Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Iwas dreaming of my 8th grade graduation trip. We went skiing. I hated skiing, but I loved sitting by fireplaces reading books, so while my classmates were all mastering the bunny hill and making out on the ski lift, I was curled up in the corner of the lodge reading a stolen and very forbidden copy of Flowers in the Attic. It was just getting good, and by good, I mean awful, when someone sat down in the comfy chair next to mine. Black shoes were kicked up on the ottoman next to my Otto the Snowman Socks.

“Hello, Poppy.”

“Ronan!” I smiled at him. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re here.” He shrugged beneath the fine white fabric of his shirt. He had that ‘I’ve been working hard’ look about him that was one of my favorite looks. His hair fell down over his eyes, and he swept it up off his face.

“You’re handsome,” I told him.

“I know. I fuck so many women.”

“You don’t fuck me.”

“Because you’re a little girl.”

“I liked it when you kissed me.”

“That won’t happen again,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t make a habit of kissing girls like you.”

Girls like me.

“The fire is big,” he said.

“I know. I like it.” I turned to look at the fireplace, but it was cold. Empty. But the smell of smoke was still sharp in the air. “What’s happening?” I asked Ronan.

“Wake up, little girl!” He leaned forward, his nose almost brushing mine. “Wake up!”

The smoke was real. And I went from waking and baffled to up and out of my bed in a heart beat. The air was hazy with smoke coming in my cracked open French doors.

I hung my head, limp with relief. Zilla must still be out there with the fire. I crossed the room and snapped back the curtain. I pushed open the French door the rest of the way and realized it wasn’t just a fire in the fire pit. My whole back yard was on fire. Literally on fire. Yellow flames engulfed the fence around my shower, the bushes at the deep end of the pool were incinerated.

I raced down the hallway and pounded on the door of my sister’s room. There was no answer, so I ran in and found her, sleeping like she always did, kitty corner across the bed, the sheets in a knot around her legs.

“Zilla!”

She woke up with a start. “What? What’s . . .”

“You didn’t put the fire out. We have to go.”

“Fire?” Her hair was sticking up in a wild rooster tail over the back of her head, and I wanted to kill her and hug her all at the same time.

How, I wondered, could she do this to me?

I grabbed her by the wrist like she was a little girl and yanked her out of the bed. Furious and scared.

“Oh my god,” she said. “That’s smoke.”

“Yeah, Zilla. You didn’t put out the fire.”

“I did. I swear . . . Poppy, listen. I did. I put it out.”

“Clearly not.” We ran down the stairs into the kitchen. Outside the sliding glass doors, it was a wall of flame. Red and orange, licking at the bright black sky. It was so hot in the kitchen, smoke thick at the ceiling and getting thicker every minute.

And loud. So loud. I remembered the fire in our childhood home, screaming at Zilla but her not hearing me over the sounds of the fire eating the wood of the house we grew up in.

It was all of that. Again.

“Holy shit,” Zilla said, beside me. “I swear I did not do this.”

Smoke was coming in through the seam in the patio doors, and I had the feeling that the glass wasn’t going to stand all that heat, just as it cracked in one huge catastrophic fission from one corner to the other.

I grabbed my phone from the counter where I charged it every night.

“Go!” I shouted at my sister just as the sound of the house alarm could be heard over the roar of the fire outside and my own internal screaming.

“Poppy?” It was Theo coming in the front door.

Oh my god. The relief was astounding.

“We’re here!” I shouted and pushed my sister towards the front door. “We’re okay!”

“I called 911!” he shouted. He was standing in the doorway, wearing grey sweatpants and a t-shirt and nothing else. He didn’t even have shoes on. “You need to get out of this house!”

I followed Zilla out the door, and Theo grabbed my elbow. “Is there anything you need to grab? Documents? Anything important?”

In case the house burned down before fire trucks could get here. This house had not a single thing in it that I cared about. Not a single thing. I thought of that banker’s box from the lawyer, but it was just paperwork.

