Seize the Night Read online

  No. No, and no, and no again. That was her home down there, nestled safe in its line of homes just like it, and it was always going to be hers, no matter how many bad looks she got from her drunken stepdaddy (and he was never going to be her father, no; her father had bled his life out on the Indiana highway, rushing home from work, and what was sacrificed could never be so easily replaced), no matter how many times her mother pretended not to see. That was her home. She was going home, and nothing was going to stop her.

  Lou was so focused on where she was planning to wind up that she stopped paying attention to where she was. Her foot found a rabbit hole in the hillside, already half-flooded, the rabbits either fled or drowned, and the sound of her ankle snapping was like a bolt of lightning, followed a second later by the dull thunder rumble of pain so big and so unheard of that it seemed to fill her entire body, leaving no room for anything else. She fell, landing hard on the jar in her arms, which shattered and drove glass shards deep into the flesh of her chest and throat.

  There wasn’t time to scream, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, for the storm took all such sounds as its own. Lou lay sprawled and shattered on the hillside, her own weight driving the glass deeper. She didn’t move.

  The storm raged on.

  There was something dream-like about the storm. It beat its fists against the rooftops and hammered against the windows, but the works of man held fast; save for a little bit of a leak up in the attic, the house was a fortress. Mary twitched the curtain aside and looked out on the backyard. The slope of the hill beyond the fence was a black hump in the darkness, almost obscured by the pounding rain.

  “Where is that girl?” she muttered, before glancing guiltily over her shoulder. Spenser was angry at the rain, said it was interfering with the television reception, and he was angry with Mary too, for trying to say that digital cable didn’t work like that. The picture had looked perfectly clear to her, but what did she know? She was just the woman who put the beer in his hand and the remote on the arm of his chair before she backed away, keeping clear of his fists, which seemed to swing especially hard when the rain came down. He didn’t like nights like this one. He wouldn’t be happy when he realized that Lou was still out there, chasing fireflies like a little kid.

  “It’s time for that girl to grow up and realize that she can’t be a hellion forever,” that was what he’d said to Mary not two months before, when Lou had come bursting in excited by the first summer fireflies. “If I need to smack some sense into her, I will.”

  Mary liked to think that she would throw him out the first time Spenser laid a hand on her baby girl, but she knew better than to believe it. This house was in her name, but his paychecks paid the bills, and she couldn’t cover the mortgage without him. If her contribution had to be paid in bruises, there were worse things in the world. Crawling back to her mother with her hat in her hands, for example. Pulling Lou out of school and away from all her friends, and all because Mary didn’t know how to pick a man.

  It was all justification and she knew it, but that didn’t change the necessity of it. Why didn’t you leave? was a question asked by women who lived in safe, comfortable houses with money in their bank accounts, who had never fed their daughters flour dumplings in soy-sauce soup.

  “Mary! Get your ass in here!” Spenser sounded furious.

  Mary tore her eyes away from the black hills behind the house. “Coming,” she called, and unlocked the back door with a quick, decisive flick of her wrist before walking quickly—not running, no, see? She still had her dignity; she didn’t run when he called her name—out to the living room. The television was on, the picture clear as shallow water. Spenser was seated in his armchair, the special one that no one else was allowed to touch without his invitation. He looked like a poisonous toad, squatting there, stockpiling his venom.

  “What’s going on, sweetheart?” she asked, putting every ounce of love and affection she could find into her voice.

  “Someone’s on the damn porch,” he said. He turned to look at her, narrow-eyed, and added, “It better not be that girl of yours. I told her to go up to her room after dinner and get started on her homework. I’m not going to be happy if she’s not been minding me.”

  “I’m sure it’s not Lou,” said Mary, who knew full well that her daughter would have tried the back door before she came around front. “It’s probably one of the neighbors, coming over to borrow a bucket.” It would have to be some leak for anyone to be willing to brave the storm rather than use a pot or pan to catch the water. Still, it was the best excuse she had.

  Spenser looked at her for a moment more, still narrow-eyed and suspicious, before he turned back to the television. Mary let out a breath she had barely been aware of holding and walked onward, toward the door. The storm wasn’t even half-over yet: she could feel the electric pressure of it pushing her down, making her skin feel too tight and her hair tingle at the edges.

  Please go around the back, baby girl, she thought, and turned the knob.

  The blue-and-red flashing lights of the police cars parked outside filled the room even through the rain. Spenser choked on his beer before twisting to watch Mary talk to the police. The rain was pounding down; he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But he saw her go pale, until the only color in her face came from those dancing lights. He saw her clutch her chest, eyes wide and childlike and filled with a painful confusion.

  He saw her sink to her knees on the floor and start to sob as lightning split the sky in two and the world was reduced to the sound of thunder.

  That was when he realized that something was truly wrong, and rose from his chair to find out what that little brat had done now.

