Arrowood by Laura McHugh Read Free Book Online Page B

its breath.
    I had been disappointed that it was Heaney at the door, though I wasn’t sure whom I’d expected. Ben? Even if he hadn’t heard people gossiping about my return, his parents still lived next door to Arrowood and had surely noticed the car outside, seen me coming and going. They would have told him I was back. Did it mean anything, that Ben hadn’t yet come by? It had only been two days, and there were a dozen logical reasons for his absence, the most likely being that he didn’t live here anymore. He and his sister, Lauren, would have moved away for college, and maybe they’d never returned. Ben had always wanted to illustrate comic books when he grew up, or work in animation. It would make sense that he had started a new life someplace else. I knew there was also a chance that Ben was here and didn’t want to see me, though I didn’t want to think about that.
    I wouldn’t have admitted to anyone that when the doorbell rang, a tiny spark flickered through the circuitry of my brain, the tenuous hope that the twins might magically show up on the doorstep now that I was home.
    Josh Kyle’s email had been nagging at me all day, a splinter needling its way beneath my skin. What evidence could he possibly have that would change my mind about Singer? Still, I wanted to know what he had to say. The moments surrounding my sisters’ disappearance were so firmly stitched into my memory that they were bright and clear after so much else had come unraveled and faded away.
    —
    After the gold car had disappeared with my sisters inside it, I’d squatted under a tree and buried my face in my Hello Kitty T-shirt, trying to catch my breath. Something dug into my hip, and I pulled a half-eaten sucker from my pocket. Violet, Tabitha, and I had been to the bank with our mother early that morning, and each of us had received a Tootsie Pop from the teller. Violet hadn’t liked hers, and after a few slobbery bites, she’d managed to get it stuck in Tabitha’s hair. I’d worked the sucker free and shoved it into the pocket of my shorts. It was fuzzy with lint now, though I could still make out the marks of Vi’s tiny teeth and a blond hair that must have been Tabby’s. I held on to the sucker, a sticky talisman, as if it might make them reappear.
    I don’t know how long I waited before I ran home to tell my mother. Her face had gradually reddened at the bank that morning during a whispered conversation with the teller, and she had been in a twitchy mood all day. I was scared to tell her what had happened; I wasn’t supposed to take the twins outside in the first place. It was my fault that they were gone, and in that moment, I was more upset about the fact that I had done something wrong and would get in trouble. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the twins might not come back, that I might never see my sisters again.
    The rest of that first day remains jumbled and patchy in my head. I don’t know exactly what I said to my mother, or what she did when I told her. I can’t remember my father coming home, or Grammy picking me up to take me to the Sister House. At some point that afternoon I must have fallen asleep, because I had a vivid dream that everything was fine, that the twins were safe after all. I would sometimes immerse myself in the memory of that dream, to feel again the warm flood of relief, however fleeting.
    I didn’t speak to the police the first day, or the next. Grammy said I was too distraught, and sick. I’d started vomiting again, and my fever returned. My mother told them my story, the one I had told her, about the gold car that had turned toward Main. When a policeman—wiry, ruddy-cheeked Detective Eckland, who had once visited my school with McGruff the Crime Dog—finally met with me and asked me to tell him what I’d seen, my throat closed up and I began to wheeze. Hot tears gushed out and Detective Eckland fetched me tissues and cold water in a paper cup and a roll of Wild Cherry Life