One by One Read online

  One time I bit into an apple and tasted something…wrong. I spit it out and stared at the spot I bit. It was brown inside, nearly black in places. Something moved inside there. A worm maybe, but I never knew for sure. I screamed and threw it across the yard, into the dead leaves.

  Every once in a while, I remember that apple. How red it was. How perfect it looked. The rot inside perfectly camouflaged.

  Had it always been there?

  I remember the house when the paint was still new, still red and bright. I can’t remember how old I was when I saw it start to peel. Maybe twelve? It doesn’t matter.

  Once I noticed it, that was all I could see. The gray underneath the red. The real color trying to get out. It almost felt like the house was waiting for me to grow up. Like I had something to do with peeling paint. Like I made it happen.

  They painted it white. Maybe that white would change things.

  I keep thinking about that apple.

  Dad should have never had a daughter.

  Each page led her deeper into the weeds, and the questions swirled around her, like flies circling a rotting piece of fruit.

  Who was this family?

  A thought occurred to her, something so obvious that she felt foolish when she remembered it. The picture in the hallway, drawn by a child’s hands. A little girl’s hands. Was it her? Was little Mary the one who’d painted it, who ruined an entire section of wall so dramatically that her angry father had to cover it up with wallpaper?

  She read on.

  Dad has his own little place. It’s out in the woods, a ways past the tree line. I think it was a smokehouse from back in the days when you couldn’t just buy meat at the store like you can now. There wasn’t much to it. Four sturdy wood walls. A leaky roof. Some wooden tables and things like that.

  Dad always complained about how there wasn’t enough room. So, he started putting things out there. Shovels and tools, stuff like that. He even put new shingles on the roof and put a fresh lock on the door to keep people from stealing out of it.

  I would say, “Daddy, who would want some old tools?”

  He never had much of an answer for that.

  I went back there one time with some of my paint and wrote on the door in big black letters.

  DADDYS ROOM.

  I did it for him. I thought he’d like it, but he got all nervous, told me to leave that place alone, to make sure, extra sure, that I didn’t tell anyone about it. I don’t know why he liked it so much. It always smelled funny to me anyway.

  Even so, I liked the idea of everyone having their own little places. I think I wanted to find a little place for myself. Somewhere quiet and lonely. I could make a sign for Peter and put it on his door. Then, I’d make one for Mom. Maybe put it in the kitchen, since that is more her room than anyone else’s. And then, I’d write one on my door, with big, blocky letters.

  MARY’S ROOM.

  Mom would have a fit over that. I could see her stomping up and down the halls, just like she did when I painted the picture. I was younger then. I wouldn’t do anything that stupid now.

  Alice closed the book. She sat in the room, her eyes narrowed. Something about this felt wrong. Felt like an invasion, like sifting through someone’s underwear drawer after they died. But even beyond that, it felt strange…maybe even dangerous.

  All of this family drama and dirty laundry. These were the things that you weren’t supposed to see, the things that lived and died behind closed doors. She thought of a friend she had in third grade, Carole. Alice could remember going to her house, how excited she had been to have a real sleepover. And what a house it was, bigger than hers, nicer. It was perched up on a hill with a long driveway, looking like a little cottage from a movie. Only, it wasn’t little at all, and she found herself getting lost in the rooms, and before night fell, Alice was suddenly and terribly jealous of her new friend. She wondered why her own life wasn’t so lavish, why her parents hadn’t been more successful in their lives. She especially thought of her father, of the way that Frank seemed almost childlike and foolish all the time, less a parent than a kid himself.

  That faded away in an instant when Carole’s own father came home. The girls had been in the playroom all day. The very existence of a separate room dedicated to children’s toys and dresses, dolls and babies, it thrilled her, and before she knew it, the tidy room was a complete disaster. Alice didn’t really notice it, partially because of how much fun she was having, but mostly because this was how her own room looked most of the time. The idea of getting bent out of shape about it was as foreign to her as having a playroom in the first place.

  Suddenly, Carole’s father was there. Alice couldn’t remember his name, but it didn’t matter. He clearly didn’t remember hers either. He came through the door, looking worn and stressed. He was wearing a neatly pressed white shirt, still crisp at the end of the day. Alice noticed that he wore cufflinks, both of them tipped with black circles like little shark eyes. She’d never seen a man in cufflinks before. The extra decoration made him look very fancy and important, like a manager at a bank.

  “What is this?” he asked, his hands perched on his hips. Something in his posture, the way he jutted out his sharp, smooth chin, the angle of his arms, and the tilt of his head, made Alice think of some kind of giant, ill-tempered bird. He scowled down at the two of them.

  “I said, what is this?”

  “We’re just playing, Daddy,” Carole said in a voice that Alice had never heard from her before. It was softer than normal, but there was more to it than that. It was pathetic somehow, at once babyish and submissive. It sounded like a two-year-old asking for another cookie while she still had crumbs in the corner of her mouth.

