Chapter 23: Out of Reach

The next Friday, Hannah picked Eliana up at seven, with the heater on full and the windshield wipers going against the snow.

She was wearing gloves on the wheel. Thin gray ones, the kind with grips on the palms. She had never driven in gloves before. Eliana noticed and didn’t say anything.

For a few blocks neither of them talked. The vanilla tree swung from the mirror. Hannah turned the radio up for a song she liked, then down again halfway through.

“Can I ask you something?” Hannah said. “And don’t do the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you answer a different question.” Hannah kept her eyes on the road. “You’re really good at it. I used to think it was cute.”

Eliana’s thumb found the cap of her pen in her coat pocket.

“Okay,” she said.

“Why do you keep telling your mom you’re at my house?”

The wipers went back and forth twice.

“Because she wouldn’t believe anywhere else,” Eliana said.

Hannah let out a breath through her nose. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s true.”

“I know. That’s what’s annoying about it.” Hannah slowed for a light and sat there with both gloved hands on the wheel. “I would’ve covered for you. I’ve been covering for you since we were twelve. You just had to tell me first. Instead I found out from Tessa. On the steps. In front of everybody.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.” The light turned green. Hannah didn’t move for a second. “That’s not really the part I’m asking about.”

Eliana looked at her hands in her lap. She could have said I was with Lexie, which Hannah already knew. She could have said it’s complicated, which was worse than saying nothing.

She didn’t say anything.

Hannah drove. After a while she reached over and turned the radio back up.

“Lexie’s coming tonight, by the way,” she said, lighter, the way she said things when she had decided to stop asking. “I texted her like four times.”

“She said yes?”

“She said fine.” Hannah almost smiled. “I’m counting it.”

Melanie’s house came up at the end of the cul-de-sac, every window lit yellow against the snow. Hannah parked, turned off the engine, and sat there a moment with her gloves still on the wheel.

“For the record,” she said, without looking over, “I still would.”

“Would what?”

“Cover for you.” She opened her door. “Come on. They started without us.”

Melanie’s living room was already dark except for the TV and a string of Christmas lights someone had wrapped around the bookshelf. The whole clique was there. Vivian and Emily were sharing a blanket on the floor, Tessa had the good armchair, and Melanie was coming out of the kitchen with two bowls of popcorn.

Lexie was on the couch.

She was sitting at one end with her boots off this time, both bandaged hands tucked into the front pocket of her hoodie, looking like she had been dragged there and was planning her escape. When she saw Eliana, something in her face eased a little.

“Okay,” Hannah said, shrugging off her coat. “Home Alone. Somebody hit play.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Lexie said.

The whole room turned to look at her.

“You’ve never seen Home Alone,” Tessa said.

“Nope.”

“How is that even possible?” Vivian said.

Lexie shrugged. “It never came up.”

Hannah dropped onto the middle of the couch, right next to her, close enough that their shoulders bumped. “Okay. You’re sitting by me,” she said, “so I can watch you watch it.”

Lexie rolled her eyes so hard it looked painful. But she didn’t move over.

When Eliana came over with her popcorn, Hannah and Lexie both shifted apart without looking up from the TV, and left a space between them exactly her size.

Eliana sat down in it. Their shoulders pressed against hers on both sides.

Nobody said anything about it.

Hannah kept reaching across Eliana to steal popcorn out of Lexie’s bowl. Lexie kept letting her, and both of them pretended not to notice. Three months ago, those two hadn’t known each other’s names. Now Eliana was sitting between them, getting popcorn dropped in her lap from both sides, and she didn’t mind at all.

She ate a piece of popcorn and looked at the TV.

The movie was the same as always. The big house, the family running late for the airport, the one kid left behind in the dark. Emily said “aw” at the same part she said it every year. Tessa said the mom was a terrible mother. Hannah laughed at all the parts she had laughed at since they were eight.

It was nice. For almost an hour, it was nice.

Then, somewhere around the part where the kid was setting up the house for the burglars, Eliana felt it.

It was faint. A low pressure at the bottom of her chest, like a bass note from a car two streets over. She stopped chewing.

