Page 23

It is March 6, 1956.

Alan is ten years old, and he is looking down at the body of his mother. She is lying in the kitchen, her skull cracked like a broken cup, and her blood already drying between the tiles. An hour earlier, he listened to his father repeatedly smacking her head against the floor there—a sickening sound that was barely muffled by the closed door and which is still replaying in his head now.

So much so that he can barely hear his brother.

Alan turns slightly, faint and adrift.

“What… what did you say?”

“That Itoldyou not to come in here.”

Edward is standing in the kitchen doorway. He is nearly two years older than Alan, and when their father left the house he told the two of them that Edward was in charge while he was out. In addition to the usual rules, neither of them was to enter the kitchen. But Alan has disobeyed their father, and there is a furious look on Edward’s face. Edward has always done what he’s told; to him, their father’s word is law. Even now, with their mother lying dead in a pool of blood, he remains at the threshold of the room.

Alan looks down at his mother.

The out-of-body feeling is intensifying, as though something insidehim is wheeling upward and looking down at the whole spinning scene from above. It is not the sight of the blood, or the aftermath of violence that still hangs trembling in the air. On both counts, he has seen worse. It is not even grief yet. It is the knowledge that everything has changed. That some taut link binding the family’s existence has snapped and there is nothing left to hold it together. There is a sense ofunraveling.

He looks back at Edward.

“But… he’s killed Mom.”

Edward stares at him, his face set hard.

“Deus scripsit,” he says.

God has written it.

Alan blinks at that. How can his brother be so calm? But then Edward has always had more of their father in him than Alan. It is Edward who was taken out the last time their father brought home a girl; Edward who crouched down over her in the night and joined in the work of making her into an angel.

“Get out of there now.”

Trembling slightly, Alan does as he is told; his brother is a head taller than him and there will be a beating in it for him if he doesn’t. Then Edward closes the door, shutting their mother’s body away.

“What are we going to do?” Alan says.

“What we weretoldto do. Now stop crying.”

Alan touches his face, surprised to find the tears there, and then follows Edward through to one of the front rooms. They sit in silence for a time. What they have been told to do is wait for their father to return home, but Alan has no idea how long that might be or what will happen afterward. Surely even Edward must feel it too—that this is different from the other times. That everything is different now.

Or can be.

And while the situation feels like a dream, the sensation inside him is more akin to having just woken from one. A kind of clarity has come over him. Five years from now, the man who will adopt him is taking him for an eyetest. As the optician slides the lens into place and the world swims into focus, the sensation is the same.

He blinks again.

“Where are you going?” Edward says.

Alan doesn’t know; he hadn’t even been aware he had stood up. And yet here he is—standing—as though pulled from his seat by someone behind he can’t see.

“I… I need the toilet.”

Edward appraises him coldly, and for a moment Alan wonders if his brother will tell him to sit back down.

“Don’t be long.”

Alan steps into the hall, his gaze quickly moving away from the closed door of the kitchen and over to the downstairs bathroom, its own door slightly ajar. His footstep echoes as he walks toward it, a scratching sound against the tiles. But as he reaches the bottom of the staircase, he pauses, and a strange thing happens.

The sound continues.