It was all so clear now. She could see her own blue eyes staring back at her and everything crystallized. The years of maddening anguish and meaninglessness were coalescing into this one moment that was so simple and perfect in the end. She had no misconceptions about what was going to happen. It would hurt, but there would be beauty in this pain. It was something pure and cleansing, like fire.
She wasn't afraid. Her gaze was steady and she thought that she felt strong now for the first time in ages. She had always thought that nothing could heal her, that she would never stop feeling like she'd been cruelly ravaged from the inside out. But now, staring into the reflection of her eyes on the cold, steel blade she held before her, she knew she had found her cure.
The blade sliced into her thumb, drawing forth a ribbon of blood that dripped down across her palm. She curled her fingers over it and squeezed. Yes, there was beauty in the way the cut stung, in the way that her blood ran and fell back to the earth, drop by drop.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
With a violent jolt, Lara woke up. Tremors shook her as she slowly remembered where she was, what had happened. Her first instinct was to go back to sleep, just to avoid the horror of reality for a little while longer, but instead she forced herself to sit up in the back of Paige’s car.
“Oh, you woke up just in time,” Paige said, glancing at Lara in the rearview mirror. “We just got off the highway, so it’s only ten more minutes from here.”
Lara murmured some wordless response and yawned.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Not really,” she said. “Weird dream.”
“About what?” Paige asked her softly, as if she was afraid to pry.
Lara opened her mouth to answer, but then she realized that she couldn’t remember. She knew that her dream had been vivid and left her shaking, but even the most general details were gone. “I don’t know,” she mumbled to her aunt.
She looked out the window and watched the town pass by. It was late in the afternoon now and it seemed like people were starting to head home for the day. The suburban streets were crowded as they drove through what Lara assumed to be the “downtown” area. There was a Dunkin Donuts, a Blockbuster, a McDonalds, a grocery store, and more antique shops than she would’ve thought could stay in business in one town. It was all pretty quiet, pretty standard.
Groups of teenagers were clustered outside of a music store and a few others were talking loudly as they walked down the sidewalks, grateful that school was out for the summer. Lara saw a few who she knew had to be about her age, but as she watched them from inside the car, they seemed so much younger.
She supposed that that was one of the unavoidable consequences of going through tragedy. It aged you. It made it difficult to relate to other people who were still living normal lives, blissfully ignorant of how fragile their worlds were. Lara had tried to visit with a few of her friends before she left home, but it had been futile. The other girls were overly nice and quiet, terrified of saying something that would shatter Lara’s composure. They’d talked about classes next year, a “boyfriend crisis” one of them was having, new nail polish. And Lara felt like she wasn’t even there.
Paige turned a corner and they started to drive into a more remote area of town. The trees were thicker and they passed by large houses separated by vast, manicured lawns. Her aunt was definitely wealthy if she could afford to live in an area like this. The houses here had three-car garages and marble pillars, for Christ’s sake. Who needed all of that?
They followed a narrow, curvy road further and further into the woods. Lara couldn’t imagine living this far out; her old house had been part of a development and she’d been able to see several of her neighbors on all sides. Up here, it looked like each house was surrounded by its own forest. It seemed lonely, detached from society.
Finally Paige turned into a long driveway and parked in front of an old Victorian house. Lara stared at it through the front windshield, her mouth slightly open. It was enormous—far larger than she’d been expecting. The three-story house had blue gingerbread siding, two rounded towers, and a turret. Each floor had more bay windows than Lara had ever seen. The wide, white front porch wrapped around the side of the house and there was a smaller porch on the second floor as well.
“Isn’t it great?” Paige exclaimed. She was standing just outside the car with the door held wide open. “It belonged to Tim’s grandmother and she left it to him a few years ago. But trust me, it took a long time to get it to look like this.”
Lara shivered inwardly. “I’ll bet,” she whispered to herself. The house was gorgeous, but she couldn’t imagine ever feeling at home here. It was too old, too large, too isolated.
She opened her car door and started to help Paige unload her bags from the trunk. It was depressing to think that her entire life now fit in two duffel bags and a backpack. But it didn’t really matter; it was just stuff. Everything that was essential to her was already gone.
As she was struggling to pick up one of her bags, a pair of strong arms came around her from behind and lifted her off the ground. Lara kicked at the air frantically as she was bounced up and down. “What the hell?” she screamed.
Abruptly she was set down on her feet. She turned to see that it was her uncle who’d been tossing her around like a rag doll. Tim was in his late forties, though he had a tendency to act like a child sometimes. He was pretty tall with muscular arms, but he was also overweight, balding, and definitely not the sharpest knife in the rack.
