Page 65 of Haven't Killed in Years
“The second you feel uncomfortable, if I’m not with you, do something about it,” said Gwen. “Don’t fight it. It’s not about pretending you don’t have these feelings. It’s about controlling them.”
“Okay,” said Natalie. “I’ll give it a try.”
Thirty-Three
Natalie
Natalie lived in atiny apartment in Malden, close enough to Gwen, but not too close. The main house had belonged to an elderly woman named Denise who never went outside. Her sons had converted the space above the detached garage into a studio apartment and rented it to Natalie to help cover costs. Natalie had only seen Denise a handful of times over the years. The last time had been when the paramedics wheeled her out on the stretcher—her body had finally given up on a mind that had packed it in long ago.
A week later, Denise’s sons had showed up with a truck and a dumpster and emptied the place in a weekend. They’d furnished the main house with cheap furniture and tacky decor and listed it on Airbnb. It wasn’t much of a vacation destination, but there was a wedding venue fifteen minutes away and they hoped it would drum up some demand, at least through the winter, when there wasn’t as much competition from the coast or the city.
Natalie pulled into her assigned parking spot behind the garage. She entered through the side door and flipped the light switch. Ittook her a moment to adjust to the latest tenant’s car, a white Suburban. After years of Denise’s rusty Windstar practically rotting into the concrete floor, the rotating cars still caught her off guard.
Natalie hiked the stairs to her apartment. She unlocked the door, slid her hand inside to turn on a lamp, and then killed the lights to the garage. She crossed the room to her nightstand and lifted a faded shoebox from the open shelf below the drawer. She placed it on the bed and sat down.
She lifted the top of the box to reveal her collection. Priceless items with no monetary value. Several receipts, a hair tie, a small jewelry tray from when Gwen used to actually finish her pottery. It was chipped and Gwen had tossed it in the trash can outside the sandwich shop after she’d noticed. Natalie pulled the sandwich card from her pocket, placed it inside the box, and closed the lid. She went to put it back on the shelf, but something caught her eye.
The shelf was dusty. She didn’t take the box out very often. She wasn’t a freak. She didn’t get the items and stare at them all day and night; she just liked to keep them. So the dust wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that the area free of dust was not a single rectangle in the shape of the box; it was as if two boxes slightly overlapped, the corners less dusty than the overlapping area. The box had moved.
Could the box have shifted on its own? Natalie heaved back on her bed, seeing if the motion would move the nightstand. The box didn’t move. She reached over and opened and closed the drawer above the shelf. She even tried pounding her fist on the top of the table, but the box didn’t budge. She sat back on the bed. Her fingertips gravitated to each other and she rubbed them together.
Had the box really moved? Even if it did, had she kicked the nightstand some night she couldn’t remember? Had she rolled over in her sleep? Was she taking the box out without realizing it?
This was supposed to be her safe space, but she couldn’t escape the idea that someone had moved that box.
Almost as if on cue, the garage door below her rumbled and squealed as it opened.
Natalie rose from her bed and went to the window. The curtains were parted enough for her to see the main house and driveway. The front door was open and she stared, waiting for a monster or an axe murderer—something to match her bubbling paranoia.
A stocky man emerged, pulling two suitcases behind him. He struggled to yank both suitcases down the stairs. Natalie watched him walk across the driveway until she couldn’t see him anymore. Then she could hear him below her, opening and closing the trunk of his SUV.
Natalie held her breath. A tiny part of her worried he was about to come up the stairs. This man who had maybe been in her apartment, moving her box. She tried to shake it off. It was in her head. She was struggling with the Airbnb and all the strangers it put in her own backyard. She tried to ignore them, but some were loud—sometimes they would fight, sometimes the opposite. It was so easy to watch from her window.
“Tom!” a woman yelled.
Natalie looked back at the house. The woman stepped outside with two full grocery bags. The man appeared again from the garage and grabbed them. Ten minutes later, the house was locked and their SUV pulled out of the driveway.
The house was quiet for several days, but the next weekend, another couple showed up. On the second night, Natalie watched the woman, intoxicated after presumably attending a wedding, still in a beautiful dress, show the man something on her phone and then slap him across the face. He ripped the phone out of her hand, shoved herto the floor, and then dropped it in the toilet. It was tense and Natalie worried things would escalate. She hated violence. It reminded her what she was capable of.
Eventually the couple went to sleep, the woman in the bed, the man somewhere else. Natalie went to her fridge and took out a cucumber. She crept down the stairs into the garage and checked to see if their car was unlocked. It was, and she slipped the cucumber under the passenger seat. It would go unnoticed until it started to rot. The smell would intensify, torturing them until they found it.
Natalie crawled back into bed and reached for her journal. The idea had just come to her. It was harmless—for them anyway. For her, it was dangerous. She promised herself she wouldn’t do anything like that again.
After she wrote a few paragraphs about the couple and the cucumber, she turned the page to write about Gwen. There wasn’t much to note that day, but that was okay—that was safe. She needed to stop watching the people in that house. She needed to focus on Gwen. Natalie could feel it. She’d been saying it for years, but this time she meant it; she was sure of it. She was almost ready to approach her.
Thirty-Four
Seventeen years ago
Natalie had never feltso good about getting in trouble before. She missed a lot of afternoon recess and almost always lost her TV time, but it never went much beyond that. Maybe she reacted too quickly, maybe unnecessarily at times, but it was working and she wasn’t going to take any risks.
Natalie stuck to Gwen like glue. Sometimes she worried that she was annoying Gwen, being too much of a burden, but it had been more than a year since they’d become roommates and Natalie was starting to think the dependence might be mutual.
Gwen never hung out with anyone else; it wasn’t like she was dragging Natalie along out of some sense of obligation. Gwen had a special way about her. Natalie never felt like a charity case. She never sensed any pity. Gwen was confident. There wasn’t anything wrong with Natalie, but she had never been taught how to deal with the world. Everything Gwen said was the opposite of anything anyone had ever told her before, and Natalie had completely bought in.
This place wasn’t so bad. Compared to some of the other kids,Natalie was almost normal. She didn’t feel like she was walking around with a big sign that saidfreakover her head. They were all freaks; it was implied. The “schooling” was way easier than a traditional classroom and she enjoyed not having to think she was stupid every day.
Gwen and Natalie talked most nights until an attendant would pound on the glass and tell them to be quiet or they would be separated.
