Page 33 of You'll Be Sorry

“Knew you were a softie.”

“He misses them,” she murmured, the lethargy moving through her in supple waves.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Them.” A gentle, forever buoyant sea.

“Why not? He clearly knows more than we do about our property.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She was floating, pressed against her husband, where she could smile at the perfection of it all. No pain, no pain, no pain. Forever no pain.

Theo, sighing. “We’re in it now, love. Half the cops in New Hampshire have been here tonight, not to mention the fire chief and a slew of emergency responders. By tomorrow it’ll get real. A visit from the ME to oversee the skeleton’s recovery. Maybe also a forensic anthropologist and a state archaeologist. Hell, every looky-loo within a ten-mile radius.”

It’s okay, she wanted to say, the dead woman deserved the attention, but Raquel couldn’t summon the words. She sighed, feeling herself starting to slip, down, down, down.

Her husband’s arm, tightening around her shoulders.

“I love you,” he whispered, the words edged in frustration.

Settling at the bottom of the abyss, where the currents carried undertones of dangers, past and present.

“Shh…” she murmured to her husband. “She’s coming. Just be quiet.”

“Raquel. Wake up, sweetheart.”

“It’s okay,” she told him, tried to tell him. “I’ll keep you safe. We simply have to kill her first.”

Then she was gone, drifting from the sucking morass to a peaceful place where the darkness felt soft and never grew fangs. Where houses felt like homes and the walls were never spattered with blood. Where a person could fall in love and never fear what would happen next.

“Forever and always,” she heard Theo whisper from far, far away.

How sweet of him to lie.

And now, a message from your sponsor…

You ever feel like you have emotions bigger than your own, sensations you can’t truly explain, memories that seem like someone else’s? Maybe it’s a subject of family lore. Grandma Sally survived the famine of ’68, then gave birth to four sons who could eat like pigs and never gain a pound. Or Great-Uncle Mike died falling out of a tree, and none of us have been great at heights since.

Nature? Nurture? Grandma had a superior metabolism, and she passed those genes down to her descendants. Uncle Mike’s loved ones regarded trees with trepidation forever after and communicated that fear to their offspring.

Or could it be something more?

Let’s talk epigenetics.

I know you. You’re tired, but you can’t sleep. You’re trying to distract yourself, surfing social media, swilling a third, fourth, fifth glass of booze. Sometimes you want to scream for no reason, so you pop a doctor-prescribed antidepressant. Sometimes you want to hit someone for no reason, so you down a doctor-prescribed anti-anxiety med. Up, down, all around. Spinning, spinning, spinning.

But you’re still feeling emotions you can’t explain, experiencing snippets of thoughts that make no sense, having associations that, well, shouldn’t be your associations.

Bringing us back to: epigenetics!

Maybe there’s more to you than meets the eye, because there’s more to you than meets the eye.

Here we go. DNA is DNA. It contains the underlying code for building and maintaining every living organism. DNA sequences drive hair color, height, even future medical conditions. We can trace DNA, pass along DNA, and now we can analyze it on the molecular level, identifying markers, proteins, and changes to methyl groups that don’t alter the actual DNA sequence but impact how the DNA works.

Which is a very complicated way of saying yes, your ancestors’ traumas, memories, experiences can absolutely be passed down to you.

Case in point: lab rats and cherries.

Rats love cherries. Smell alone makes them come running. Thus, in a scientific study, rats were exposed to the scent of their beloved fruit, followed immediately by a mild electrical jolt. Soon enough, the rats froze in place every time they caught a waft of juicy sweetness. Basic conditioned response. Cherries equal pain.