“Sorry there, Lara,” he said. “It’s just that I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl. I guess I got carried away.”
“She’s sixteen, Tim. Don’t embarrass her,” Paige scolded playfully.
Lara pasted a smile on her face, the same one that she’d used to politely thank the guests for coming to her parents’ funeral. “Not embarrassed, just disturbed,” she said sarcastically.
“Well here, let me help you with your bags” Tim said. He heaved both of Lara’s larger duffel bags over his shoulder as he walked toward the house.
She was hesitant about following him and Paige. Once she crossed the threshold…that was it. Her new life began. She had the insane notion that if she just stood in the driveway, she could stop time from moving forward, dragging her away from her parents.
Paige paused from up ahead, looking back at her worriedly. Lara was again brutally struck by how much her aunt resembled her mother. It tore at her.
“Come on, Lara,” Paige called. “Are you alright?”
Hellafucking no! Why did this woman insist on asking such absurd questions? “Fine, just fine,” she replied in a dull voice as she caught up with her aunt.
As it happened, entering the house didn’t feel like the monumental moment that Lara had been anticipating. It felt exactly the same as every other moment: excruciating. Strange that in her grief there were no extremes in emotion—no hysterics or tears, just a numbing stream of sorrow that never ended.
The inside of the house was as beautiful and overwhelming as the outside. The hardwood floors were glossy and the rooms were spacious. Sunlight flooded in through the bay windows and filled every corner of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Lara was surprised to find that Tim and Paige had decorated the rooms on the first floor very tastefully; she’d half-expected her uncle to mount animal heads on the walls.
“Tim hasn’t quite finished the second floor yet,” Paige told her as they walked up the spiral staircase. There were dusty tarps and unopened paint cans lying in the hallway and the entire floor smelled like freshly cut wood. “But don’t worry. Your room and the bathroom are done.”
Lara followed Paige and Tim into the bedroom at the end of the hall. Like all of the other rooms, it was very large and airy, but the bed and dresser were heavy antiques. The curtains and bedspread were a deep shade of red that reminded her too much of the color of blood.
"You have a bathroom across the hall and a closet in here," Tim opened a door next to the dresser.
She nodded in response, feeling shell-shocked as she stood there.
“Why don’t you unpack a little and then come downstairs for some dinner,” Paige suggested.
“Yeah, okay,” Lara whispered, letting her backpack slide onto the floor. She leaned back against the stiff, four-poster bed and listened to her new family’s footsteps fade as they walked down the hall.
Once alone, Lara looked around the room and was overcome. Silence rang loudly in her ears. She sank to her knees on the glossy floor, letting her long black hair cover her entire face. She suddenly felt more lonely than she had ever felt in her life. Even during the two horrible weeks she spent at the Bennetts' house, she’d felt some comfort in being with people who she knew well—people that her parents had loved. The surroundings hadn’t been beautiful or elegant, but it had at least been familiar. She had sometimes walked from room to room in their house, thinking with each step that her mother or father might have stood on that exact spot. There, Lara could still feel a connection with her parents, as if she hadn't lost them forever. Here in this house, there was nothing familiar but the face on her aunt and the sensation of her throat closing and the agony of suffocation. She fought for breath again and again, her teeth clenched tightly, but she didn't cry. Lara never cried.
She dug her nails into her palms and bit her lip hard; she wanted to scream. Her body shook with the intensity of her concentration and when she tasted blood on her lips and felt the wetness in the grip of each hand, Lara thought of her mother's blood gushing through her fingers and her father's last gasps for air.
There was a hushed sound, something like a sigh, from the corner of the room. She stayed completely still for a long moment, remembering the dark-eyed man she’d seen in her parents’ house. Lara had convinced herself that she’d imagined it in her exhaustion, but from the way her skin crawled now, she was sure that she was being watched. But strangely, she wasn’t afraid, only curious.
She raised her head slowly, not wanting to make a sudden movement that might scare him away.
Nothing. Her room was empty.
Lara stood up. “Are you there?” she murmured.
She heard the sigh from behind her then, warm breath against her hair, and she spun around.
Nothing.
“I’m not scared of you,” she said quietly.
A deep laugh surrounded her so that she couldn’t tell which direction the sound was coming from. She turned around again, but found herself alone in the room.
“Fine, then. Coward.”
There was no response this time, but Lara could still feel a presence. She hated being stared at and she’d withstood too much of it in the past two weeks. Her parents’ friends and her own friends had surreptitiously kept their eyes on her during the wake and the funeral, always darting their gaze away as soon as Lara looked back at them. They had wanted to see the spectacle of the mourning daughter, but the true depth of pain in Lara’s eyes was an intrusion on the show. It was too real.
