Page 82 of The Family Plot
“I’m not,” I admit. And at the relief that flashes across his face, I add, “Not right now, anyway. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Charlie repeats, an edge to his voice. “Well, good thing, Dolls. Because we’re minutes away from opening the house.” He pauses. “Literally and figuratively.”
He turns around, heading back the way he came. Tate sighs as he goes, dropping her eyes to my hand.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at Ruby’s embroidery, its words pressed to my thigh.
I try to exhale my frustration, forcing out a breath that’s hot and long. “Just something for the museum,” I say.
She tilts her head. “You’re displaying something? I’m surprisedyou even came down for this. Especially given…” She waves a hand, referencing the spot where Charlie just stood.
I stare at that spot as I answer. “I’m trying to say goodbye to Andy.”
But those words together—Andy;goodbye—sound like a foreign language.
“So you’re okay with the Honoring then?” she asks.
“What Honoring?”
“Oh. Just—it’s Charlie’s ‘grand finale.’ We’re doing a public Honoring for Andy. As a demonstration, kind of?”
I gape at her. Just the thought of that—something so personal becoming so performative—makes me sputter out an indignant chuckle. “Wow. Charlie’s thought of everything, huh?”
Tate crosses her arms, immediately protective. “Well, what did you think he meant by LighthouseMemorialMuseum?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. You’re right. With our family, what else would it be?” I look at the wooden hoop dangling from my hand. I tap it against my side like a silent tambourine. “I need to find a place for this.”
Tate nods, gaze still sharp. “I should go help Charlie.”
I take a final glance at the diorama—the last I’ll see of it before others see it, too—and as Tate walks away, a shudder of anger, or maybe just grief, passes through me. The Andy doll wears little white sneakers, the heels of which stick out from the dirt like something trying to grow.
Swallowing down the lump in my throat, I do a sweep of the rest of the foyer. Charlie’s leaned our stolen doors against the walls, using them as display areas for the old watercolors and sketches from Tate’s bedroom.Behind Closed Doors, he’s labeled the series.See what artist Tate Lighthouse created before anyone was watching.
On the table closest to me, a card reads,Murder documentaries, an essential element of Lorraine Lighthouse’s homeschool curriculum.Behind the card is a stack of DVDs, some whose spines are familiar to me, others I barely remember. On another card, on a different table, the typewritten font reads,Portrait of Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, namesake of Dahlia Lighthouse.Tate rendered the painting in black and white from the famous photo of Elizabeth: dark curls, dark brows, dark lips. As a kid, I used to stare at it until my eyes lost focus and the painting became a Rorschach test, all those black and white blobs swimming around until they rearranged to show me myself.
He’s displayed the other namesake paintings, too: Sharon in muted shades of gold; Charles in his baby chair, reaching for the only birthday cake he ever lived to see; Andrew in a suit and beard, frowning into the distance. “What a dweeb,” Andy once said about the Borden painting, and that single memory fills me with a longing so strong it hurts to breathe.
As I head into the living room, I pass a table with Dad’s hunting rifles, and nausea threatens to bowl me over. I have to distract myself with other exhibits until the feeling subsides.
For a while, I stand before the stubs of Honoring candles, used on each of our birthdays. Mom saved them, apparently, writing our name and age in black marker along the wax. Charlie has displayed them in chronological order, separate rows for each of our eighteen years. My cheek twitches at Andy’s—shorter than the rest, stopping two candles too soon.
There are stacks of newspapers, fanned out neatly along the coffee table in the living room, and there areLighthouse children murder reports, as assigned by Lorraine Lighthouse, on each of the end tables. Charlie has also displayed legal pads and pens, as if someone might be moved to write a report of their own. I recognize Andy’s sharp, angular handwriting on one of the piles of stapled papers, and I zip my eyes away.
Voices burble in from outside. The windows frame a view of people gathered on the lawn, and on the perimeter of the crowd, there’s a group of middle-aged women with their arms crossed, bouncing on their feet to stay warm.
Soon, they’ll be in our house.
I find an empty spot beside a heap of old Honoring calendars and place Ruby’s embroidery there. Using one of Charlie’s pads and pens, I write,A sixteenth birthday gift from Ruby Decker to Andy Lighthouse. It looks amateur compared to the typewritten labels. I glance at my hand, Charlie’s Sharpie mark still visible, despite how hard I’ve tried to wash it off. On my makeshift label, I add a line, a space, and a dot beneath the words, mimicking that sideways, lowercaseiof Charlie’s “trademark flair.”
“What did you just do?”
When I turn around, Charlie’s in the doorway, glowering at the embroidery from across the room. Walking toward it, he nudges me aside. Then he picks up the card I’ve hastily written and reads.
“What the fuck is this?” he finally says.
It’s a stronger reaction than I expected, even though I knew he’d be annoyed with me for disrupting his aesthetic. Still, I explain Ruby’s embroidery: how she loved Andy and he wouldn’t let her; how he refused this present the last night anyone saw him; how, when she spoke of the future she wanted for them—marriage, kids—he grew angry, grew cruel.
“He said to her,” I tell Charlie, “?‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ I didn’t know what that meant when she first told me, but now—” I blink back tears. “He must have been thinking about Dad. Worrying that Dad’s evil was something he inherited, and might inflict on someone else.”
