Never Missing, Never Found (23 page)

I didn’t get another companion. After Pixie, after what she did and what she said, I knew better than to ask for someone else. I did the work of two people, scrubbed thoroughly and silently, and resigned myself to the loneliness.

I thought about Pixie all the time. I scrubbed harder when I thought of her, scrubbed fiercely at the wet streaks on my face.

B.P. was four years long. A.P. was another three years. I was eight when the man scooped me into his car and deposited me in the basement. I was fifteen when I left.

I knew something was going to happen a few months before it actually did. Stepmother’s skin was slowly turning gray, as if she were hardening into stone, and her hair was thinning out and then finally gone, her patchy scalp covered at all times by one of the girls’ colorful scarves. One morning, just after my fifteenth birthday, I was sweeping the living room when a man showed up, one whose pencil-thin mustache and greasy hair made the hairs on my arms rise straight up.

She called me into the kitchen as soon as he left. “Jane,” she said. “The door is unlocked. Go.”

I looked at the kitchen door. It was indeed unlocked. I looked back at her and didn’t move. This had to be some sort of trick.

She sighed. “Go,” she said wearily. “I’m going into hospice at the end of this week, and that man will be taking over my operation. You don’t want to be here for that. This is a kindness, Jane. Take it.”

I took a hesitant step toward the door, then looked back. I didn’t know what I was looking for. If she was telling me to go, I was going to go. I had never disobeyed her before.

“Don’t tell anyone about us, of course.” Stepmother’s voice was still strong, even if her body wasn’t. “I may be dead, Katharina Svecova may no longer walk this earth, but you wouldn’t want the girls to get hurt.”

Katharina. Stepmother’s name was Katharina. I nodded at Stepmother, at Katharina, and I fled.

I didn’t tell on her, and I didn’t forget her. I borrowed her name when I needed a new one. I borrowed her name when I needed to be as hard and cold as she was.

I borrowed her name when it came time to make Pixie pay.

The seconds tick by so loudly it’s like I’m trapped inside a clock. Wind rustles the branches above but flees when it sees the scene below.

Katharina is holding a knife to Matthew’s throat. She’s holding. A knife. To my little brother’s
throat.

I’ve never seen Matthew so still. He stands rigid, pressed against her stomach, his eyes so wide they might pop out and roll away on their own. The metal of the knife must be cold against his skin. “It’s okay,” I tell him, but my voice shakes. “It’ll be okay. Don’t move.”

He doesn’t move.
Good boy.
I turn my attention to Katharina. “Let him go,” I say. This time, my voice is deadly calm. I search my mind for other things to say, for threats, promises, pleas, but I come up blank. She has a knife against my little brother’s
throat.
“Let him
go.
”

Katharina is seething, spit practically frothing on her lips. “I will cut his throat.” Involuntary yelps escape my and Melody’s throats at the same time. “I swear to God, I will cut his throat if you don’t give me my life back.”

“He’s your brother,” Melody says. Her voice is shaking. “You can’t hurt him. He’s your
brother.
”

Katharina doesn’t listen. It’s like she doesn’t even hear her. She’s focused on me, eyes shining, and I notice her arm, the arm holding the knife, is shaking too. “I will cut his throat if you don’t give me my life back,” she says, and her voice is steady, and I don’t doubt her for a second. I don’t even need to hear what she says next. “I did it before.”

A breath stops halfway to my lungs. “Monica…”

Katharina barks a laugh, but she doesn’t sound angry. Just sad. “She found out I was living in the storage building. She found out what I was. I had to stop her. I couldn’t let her tell.”

The breath charges in, hits my lungs so hard I feel sick. “She was innocent.”

Katharina spits out another sad laugh, and somehow I find myself feeling pity. She isn’t a psychopath. She didn’t enjoy killing Monica, and she doesn’t enjoy the thought of hurting Matthew. She’s warped. She’s made too many choices in the wrong direction.

Nobody can come back from that.

“No,” Melody is saying behind her. “No, no, no, no, no,” and it sends me right back to the basement, to the flow of words I couldn’t stop, to the feeling of Scarlett’s shirt damp against my cheek.

I can’t focus on Monica now. She’s already dead, and there’s no coming back from that, either. “Let Matthew go,” I say, and sorrow cuts through me. “I will give you your life back. You can be Scarlett again. I swear.” I swallow hard, rocks cutting into my throat. I’ve lied before. I’m not lying now. “I will do anything, anything, to keep him safe.”

Melody is sobbing, the “no’s” dissolved into tears. She is useless right now. I can’t depend on her, so I zero back in on Katharina. “I swear,” I say, and I’m looking at her and she’s looking at me and her arm is shaking and my throat is gulping and her face shifts and something in my face or my voice must convince her, because she drops her arm and lets Matthew run to me; he buries his face in my shirt and I know he’s getting snot all over me and I don’t care.

“How should we do this, then?” Katharina says, and she sounds calm, like ten seconds before she’d been ordering a sandwich or processing a return, not holding a knife to a little boy’s throat. “Make the switch? Obviously, we’ll have to go to the police.”

“Obviously,” I say, pushing Matthew behind me and moving closer to her.

“I’ll ask them not to be too hard on you,” Katharina says. “Even with all you did. You’ll probably get sent to juvie or a state facility or something. You’ll get out and get to have a normal life after a few years.”

“Sounds fine,” I say, moving closer, slipping my hand into my pocket.

