“Here, catch!” Tatum scrambled in front of them, tossing them one of the ballgowns from the elimination ceremonies. It soared heavily through the ground and landed at their feet, gas fumes wafting up into their nostrils.
Linda set Charity onto the ground and lifted the dress. Charity moved backward on hands and her one good leg, away. Linda didn’t have time to think about what might happen. She wadded the dress and tossed it. Marion was close enough that the dress snagged on her ridged limb.
“There’s no goddamn fire, Tatum!” Linda yelled.
She dragged Charity, panting hard, as Marion closed in.
“We have to get inside,” Charity wheezed.
“Fuck. Shit.” Tatum pulled a lighter from his pocket. “Hey, Deja! I quit!” He ran, screaming, and as he neared Marion, readying himself to jump, flame flickering in his hand, Marion raised her trunk of a foot and brought it down on top of him. The flame died as Tatum’s bones broke with a sickening crunch, his guts flowing out in all directions like a squashed roach.
Deja let out an unexpected cry.
Linda glanced across the vast expanse of yard. The woods seemed closer to the manor with each minute. And who was to say Marion wouldn’t brute her way indoors? But Linda followed Charity’s request. It was the best she could do.
Marion groaned, and though Linda didn’t look back, she smelled the reek of gas and old wounds and fresh bark and rotting flesh. A lighter clicked in the background. A great whoosh. Linda dove, pushing Charity farther into the grass. Marion lunged with one final shriek. The rip of tearing clothes preceded an amalgamation of screaming, then groaning, then fire erupting. Linda dared to turn, still scurrying backward: Marion’s hands were wrapped around Deja’s body, shredding with abandon as Deja clung to the fiery gown with one hand and to Marion’s thick neck with her other. Marion freed herself from Deja and tossed her out, but it was too late. The fire had caught on Marion’s woody exterior, and as they watched, she burst into flame.
Deja rolled away, extinguishing the flames engulfing her own body, then lay, broken and bleeding. Marion’s body stilled as she shrieked, the flames licking her from crown to toe. She burned black, the radiating heat warming Linda in the chill air. Charity collapsed. Sweat beaded on her forehead from the heat and the infection. When Linda pressed the back of her palm against the skin there, it burned to the touch.
“Deja, please help me,” Linda called out. But Deja was worse off than Linda had realized. She could barely move from the burns that marred her body. What wasn’t burnt, leaked blood from gashes Marion had inflicted. Linda crawled to Deja as Marion’s trunk broke down, small chunks falling into a pile of coals and ash.
“I’ll patch you up,” Linda said. “You’ll be good as new.”
But Linda knew it was a lie even as she spun it.
Deja’s laugh became a cough that wracked her fragile body.
“It’s too late for me, but you… You can get away from them,” Deja said. And Linda understood Deja didn’t mean from the woods or the haunted house, but from the wounds of her family.
“I’ll keep them at bay,” Deja said, “if you sew me into a tree.”
Linda pulled back, a wave of horror stirring through her. “But you tried to burn down the woods. Now you want me to make you one of them?”
“I want you to let me destroy them from the inside out,” Deja said.
Linda glanced back at her girlfriend shaking in the dying grass.
“And you’ll keep them from killing us?”
Deja tried to lift her hands only to yelp and let them drop. “Cross my wicked heart.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Linda
The moments Linda remembered best from childhood: her father’s vodka breath when he picked her up, her father’s open mouth as he drunkenly dozed on the couch each night, her father’s inconsistent anger, her mother’s tears behind a closed bathroom door. As a little girl, she never knew whether an errant word from her might set him off, and so she remained, for the most part, silent. She wanted to stick up for herself, for her mother, for their lives, but she was seven years old, and she quickly learned she was not allowed, by the laws of parenthood, to fight back against her father’s injustices. Childhood demanded she accept what she had been given or face the loud whip of a belt against her bare ass. Childhood demanded she ignore her mother’s dark circles or else call the wrath of her father’s insults down upon them both. She was “a smart aleck,” “nosy bones,” or even, when she tried to wrap her arms around her mother’s leg, trying with all the power of her thoughts to protect the woman, “a rotten brown-noser.”
Other days, her father was precious to her. His terrible moods made her all the more thankful for his loving ones, and so when he offered to toss a ball with her in the front yard, or play diving games with her in the pool, or teach her a poker game that held all the allure of adult things, she rushed to his side and soaked up every kind word he offered, like parched dirt in a summer shower. Some days, she even thought she might love him the most, out of her two parents. The way her love for him ebbed then surged couldn’t compete with the steady admiration and adoration she held for her mother and her sister.
