“I never did it,” said Savannah. “I just thought about it, but it was so cold out there, on the street, and I was bleeding, and I felt really dizzy, so then I thought, to hell with it, and I knocked on your door, and I felt quite faint, and then … well, then you were both so nice to me. So very, very nice. It was strange.”
They were so kind and loving and welcoming. They treated her as if she were a daughter returning home. She was fed and bathed and put to bed, and because they treated her like a girl in need of help, she became a girl in need of help, and another girl’s story from a documentary about domestic violence slid into her memory and became the truth.
“But why?” said Joy. “Why would you want to throw a brick through our window? What did we ever do to you? I don’t understand.”
She’d put on a little weight since Savannah had begun feeding her. So had Stan. There had been pleasure in watching their faces smooth out as Savannah increased their calorie intake. She was like the wicked witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” fattening them
up before she ate them.
“I just hated this house so much,” said Savannah. “I hated all of you so much.”
Joy gasped in surprised pain at that, as if she’d burned herself.
“We don’t need to hear this,” said Stan.
“Be quiet, Stan, we do so need to hear it,” said Joy fiercely.
She was so tiny, but she could instantly quell that giant man with her quick, snippy remarks. Savannah found her inspirational. She already knew that she would keep some of her speech patterns for future use: What the heck? Oh my word! Heavens to Betsy!
“Explain it to me,” Joy said to her. “Start from the beginning.”
Savannah took a breath. Was it even possible to untangle the multitude of memories that had led to this particular moment in this bedroom?
“I was the one who bought the raffle ticket,” she said. That was the very beginning, if she threaded her way back to the start.
“Raffle ticket?” Joy frowned. “You mean the ticket for the free private lesson? The one Harry’s father, your father, won?”
“I gave it to him for Father’s Day,” said Savannah. “I bought it at a shopping center with my own money. My brother said, ‘That’s a stupid present.’ You would think when the ticket won my father might have given me the private tennis lesson, not my brother. Imagine that. Harry might never have picked up a racquet if I hadn’t bought that ticket.”
“Do you blame your parents’ divorce on us?” asked Joy. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“We’ve heard enough. You need to leave,” said Stan. “You lied to Troy. About me.”
People made accusations of lying with such triumph: as if pointing out a lie won the game, as if you’d just shatter with the shame of it, as if they’d never lied themselves, as if people didn’t lie all the time, to themselves, to everyone.
“Did I?” said Savannah archly. It was always possible to plant doubt. Most men carried the guilt of their gender. You just had to apply a tiny flame to the kindling. She’d seen the terror fly across his face when she walked around the house in nothing but her towel. He felt compromised the moment he looked at her.
“Stop this!” shouted Stan. A woman’s lie could terrify but so could a man’s shout. It made her want to hunker down and put her hands over her ears.
She pressed on. “You remember what you said to me?”
He’d never said a single inappropriate word, he’d been unfailingly kind, he’d been nearly as fatherly as Joy had been motherly, but Stan’s fatherliness was a flimsy facade Savannah could smash with ease, not with a brick but with a lie, which was why she had to do exactly that, to prove it wasn’t real. Look how easily she’d flipped him from affection to hatred. Love was never real no matter how authentic it seemed.
She said, “You remember what you asked me to do?”
(Not him, but another man, not her, but another girl. There was another girl’s awful truth at the heart of her awful lie.)
He loomed over her, savage with rage. “Stop this, stop this, stop this!”
Chapter 42
NOW
“Stop this, stop this, stop this!”
Stop what? Caro Azinovic was one hundred percent positive those were the words a man—it had sounded like Stan Delaney—shouted over and over on a coolish night last spring. Caro had been dragging her yellow “glass and plastics” bin to the curb, and she’d heard the shouting over the rattle and scrape of her bin and stopped in her tracks, a little shocked.
She didn’t know what had suddenly made her think of that night now, all these months later, as she carried a vase of dead tulips from her dining room into her kitchen.