“No,” I told him.

He nodded, like he understood and put his arm over my shoulder, and we ran out into the lane. It felt like years, but it was probably only a few minutes before we heard the sirens.

“Poppy,” Zilla said. She stood in front of me with red-rimmed eyes and wild hair. “I swear to you, I put out the fire.”

Some things are worth the consequences.She said that earlier tonight. As well as all the shit about Caroline and how the house was a prison.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked, and she didn’t sound angry. She sounded hurt. She looked hurt.

“I don’t know what to believe,” I told her honestly. Tears from the smoke and from my baffled heart and our bruised past welled up in my eyes.

Zilla licked her lips, tears in her eyes too. “I know . . . I mean, I guess I understand that I deserve that in some capacity. But you know I’m good right now. I’m on my meds. I’m stable. I’m going to fucking nursing school, Pops. I’m not a person who burns down houses anymore.”

The sirens were no longer in the distance. They were deafening as the trucks made their way into my little cul-de-sac. Theo herded us out of the way.

“They’ll have questions for you,” he said to me.

“I don’t have any answers.”

Over my shoulder his arm tightened. A strange hug, and I leaned into him. A strange hug back. And then he stepped forward to go talk to the firefighters pouring out of the trucks, and I was so grateful that he was going to answer questions, because I was terrified of the answers I had.

“Poppy?” Ronan’s accent pulled me away from my sister. I took a step to the side to find him standing in the shadows. His face all pale angles in the gloom.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, astounded to see him. He was dressed in a dark overcoat with black gloves on his hands. He smelled of smoke, though I imagine the whole neighborhood did.

“I heard the sirens.”

“It’s four in the morning.”

He didn’t answer. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. I’m—” I stepped towards him, and he eased deeper into the shadows, his eyes flicking over my shoulder. I turned and saw Theo standing there. Nondescript but steady Theo with all the worry in his eyes.

What was wrong with me that my internal compass led me constantly to the cruel man in the shadows instead of the steadfast man right there in front of me?

“Poppy,” Theo said. “The fire chief has some questions for you.”

“Yeah. I’m coming.” I turned but Ronan was gone.

But his words from earlier remained.

Don’t trust anyone.

And why was he here? So conveniently at 4 am?

The sun was coming up over the hill behind me when the fire was finally out. It had spread to the kitchen, and the investigators were combing through the wreckage.

“Do you have some place to go?” The fire chief asked me. “We won’t have answers until later today, and you’ve been standing out here for hours.”

“We can go to my apartment,” Zilla said.

“That’s so far away.” And frankly that it was exactly what Zilla wanted me to do earlier in the night did nothing to ease my fear that she’d had something to do with this fire as a means to the end she craved. As long as her scales of justice were balanced, damn the consequences.

“You can stay at the cottage,” Theo said. “I’ll leave.”

“I’m not kicking you out of your house.”

“Then where will you go?” Zilla asked.

“A hotel in town,” I said. “I need to be close in case the fire chief has more questions.”

“That’s why god created cell phones,” Zilla said.

“Please, Zilla,” I said in a low murmur.

“I’ll go with you—”

I shook my head, and she didn’t fight me. Which actually only made me more worried she had a guilty conscience.

Why would she keep the fire going and then go to sleep? She’s homicidal. Not suicidal. And, I really didn’t think she wanted me hurt in any way. She just wanted me free of the senator and his world.

But when Zilla was in justice mode she didn’t always connect the dots. She acted on instinct and maybe . . . maybe her instincts just led her to this outrageous and dangerous action.

“Just go,” I told her. “Go home. I’ll be in touch.”

“Pops?” she breathed, and I heard all her regret. All her sorrow. But I could not manage it on top of my own.

Her car was in the long driveway, and I stood in the road until she drove by, her hand lifted and pressed to the glass.

“Poppy?” It was Theo.

“You’ve been so good to me tonight, Theo. Head on home, would you?”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to stay at a hotel.”

