I don’t know why Wyatt thought it would be okay to strip a broken person of her last defenses.
I don’t know how he knew that everything about me was a lie.
But I did know he was right.
For the rest of the weekend, I couldn’t get Wyatt’s accusations out of my mind. I was hurt and insulted and so … so …
Sad, I told myself.
You know, the kind of sad that makes you want to punch someone in the stomach.
I couldn’t even manage to get worked up about the vision I’d had in Marnie’s car. What was the point? My life was a surreal sham anyway. Might as well throw in some trippy delusions, too. Keep things interesting.
Sunday evening, Mom roasted a chicken, and I helped her set the table with cloth napkins and fancy silverware from the sideboard in the dining room. (But first I had to ask her what a sideboard was and be told that it was the low cabinet-thingy. So, to be less pretentious about it: I set the table with cloth napkins and fancy silverware from the low cabinet-thingy.)
We sat down to eat, with Jonathan at the head of the table.
“Could you get me a carving knife, Willa?” he asked. “They’re in the sideboard, in a long, flat box.”
Mom gave me a secret smile, like we’d accomplished something great by learning the names of all the furniture in time to anticipate my stepfather’s whims. In the middle drawer, I found a long, flat box containing a narrow, curved knife and an oversize two-pronged fork.
“Joanna, this is gorgeous,” Jonathan told Mom, carving away. “And so was last night’s dinner. But, honey, we can hire a cook. Or have Rosa come in more often and handle the kitchen cleanup.”
Mom blushed. “I don’t mind. I like cooking. I even enjoy doing the dishes.”
I hadn’t thought anything could distract me from my self-pity party, but Mom’s words hit me like a freight train.
Until my mother had somehow captivated Jonathan with her suburban-mom wiles the previous summer, she’d been the Media Relations Coordinator for Joffrey, Connecticut. She got to interact with film crews who wanted to shoot in our town (hence aforementioned captivation of Hollywood director). She even had a weekly radio show, chatting with cantankerous Joffreyites about their grievances — Talk of the Town with Joanna Cresky. She was good at her job. She loved it.
Now she loved doing the dishes?
Since the wedding, all she seemed to care about was making sure things were convenient for Jonathan — that we weren’t too intrusive; that we were on our best behavior, always.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Jonathan said.
My mother smiled a non-smile. And my stepfather, who had apparently married her without knowing any of the important things about her, smiled back.
I studied my fork for a few seconds, then looked up at Mom, who was carefully spooning roasted carrots onto Jonathan’s plate.
On the wall behind her, in jagged letters about a foot tall, were the words:
THIS IS THE KIND OF DREAM YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM, HENRY
The letters were black and gooey-looking, like fresh paint or tar or oil. And as I stared, more writing appeared, underneath the sentence:
818
I blinked and closed my eyes and shook my head.
“Would you like carrots, Willa?” Mom asked. Her voice buzzed in my head. “There are also dinner rolls.”
I tried not to look at the letters and numbers, but I couldn’t stop myself. The words were still there, circling all four walls of the room. And then the numbers began appearing again and again — 818 818 818 818 818 818 — in fast, reckless strokes.
It’s a hallucination, I told myself. Just another stupid hallucination.
“Willa?” Mom leaned across the table and reached out as if to touch my arm.
I dropped my fork with a clatter and jumped away from her. I don’t know why. I suppose part of me was afraid that if she touched me, she would be able to tell that something was wrong.
“Honey, what’s going on?” Mom asked.
I waited for her to add, Where did those numbers come from?
But instead, she said, “Why are you acting so … so frightened?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I guess when something seems so incredibly real, no matter how improbable, your brain fights to believe you’re not crazy. That it’s really happening.
But Mom and Jonathan didn’t see the writing.
So I was crazy.
“I’m fine,” I said. I forced a cough. “I swallowed something wrong, that’s all. Had to wait for it to go down.”
“Goodness, you scared me,” Mom said.
“Jo, she’s fine,” Jonathan said. “Let’s all eat.”
So we ate. I mindlessly chewed and swallowed carrots and chicken and a dinner roll while trying to ignore the fact that the walls were covered in words and numbers that only I could see.
By the time the meal was over, the writing had faded to a few pale gray streaks.
I started to carry my dishes to the kitchen, but my mother took them from me. “You go upstairs and rest,” she said. “You don’t look like you feel well.”
I had a headache like a bass drum. “Mom, I’m totally fine.”
But she sent me upstairs anyway, so I went.
“Feel better,” Jonathan called after me.
Wyatt was right. I was a huge liar. But what was I going to do — tell them the truth?
The body in the pool. The force that held me down. The waking dreams. The voices. The overflowing tub.
How long was I going to ignore the writing on the wall?
Especially now that there was literally writing on the wall?
I guess you could call me a fool for taking so long to connect the various incidents to each other. Although, in fact, nothing actually did connect them. What could a dead body in the pool have to do with the name “Henry”? How did the number 818 fit together with an overflowing bathtub?
I had a list of unexplainable events. What I didn’t have was the tiniest hint of a suspicion about their origins.
Well … I might have had the tiniest hint.
Jonathan had said that the movie star Diana Del Mar died in this house.
No, Willa. Don’t even go there.
The food I’d forced myself to eat was churning in my stomach, and my headache was making my vision fuzzy. I stumbled and knocked into the corner of my desk, sending a stack of papers and binders to the floor.
Kneeling to clean up the mess, I noticed that one of the notebooks had fallen open. Wyatt’s notebook.
I glanced at the page just before I closed it, and in that millisecond, the words burned into my eyes. I gasped and then pawed through the pages, looking for what I’d seen — not even totally sure I’d really seen anything. Maybe I was hallucinating again. Maybe I misread.
But then I found the list, written in Wyatt’s impeccable, unmistakable print:
WATER (BATHTUB/POOL)
ROSES
NECKLACE (ALSO ROSE)
HENRY
Wyatt didn’t notice me waiting by his locker until he was only a few feet away. By then I was holding the notebook in front of me, cradled against my chest.
“You were right,” I said. “I’ve had it for a week. I tried to give it back right away, but you were such a jerk that I changed my mind.”