Losing Faith (21 page)

Tessa fiddles with something in her black jacket and pulls out a foot-long rod of metal. She gets down on her knees and
sticks it into the keyhole. Alis eyes me, and I give him a nod to let him know she won’t bust Reena’s door. He still looks doubtful. We turn our eyes back to Tessa, but it seems to take forever. She pushes and looks relieved, then leans in closer and fidgets some more.

“Are you … Do you think you’ll be able to?” Alis ventures.

She glares up at him. Holds out the rod. “You wanna try?”

He takes a step back.

Thirty seconds later, a click sounds. “All yours,” Tessa says to Alis. She knocks him on the leg with her wand so hard I hear the
snap
, but if it bothers Alis, he doesn’t show it.

He reaches to try the knob. When it turns, a smile tugs at the side of his mouth.

Alis holds the door open, and Tessa and I walk through. He follows behind us. I lean into the wall, thoroughly creeped-out by my first glance at Reena’s hidden world.

Taped around Reena’s walls are papers with Bible verses—that much I expected—but there’s also what I could only describe as hate messages, strewn among them.
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
, in big bold letters.
VENGEANCE IS MINE. HATE YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER AND SISTER AND BROTHER … EVEN YOUR OWN LIFE.

“What is this?” Tessa asks. “Some kind of labyrinth of deep-seated confusion?”

Across the length of her ceiling is a large hand-drawn,
half-painted picture of a cross. If not for what’s attached to the cross, I would love to lie back and admire the artistry. But the unmistakable likeness to Reena overlapping the ornate drawing causes my eyes to shoot away and down to the floor. At least her brown shag carpet is nothing unusual.

When I hear Alis gasp beside me, I glance up. He’s taking in the whole room at once. I wonder how recently Reena did all this.

“Let’s get to work,” Tessa says. She, obviously, is over the shock.

I want to ask Alis if he’s okay, if he wants me to do this instead, but when Tessa starts yanking open drawers, he crouches by her bookcase, running his thumb along the spines of her small library. Many of them are Bibles, and again I wonder why one person needs so many. I follow him over and lean down beside him.

He pulls off a hardcover book of photography. It’s coated in dust and I hold back a sneeze.

“This was my mom’s.” He fans through the pages, and now I do sneeze. I turn my head, so as not to get any spray on his heirloom.

He removes a card from the middle. A piece of notepaper slips out, which he scans, and then slides under the cover of the book. Without acknowledging it, he flips back to the card
and opens it. “An old birthday card. For my dad.”

I peer over his shoulder at the card addressed to Henry. The whole left-hand side is covered in cursive writing and signed
I love you. Annie.

“This is from your mom to your dad? Why does Reena have it?”

He scans the writing and shakes his head. “Just memories, I guess.”

“Are you okay?” I whisper. He doesn’t answer right away, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Check these out,” Tessa says, holding out a pair of silky full-fit underwear from Reena’s drawer. “Looks like something my grandma would wear.” Tessa cackles, which for a second seems like it’s aimed right at Alis and his pain. When I look at him, his jaw is tense.

“Come on, Tessa.” I scoot over, take the underwear, and shove it back in the drawer. I wonder what she’s even looking for. Did she really suggest we break in here so she could check out Reena’s undergarments? “Please stop,” I add when she reaches for the next drawer.

She glares at me.

Turning away, I head over to the window to avoid her bullying eyes. But that’s not any less scary, since the second-story view makes me jittery. At home I keep my blinds closed
and my bed as far from the window as humanly possible for this very reason. I put my hands up on either side of Reena’s large window frame to catch my breath, but the latch is loose and I shriek when it suddenly gives way under my hands and the cold outside air blasts against me.

In less than a second, Tessa grabs my arm and jerks me away from the window. “Will you shut up! You scared the crap out of me.”

I snap my mouth shut and glance at Alis apologetically, but he’s just staring down into another book. I’m afraid he’s on the verge of telling us both to get out, so I turn the opposite direction for Reena’s nightstand while Tessa pulls the window closed.

I take measured breaths and try to focus. Under Reena’s bedside lamp, I find a rectangular pad. My hand catches on a hook of paper, sticking out from it. I place the lamp on the floor out of the way, and pick up the rectangular piece.