As she grew old enough to know better, she understood that other children’s parents didn’t drink until they couldn’t walk or talk. They didn’t drink until they could no longer understand language itself. Her father’s drink infused him with irritation; he became more frustrated with the conversation that passed around him among Linda, her mother, and her sister. They were always forced to contend with his needless confusion. As a result, their conversations were muddled with constant re-explanations, responses to his repeated what’s, and angry sighs from every mouth. The family grew apart more and more, unable to focus on anything but the man of the house and his constant need for attention, for care, for pity. If they had allowed each other to speak their emotions, they would have, all of them, fallen to pieces. And who would have cared for the man who fell down the stairs and broke his arm one sloppy morning?
During her turbulent adolescence, Linda needed more than anything to be wrapped in the loving arms of family and assured that the roiling fear and anger and sadness inside her would calm, would become manageable. She needed more than anything for her family to notice her daily breakdowns and get her help. She needed something, anything, to lead her through the rage that descended upon her without warning.
Instead, she was advised to suck up her emotions and to let go of what couldn’t possibly be that bad, considering her age. She was ignored for the sake of her father’s errant moods, which were assigned more importance than hers for no reason but that he had earned them, with his years and the priority that all men were given over girls.
They had one cell phone, and it was her parents, an early flip-phone model, thin and fragile. Her mother planned the camping trip. When Linda’s mother and father were younger, they had enjoyed similar camping trips. They had hiked. He drank as much then, too, but it didn’t weigh on his body as it did by the time he became a father. Linda’s mother wanted to bring the phone along, in case of emergency; motherhood had made her more cautious. But Linda’s father worried about the phone’s fragility. Linda heard them arguing as they packed for the trip.
“We’re going to the top of a mountain, Sam,” she said.
“Yeah, and we’ve done it before. Before cell phones. Before there were even as many rangers stationed about. We’re leaving the phone,” he said.
“What if something happens to one of us?” Linda’s mother asked.
“We’re going to be fine. You’re being paranoid.”
But Linda understood the worry. What if something happened to her father, to Sam? What if he fell down a mountain as he had fallen down the stairs? At the thought, Linda couldn’t help but smile. The smile disturbed her, and she dropped it from her face. She closed herself in her room. She had wished, for a moment, for her father’s death. She examined the emotion, a coping mechanism she taught to herself. If her father died, she would be sad. She would remember the good things he had done. She would remember the bad. She would cry at his funeral. She would be relieved. She could process his memory in a way that she failed to process during the living nightmare of his daily presence.
Linda took a walk through the woods that surrounded their house. She tried not to let herself cry, but she couldn’t help it. She navigated the trails, despite the hazy vision caused by a deluge of tears. She pushed through great walloping sobs. She was full of hormones, and she understood that, but she also understood that her mother and her sister were past their adolescence and still they cried for her father. If he died, they could move on, the three of them, and live a happy life. Her mother would never leave him because of her own medical issues and her subsequent inability to work, but if he was dead, she’d have no choice, and her daughters could take care of her. She never discussed her medical issues openly, but even as a child, Linda understood them to be of a mental variety that required extensive medication. Linda’s mother had birthed herself a cage, with daughter-shaped bars and a lock shaped like a husband who would never, ever open up and set her free.
On the trail, Linda stopped in her tracks. She’d come to a patch of bright green, three-leafed, woody plants. She blinked her tears away and knelt in front of them. When she was little, she had picked a bouquet of these flowers and these plants, her first time encountering them, and brought them inside to her father. He had yelled when he saw them. Was she trying to kill him? he asked. Her mother heard the commotion and came to explain to the young Linda, these were poison ivy. Leaves of three, let it be. Linda’s father was allergic. Linda might be allergic, too, though the allergy had spared Linda’s mother and sister. Linda’s mother took the bouquet and threw the whole thing far away in the yard.
Linda had stumbled into the plant several times throughout her childhood. She had been upset to discover she shared her father’s allergy. Often, when she accidentally encountered the plant, she developed such an intense rash all over her arms, legs, and face, that she was forced to stay home from school.
On the trail, Linda thanked a God she didn’t believe in that she hadn’t stepped into the poison ivy. She took a deep breath. She moved on down the trail.
Later, on her way up the mountain with her family, she noted the prevalence of poison ivy over the trails they walked. She remembered her father’s fear. He had accused her as a child of trying to kill him when she had wanted only to impress him. Now, she felt a thing growing inside her that may have been planted all those years ago, a dark urge in her belly. She did want to kill him. More than anything. As she watched him struggle, panting in his ill health, up the side of the mountain, she wanted him to meet his end.
Once they set up camp, Linda’s mother began cooking hot dogs and burgers over the campfire Linda’s sister built. Linda excused herself to a bathroom trip in the brush and took with her gloves, a shovel, and a plastic bag. She gathered as many bunches of poison ivy as she could within a period that wouldn’t arouse questions about her whereabouts. She placed them in the bag and tied it. She stomped on it until she was sure the poison ivy had been crushed. She returned to the campfire, to her father dozing drunk in his camp chair while her mother finished cooking. Linda’s mother finished the food and asked Linda to shake her father awake.