On the other end of the couch, Lexie had gone still too. Her eyes came off the TV and found Eliana’s over the top of Hannah’s head.

Neither of them moved.

The kid on the screen was painting the stairs. Everybody laughed. The pressure stayed exactly where it was, and didn’t go away.

The sliding door to Melanie’s backyard was behind the couch, a big black rectangle of glass. Past it, the deck lights were on, and the heated pool was steaming in the snow.

“Who’s that by the fence?” Hannah said.

She said it lightly, the way you’d ask about a neighbor, twisting around to look over the back of the couch. “Tall guy. By the shed.”

Everybody turned. Vivian squinted. “There’s nobody there.”

“There was a second ago.”

“It’s the burglars,” Vivian said, in a spooky voice. “They’re coming for Mel’s Christmas lights.”

The room laughed. Hannah laughed and threw the popcorn at her.

Eliana didn’t. She had felt it the moment Hannah pointed, the low pressure settling in her chest, heavier than it had been all night. On her other side, Lexie had stopped chewing too.

Lexie got up.

She did it casually, stretching, like she was going for a drink. Instead she walked around the back of the couch to the glass and stood there with her bandaged hands in her hoodie pocket, looking out at the yard.

“Mel,” she said, without turning around. “Is this locked?”

“Um. Probably?”

Lexie checked. It wasn’t. She locked it.

“Oh my god,” Vivian said. “She’s scared of the burglars.”

“Yeah,” Lexie said. “Terrified.”

She didn’t come back to the couch. She sat down on the floor right behind it, with her back to the couch and her face to the glass, between the door and everyone else, and stayed there.

Eliana watched her do it. Then she looked at Hannah, who was watching Lexie too, with a small line between her eyebrows.

Melanie hit play.

For ten minutes nothing happened. Then Hannah stopped laughing at the movie.

Eliana felt it in the couch first, Hannah going still beside her. Hannah had twisted around again, looking over the back of the couch. Past Lexie, into the dark.

“Where?” Eliana said quietly.

Hannah turned her head, surprised. Eliana hadn’t asked what.

“By the pool shed,” Hannah whispered. She wiped her palm on her leggings. Then again. “It’s closer.”

On the floor, Lexie had heard. She didn’t turn around. She just shifted, very slightly, so she was square in front of the glass.

“What does it look like?” Lexie said, low, to the window.

Hannah didn’t answer.

Her hand found Eliana’s wrist and closed around it. Her whole palm, flat and tight, the way she hadn’t touched anything since the pool. It was ice cold, and it was shaking.

“Hannah,” Eliana said.

“It doesn’t have a face.” It came out of Hannah in pieces. Her breath was going too fast. “Eliana, it doesn’t, there’s nothing, there’s just skin, and it’s looking at me anyway. How is it looking at me?”

Her eyes were wet. She couldn’t stop staring at the glass.

“I know it’s there,” she whispered. “You don’t believe me. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

“I believe you,” Eliana said.

Hannah’s grip tightened until it hurt.

She wouldn’t let go of Eliana’s wrist, so Eliana stayed where she was.

On the floor behind the couch, Lexie sat with her back straight and her eyes on the glass. The pressure didn’t go up and it didn’t go down. It just sat there in all three of them, like a held note.

Then Lexie got up.

“Front door,” she said, to nobody, and walked out into the hall.

Eliana could see her from the couch, down the short hallway to the front entry. Lexie checked the lock on the front door, then the chain. Then she stopped beside the narrow window next to the door, the one that looked out at the street.

She didn’t move.

Eliana watched her stand there. Five seconds. Ten. Lexie’s hand had come out of her hoodie pocket and was pressed flat against the glass.

“Lexie?”

Lexie didn’t answer. Eliana leaned, as far as she could with Hannah holding on, until she could see past her through the narrow window.

At the end of the cul-de-sac, under the one streetlight, a woman was standing in the snow.

She was in a gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, her hair in a messy knot. No coat. She was looking straight at Melanie’s house, and she was smiling, wide and easy, the way she smiled in the photo on Tommy’s couch.

Then she lifted one hand and waved.