When I flip it over, the papers attached on the back side fall loose toward me. “Hey, look,” I say. “A calendar.”

The first thing I notice is it’s still on September. There are notes in almost every square, with times listed. Most say seven o’clock, but there are a few as early as five. There are also a few acronyms scattered on different dates. Most of them read
YE
.

I feel Alis’s breath over my other shoulder. The only
noticeably different square is one near the bottom. September twenty-fifth, the day that Faith died. It says
OR. Talk to Faith.
When I flip to October and then November, the pages are empty.

“Faith?” Alis says from behind me. I turn back. He looks as serious as I feel, but I can tell in his eyes that he doesn’t have any more answers than I do. If anything, just more questions.

“I bet these are those home group meetings,” I say, pointing to the times. It’s all I can do to distance myself. I try to think of the whole thing like a puzzle and not like the key to the last moments of my sister’s life.

I look up from the calendar to Reena’s strange room decor and shake my head. “It’s like she’s in some kind of cult.”

“No,” Alis says too quickly. Defensively. “It’s not …” He stops. “We have to go soon,” he whispers.

The truth is, I want out of here way more than I want to keep looking. My stomach feels queasy. I try to give him a look that says it’s okay. That whatever this is, my sister was wrapped up in it too.

He doesn’t see me though and turns to make his way to the door with fists clenched.

“Wait!” Tessa is crouched down near the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, flipping through an open file. “I thought this was all just homeschool shit, but look.”

Alis and I both kneel beside her. The first thing I see is a page of stickers at the front of the file. Five more of the same yellow ones Faith and Celeste had on their dashes. Several more in orange, red, and black. Tessa starts reading from another page.

“Yellow Entry Level,” she says. “It says they need to memorize these eight Bible verses and prove their lives to be pure.” Her eyes scan the page for anything else of interest.

I can’t believe she’s found explanations of what this home group is all about. But somehow the whole thing sounds a lot more normal than I’d expected.

“Orange Level Two,” Tessa reads from another sheet. “Otherwise known as The Martyrdom Level.”

“It says that?” I pull the paper down so I can see it too.

“Look at all those verses,” Alis says. “There’s got to be at least thirty.”

“Do they all have to do with martyrs?” I ask.

Tessa scans the sheet. “I think so.”

I pick at the carpet under my knees. “Faith had one of those yellow stickers in her car.” I can’t help my mind going to the possibility of her having an orange one somewhere else. Somewhere I hadn’t seen.

“But if there were four levels, how could they actually martyr themselves at level two?” Tessa asks. And this makes sense. I start to relax a little, but the room is so silent, and
when Tessa’s watch beeps, it sounds like a fire alarm.

“Crap, we gotta go.” Tessa pushes all the papers back into the file. “We have to keep this.”

“No!” Alis tries to grab it from her. “She’ll know. Reena’s meticulous with her stuff. No way.”

Tessa grits her teeth, so I quickly grab it from both of them. “Listen, I know there’s more in here, but we’ll have to come back.” I pass it to Alis.

Tessa turns and stalks away, thudding down the stairs like she’s three hundred pounds.

“She’s a little hard to get used to,” I tell Alis. “Thanks for letting us do this.”

He offers a half smile, then bends down to tidy up the mess of papers Tessa left. “You better go.”

I back toward the hallway, wanting to stay and make sure we’re okay, but also in a panic to get out. Not coming up with anything else to say, though, I finally turn and rush to catch up to Tessa just outside the back door.

We cut through a path in the backyard to get to her car. It’s twenty-five after by the time we leave. I let out my breath when we finally drive away from their cul-de-sac.

Tessa’s still pissed, I can tell by the way she keeps her face away from me. I try to think of a way to calm her down, but she opens her mouth before I can come up with anything.

“You need to get back to your homework before your teachers start getting on your case,” she says, surprising me with her sudden change in temperament. “One of us might go to college, and at the moment, it’s looking in my favor.”

I wonder how she knows I’m behind on schoolwork. And that all of my teachers have been giving me a break. Personal experience, I suppose. But now that we’re getting some answers about Faith, even if some unexpected answers, I actually think I could concentrate on a bit of homework. Tessa hits the brakes just outside my house. “Call me,” I say.

