Page 79 of The Family Plot
“We were teenagers, too.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Dahlia.” Charlie drags his hand down his face, raking away his tears. “The islanders still want to see someone go down for the murders, and the only person left with any involvement is me. I trusted you with this, I shared it with you. And now you want to take it to Kraft, just hand him the evidence he’s hunting for so he can prove that his dad was right about us all along? That the Lighthouses are monsters?”
“It’s notus, it’s Dad, it’s—”
“Is that what you want for Andy?” Charlie presses. “For people to remember him like that, as someone who played a role in the Blackburn Killer’s crimes?”
Beside him, Mom sobs.
“Is that what you want?” Charlie repeats.
Of course it isn’t.
I’d hate for that to be my brother’s story, for people to view Andy’s murder as a punishment he earned. I can already hear the islanders, gleeful with what they think is justice:Well. He helped a killer. He got what he deserved.
My eyes drift to Mom, whose tears keep falling. Her gaze sinks to the floor, heavy with everything we’ve learned and lost. Among it all, I hope she recognizes this devastating truth: the roots she planted on Blackburn Island, grown from the seed of a single lie, have been rotting from the start.
“Dahlia?” Tate prompts.
But I don’t respond. Instead, I leave my family where they sit, huddled together, waiting for my answer. I hear them calling after me, but I don’t turn back.
Upstairs, I stand at the threshold of Andy’s room. I hesitate for only a moment before walking toward his beanbag chair. When I floponto it, the dust of our years apart billows around me, clouding a room, a boy, I once saw so clearly.
My whole life, I trusted him, trusted only him, and I thought he trusted me, too—enough to confide in me when someone was hurting him, when something made him feelcut up inside, like Charlie described.
And Charlie—if he’d just told someone, if he’d exposed Dad for the killer he was, then it never would have happened to Andy, who spent his too-brief life flashing in and out of frustration, digging his ax into trees as if, in wounding something else, he’d become woundless himself.
“Goddamnit, Charlie.”
I say it out loud, even though he’s too far to hear me, enshrouded by people who will ignore his sins to soothe his suffering. But as the words come out, I know they’re the wrong ones. I look at Andy’s bed, empty for a decade now. For so long, I made myself believe he’d return to this place, or at least to me, because the alternative was too agonizing to consider. But now, glancing at floorboards that will never again creak beneath his feet, I know: it isn’t Charlie I’m furious with. What Dad did—it would fuck with anyone’s mind, their sense of right and wrong. In truth, I’m furious with myself. For never noticing. For not being someone Andy thought he could tell. For refusing to go all those times he said we should leave. For keeping him here, stuck in the grip of a killer, until he was killed too.
Waves of sobs crash through me, torturous and tidal.
I assumed the chest beneath the shed was split by Andy’s ax, that he found the key somehow, went down to that room, but then was killed before he could show me what he’d uncovered. I assumed it because I couldn’t fathom a world in which he would choose to carry such crushing secrets alone. But I didn’t know him. Not his thoughts.Not his pain. Not the tenderest parts of his heart. All these years, I’ve been searching for, yearning for, a stranger.
Even worse: he harbored something so dark inside him, something no child should ever be near, let alone have to know.
But it’s not true, is it, that he didn’t try to tell me? He said our family wasunnatural, too decked out in death—only I never wanted to listen. I wanted only to exist in the bubble of us.
Charlie, Tate, Mom—they’re all downstairs, arms tangled up in one another, the space between them squeezed to almost nothing.It’s okay, I imagine Tate saying,we’re here, Charlie, we’re here.
And I’m in a dead boy’s room, the cool air my only company. I’ve got no one to hold me but myself.
twenty
The Lighthouse Memorial Museumis moving ahead as planned. Two rooms down, Charlie tells Tate to hurry up.
“I’m putting the finishing touches on everything right now,” he says. “So either you’re done or it doesn’t get displayed.”
“I’m going as fast as I can. I lost a lot of time yesterday.”
“Oh! I’m sorry if my emotional breakdown came at an inconvenient time for you. Next time, I’ll try to schedule it better.”
I can sense the smirk in his voice. How quickly he’s returned to his usual self: sarcastic, spitting out dark humor. It doesn’t even surprise me to hear that he’s joking. He’s the same person who chuckled through Honorings, using fake, high-pitched voices as he chanted the prayer. Only when Mom shot him a glance would he undo his smile, pretend to be reverential.
But it hits me now, like a fist to my diaphragm, that it must be how he copes. Andy hacked at trees; Charlie twists things into jokes. It steals my breath to think of it—that everything I know of Charlie might only be armor. Even his theatrics, his acting. And after what he’s been through, why wouldn’t he want to slip into someone else?