  “This damn mess better be cleaned before bed, do you understand?” Before she could answer, he repeated, “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  He stomped off into some other corner of the house, and all at once, Alice saw the room for what it was. Nothing magical. Nothing even special. Just a room that happened to have more space and more toys. They spent the rest of the time before dinner quietly putting things back, and when it was all said and done, Alice never stayed the night with Carole again.

  Something about that night swirled up in her mind, like a breeze catching last year’s dead leaves in a gust. This book, this window into the past, reminded her of that little moment with Carole’s father. No one got hurt. Nothing much was lost. But somehow, she had seen into a dark corner that wasn’t meant for her eyes. Carole’s dad burst in and brought all of that grown-up baggage with him.

  But the book. The book was different. This was something she could put down, something she could turn away from, something she could toss into the trash. And yet, even the idea of such a thing terrified her. This was someone else’s property, someone else’s deepest thoughts thrown together with paper and ink. Keeping it was wrong, but throwing it away, not reading it word for word, well that was unthinkable.

  Her hands felt suddenly dirty, covered with germs. Like whatever secrets the book held might infect her somehow. Like they might escape if she didn’t keep the cover latched and locked.

  With a blooming hum, the power returned to the house, and moments later, she heard her brother milling around in the hall. Without thinking, she slid the diary under her pillow. Seconds later, she emerged, out into the hallway.

  Dean passed by her, a bag of tortilla chips in hand. Alice did her best to look casual, which instantly had the opposite effect.

  “The hell are you up to?” Dean asked, though he never even slowed down, not waiting for an answer. He retreated into his room, and seconds later, the sounds of violent, virtual death began to blare out from within.

  Alice spent the next ten minutes walking around the house, once again trying to look casual even though there was no one around to witness it. She sat in the living room for a mome
nt, looking at the TV but not turning it on. Had Mary’s family kept the television on the same side of the room? Was it as big as the one her dad had insisted on getting? She tried to imagine what the family might look like sitting around the room.

  “Were they happy?” she asked the empty room, wincing at the sound of her voice in the silence. It seemed to echo within her, a slightly deeper voice asking, Are you happy?

  She went to the kitchen and stared into the fridge, then the pantry, then the fridge again, all the while knowing that she wasn’t actually hungry, just anxious. The wind kept whistling outside, the sound of it growing as the day dragged on, and she pictured this house like a cabin built of twigs and sticks, all full of holes, easy for things that crawl and skitter to come in and out whenever they pleased.

  But the secrets are here to stay.

  Alice had already made up her mind to keep the book, but she wouldn’t read it anymore, not just yet. She knew, in her rational, logical, motherly mind, that it was a book and nothing more, that having it, reading it, keeping it were all perfectly acceptable things. There was a reason that it ended up in her room. Her mom or dad must have found it tucked into a drawer somewhere, and if they had, it would have made perfect sense to give it to Alice. Of course she’d find it interesting. She loved old things, loved to write, loved to wander and daydream.

  That was the solution. She’d tuck it into a drawer, maybe hidden under some pictures or old papers, and she’d wait. Tonight, when everyone was home, they’d mention it. Ask about it. And she’d play coy, saying she glanced at it but didn’t give it much mind, and that would be that. When the house quieted down, she’d dive back in, alone.

  Chapter Ten

  Everyone knew that Alice had a problem with focusing, but no one really understood why. Unlike most kids her age, who tended to drift around from subject to subject, staring out the window during math class, she had the opposite problem. She would focus so intently on a single thing that she would get lost in it and the rest of the world would disappear around her. When a teacher started lecturing on the Fertile Crescent, that mere phrase would stir images in her head so intense that she’d lose the next ten minutes dwelling on what it might mean. It drove her dad crazy, especially when the family gathered around the TV to watch a movie on Netflix or to catch up on the latest episode of whatever show they were watching. It was, inevitably, Alice who would tilt her head, squint, and ask, “Now what’s going on?”

  This earned her the reputation as a daydreamer, the girl with her head in the clouds. And, she supposed, it was a fair way to see her, at least from the outside. But on the inside, it was a completely different story. An actor’s face, for example, might stir a bit of recognition. Had that person been in something else she’d seen? That face would linger, like the negative of a photograph, blurring out the background, distracting her from watching the rest of the scene as she mentally went back through every scene she could, cross-checking for the image of that face.

  So it was in the hours that passed after finding the diary. The TV was on, Dean was busy in his bedroom, and the wind continued to blow bits of loose snow onto the bare tree limbs. A show she liked was flashing across the screen, a cartoon about a talking dog and a boy named Finn, but she didn’t see any of it. Her mind was a pinhole camera, blotting out the rest of the world except for one thing.

  Daddy’s place.

  The woods back behind the house waited, silent, watching. The gray, craggy trees loomed over the top of the fence around the pool, leering over like headless skeletons. If Alice walked around from the gravel driveway, she could get back there. There was a little path between an old storage shed and the fence, but she never considered actually venturing out into those darkened woods. Frank and Dean had been back there the day before to bury Baxter. She could have gone back there to see the grave, but she simply didn’t want to. She could tell that her mom thought it was because she was too sad. The truth was she just didn’t like the look of those woods.