She nods. “No meetings coming up on Reena’s calendar, huh?”

That’s when it strikes me. Alis says Reena hasn’t had any meetings at the house. Not since the night of Faith’s death.

“But she invited me to a group,” I say. “The meetings must still be happening.”

“Yup. You’re right. That means we just have to find out where.”

chapter
TWENTY-FOUR

f
or most of the next day, I look for Tessa and can’t find her. She doesn’t show up at her locker and I wonder if she’s skipping. I can’t help thinking that it could be because she doesn’t want to bring me home after school. I already told Dad, and he seemed pleased I was going to a friend’s house.

But on my way out the front doors at the end of the day, there she is, waiting for me. I start to ask her where she’s been, but she interrupts with, “Don’t ask.”

Okayyyy.
But she motions with her head for me to follow her toward the bus. That’s a good sign at least. I board behind her and sit in silence while she stares out the side window.

The bus pulls up in Tessa’s neighborhood and we get off. We walk into the lobby of her dark apartment building. The walls in the hallways aren’t the usual light cream or beige colors you normally see, but murky forest green instead. And the doors to each apartment are an old, scuffed-up brown.

I follow Tessa to apartment number thirty-two and she slides her key into the lock.

The inside isn’t any brighter than the outside. The walls within my vision are a dark navy blue. The pictures on the walls—large family gatherings, smaller family portraits—cram into one another, almost overlapping. Many are similar, four people in the same burgundy-and-white outfits, like they’re all from the same photo shoot, but somebody doesn’t want a single one to get wasted in a drawer.

“This is your family?” I whisper. It seems deathly quiet in here, and I figure her dad must be taking a nap if he’s home.

“Yup,” Tessa says.

I look at her, just for a second, and then back at the pictures. My breath catches. Tessa and her sister who was hit by the truck. Corey. Tessa, maybe in kindergarten, seriously looks like a fairy princess. So happy. The blond is such a far cry from her current jet-black look, I can’t get my head around it.

“Come on,” she says, and pulls me down the hall. I doubt anyone in our whole school has ever been in this apartment
and it feels weird, scary even, that she wants to bring me here.

A slight humming sounds when we get farther into the apartment, but this time it’s not Faith. It’s a deeper hum that I might mistake for a household appliance, but then it changes octaves.

We turn the corner into the living room, and I get my first glimpse of Mr. Lockbaum. He sits at a computer desk with his back to us. It’s late afternoon, but he wears a gray robe and scuffed black slippers. His hair, sticking up like a punk rocker’s, looks like it hasn’t been brushed yet today.

“Hey, Dad. This is my friend, Brie.”

The casual words stun me. I guess I thought I’d never hear them.

Mr. Lockbaum cuts his humming, switches off his computer screen, and spins on his stool to face us, beaming.

“A friend? Oh, Brie. It’s so good to have you here.” He stands and reaches over to place both hands on my shoulders. He’s not a big man, more like a teenager who never filled out. I would have expected Tessa’s father to be much tougher-looking. “Are you girls hungry? Why don’t you go play in Tessa’s room, and I’ll make you up a little snack.” He backs toward what must be the kitchen. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Play in Tessa’s room?

“Watch this,” Tessa whispers, so only I can hear. Then, “That’s okay, Dad.” She walks for the kitchen. I’m not sure what she’s doing or expecting, so I stay glued to my spot. “I’ll just make us a couple of grilled cheeses.”

Mr. Lockbaum rushes for Tessa, arms outstretched. Maybe grilled cheese is code for something in this house?

“No, no, no,” he says. “You keep away from the stove, honey.” He eases Tessa out of the doorway and back toward me. Then he gives her a pat on her head, which looks strange since she’s almost as tall as he is. “I’ll call you two when they’re ready.” He disappears behind the door.

“Holy cow,” I whisper. “What’s up with him? He won’t let you near the stove? Did you start a fire or something?”

Tessa laughs. Loud. “It’s okay,” she says, taking in my wide-eyed glance toward the kitchen. “He can’t hear us, and even if he could, it wouldn’t matter.” She walks in the other direction. “My dad thinks I’m six. Seriously. Like first grade.”