“The doctors told me not to add stress to your life,” she says. “They said the fire might have triggered the headaches, whether it was smoke inhalation or—or fear,” she finishes lamely.
“I’m not a child,” I say. “I can be trusted to know basic information about our family. All summer I’ve been working to remember my accident, and what happened right before. Why not tell me, Mummy?”
“I did tell you. Two years ago. I told you over and over, but you never remembered it the next day. And when I talked to the doctor, he said I shouldn’t keep upsetting you that way, shouldn’t keep pushing you.”
“You live with me!” I cry. “Don’t you have any faith in your own judgment over that of some doctor who barely knows me?”
“He’s an expert.”
“What makes you think I’d want my whole extended family keeping secrets from me—even the twins, even Will and Taft, for God’s sake—rather than know what happened? What makes you think I am so fragile I can’t even know simple facts?”
“You seem that fragile to me,” says Mummy. “And to be honest, I haven’t been sure I could handle your reaction.”
“You can’t even imagine how insulting that is.”
“I love you,” she says.
I can’t look at her pitying, self-justifying face any longer.
74
MIRREN IS IN my room when I open the door. She is sitting at my desk with her hand on my laptop.
“I wonder if I could read the emails you sent me last year,” she says. “Do you have them on your computer?”
“Yeah.”
“I never read them,” she says. “At the start of the summer I pretended I did, but I never even opened them.”
“Why not?”
“I just didn’t,” she says. “I thought it didn’t matter, but now I think it does. And look!” She makes her voice light. “I even left the house to do it!”
I swallow as much anger as I can. “I understand not writing back, but why wouldn’t you even read my emails?”
“I know,” Mirren says. “It sucks and I’m a horrible wench. Please, will you let me read them now?”
I open the laptop. Do a search and find all the notes addressed to her.
There are twenty-eight. I read over her shoulder. Most of them are charming, darling emails from a person supposedly without headaches.
Mirren!
Tomorrow I leave for Europe with my cheating father, who is, as you know, also deeply boring. Wish me luck and know that I wish I were spending the summer on Beechwood with you. And Johnny. And even Gat.
I know, I know. I should be over it.
I am over it.
I am.
Off to Marbella to meet attractive Spanish boys, so there.
I wonder if I can make Dad eat the most disgusting foods of every country we visit, as penance for his running off to Colorado.
I bet I can. If he really loves me, he will eat frogs and kidneys and chocolate-covered ants.
/Cadence
THAT’S HOW MOST of them go. But a few of the emails are neither charming nor darling. Those ones are pitiful and true.
Mirren.
Vermont winter. Dark, dark.
Mummy keeps looking at me while I sleep.
My head hurts all the time. I don’t know what to do to make it stop. The pills don’t work. Someone is splitting through the top of my head with an axe, a messy axe that won’t make a clean cut through my skull. Whoever wields it has to hack away at my head, coming down over and over, but not always right in the same place. I have multiple wounds.
I dream sometimes that the person wielding the axe is Granddad.
Other times, the person is me.
Other times, the person is Gat.
Sorry to sound crazy. My hands are shaky as I type this and the screen is too bright.
I want to die, sometimes, my head hurts so much. I keep writing you all my brightest thoughts but I never say the dark ones, even though I think them all the time. So I am saying them now. Even if you do not answer, I will know somebody heard them, and that, at least, is something.
/Cadence
WE READ ALL twenty-eight emails. When she is finished, Mirren kisses me on the cheek. “I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”
Then she is gone.
75
I BRING MY laptop to the bed and create a document. I take down my graph-paper notes and begin typing those and all my new memories, fast and with a thousand errors. I fill in gaps with guesses where I don’t have actual recall.
The Sinclair Center for Socialization and Snacks.
You won’t see that boyfriend of yours again.
He wants me to stay the hell away from you.
We adore Windemere, don’t we, Cady?
Aunt Carrie, crying in Johnny’s Windbreaker.
Gat throwing balls for the dogs on the tennis court.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
The dogs.
The fucking dogs.
Fatima and Prince Philip.
The goldens died in that fire.
I know it now, and it is my fault. They were such naughty dogs, not like Bosh, Grendel, and Poppy, whom Mummy trained. Fatima and Prince Philip ate starfish on the shore, then vomited them up in the living room. They shook water from their shaggy fur, snarfled people’s picnic lunches, chewed Frisbees into hunks of unusable plastic. They loved tennis balls and would go down to the court and slime any that had been left around. They would not sit when told. They begged at the table.
When the fire caught, the dogs were in one of the guest bedrooms. Granddad often closed them in upstairs while Clairmont was empty, or at night. That way they wouldn’t eat people’s boots or howl at the screen door.
Granddad had shut them up before he left the island.
And we hadn’t thought of them.
I had killed those dogs. It was I who lived with dogs, I who knew where Prince Philip and Fatima slept. The rest of the Liars didn’t think about the goldens—not very much, anyway. Not like I did.
They had burned to death. How could I have forgotten them like that? How could I have been so wrapped up in my own stupid criminal exercise, the thrill of it, my own anger at the aunties and Granddad—
Fatima and Prince Philip, burning. Sniffing at the hot door, breathing in smoke, wagging their tails hopefully, waiting for someone to come and get them, barking.
What a horrible death for those poor, dear, naughty dogs.
76
I RUN OUT of Windemere. It is dark out now, nearly time for supper. My feelings leak out my eyes, crumpling my face, heave through my frame as I imagine the dogs, hoping for a rescue, staring at the door as the smoke billows in.