She’s gazing off into the distance, eyes dreamy, like she’s visualizing her pink canopy bed, the glow-in-the-dark stars spotting her ceiling. The new pink sneakers sitting untouched in her closet, way too small now for her feet. “I can’t wait to be back in my old room,” she says. “I can’t wait to—”

She doesn’t see me—or the pepper spray—coming. Melody does, though, and jumps out of the way just in time for me to slam into Katharina, who’s doubled over wheezing, and push her through the door of the cabin, then pull the door shut and snap the padlock closed. She shrieks in surprise and then pounds on the door, still coughing. The door won’t open as long as the padlock is closed, but it won’t take long for her eyes to clear and for her to climb out a window or something. One is already broken. This is a temporary measure only.

“She had a knife,” Melody says. Her tears have dried up, leaving shiny trails down her cheeks. “What if she stabbed you?”

I didn’t even think about that. I just shake my head. Even if I had thought about it, I don’t think I would have cared. “I’m going to take Matthew home,” I say. Let her try to stop me. I dare her. I don’t want my baby brother to remember me like this; if I’m going to have to run, I want him to have a good memory of me as his last one. This car ride is all I have. “And then…” I stop. I don’t know what comes after the ellipsis. I just know I’ll have to get away before Katharina gets out, before Melody tells. “I don’t know. I just need to take him home.”

Melody nods, but she doesn’t move. I don’t know if she’s in shock or if she’s waiting for me to leave so she can let Katharina back out, usher her back into her old life. It doesn’t matter; I can’t do anything either way. I leave her behind, glancing over my shoulder once. She’s watching us go.

I spend most of the car ride home trying to make Matthew feel better; he’s panicked, quite understandably, about having a knife held to his throat, and stops shaking only when we’re almost home. I also tell him I love him approximately five hundred times. When he thinks of me, I want that to be what he remembers: that I love him. That I love him more than anything else in the world.

“You okay?” I ask as we pull into the driveway. My dad’s car is there. My heart twists and squeezes, a piece of wrung-out laundry.

He nods, but tears carve a path beside his nose. I pull him close to me and kiss his head. “I love you, and I am your sister,” I say. “That’s the truth.”

He nods again. “I know.”

I pat him on the shoulder. “Listen,” I say. “Dad’s home, but you can’t tell Dad what just happened. Not until Melody gets home. Okay?”

He nods. He trusts me. I love him for that. “Okay.”

“Good,” I say. I close my eyes and brace myself. “Go ahead. Go inside. And remember I love you, okay?”

He doesn’t move. “Where are you going?” There’s fear in his eyes. “Are you coming back?”

“Of course,” I say, but the words feel heavy. I want them so badly to be true, to be light and carefree and melt on my tongue like Adventure World’s fly-riddled cotton candy.

“Good,” he says. “See you later.” And he hops out and charges inside, without even looking back. Like he’s so confident I was telling the truth he doesn’t even worry about taking a last look.

I watch him until he disappears from view, even leaning forward for that last split-second glimpse of him as he shuts the front door behind him. I am not so confident.

I do know where I’m going, though. I drive by pastoral fields of hay waving in the breeze, past cheerful red barns and even more cheerful white picket fences and horses so cheerful they might as well be braying music, to Connor’s house. I park a little ways down the street and sneak through his backyard to the barn. I slip inside and sag against the wall and nod a silent hello to Ernesto and Bessie, who might not even be there. They might be dead, for all I know, ground up and jammed into cans of cat food. But the barn smell is calming, and the hay in the air and the nails in my back and the thin threads of light trickling in through the slats of wood remind me of the last time I was really, truly happy. I’m going to need this memory for whatever happens ahead.

I don’t know how long I sag there before I hear Connor say my name. I stand up straight, blinking in the sudden influx of light. “Scarlett?” he says again. “My brother said he thought he saw a girl in the barn.”

Despite myself, despite everything that’s happened, I still feel a rush of pure, hot want when I see him in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just…needed to hide for a little while, and this is the first place I thought of. I’ll go.”

He steps inside and closes the door behind him. I tense, but mostly out of reflex. I am no longer afraid of the dark. There are worse things to be afraid of. “Don’t go,” he says. “I mean, it’s amazing. I was just thinking about you and now here you are.”

“It’s like I’m a figment of your imagination.”

“No,” he says. “No, I could never imagine someone quite like you.”

Somehow he’s there, in front of me, so close I can feel his heat. It stokes the want, and I have to press my hands against the wall behind me to keep myself from lunging at him. “Why were you thinking about me?”

“I talked to Cady. I made it clear I would always be there for her as a friend, but that I liked you and I wanted to be with you,” he says. “I wasn’t being fair to anyone. It took me a while to realize it, but I had to do the right thing.”

I answer him with my lips, and then my back is up against the wood, the nails digging in. I welcome them into my flesh. I missed them.

He pulls away after a minute. “I thought you hated me,” he says huskily.

“No,” I say. And it’s true. It just took me some time to realize it, and for the want to wash it away. Because haven’t I done so much worse than be confused over my love life? And if I’ve done so much worse, and if Skywoman has done so much worse, does that mean we don’t deserve to be loved?

“But…”

I silence him with another kiss. “I like you more when you don’t talk,” I whisper. It’s not true, and his laugh tells me he gets it. He gets me. I press up against him and let the want carry me away.

My phone vibrating in my back pocket, buzzing angrily against the wood of the wall, yanks me back to the present. Yanks me back to Pixie. The nails in my back no longer feel quite so welcoming. “Wait,” I say, and pull out my phone.

It’s Melody. My stomach fills with dread and I’m tempted not to answer, to push off the inevitable just a little longer, but something makes me click the green light and press the screen against my ear. It slicks with sweat. “Melody?”