Chapter 31
VERO AND I are fighting.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I tell her. “I want my life back.”
“What life? You don’t have a life.” Vero sits calmly at the wooden table in the tower bedroom. She has finally put on clothes, that dreadful floral dress, though her skin is hanging from her skull in leathery flaps.
“I didn’t know about the scar!”
“Should’ve. Lived with me long enough. Not my fault you weren’t paying attention.” She holds out her left arm, but she’s gone all skeletal again, revealing only the twin bones radiating from her elbow down to her wrist. “Oops,” she says. “Maybe I forgot something after all. But again, not really my fault. I am you, you know.”
I rub my forehead. In my mind’s eye, in real life? The lines are too blurred; I don’t know anymore.
“I want to be free.”
“No. You want to be me. Always have. Again, not my fault you’re so jealous. First time I told you about my mother, that someone out there actually loved me, that someone out there actually cared about me.” Her tone is mocking. “You’re the one who set out to make my life miserable.”
She’s right. There are other images in my mind. Deeper, darker memories I never visit, because I prefer Vero’s stories. From the very beginning, hearing about the magical queen, the evil witch. Vero might have ended up in the dollhouse, but for six years prior to that, six long, glorious years . . .
A mother who hugged her. A mother who let her crawl on her lap. A mother who once slept with her on the floor and begged her to live.
I have none of those memories. Not even three concussions later. I have only Vero, whom once I hated and then . . . grew to love in my own way. Incarceration can have that effect on people. Her stories became my stories. Her hope, my hope. Because all those years we were together, Vero never stopped talking about one day seeing her mother again.
Except, of course . . .
“You shouldn’t have killed me,” she says now, voice conversational. She is pouring herself a cup of tea, a shot of scotch. “If you hadn’t killed me, maybe you would’ve escaped me in the end.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Who hoarded her drugs? Who left them someplace you knew your roommate was bound to find?”
I finally stop pacing, do my best to take a stand.
“Vero wants to fly,” I state flatly. “And that’s what you did. You gave up. You shot up, anything, everything, the entire supply. If you hadn’t done that . . .”
Vero grins at me. “If I hadn’t done that . . . ,” she goads.
I try to stay on track. “You had someone out there who loved you. You should’ve put the drugs back. If not for yourself, then at least for her.”
She is definitely in a mood now. “Then what? I would’ve lived happily ever after? You and me, best friends forever in the dungeon of the dollhouse?”
Abruptly, the room grows hazier. The rose mural nearly disappearing. As if the room is suddenly filling with smog. Or smoke.
In my mind, in real life, I feel myself automatically reach out my hand.
But of course, Thomas isn’t there.
“Tell me,” Vero demands now. “Tell me what would’ve happened if I hadn’t taken the drugs.”
“I don’t know!”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t! I never—”
“Yes, you do. Yes, you did!”
And of course she’s right. More dark shapes shift. Memories I can’t afford to have. Willful ignorance I’m still waiting to bring me bliss. Except now I can feel them, looming larger, darker, chilling the very corridors of my mind. Sergeant Wyatt had been right; none of this is about Vero. It’s about me. It’s always been about me and, three concussions later, the past I’m still not ready to face.
“Go away,” I order now. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore!”
“Can’t. I’m you. Only one talking here is you. Only one arguing here is you. Only one who can’t handle the truth is you. I’m not just a pretty little ghost, you know. I’m your fucking conscience.”
She holds out her arm. Her skin is back, and now the left arm’s scar stands out prominently, a thick, jagged pucker ripping savagely down smooth white skin. Proving once and for all what I did know, even if I later chose to forget. Vero smiles, except this time her mood isn’t antagonistic. Her ghost, my conscience, appears sad.
“I wanted to fly,” Vero says quietly. “Once. A long time ago. A little girl who didn’t know any better. Then Ronnie picked me up and hurtled me into a coffee table. There are many ways to die, Chelsea. And not all of them happened in that dollhouse.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You wanted the princess to have a happy ending. You wanted her to reunite with the magical queen and everything to turn into sunshine and rainbows. In your own way, you believed in me long after I stopped.”
I don’t say anything.
“But you also know, Chelsea,” she continues soberly, “deep down inside, why that couldn’t happen; my story was only a work of fiction. Now you can visit me as much as you want and resurrect me in your head for as long as you’d like. But there’s still no going back. There’s just you: the lone survivor.”
“I loved you,” I whisper.
“I know. But take it from me, love alone can’t save you in the end.”
Abruptly I feel more shifting in the dark corridors of my mind. Memories I swear I didn’t stir up, and yet . . . I look up sharply. Vero is watching me, her look cunning.
“Stop,” I tell her.
“Can’t. I’m you, remember?”
“I’m not ready for this.”
“For what? The smell of smoke? The heat of flames. Fire, fire, everywhere. Why’d your husband burn your house, Nicky? Why? And better yet, when did Thomas get so good with flames?”
“Shut up!”