  It had been the rain. It had fallen so hard and so suddenly that the ground hadn’t been prepared to absorb it all. There hadn’t been enough to shift the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, but there had been enough to wash her blood down the hillside in a crimson ribbon, one that held together despite all odds, until it swirled into the gutter near a stopped police car. Even then, it might have been missed, had the junior of the two policemen not been returning to the vehicle after writing a speeding ticket for a woman who just wanted to get home, out of the storm.

  He had stopped when he saw the blood, looking at it speculatively. Odds were that it belonged to some animal, a cat-killed bird or a rabbit with its leg in a snare. But the storm had been a vicious one, and odds weren’t enough to justify potentially leaving someone out there when they were hurt and in need of assistance. He had knocked on the police car window. He had shown his partner the blood. Together, the two of them had gone up the hillside, flashlights in hand, hoping that they wouldn’t find anything worth getting wet over.

  They had found a little girl.

  The world transforms when a child dies. As the officers attempted to comfort Lou’s sobbing mother, the coroners were removing her body from the hillside, where the rain had already washed away any forensic evidence—not that they were really thinking of this as a murder. The story was too easy to see, written in broken bone and shattered glass. A terrible accident, a terrible fall, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, if they ran down the wrong hillside in the rain. She was very small. She would never get any bigger.

  As Spenser demanded proof that the little girl they had found was his stepdaughter, Lou was being bundled into the back of an ambulance, which drove through town with its flashers off, obeying all the traffic laws. There was no need to use the siren. There was nothing there in need of saving.

  As the officers handcuffed Spenser for taking a swing at them, Lou was being transferred into the freezer at the county morgue. She would be shown to her mother later, after one of the medical examiners had removed the larger pieces of glass from her chest. Just enough so that the sheet would lie flat, and Mary wouldn’t have to confront the story told by those planes and angles, that impossible geometry of loss.

  As Mary and Spenser were being loaded into separate police cars f
or the ride across town—one as grieving mother, the other as drunken assailant—Lou was alone.

  Lou opened her eyes, and they were filled with firefly lightning.

  Somewhere, thunder rolled.

  “What do you mean, you lost the body?” The officer tried to keep his voice low as he spoke with the medical examiner. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing back to where Mary sat on a hard plastic chair, folded nearly double in her grief. Spenser was elsewhere, being given a stern warning. They weren’t going to book the man. Not when his stepdaughter had just died; not when his wife needed him so badly.

  And besides, there were other things to worry about.

  “I’ve called the crew that brought her in; I’m sure they just put her in the wrong drawer.” The medical examiner held up her hands, expression baffled. “Don’t shoot the messenger. We’re looking for her now.”

  “I have her parents waiting to identify the body,” snapped the officer. A little too loudly: Mary’s head came up, eyes questing in his direction. He hunched his shoulders, turning partially away. “We need to be sure. The ID was made from a library card in her pocket, and that’s not sufficient.”

  “Look, we’re doing everything we can,” said the medical examiner. “You have to give us time to figure out where she is.”

  “This is a little girl we’re talking about here,” he said. “Find her.”

  “I will,” she said.

  They didn’t.

  By the time they sent Mary home—wrung out and exhausted from her crying, with Spenser standing like a sullen shadow by her side—they had turned the entire building upside down repeatedly, only to find no trace of the thirteen-year-old girl who had been found on the hillside. Lou was, quite simply, gone.

  The sky was bruised black and silent, unmoving. The rain had stopped somewhere between the cruiser’s leaving the police station and pulling up in front of Mary and Spenser’s home. The streets remained empty; no one wanted to risk being caught in another torrential downpour. Both of them had been silent for the entire drive, Mary sunk deep into confused grief that was beginning to mingle with denial, Spenser dwelling on the way he’d been treated. By the time the police dropped them off and drove away, he was a powder keg, ready to explode.

  Mary dug for her keys as she stepped onto the porch. Spenser tried the doorknob. The door swung open. That was the spark that he’d been waiting for.

  “Well, would you look at that,” he said in a wondering tone. He prodded the door with his finger. It swung open wider. “Some dumb bitch didn’t lock the door. Let’s go in and see what’s worth stealing, huh? I bet we can clean these dummies out before they get back. What do you think, Mary?”

  “Please, Spenser, not right now,” she said, voice little more than a moan. “I’m sorry I didn’t lock it, but no one was out in this storm. No one except for . . . except for . . .” She began crying again. She stopped after shedding only a few tears. There just wasn’t that much moisture left inside of her.

  “We don’t even know if those police were telling the truth,” scoffed Spenser. “It could have been someone else’s kid. It could have been a fucked-up prank. Who knows what these cops get up to when nobody’s keeping an eye on them? Crooks, the whole lot of them. We should sue the bastards.”