A crash downstairs startled her and broke the spell that had settled in the room. The presence was no longer there and Lara let out a slow breath, feeling distinctly alone. She walked out and shut the bedroom door behind her before she started down the hall.
In the kitchen, there were pots and pans strewn across the cool tile. Tim and Paige were picking them up and stacking them on the counter.
“I told Marc those nails weren’t strong enough to hold up that rack,” her uncle said. Then he noticed Lara standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “Everything’s okay,” he told her. “The pot rack just fell down.”
“Are you hungry?” Paige asked her. Then her eyes widened. “What happened? Your lip is bleeding.”
Lara quickly licked away the blood that had dried on her bottom lip. She’d forgotten to wipe it away before she’d come downstairs. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a bad habit.” She was careful not to let them see the crescent-shaped cuts on her palms.
“Oh,” her aunt said, still looking a little anxious. “Well dinner will be ready soon. We’ve just got to clean up this mess.”
“I’ll have Marc hang the rack again tomorrow,” Tim said.
Paige frowned. “I thought you gave him the day off. The boy needs more time to relax before he goes to school this fall.”
Tim flushed. “Well, I did. But I thought Lara might want to meet someone her age that lives around here.”
“I don’t know if she’s ready for that,” Paige said. “She’s only just gotten here and she’s been through so much already.”
“I know, but it couldn’t hurt to meet someone nice, to make her feel more at home.”
“Would you stop talking about me as if I weren’t here?” Lara snapped. God, she was sick of this.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” her aunt crooned. “Do you think you might be up for meeting Marc tomorrow?”
Lara rolled her eyes. “I don’t really care one way or the other,” she said tiredly.
She started back for the stairs. Whatever weirdness that she’d experienced upstairs was better than this.
“Wait, what about dinner?” Paige called after her.
“I’m not hungry,” she yelled from the top of the staircase. She thought that she heard murmurs of dismay from the kitchen, but she didn’t give a damn. This was the longest amount of time that she’d been out of bed since the crash and she’d had enough.
She searched through one of her bags and pulled out her pajamas, then crossed the hall to the bathroom. There was a spa bathtub, as Paige had mentioned, as well as a standing shower. The rugs and towels were all the same deep shade of red as the bedding in Lara’s room. It all reeked of money, as the rest of the house did and she was quickly getting disgusted with it.
After wrenching on the hot water, she tore her clothes off angrily. She was sick of this place, sick of this day, of her life. Goddamn it!
Suddenly it seemed that the bathroom was very cold in spite of the steam that was rising from the tub and Lara realized her skin was covered with goose bumps. Just before she stepped into the bathtub, she looked into the mirror that hung high on the wall and her breath stopped.
The reflection was not her own. The figure she saw in the mirror was that of the man from her parents’ house. He was tall and the black hair was shoulder length, the eyes were black also, endlessly black. He seemed more vivid now and Lara noticed details that she hadn’t seen before. The face appeared delicate, but also strong; pensive, but possessed an air of arrogance; almost feminine in its beauty, but distinctly male. He was smiling as if Lara's fear amused him and a soft laugh echoed off the walls. Lara blinked and the reflection changed. She was staring at her own open mouth, lips still stained a little with blood. Her hands were shaking and she could hardly breathe.
Lara stepped closer to the mirror and stared at herself, waiting for the image of the boy to return. Then she was so close to the mirror that she was only gazing mercilessly at her own blue eyes. Blue, black, blue again. "Are you playing with me?" Lara whispered.
Finally she shook her head and backed away from the mirror. She didn’t know what was going on, but she wasn’t ready to deal with it yet. Slowly the room started to feel warm again and she stepped into the hot water. Lara tried to calm down and breathe deeply, but she still imagined those dark eyes on her, studying her, giving her a shameful rush of power. Unable to relax, she quickly washed and put her pajamas on as her teeth chattered..
Back in her room, Lara curled up on the red velvet cushion of the window seat and leaned her head against the window. The sun had set and she stared out into the darkness of the woods surrounding the house.
Despite how tired she was, Lara knew that she wouldn’t sleep. Although she’d spent so much time in bed at the Bennetts’ house, she hadn’t slept much at all. Insomnia had set in after the crash and after a while, she’d started to rely on the dazed feeling it gave her. She moved, but didn’t feel. And she needed that now. The few hours of sleep she’d gotten in the car on the way here had made her too alert, too raw.
But her eyes closed in spite of herself. She felt warm and comfortable, even though she was sitting in an awkward position. Consciously, she knew that she was started to drift away, but she couldn’t stop it. It was like something was pulling at her, dragging her underwater. She kicked at it, but she couldn’t make her way back to the surface. She was lost.
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