But she won’t. Vero shoves away from the table. She marches across the room. Her dress is gone. Her skin is gone. Now she is nothing but decaying flesh, marching closer and closer, reaching out with her bony hands.
“Thomas,” she singsongs. “Handsome Thomas. Caring Thomas. Thomas who’s always been there. Is it your past you’re trying to escape, Nicky? Or is it the man you married?”
Her skeletal hands reach my neck, scrape across my collarbone.
Abruptly, the door to the tower bedroom crashes open behind me. But I don’t turn. I keep my eyes on Vero’s grinning skull. Because I already know I don’t want to see who’s standing there.
“What have you done, Nicky?” Vero whispers to me. “Who else do you have to fear?”
* * *
I JERK AWAKE with a gasp. My head is on fire; my entire body aches. For a second, instinctively, reflexively, I lock down each muscle. Willing myself not to move. Old habits, back from the days when you never knew who else might be present. Waiting to hurt you next.
A first careful inhale. Followed by a long, slow exhale. I listen, registering voices, coming through the wall, from the room next door. I search closer, for the sound of another person’s presence nearby. Only when I’m absolutely, completely convinced that I’m alone do I finally open my eyes, allow my muscles to relax.
The room is dark. I can see a thin streak of light on the far wall, coming from the cracked doorway between the two hotel rooms. Bits and pieces return to me. My current hideaway in the form of a nondescript New Hampshire hotel room. The disastrous meeting with Marlene Bilek, who turned out to not be my mom, because of course, my real mom died of an overdose years ago, before I even escaped from the dollhouse. Someone I once looked up to, only to forget again, because what was the point? I was never the princess with a magical queen. My entire life, I’ve only ever been in the service of an evil witch.
My eyes burn. Stupid tears, I think as I roll over, eye the second bed. It’s empty, as I’d suspected. Tessa must be in the adjacent room, talking to Wyatt.
They are probably rehashing the case. Trying to understand why I went to the trouble to track down Marlene Bilek, when she isn’t my mother. Why I cling to a quilt handcrafted by a woman I’d never met.
How I ended up with Vero’s fingerprints in my Audi.
I don’t know the answer to the last question. It confuses me as much as it does them. As for the first two issues . . . I guess I was just trying to keep Vero alive, shore up her memory. Our imaginary visits weren’t enough to ease my pain, so I went to the next step of establishing a tangible connection in the form of her mother.
Maybe, if I could make Vero real enough, her family real enough, then she wouldn’t be gone and I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty.
Because twenty-two years later, I still haven’t figured out the business of living. I survive, I suppose. I exist. I even got married and moved all around the country. But was that truly living or just another form of running? All those nights I woke up screaming. All those memories I suppressed time and time again, until my mind was a mixed-up mess way before the concussions began.
I got out of the dollhouse but never escaped the past. The weight of my own guilt, a skill set I never learned? I don’t know. I feel like I want to be something more. I want to do something more. But I don’t know how to get there.
I could run again, I contemplate now, curled up on the hotel room bed. Pick out a new state, new town, new identity. It’s what I’ve done before. Especially the first two years after my escape. Dragging Thomas from place to place, name to name, often on a weekly basis. Less a strategic bid for freedom than a clear case of hysteria. Thomas had begged me to slow down. At least try out a new location before casting it into the wind. At least pick one name, one identity, so we had some shot at building a normal life.
Under his guidance, we’d done one last professional do-over, paying good money for proper IDs, vetted history. We’d become Thomas and Nicole Frank, identities he swore would keep us safe. And yet still, every two years I’d had to move again. Because the weight of November still became too much.
Maybe I can take up drinking seriously this time, I ponder now. Brain trauma be damned. I’ll throw back scotch, burn out these terrible memories once and for all. I’ll tell myself I’m free and happy and independent. Fuck Thomas; fuck Vero. I will escape both of them. I will be a woman who has it all.
A woman who is no one at all.
Except that’s not completely true, I find myself thinking. More shadows, shifting and lurching in the back of my head. The taste of dirt. The feel of earth giving way beneath my fingertips. And that moment, that one savage moment when I realized I had done it. I was out; I was alive. I was free of the dollhouse.
That moment, right before . . .
Smoke. Heat. My house burning down in New Hampshire. Why did Thomas torch it? His workshop maybe, but our entire house? Why the need to burn it to the ground?
How did Thomas become so good with fire?
Vero, laughing in the back of my mind. “Is it your past you’re trying to escape, or the man you married?”
I rein it all in. Force my eyes to focus on the here and now. The darkened hotel room. The empty bed beside me. I don’t want to feel so helpless anymore. Or lost or confused or overwhelmed.
This is it. The moment of truth.
I can spend the rest of my life being a dead woman’s roommate or a missing man’s wife.
Then, in the next heartbeat.
No. I’m more than either of those two things. I’m the one who wanted to move to New Hampshire, even when Thomas tried to convince me otherwise. I’m the one who hired a private investigator, even though Thomas tried to tell me to let it be.
I’m a woman twice returned from the dead.
And I’m not finished yet.