“It’s her,” Lexie said. Her voice sounded strange, flat and very far away. “It’s wearing her.”

“Lexie.” Eliana kept her voice low, under the movie. “Don’t.”

Lexie undid the chain.

“Lexie, it wants you to. That’s why it’s there.”

“I know.” Lexie turned the lock. Her hands were shaking. “I don’t care. It’s right there. If I get it, it’s over. All of it.”

“And what’s so bad about all of this!”

It came out of Eliana louder than she meant, over the movie. On the floor, Emily glanced back at them.

Lexie stared at her down the hall, her hand still on the lock.

Eliana lowered her voice. “Hannah is here.”

Lexie looked back down the hall at the two of them on the couch, at Hannah’s white face and Hannah’s hand locked around Eliana’s wrist. For a second, Eliana thought she would stop.

“It killed her,” Lexie said. Her voice cracked on it. “And now it’s standing out there in her face, waving at me. That’s what’s so bad.”

She opened the door. The cold came down the hall in a gust, with snow in it.

“Stay with Hannah,” she said, and the door banged shut, and she was gone.

Melanie had paused the movie. Nobody was laughing.

“Who killed who?” Tessa said.

“Is she okay?” Emily was half up off the floor, looking at the front door. “She didn’t take her coat.”

Vivian went to the narrow window by the entry and looked out. “There’s nobody out there. There’s just the streetlight.”

Everybody looked at Eliana.

“Her aunt died,” Eliana said. It came out flat. “A few months ago. It’s a bad night.”

It was true. It was nowhere near the truth, but she watched it land anyway. Emily’s face fell. Tessa opened her mouth, then for once shut it.

Eliana didn’t look at any of them for long. She looked behind the couch, at the black glass of the sliding door, where Lexie had been sitting a minute ago.

Nobody was guarding it now.

Hannah’s grip tightened on her wrist.

“Eliana,” she whispered. “It’s at the pool.”

Lexie was halfway down Melanie’s driveway before she realized she didn’t have her boots on.

She had left them by the couch. Her socks were soaked through in three steps, and then her feet stopped feeling like anything at all. She didn’t stop.

Under the streetlight at the end of the cul-de-sac, Cece was still waiting.

She looked exactly right. That was the worst part. The gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, the messy knot, the way she stood with her weight on one hip. She watched Lexie come, and smiled, and then she turned around and walked away around the corner. Not running. Strolling.

Lexie ran.

She came around the corner and Cece was at the end of the next block, under the next streetlight, looking back over her shoulder. Lexie’s lungs burned in the cold. She ran harder. Cece turned another corner.

Lexie followed. And another. The houses got darker. Christmas lights blinked in yards, red and green on the snow. Every time Lexie got close, Cece was already at the next light, waiting, smiling, and then gone again.

“Hey!” Lexie’s voice cracked. “Hey!”

At the far end of a street she didn’t know, Cece stopped under the last streetlight and turned all the way around.

“Lex,” she said.

Nobody had called her that since September. Nobody alive.

Lexie stopped running. She stood in the middle of the street in her wet socks with her chest heaving and her bandaged hands in fists at her sides.

Cece smiled at her, warm and easy. Then she stepped back out of the light, and there was nobody there.

Past them, going off into the dark between two houses, was a line of small, neat prints. Four toes and a pad. Something the size of a cat, trotting away under a fence like it had all the time in the world.

She stood there, panting, and waited for the pressure. It was barely anything here, a faint hum like the last ring of a cymbal.

It was heavier behind her.

Way behind her. Back the way she had come, back past all those corners, at the end of a cul-de-sac, where it had been sitting in her chest all night like a fist.

Lexie turned around.

She had no idea how many blocks she had run. She couldn’t feel her feet. She started running anyway.

Eliana felt Hannah’s grip loosen on her wrist.

Hannah was staring at the black glass behind the couch. Her face had gone a strange, set kind of pale. Around them, the clique had gone quiet in the awkward way people go quiet after someone says a dead aunt out loud. Melanie hit play again just to fill the silence, and the movie came back on, loud.

