I want to go to the store—can I have the keys?
Her mother’s reply: They’re in my purse. Take some money, too. And can you pick up some …
She couldn’t remember what her mom had asked her for. Broccoli? Bath soap …? Something that began with B.
The next thing she remembered was going out the front door and getting in the car … and thinking that as usual, it smelled like Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and coffee—which might have been nasty, but was actually wonderful. Talk about straight out of childhood. Her mom had always taken a travel mug with her whenever she was in the car in the mornings, and in the afternoons, she was all about the gum. When Sissy had been in middle school and the seasonal rotation of field hockey/swimming/dance, etc., had required a nearly constant juggling of rides, the sweet, earthy smell in that Subaru had been all about home.
God, that hurt to think of right now…
And strange that on the night everything had changed she had noticed it one last time—and had smiled to herself as she’d backed out and gone at the speed limit down the road they lived on. She had been saving up for her own car, and looking forward to the summer break when she could pull big hours at Martha’s, an ice-cream place across from the Great Escape theme park near Lake George. If she bunked in with a couple of friends and worked pretty much around the clock, by the time September rolled around, she would have been able to buy her own beater and go back and forth more easily from school.
The drive had been less than four miles and taken maybe eight minutes, tops.
After pulling into the parking lot at Hannaford, she’d left the car about five spaces up from the handicap reserves, and walked quickly to the entrance with its shopping carts centipeding in rows. Inside … she had lingered over picking out the ice cream. In the end, it had been all about the Rocky Road—because she liked the crunch of the nuts and the chocolate chips and the smooth, super-sweet veins of marshmallow.
Rocky Road. How fitting.
At the self-checkout, she’d scanned the two things in her basket, the ice cream and the B whatever it had been that her mother had wanted. She’d paused to check out the new issue of Cosmopolitan, but she hadn’t gotten permission for it, and it felt wrong to buy the trashy magazine without having asked first. At that point, she’d gone for her cell to call and see if it was okay, but no-go. Having been in a rush, she’d only taken her wallet and the twenty-dollar bill her mom had let her have.
No way to phone home—or for help either, although she hadn’t been thinking about that at the time.
She could remember putting the ice cream in one of the plastic bags that was held open by struts on a Ferris-wheel scale.
Out toward the automatic doors. Into the parking lot.
Everything after that was hazy. Someone had stopped her? Someone who’d needed a…
She’d tried throughout the day to get her brain to cough up the goods, give her what she wanted, show her the steps that had led … to Hell.
All it had gotten her was a migraine.
Turning her head to the other side, she saw the curtains that hung by the bay window. Her mom had picked out the material about two years ago and made the panels herself. She’d needed help putting them up, and she and Sissy’s father had gotten a stepladder out and worked together for an hour, changing the hardware that was screwed into the walls, anchoring the rod, clipping the tops of the drapes into the hooks.
Sissy and her sister hadn’t paid any real attention to the efforts or the result—Sissy had been on her way out to a friend’s house and had offered only a passing, “It’s great!” as she’d run out the door.
Now she wished she’d been a part of the whole process.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself back from the warmth she’d taken advantage of. And then she stepped away from her savior. Like the relentless searching of her empty data banks, getting stuck in neutral in the middle of this room was going to get her nowhere. She had come to see her parents in their slumber, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
Except first she looked around again. Inhaled deeply. Went over to the bookcase with all the family photographs on it.
She had to blink away the tears, but she made herself stare at each of the images: If she couldn’t handle two-dimensional photographs, how the hell was she going to get through standing over her family?
“This is easier than that.”
“What?” came a deep rumble from behind her.
Okay, guess she’d said that out loud. “The wall. However hard this is, it’s got nothing on that prison. I have to … remember that.”
After a moment, Sissy squared her shoulders and walked over to the base of the stairs. Gripping the handrail, she felt the smooth wood and leaned to the side. Down at the base of the balustrade’s footer, there was the dipsy-doo, as her father had called it, the little ring around where the fixture curved into a circle. At the center of it, there was a space on the floor that was uncarpeted and hidden unless you looked down from this angle.
Every year, her parents had insisted on doing an Easter-egg hunt in the house for her and her sister—and that tradition, which had started in their toddlerhood, had continued even as they’d gotten older. It was always done inside—after all, in upstate New York, outdoors was usually not an option, assuming you didn’t want to wear a parka with your Sunday best. And her father had always used “live eggs” as opposed to those hollow plastic casings that you could fill with stuff. Didn’t seem right otherwise, he’d maintained.
Everything had usually gone well … except for that one year. Within a day or two of the hunt, an incredible stench had lit off in the house, the nose-curling horror worsening by the hour and permeating throughout—talk about your once-more-with-feeling on the hunt thing.
It had been to no avail, however. No one had been able to find the egg.
They’d had to have the place fumigated and were about to start knocking through the Sheetrock to see if some critter had taken one of her father’s “live ones” into the walls of the living room when an unlikely solution had presented itself.
On four legs.
The neighbor’s dog had discovered the dead body. Brought in as a Hail Mary, with no hope anything would help, the terrier had zeroed in on the offending item immediately—and found it in that two-square-inch space at the base of the dipsy-doo.
They’d had a good laugh about that for years.
Sissy looked over her shoulder. Her savior was standing pretty much where she’d left him—except that he’d turned to face her.