Page 58 of The Family Plot
She walks toward us, gaze brushing against the sketches taped to the wood. I shine the light on them so she can see them better, but it’s only a moment before she looks at us again. Her shoulders slump, like a person defeated.
“Tate didn’t draw these,” she says. “I did.”
fifteen
We’re stuck in arelay of glances—Tate to Charlie, Charlie to me, me to Tate—as silence stretches out from Mom’s strange confession. With four of us here, the passageway feels tighter, but no one moves to give themselves an extra inch. Even the dust seems frozen, suspended in the air, listening to us breathe.
As Mom views the sketches, a medley of emotions plays across her face: horror, guilt, pain. “This hallway,” she all but whispers. “It was a fairly common feature, back when the house was built, in homes of this style. The idea was to connect the master bedroom to the nursery, making it easier for parents to reach their children in the night. To soothe them. Feed them. Keep them safe.” She tries to smile, but her lips quiver. “My mother called it the Protection Passage.”
“Mom,” I say, not bothering to hide my impatience. “Why would you draw these pictures?”
She drags her gaze from the wall, settling it on me instead. “When we thought that Andy ran away,” she says after a while, “I couldn’t stop imagining all the ways he might die.”
A chill creeps over me, starting at my shoulder blades, crawling up my neck.
“I’d see him knifed down in some alleyway, or a man with a gun to his temple…”
She trails off, and I know she’s thinking of her parents, how the bullet smashed through her mother’s skull and hit the glass cabinet beside her, shattering their wedding china. It’s a story we’ve been told a million times, how afterward, once the bodies were gone, Mom had to gather the pieces of plates and bowls, their ivory details outlined in blood.
“And I thought,” she says, “I thought that if I got them down on paper—these awful images—then I could, I could ward against them somehow.”
Charlie snorts. “Ward against them?”
“I couldn’t stop drawing. Every day, another way he could die. Another way I saw him when I closed my eyes. And I think now that maybe I…” A tear slips down her cheek. Her voice becomes brittle. “Maybe the images wouldn’t stop because part of me knew he was dead.”
Shame flares in my cheeks. Part of me—all of me—should have known, too.
“I drew and I drew and he never came back, just like the note said. So I kept on drawing, and I put all the sketches in here. I couldn’t bear to have them lying out in the open. But I couldn’t bear to get rid of them either. They were wards. They were protection. But, no—they weren’t. I couldn’t protect him. He was already…”
Her shoulders shake with a sob.
“But Mom,” I say, “in all these sketches, you drew him as he actually died. With a head wound.” I pause, steeling myself against a wave of nausea. “How did you know?”
I expect her to say shejust knew, that she intuitively felt how Andy had died, just like I should have known he wasn’t out in some city; he was stuck beneath bugs and sludge.
But Charlie speaks first. “That’s not true,” he says. “Look.”
He points toward one of the sketches, and as I focus my light on it, I’m surprised to see he’s right. In this picture, Andy isn’t limp on the ground, bleeding from the head; he’s in a hospital bed, cheeks so sunken they look sucked in. And now I notice that in another, he’s crumpled in front of a car, and in another, he’s slumped against a wall, a knife protruding from his stomach.
My own stomach churns at these images—but I’m realizing that, ever since I first found them, I never fully took them in. My eyes skimmed along the pictures, clinging to only a few, where, yes, the wound appeared to be in Andy’s head. But there were so many others I’d skipped past, overwhelmed by the quantity. Even when I showed them to Tate and Charlie, I blurred my vision, keeping myself from seeing my brother dead.
“I did this to him,” Mom says, and now she’s pointing at the wall, eyes blazing with the guilt I saw just flickers of before. “It’s my fault Andy’s dead.”
The sentence stabs me—a hot, sharp wound in my chest. As Mom turns to us, I hold my phone low enough to keep from blinding her, but high enough to see how her brows squeeze together, how the creases around her mouth seem to deepen.
“It was karma—”
“This again,” Charlie grumbles.
“For the lie I told,” Mom finishes.
For a moment, there are only our shared glances, volleyed between me and Charlie and Tate before we return our attention to Mom.
“What lie?” Tate asks.
Mom dips her chin, staring at the floor. “My parents weren’t murdered,” she says, her voice as quiet as a match being struck. “They died of lung cancer.”
Everything inside me goes still. Tate’s mouth drops open. Charlie blows out a laugh.
