Page 78 of A Heart So Haunted
I waited for two yellow eyes to appear, maybe his rows of serrated teeth and stretched lips, but nothing did.
I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was the silence that lured me in, spurred the worry in my mind like stoking a flame. Maybe it was because I couldn’t see him, if he was there, that encouraged me a little.
I neededhim.
“Hadrian, I messed up,” I whispered. It was easier, in the dark with my eyes to the wall, to talk as if he were listening. The pressure of his attention, the shifting of expressions, no longer applied. It was just me and the shadows and my trembling words. “I didn’t know. All this time, I didn’t know Emma was struggling. I ignored it because I was only worried aboutme. Why was I so selfish?”
Words began to tumble out. I told him about how my mother found out my father was cheating, and walking home in tears because I’d been bullied off the bus. I told him about the ants in the kitchen cabinets and the fear of food because eating the food meant it was gone, and once it was gone I couldn’t control it—and somehow, even now with a job and money, I couldn’t find a way to jump the hurdle. I told him about the nights I used to sit in my apartment and watch the cars drive by until the early morning hours while I picked at scabs along my arms.
I told him about the struggle of keeping friends because everyone wanted toknoweach other, but the last time I let someoneknowme, he used my own bones as picks and slowly, slowly removed the thick skin I’d carefully crafted. Until I was nothing but a raw, sensitive woman who had to figure out how to put herself back together, because people hurt people. I’d hurt people.
“And I ignored her. My own sister, I ignored her, Hadrian.” I cried into my pillow, eyes squeezed shut. “And I have this … this ugly thing in my chest that I can’t get rid of.”
So ugly, it was only a matter of time before Emma saw it, too.
Before she left me, just like everyone else had.
Chapter Sixteen
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The root split in two beneath my hand trowel. Sweat trickled down my neck, between my breasts, and settled in the band of my sports bra like an anxious memory. My knees were the only cool part of my body, and only because of the damp, fluffed dirt I kneeled in.
I despised tilling dirt, especially by hand. I really did. There was something about the idea of little beings—bugs and worms, specifically—crawling through the dirt just beneath my fingertips, slowly decreasing the distance between my body and theirs, that made my hair lift at my nape. It was one thing to rip open a bag of potting soil; another beast entirely to dig my fingers into the ground where maggots and beetles lived.
You’ll be here one day, it whispered.
The tornado of whispers wouldn’t shut up.
Images continued to flit before me. My mom, tossing another liquor bottle into a heap in the corner of the apartment. My father, asking why I smelled the way I did. Ivan, his nose an inch from mine, his brows slammed over his eyes as he asked, “How embarrassing can you be, Lan. Don’t embarrassmelike that again.”
Three words had circled like vultures when I’d found that closet. Touched the door. A sick feeling coiled in at the base of my throat. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought of it before—but if memories replayed in that room, they’d come from somewhere. I’d seen the attic, then, as what I assumed it used to be. What if those words were from him?
Don’t embarrass me, Lan.
Over and over they tumbled, morphing into a slew of snide remarks, ranging from Ivan’s voice to my mother’s, then to everything my fatherdidn’tsay.
What will other people think?
I don’t need you.
This is why everyone leaves you.
Mom’s voice hissed in my ear.Your father left me because of you, Landry.
If you didn’t exist he might still be here, Landry.
Tears clouded my vision. My hacks into the soil became restless, desperate, urgent. Last night, I felt it: the slow unraveling of my resolve. A realization that I didn’t want to accept.
Even now, the fettuccini noodles sat like curdled milk in my gut. Dirt flew like tiny needles, peppering my skin.
I grunted. The roots were chopped at the ends, but the stupid weed still stood tall, and suddenly I hated it, Ihatedthat weed. So I grabbed it by the neck and I ripped it from the earth. Part of the roots held strong. I threw it into the bushes beside the shed, then pushed my hands into the flower bed, grasped for every last tendril of root, and ripped it some more. I threw that away, too.
What was wrong with me?
I curled over the earth. I dug my gloved hands into it, squeezed it until the dirt pushed out around my fingers.
The first sob hurt. Worse than last night. For the briefest of moments, I wondered if Mom was right. Would things have been different if I wasn’t here? Better? Easier?