“Okay,” Hannah said. Barely loud enough to hear. “Okay. This is stupid.”

“Hannah…”

“There’s nothing there.” She let go of Eliana’s wrist and stood up. “I’m going to go look. And there’s going to be nothing there, and then I’m going to come back in and finish this movie like a normal person.”

“Don’t.”

Hannah was already around the couch. She unlocked the sliding door Lexie had locked and pulled it open. Cold came in with the smell of chlorine. Nobody on the floor turned around. On the screen, someone was screaming at a tarantula, and everybody was laughing.

Hannah stepped out onto the deck in her socks.

Eliana went after her.

Outside, the deck lights made a bright square on the snow, and past that, everything was dark. The pool was a long glowing rectangle, steam curling up off it into the falling snow. It was quiet out here. The movie was a muffled noise through the glass.

Hannah walked to the edge of the pool with her arms wrapped around herself and stood there looking at the corner by the shed.

“See?” she said. Her voice was shaking. “There’s…”

Eliana couldn’t see anything. Just steam, and snow, and the dark past the lights. But the pressure in her chest went from a fist to something crushing, and every hair on her arms stood up at once.

“Eliana.” Hannah’s voice was very low. “It’s right there. By the shed. It’s reaching.”

Then her feet went out from under her.

She hit the tile hard and slid toward the dark, and her hand shot out and caught the pool ladder, and she held on. Her bare palm, wrapped around the steel rail.

“Let go!” She kicked back at nothing, hard, and Eliana heard it connect.

Hannah’s leg dropped to the tile. She scrambled back against the ladder, breathing hard.

Then something touched Eliana’s neck.

It was cold. Colder than the snow. It slid around the back of her neck and across her collarbone, slow, the way a hand would if it had far too many knuckles. Fingers. Long ones. She felt each joint bend as it wrapped around her, and then another one slid under her arm and across her ribs, and she couldn’t see any of it. There was nothing there. Just snow falling through the deck lights, and the feeling of being held.

It pulled.

Eliana went over backward. Her shoulder hit the tile and she was sliding, toward the dark past the edge of the deck, and the cold was tightening around her chest so she couldn’t get a full breath, and she couldn’t see what she was fighting.

A hand closed around her wrist.

Hannah. Flat on her stomach on the wet tile, one arm hooked through the ladder, the other locked around Eliana’s wrist. Bare palm, skin to skin. Holding on.

“I’ve got you,” Hannah said through her teeth. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you…”

The pick was still in Eliana’s other hand. The other rail was just above her head.

She swung up and hit it.

It rang, thin. One note. The cold around her chest squeezed tighter.

“Where?” Eliana gasped. “Hannah, where?”

“It’s over you.” Hannah’s voice broke. “It’s bent all the way over you. It doesn’t have a face, Eliana, it’s just looking…”

Eliana thought about Hannah’s hand, bare, on her wrist. Hannah, who hadn’t touched anything with her palms since the pool. Holding on anyway.

She didn’t want to push it away.

She brought the pick down, and she screamed the words herself.

back up, back downthis ain’t your town

Her voice was terrible. It cracked and broke on town. She had never really sung anything in front of anyone in her life. She aimed straight up, where Hannah said it was, and hit the rail on every beat until her calluses split.

you heard me oncedon’t make me twice

The air went out of her in one huge shove.

The cold tore off her all at once. The snow at the edge of the deck exploded outward, steam ripped off the pool in a sheet, and somewhere above her something made a sound like a branch snapping in half.

“It’s going,” Hannah said. “It’s going, keep…”

Eliana kept going. She hit the rail and screamed the words, raw and off-key, until the pressure drained out of her and into the dark, the way water goes down a drain, and there was nothing left of it at all.

She dropped the pick.

Her hand was bleeding. She lay on the wet tile with Hannah still holding her wrist, shaking so hard her teeth clicked together. Around her neck, where the fingers had been, her skin still felt cold.

Hannah let go, slowly, one finger at a time. She sat up against the ladder, breathing hard, and stared at her.

For a while neither of them said anything.