“I’ll drive you.”

I shook my head. “I think I need the walk.”

And after giving my cell phone information to absolutely everyone who needed it, I turned and walked to the end of my cul de sac, onto the small trail through the woods, up over the hill. On the other side, I broke through the treeline into the tall grass, and to my shock, I saw someone coming down the hill from the Constantine Compound. A woman. And when she saw me, she started running.

The sob I’d been holding in burst out of my chest, and I went running to meet her.

Caroline threw her arms around me and absorbed my impact.

“Ronan just told me,” she said. She was in silk pajamas with an overcoat thrown over her shoulders. Her feet were stuffed into Hunter boots. I saw in my mind what must have happened. She came downstairs for coffee and the newspaper only to find Ronan there, unreadable with news of the fire.

And she came running.

This was the part of Caroline that Zilla never understood. Never got to see.

“Are you all right?” she asked, cupping my face.

“Fine. We got out before the fire spread to the house.”

“We?”

“Zilla was there.”

“Where is she now?”

“I sent her back to the city. She . . .” I wasn’t going to put my suspicion into words. And with one look at Caroline’s face I saw that she understood.

“Do you know that for sure?”

“No,” I said quickly. And even managing to laugh, like—oh my god, how silly we are to even be talking about this.

“But it does feel like . . . something she might do?”

To that I had no answer, and the weight of the evening rested on my neck and on my heart. I hung my head.

“Okay. You’re here.” She turned us towards the compound, and together we started walking across the grass. “You’re safe. For as long as you need.”

There was coffeeand scrambled eggs. Granola and fresh fruit, but I couldn’t sit down.

“I smell like smoke,” I said, sniffing my hair.

“Of course. Denise will show you to your room,” Caroline said, squeezing me one last time. She’d had her arm around my shoulder the whole walk up the hill to the house, and she’d kept it there through the house. The support was wonderful.

But I hadn’t had so much in so long, it was almost too much.

I followed Denise through the house upstairs to the wing of guest rooms. She stopped in front of the furthest door. “This one is the most private,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“There are towels and a robe in the bathroom. Would you like me to send someone to get clothes?”

Everything at my house smelled like smoke. Or was ruined by the water from the hoses. I shook my head. “I’ll handle everything later.” That seemed like a good answer even though it was pure bullshit. Denise nodded and walked back down the hallway. Morning sunlight came in through the bay windows, illuminating everything.

The bedroom was cream and pale blue, the bed a raft of comforters and pillows. A monument to sleep. I pulled the blinds and the room went dark, and the exhaustion filled me up from my toes to the top of my head.

Shower. Shower and then sleep and then . . . well, whatever comes next, I suppose.

I washed my hair three times and scrubbed the top layer of skin off my body in a hope that I could get the smell off and the fear. The fear that my sister was coming unhinged again. Fear that Ronan had done this to scare me away. Fear. Fear. Fear.

What in the world would vanquish this fear? What mantra could I recite? What research could I do? How could I pluck this like a cancer right out of my head, so I could sleep? So I could plan and think of what to do next?

Part of me wanted to let Caroline handle this, the way she’d handled my life when it fell apart last time. But as soon as I thought it, put it into concrete terms, I recoiled.

I’d spent the last two years letting fear rule my life. Letting it shove me in corners and walk in the shadows hoping to be unnoticed. Not again. Not ever again.

If anyone was going to save me this time, it was me. It had to be.

Wrapped in a pink silk robe, my hair in a towel, I walked into the dark bedroom comforted slightly by my determination. I wasn’t sure how I would do any of this, but believing was half the battle. Or so I’d been told.

Perhaps it would all be easier once I got some sleep.

There was a quiet knock on the door and expecting Denise, I said, “Come in.”

Only to have the door slide open and reveal the one thing, the one person who could put a pin in all my bravery and who, at the same time, made me ache for the things I wanted to be brave enough for.

Ronan.