  Mary stared at him, eyes wide and wet and uncomprehending. “What are you saying?” she whispered. “Are you saying that they lied? They lied about my Louise?” Her daughter’s full name fit oddly in her mouth. She used it so rarely, usually when the girl was in trouble. Lou had been her name since the day she was born, and it should have been her name now, on the night she’d . . . that she had . . .

  “I’m saying the police twist the truth to suit themselves,” said Spenser. He seemed oblivious to the fact that they were still standing on the porch, exposed to the night air: he had his teeth in something that would allow him to work off some of his aggression, and he wasn’t letting go. “She’s a pretty thing. Maybe they couldn’t find her because they’re the ones who snatched her, and she’ll show up in the morgue when she’s good and used—”

  Her palm caught him across the cheek, rocking his head back more from surprise than from the actual pain of impact. Mary squealed and snatched her hand to her chest, cradling it there like an animal with an injured paw. Spenser’s eyes went wide. Then, slowly, his eyes narrowed, the color flaring up in his cheeks like a flame.

  “Did you lay a hand on me, you little bitch?” The question was calm. The swing that accompanied it was not. His fist hit Mary in the eye, sending her crashing to the floor, where she huddled, sobbing. She was halfway inside the house, her feet still on the porch, her torso on the hallway floor.

  “Cow,” he said, and kicked her casually as he stepped over her body and left her where she lay. Mary didn’t try to move. She stayed where she was, and cried, and waited for the long, dark night to end.

  The mud squished between Lou’s toes as she walked, black and viscous and sticky. She looked down at it and frowned, trying to remember why it mattered. A piece of glass caught her eye, protruding from the left side of her chest. She grasped it firmly and yanked it out of her body with a wet sucking sound, very similar to what her feet made every time she took a step. The edges sliced her fingers, creating long, bloodless cuts. She looked at the glass for a moment, dispassionately, before she threw it aside and kept on walking.

  She had been walking for miles now. Hours, even, across the city and down the rain-soaked sidewalks until she had reached the edge of the fields that extended behind her housing development. Then she had left the sidewalks behind, understanding on some level—even if it was a blurred, distorted one, still tangled with the sound of distant thunder—that she didn’t want to answer any questions about where she was going, or why she wasn’t wearing shoes, or why there was so much blood on the front of her dress.

  (Why was there so much blood? Why didn’t she bleed when she pulled the glass out of her body? Every time she’d cut herself before, there had been blood, but now there was only a faint tugging sensation and a momentary light, like one of the fireflies she’d lost in the storm was hiding somewhere in her skin.)

  The clouds were starting to clear, and the stars were coming out. They looked like fireflies hanging up there in the black. Lou walked on. She was going home. She knew that much. No matter how confused she was, no matter what else was going on, she was going home. She just had to . . . she just had to make it home.

  Fireflies began to drift up from the grass at her feet, swirling around her in a great, silent cloud. Lou stopped walking and held out her hands. The fireflies landed on her palms, covering them, until she could feel the weight of a thousand pinprick feet pushing down on her.

  “Hello,” said Lou.

  The fireflies took flight. They swirled around her, and it was like standing in the middle of a special effect, like something from a Disney movie, the moment where the servant girl becomes a princess or learns that she’s been a princess all along. Lou laughed out loud, and then gasped as the sound knocked something loose inside of her, some small, essential scab on her soul.

  She remembered lightning splitting the sky.

  She remembered the feeling of her ankle breaking.

  She remembered—

  “Who are you?” The man who appeared out of the cloud of fireflies was tall and thin and oddly pale, seeming to shine with the same soft, internal light as the fireflies. Most of them seemed to have vanished when he came; the few that remained alighted on his hair and shoulders, glowing dimly. “What are you doing out here, all alone? Where are your parents?”

  “I’m Lou,” she said. Speaking made the glass in her chest tug oddly. She pulled out another shard. This one was longer than the others, and there was actual blood at the tip, gleaming when the light from the fireflies touched it. She threw it thoughtlessly aside. “I’m out here because out here is between me and where I live. My daddy’s dead. My mom’s at home. She’s probably real worried by now. I’m going
home to her.”

  The man leaned a little closer and sniffed at her. Lou blinked at him.

  “I don’t smell bad,” she said.

  “Child, you smell dead,” he replied. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

  “I was catching fireflies and I fell down.”

  The man sighed. It was a deep, hollow sound. “The adze choose who they will, and I have no recourse but to call you kin. You are my sister, child, and you are not going home, because home will no longer have you.”

  Lou frowned. “I am going home. I promised.”

  “And what will you do when you get there? Will you fly to your mother’s arms and cover her with kisses? You, whose breath smells of the grave and whose body will not bleed?” He leaned closer to her. “You will not be welcome there. You will not be welcome anywhere.”

  “I’ll be welcome,” said Lou. “I have to go home.”

  He sighed again. “Very well, then, sister. Let me show you the way.” He offered her his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Lou took it.

  The man exploded into fireflies.

  So did she.