The snow kept coming down through the deck lights. Through the glass behind them, the movie was still going. Someone on the floor laughed at something. Nobody had come to the door. Nobody had heard a thing.

Hannah looked down at her own hand. The one that had held the ladder, and then Eliana’s wrist. She turned it over and looked at the palm for a long time, like it belonged to somebody else.

Then she looked at Eliana.

“What was that,” she said plainly.

Eliana opened her mouth.

“Don’t.” Hannah’s voice was shaking, but it was hard underneath. “Don’t tell me it happened really fast. You said that last time. On the steps. I’m not hearing it again.”

Eliana closed her mouth.

“You sang.” Hannah said it like she still couldn’t believe it. “You don’t sing. You hit a ladder with a guitar pick and you sang, and the air…” She stopped. Her hand made a shape in the air, a push. “It threw it. I watched it throw it.”

Eliana looked at the pick on the tile between them. It was dark with her blood.

“Was it this at Mel’s?” Hannah said quietly. “In October. The unicorn.”

Eliana didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” she said. She nodded slowly, like she was filing it. “Okay. I kind of knew that.”

She got up, one hand on the ladder, and tested her ankle. Then she stood in her wet socks in the snow, looking at the black glass of the door. At the empty spot on the floor behind the couch.

“It’s Lexie too,” she said. “Isn’t it. That’s why she’s always there. She’s in it with you.”

Eliana nodded.

“Since when?”

“Since the fire.”

Hannah let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “The fire. October. You barely knew her name in October.” She looked down at Eliana. “I’ve known you since we were five.”

“It wasn’t like that. It just happened to both of us…”

“I wouldn’t have told anyone,” Hannah said. She started to wipe her palm on her leggings, then stopped herself and made a fist instead. “You know that. Whatever this is, I would’ve kept it.”

Eliana looked down at the pick on the tile and didn’t say anything.

“I’ve covered everything for you for three years without ever asking a single question,” Hannah said. “I thought it was because you knew I’d always be there. Turns out you never thought I needed to be.”

She went to the door, and stopped with her hand on it.

“You let her in,” she said, not turning around. “Just not me.”

Eliana was still sitting where Hannah had left her when Lexie came back through the side gate, breathing hard. Her socks were soaked dark to the ankle and she was limping. “It got away,” she said. “It ran me around half the neighborhood and then there was just a cat. A cat, Eliana.” She stopped at the edge of the deck and looked from the wet tile to the shut door. “Where’s Hannah?”

“Hand.”

“What?”

“Show me your hand.”

Lexie stared at her for a second, then held up her palm. The burn was there, shiny and pink in the porch light. Eliana looked at it longer than she needed to.

“Okay,” Lexie said slowly. “Where’s Hannah?”

“Inside.” Eliana picked the pick up off the tile. Her fingers were still shaking, so she closed her fist around it. “She knows.”

Lexie went still. “Knows what?”

“All of it. The fire. You.” Eliana kept her eyes on her fist. “She figured it out by herself. I didn’t even have to say anything. I just had to sit here while she did it.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s… we can deal with that.”

“She was the only one who could see it. She held onto me while it was…” She couldn’t finish that. “And you weren’t here. You left her.”

“I didn’t leave anyone. It was right there. It had her face, Eliana, it was standing out there wearing Cece’s face, what was I supposed to…”

“I don’t care!”

It came out louder than anything she’d ever said to anyone. Someone inside turned the movie down.

Lexie’s mouth stayed open. She closed it.

“She thinks I picked you,” Eliana said. “Over her. And you weren’t even here.”

Lexie tried saying something, but no words could surface in her mind.

“You always do this. Something shows up and you just go. You don’t even look back to see who’s still standing there.”

“Because if I don’t go, it gets away.”

“It’s always going to be right there.” Her voice cracked on it, and she hated that it did. “That’s the whole point. That’s what it wants. It doesn’t have to fight us, it just has to show up and wait for you to run.”

Lexie looked at the door again. For once she didn’t have anything to throw back. She shoved her burned hand in her pocket.

“Eliana…”

“Don’t text me.”

She pushed past her toward the gate. She didn’t look back to check if Lexie was still standing there.