If she can just get it clean enough to let her gorge settle, she can microwave one of Mrs. Reilly’s Lean Cuisines and pop a diet soda and curl up and watch TV and pretend for five minutes that life is normal and safe and that there aren’t dead things everywhere that have been left behind. This house is a time capsule—everything here is exactly like it was before the Violence, before that first lady beat someone to death with a bottle of salad dressing. There’s even pepper in the cabinet—now a class 3 substance, according to what she heard on the radio while driving around. She shoots her mother a quick text about it but, again, receives no response.
Finally it’s all done. The stink is still there, but it’s more like a footnote, and she opens the screened windows and turns on all the ceiling fans and lights the candles Mrs. Reilly thought would cover up the reek of the weed she smoked for her back pain. Ella remembers the day she found it, thinking it was catnip at first but then recognizing the smell. She doesn’t do that sort of thing—not before, when it was rebellious, and not now when it could get her killed for being too slow and stupid—but she’s glad for the strongly scented candles.
She eats a shallow pan of fake macaroni and drinks a Diet Sprite—delicious, indulgent, the taste strange on her tongue—and watches a cooking show in which jolly, kind British people cheer one another on as they make desserts. Every time her mind tries to settle on a topic like Brooklyn or Mom or Dad or the sound Mr. M made when she pried him off the tiles, she refocuses on the cooking show, on the pastel meringues and macarons and puddings. It almost works.
It’s past midnight now, and even though she feels like a live wire, her eyes have that dry, pinched feeling of sleepiness. She blows out the candles and closes the windows and turns out the lights before heading up to the guest bedroom she remembers from her catsitting. The double bed is neatly made up with a quintessentially Florida quilt, white with blue seashells, so new it still has creases from the bag. Ella plugs in her phone on the bedside table and drags in her bags from downstairs and does one more round of the familiar but unfamiliar house, double-checking that all the doors and windows are locked.
This is a difficult world with little safety, but for now, finally, she’s found a place that feels safe. She pulls out her laptop, stares at the screen blankly, and closes the browser. She’s too tired to catch up on whatever she’s missed since she and Brooklyn became Nana’s prisoners. All she wants to do is keep watching that cooking show on her phone.
She falls asleep while they’re making gingerbread houses.
The next morning, when her eyes open, she’s momentarily lost. Where is she? What is this bright, pretty room, as bare and welcoming as a beach condo?
Then she sees the cat tree in the corner and remembers.
For a moment, lying there in the fresh bed that smells like detergent, she expects Mr. M and Griz to come running and hop on the bed, meowing and chirping. If they had ghosts, that’s what they would do, crowding around her with the brush of spectral fur. She dreamed about them, that they were tiger-sized and hunting her to eat her. But now that she’s awake, she’s just sad.
Downstairs, she finds frozen waffles in the freezer and scratches an itchy spot on her neck as she waits for them to pop up in the toaster. The maple syrup is still good, and there are cans of fruit cocktail, so it’s not the worst breakfast. Poor Brooklyn is probably still chewing through Nana’s diet cereals. As Ella eats freezer-burned waffles off Mrs. Reilly’s flowered plates she scrolls through the news, determined to find out what her dad was talking about in his text.
When she types her mom’s name into the search bar, she can’t believe what she sees.
Her mom killed Jeanie.
With a Yeti cup.
On I-4.
Ella snorts, then snorts again, and then she’s straight up laughing so hard that her eyes water.
This is utterly insane.
The situation, and the fact that she can’t stop laughing about it.
It’s awful.
It’s horrendous.
Jeanie was really nice, and she used to help Ella with basketball when she was shooting hoops in the driveway and bake them Hershey’s Kiss cookies at Christmas.
But the thought of her mom…doing all that.
She tries to imagine it and can’t.
Her mom is soft. Wilting. Curved in. Hunched over. She is a repository of abuse.
Aside from the time Ella watched her stomp the dog to death.
The Violence—God, it’s terrifying and strange and impossible.
Ella doesn’t know which is harder to believe, that her mom beat Jeanie to death in a moving car or that she reached into a cow patty and threw it at some old guy before stealing his truck.
And that wasn’t even the biggest news story that day.
The only thing for which Florida Woman and Florida Man can be counted on is that a new Florida Man or Woman will supplant them within hours by doing something outrageous, stupid, or dangerous.
She texts her mom: Are you okay? I saw the news. Dad is home. He keeps texting me.
And then she adds: Don’t go home. Please.
She scrolls back through all the texts she’s sent her mom, but they’re all unread. Now she thinks she knows why. Her mom’s phone was probably in her minivan with Jeanie when her mom ran away.
So there’s no point in texting her at all.
And yet…there’s something comforting about it, too.
I’m scared, she types.
There’s no response to that, either.
Please help me.
As if by magic, the doorbell rings.
For the tiniest, briefest, stupidest moment, her heart lifts. Have her prayers been answered?
But then reality descends. No one should be here. No one should ring this doorbell.
This is not a good sign.
Ella scrambles to the knife block by the fridge and selects the biggest blade that’s not a butcher knife. It feels solid in her hand and reminds her of the one she kept under her pillow back home. She sneaks to the side window and peeks out without rustling the curtains. Her brain goes to Threat Level Red when she realizes it’s a police officer.
“Come on out, Ella. I know you’re in there.”
Uncle Chad.
How…could he know?
He has to be here because Dad asked him to come.
But he never came to Nana’s to find her. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe Dad didn’t know she was there. And if he did, the guard said no one was on the list. Maybe police can’t just go through those gates anymore. Or maybe when Ella took her car, Dad really got mad.
Wait. Her car.
Dad must have her car…bugged? Tagged? Whatever.
As long as the car was home, Dad had no idea where she was.
And now he knows exactly where she is.
Which means she can’t take her car. Maybe she can run out the back?
But no. Mrs. Reilly has a very high plastic fence to keep dogs and kids out of her backyard. There’s only one door, and it opens up to the side of the house…where Chad is.
“Ella, it’s Uncle Chad. I need you to open the door, or I’m going to have to bust it down and come in there with my gun up. You don’t want that, right? I sure don’t.”
“Yeah, right,” Ella mutters under her breath.
Uncle Chad is an asshole. He calls his wife “the ol’ ball and chain!” He sometimes wears shirts that say things like COOL STORY, BABE, NOW MAKE ME A SANDWICH. Much like that guard last night, she’s pretty sure Uncle Chad sees women as the enemy, and that he’s got a boner for threatening them with his gun.
No way she’s opening the door.