All packed, I peek into the hallway to make sure there’s a clear path to the back door off the kitchen. My father came home for lunch, which he sometimes does when a job site is nearby. He’s now in the living room, watching TV and eating a sandwich while sunk deep into his La-Z-Boy.
In the past six months, the two of us have become experts at avoidance. Full weeks went by in which we never saw each other. I’ve mostly kept to my room, venturing to the kitchen only when I was certain my father was at work, asleep, or out with the girlfriend I’m not supposed to know about. We haven’t been introduced. I’m only aware of her existence because I heard them talking in the living room last week, surprised by the sound of another woman’s voice in the house. The next night, my father snuck out like a schoolboy, either too afraid to admit he’s started dating again or too ashamed to risk my bumping into his new lady friend.
Now it’s me sneaking out, moving on tiptoes as I make two trips to my car, one for the suitcase and medical bag, one for the box of books. On the second trip, I find Kenny leaning against my Ford Escort. Clearly, he saw me with the suitcase and came out of the house next door to investigate. Staring at the box in my hands, he says, “You moving out?”
“For now, yeah,” I say. “Maybe for good. I got a new assignment.”
“I thought you were fired.”
“Suspended. It just ended.”
“Oh.” Kenny frowns. Rare for him. Normally he only sports a horny, hungry look. “Quickie before you go?”
Now that’s the Kenny I’ve gotten used to seeing since we started sleeping together in May. Like me, he’s currently out of work and living with his parents. Unlike me, Kenny is only twenty. He’s my dirty little secret. Or, more likely, I’m his.
It started one afternoon when we were both lazing in our connecting yards at the same time, me with a Sidney Sheldon paperback, Kenny with a joint. We made eye contact across the lawn a few times before he said, “Not working today?”
“Nope,” I replied. “You?”
“Nope.”
Then, because I was bored and lonely, I said, “Want a beer?”
Kenny said sure. Which led to drinking. Which led to small talk. Which led to making out on the living room couch.
“You want to fuck or something?” Kenny eventually said.
A month into my suspension and full of self-pity, I sized him up. He wasn’t bad-looking, despite the mustache that drooped like a dead caterpillar under his nose. The rest of him was much better. Especially his arms, which were wiry, strong, and tanned. I could do—and have done—much worse.
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “Why not?”
When it was over, I vowed never to do it again. I was eleven when Kenny was born, for God’s sake. I remember his parents bringing him home from the hospital, my mother cooing at him, my father slipping an envelope of cash into his dad’s sweaty palm. But when Kenny showed up at the back door two days later, looking like a stray dog seeking scraps, I let him in and guided him to my bedroom.
That’s how it’s been once, twice, sometimes three times a week. I know the score. This isn’t romance. Half the time we don’t even talk. And even though I feel guilty about it, I also know I needed something besides reading to get through the long, lonely days.
“My dad’s inside,” I tell Kenny. “And my new patient is expecting me.”
I don’t tell him just who that new patient is. I’m afraid of what he’ll think of me if I do.
“Sure, I get it,” Kenny says, doing little to mask his disappointment. “See you around, I guess.”
I watch him walk the short distance back to his house. When he goes inside without a backward glance, a pang hits my heart. Not sadness, exactly, but something mighty close. It might have only been sex, and it might have only been Kenny, but at least it was something and he was someone.
Now there’s nothing and no one.
I place the box and suitcase into the trunk before making one last trip into the house. In the living room, I find my father watching the noon news because that’s what my mother used to do. It’s a habit, and for Pat McDeere, old habits die hard. On the TV is a clip of President Reagan giving a speech about the economy while Just Say No Nancy stands primly beside him. My father, who hates all politicians regardless of party, lets out a derisive snort.
“Bullshit, Ronnie,” he mutters, his mouth full of sandwich. “Try doing something that’ll help guys like me for once.”
Standing in the doorway, I clear my throat. “Dad, I’m leaving.”
