Page 38 of Home Before Dark

It was thrilling, reading something forbidden. I finally understood why my classmates had been so giddy about stealing their older sisters’ copies ofFlowers in the Attic. But it was also deeply unsettling to see my parents’ names—to seemyname—in a book about things I had no memory of.

Even more disconcerting was how my father had turned me into a character that in no way resembled the real me, even though only four years separated us. I saw nothing of myself in the Book’s Maggie. I thought I was smart and capable and fearless. I picked up spiders andscrambled to the top of the jungle gym. The Maggie in the Book was shy and awkward. A weirdo loner. And it hurt knowing it was my own father who had portrayed me that way. Was that what he thought I was like? When he looked at me, did he see only a scared little girl? Did everyone?

Finishing the Book left me feeling slightly abused. I had been exploited, even though I didn’t quite understand that at the time. All I knew then was that I felt confused and humiliated and misrepresented.

Not to mention angry.

So fucking furious that my younger self didn’t know what to do with it. It took me weeks to finally confront my parents about it, during one of their custody exchanges in which I was handed off like a relay baton.

“You lied about me!” I shouted as I waved the Book in front of them. “Why would you do that?”

My mother told me the Book was something we didn’t discuss. My father gave me his scripted answer for the very first time.

“What happened, happened, Mags. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”

“But you did!” I cried. “The girl in this book isn’t me.”

“Of course it’s you,” my mother said, trying hard to end the conversation.

“But I’m nothing like her!” I’d started to cry then, which made me all the more humiliated. I’d wanted to be stronger in the face of their resistance. “I’m either the girl in this book, or I’m me. So which one is it?”

My parents refused to provide an answer. My mother left me with a kiss on the cheek, and my father took me out for ice cream. Defeated, I swallowed my anger, gulping it down like a bitter pill, thus setting the course for the rest of my adolescence. Silence from my mother, denial from my father, and me starting a yearslong secret search for more information.

A little of that nine-year-old’s anger returns as I flip through the Book, scanning passages I’ve long committed to memory.

“I really hate this book,” I say.

Dane gives me a curious look. “I’ve heard it’s good.”

“It’s not. Not really.”

That’s another aspect of the Book I find so frustrating—its inexplicable success. Critics weren’t kind, calling the writing pedestrian and the plot derivative. With reviews like that, it shouldn’t have become as big as it did. But it was something different in a nonfiction landscape that, at the time, had been dominated by books about getting rich through prayer, murder in Savannah, and barely contained Ebola outbreaks. As a result, it became one of those things people read because everyone else was reading it.

I continue to page through the Book, stopping cold when a two-sentence passage catches my eye.

“Maggie, there’s no one here.”

“There is!” she cried. “They’re all here! I told you they’d be mad!”

I slam the Book shut and drop it on the desk.

“You can have this, if you want,” I tell Dane. “In fact, you can take pretty much anything in this room. Not that it’s worth anything. I’m not sure there’s a market for household junk found in bogus haunted houses.”

There are two closets, one on each side of the room, their doors slanted to accommodate the vaulted ceiling. We each take one, Dane’s opening with a rusty creak.

“Nothing in here but suitcases,” he says.

I cross the room and peer over his shoulder. Sitting on the closet floor are two square cases. We drag them out of the closet and each open one. Inside Dane’s is a record player. Inside mine is an album collection. The record on top is a familiar title:The Sound of Music.

Seeing them gives me the same creeping sense of unease I felt last night when I realized my father hadn’t lied about leaving everythingbehind. I do an involuntary shimmy, trying to shake it away. Just because they exist doesn’t mean what my father wrote is true. I need to remember that. Baneberry Hall is likely filled with things mentioned in the Book.

Write what you know. My father’s favorite piece of advice.

“It’s junk,” I say as I stalk back to my closet. “We should toss it.”

Dane does the opposite and lifts the record player onto the desk. The case of records soon follows. “We should give it a spin,” he says while sorting through the albums. “Showtunes or, uh, showtunes?”

“I prefer silence,” I say, an edge to my voice.

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