  Daddy’s place.

  If the diary was telling the truth, there was something back there, something hiding, waiting in the woods. Alice knew it was foolish, but she wanted to see it. Wanted to know if there was some piece of Mary back there, some deeper clue into the strange family that had lived there before them. She glanced at the clock on the wall. Her mom could be home at any time, but that didn’t matter. She had a fine alibi for being back there. Alice was already dressed in her coat and boots before she even thought the whole thing through. Just as she walked back out of her room, Dean stepped out of his own room, empty chip bag in hand.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said. “I’m not your babysitter, but if you get into some trouble, I’m the one who’d get all the shit for it. What are you up to?”

  She considered the book, wondering why she felt so compelled to keep it a secret. Maybe it was just the simple fact that it was her secret, something she didn’t have to share with anyone else. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

  “I want to go check out Baxter’s…place.”

  The word “grave” stuck in her throat, not from grief but from all the images it conjured. She was already afraid of the woods. Her imagination didn’t need any extra encouragement.

  Dean sighed. “You know, we didn’t even have him for that long.”

  He’d misread her. They all seemed to misread her. She pushed down the urge to get upset about it. In this case, it helped her.

  “I know. I’m fine. I just want to see.”

  She saw something on Dean’s face then, his mask slipping a bit. It was the look of a brother dropping his bike and running over after she had taken a spill. The look of a brother who began to truly panic when she choked on a hot dog one Fourth of July. It was concern, true and unspoiled by teenage surliness.

  “Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  When he spoke, the teenager had returned, but it wasn’t the same now. It was all just smoke, his attempt to hide the fact that he did actually love his sister.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she replied, trying to tamp down the swell of emotion in her chest.

  “No,” he said, retreating to his room to suit up for the cold. “If you go out there and break an ankle, tripping over a tree stump, I’ll be the one to hear about it.”

  She waited in the living room, staring out the wide, sliding glass door to the swimming pool and the woods beyond. Alice could hear the cold, even inside, the way that the wind blew, the soft dust of snow that was just then beginning to stick to the tree limbs. It would take a long time for such a light snow to coat the ground, but the news promised more of it, maybe a lot more. Normally, it was exciting to think about, but something about this place, the strange, dreamlike feel of it, made her dread the snow. The prospect of being stuck here made her stomach curl, like being marooned on an alien planet.

  “You daydreaming again?” Dean asked.

  He was standing right next to her. Somehow, she hadn’t even heard him walk up.

  “No. Just thinking.”

  “That’s what daydreaming is, genius.”

  “You don’t have to be an ass.”

  Dean laughed, enjoying this new side to his sister. Alice didn’t curse very often. Usually, it was the opposite. She was the one getting on him, telling her brother that he needed to watch his mouth, that one of these days he would slip up and say ass or shit or something even worse in front of a teacher. Even so, Alice knew that a well-timed bad word would work wonders with Dean.

  “Calm down,” he said in that easy way he had whenever someone else was getting upset. It made Alice even madder, the fact that he could bring himself back from the brink when he was angry. For her, losing her temper was like sliding off the edge of a cliff. Once she was over, it might take hours to scale
her way back up. For Dean, it was more like jumping off the cliff with a balloon on his back. He might end up even more relaxed once he leapt.

  Alice sighed, pushing herself back from the edge. She wasn’t mad, but she knew herself well enough. If she kept going in circles with him, she might end up mad before it was over with. What she didn’t have was a plan for getting Dean to walk even farther back into the woods, but she didn’t worry too much about that, now pretty confident that he would follow her wherever.

  “Let’s go,” he said, sliding the door open. “We don’t need to stay out here any longer than we need to.”

  The wind blew the cold day in, greeting them before they ever actually took a step out. Alice had known it would be cold, but she swore it had already dropped a few degrees in the past few hours. Dean led the expedition past the frozen pool.

  “Ugh,” he said as they passed by it. “Smells like shit.”

  “Why do you think it stinks so bad?”

  “Who knows? Dad thinks the septic tank might have leaked into it. Maybe something else fell in and died before it started to freeze. Either way, that shit is gross.”

  To the right of the pool was a gate that led to the driveway. Dean had to muscle it into moving, but it swung forward, shrieking on its rusting hinges. The drive stretched from the main road all the way up to a small path between the fence and a storage shed. Dean led them on, Alice’s heartbeat quickening as they walked. This was it: the path into the woods that had loomed over everything. Past the shed, a yellow clearing greeted them, and there, tucked back close to the fence itself, was a small patch of dirt.

  “Here it is,” Dean said as they walked up to the unmarked grave.

  Here lies Baxter, the cynical part of Alice whispered. The asshole cat.

  The reality of the grave, the pomp and circumstance of it all, that it concealed something that was once alive; before coming back there, she’d wondered how it would affect her, if she would get sad, start crying, start reminiscing about the good times she had with the surly cat.