flatten my back against the headboard—something firm to center me, to hold me in place. My stomach writhes at the mere thought of hearing his—
“Hello?”
My bones crumble at the sound of Rafferty Pierce’s voice. It’s deep with a hint of rasp, of sleep. It’s a man’s voice, so different from when he was a young teen, and I’m immediately chiding myself because of course it is, but then he speaks again, “Hello?” and I can hear the same inflections, the same tone.
I can’t say a word in reply. My throat is choked with five years’ worth of tears.
There’s silence, but the call is still going. We’re both there, just breathing into the phone.
“Hello?” he says again.
I miss you, I think. I’m so sorry I left without a word.
More silence. But then I almost drop the phone when his voice suddenly sharpens, becomes suspicious, and he says: “Lia?”
I think I might gasp, just the tiniest bit. Nothing but an influx of breath, but I think he takes this as an affirmation, because he continues, “You don’t need to say anything if this is you. Just don’t hang up, okay? Don’t hang up yet.”
We breathe together, and just the sound of his breath makes me want to cry. My eyes burn, my fingers clenched around the phone.
“Lia,” he whispers. My name sounds better in his mouth. I miss the Lia he’s talking to. “Why did you—?”
He breaks off, but I know I can finish his sentence any number of ways. Why did you leave me? Why did you never call? Why did you forget about me, about us?
I’m about to answer, to find the courage somewhere deep down to say his name in reply and tell him I miss him and that he’s the best thing in my memories, but I’m interrupted by a call waiting. Someone’s trying to call me—Ali. Ali hasn’t called me in years, and my stomach immediately plummets. Ali wouldn’t call me unless she had to. Unless she really, really needed me.
I don’t want to answer. But somewhere tucked away inside me lives the Ali I miss, the one who would shove me from a ledge just to pull me back with a shout: Saved your life! The one who still loves me.
I stare at the incoming call for a second before taking a deep breath, sending Raff an I’m so sorry he’ll never hear, and accept her call instead. This is what he probably expects from me. Lia, the girl who disappears into nothingness.
“Hello?”
There’s rustling on the other end, and then a whisper cuts through: “Lia? Lia? Are you there?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” I pause. “What do you want?” She sounds different from when I spoke to her only an hour ago outside Daley High; there’s a note of underlying panic that trembles through her voice.