“Oh.”
There’s no surprise behind the word. If anything, my father sounds relieved.
“I’m back on the job,” I add when he doesn’t press for details. “My new patient’s a stroke victim. Lives out on the Cliffs.”
I say it hoping he’ll be impressed—or, at the very least, intrigued—by the idea of rich people trusting me enough to take care of someone. If he is, he doesn’t show it.
“Okay,” he says.
I know the one sure way to get my father’s full attention is to tell him the name of my new patient. Just like with Kenny, I don’t even consider it. Knowing I’ll be caring for Lenora Hope will only make my father think less of me. If such a thing is possible.
“Do you need anything before I go?” I say instead.
My father takes another bite of sandwich and shakes his head. The pang I’d felt outside returns with another kick. Harder this time. So hard I swear a chunk of my heart has broken off and is now dropping into the depths of my stomach.
“I’ll try to check in every two weeks.”
“No need,” my father says.
And that’s all he says.
I hover in the doorway a moment—waiting, hoping, silently pleading for more. Anything will do. Goodbye. Good riddance. Fuck off. Anything but this hostile silence that makes me feel like nothing. Worse than nothing.
Invisible.
That’s how I feel.
I leave after that, not bothering to say goodbye. I don’t want to be met with silence when my father refuses to say it back to me.
THREE
Duran Duran blasts from my car stereo as I follow a road that hugs the rocky coastline, climbing higher and higher until the Escort shimmies and the rough waters of the Atlantic become blurs of white crashing against strips of sand far below. In my rearview mirror is an area that is definitely the Cliffs. It practically screams old money, with massive houses clinging to the craggy bluffs like gannet nests, half hidden behind brick walls and swaths of ivy.
How the other half lives.
That’s how my mother would have described those cliffside dwellings with turrets, widow’s walks, and bay windows facing the sea.
I beg to differ. Not even the other half can afford to live at the Cliffs. The area has always been—and always will be—rarefied air. It’s home to the cream of the crop, perched over everyone and everything, as if God himself had placed them there.
“Yet here you are, Kit-Kat,” my mother would have said. “On your way to a job in one of these places.”
Again, I would disagree. Where I’m heading isn’t anyone’s idea of a prime destination.
Hope’s End.
Until today, I’d only heard it referred to simply as the Hope house, usually in that hushed tone reserved for tragic things. Now I know why. Hope’s End strikes me as a startlingly apocalyptic name for an estate. Especially considering what happened there.
My knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond the rhyme. I know that Winston Hope made a fortune in shipping and built his estate on the rocky coast of northern Maine and not in Bar Harbor or Newport because the land here was mostly undeveloped and he could have his pick of pristine ocean views. I also know that Winston had a wife, Evangeline, and two daughters, Lenora and Virginia.
And I know that one long-ago October night, three of them were murdered—with the fourth member of the clan accused of doing the killing. A seventeen-year-old girl, no less. No wonder I thought that morbid rhyme I first learned on the scrubby playground behind the elementary school was made up. It all seemed too Gothic to be real.
But it happened.
Now it’s town legend.
The kind of thing kids whisper about at sleepovers and adults don’t like to whisper about at all.
Lenora, the only one left, claimed to have had nothing to do with it. She told investigators that she was asleep during the murders and only knew about them after she woke up, went downstairs, and discovered the rest of her family dead.
What she couldn’t tell the police was who else could have done it.
Or how.
Or why.
Nor could Lenora explain why she wasn’t targeted by the killer, which led the police to suspect she was the one who did it, even though no one could prove it. All the servants had conveniently been given the night off, eliminating any possible witnesses. With no evidence physically linking her to the crimes, Lenora was never charged. But one need only look to that schoolyard chant to see what the public thought. The rhyme’s first line—At seventeen, Lenora Hope—fully establishes that she’s to blame for everything.
I’m not surprised. There’s no such thing as presumed innocence.