The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,33

closed the back door, and the silverware drawer rattled, a quirk of the house.

He raised his hand in acknowledgment as he walked away. I watched from the window, standing beside Elyse, as he turned back for his own house, satisfied that I was home and safe.

“That was odd,” Elyse said, the moment between us long gone.

“No. That’s just Rick. He keeps an eye on me.”

“Mm,” she said, turning back to the eggs. “Where do you keep the whisk?”

I pulled out the middle drawer, handed it to her, and as she turned away, beating the eggs over the countertop, I stared at the top drawer.

A box cutter, she’d said. Something sharp and short and efficient. I’d used mine just a few days earlier to open the box of my mother’s things. I held my breath, eased the top drawer open slightly. Pens and scissors and a pad of paper. I moved a few things around with shaking hands, but I didn’t have to. I could already tell: It was gone.

“I should’ve asked,” Elyse said. “You good with scrambled?”

I eased the drawer shut, feeling untethered, a balloon floating away.

“Liv?” she asked. “That pill isn’t working already, is it?”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Yes, scrambled is great.” I heard the click of the gas before the flame caught, the sizzle of butter in the pan on the stovetop.

I didn’t like enclosed places, which was part of the allure of the house: the openness around it; the multiple windows and exits; the rooms that flowed from one straight into another. But now I felt bound by the perimeter, like people were watching; like I shouldn’t leave without reason.

The box cutter wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Something breaking open inside me. All the possibilities of where it might be.

The box had arrived on Wednesday, and I’d used the box cutter to slice through the tape. I’d pulled out the contents, gotten swept away in the moment . . . I must’ve slid it into a different drawer afterward, my mind unfocused. Or left it inside the box by accident, as I replaced each item.

“Sit,” she said, pointing the whisk at me. What I really wanted to do was ask her to leave so I could go through the drawers one by one. Search the house top to bottom until I found it, and be sure. Because that was the problem: I could never be sure. Not until I had it in my hand.

Elyse slid the dish in front of me, and I continued to surprise myself, scooping up the eggs like I hadn’t eaten in days, practically ravenous. Even after all this.

“You might want to slow down a bit . . .”

I put the fork down, a memory surfacing.

Eggs on the tray in front of me. My mom beside the bed, arms crossed. The doctor at the foot of the bed. The sound of the fork against the tray, nothing satisfying, an endless bottom. “Slow down, Arden—”

The days after the rescue. Scenes flickering into focus—though incidents that might not be real.

It had been happening like that ever since I opened the box—this blurring of time.

I’d passed a group of nurses gossiping in the lobby the morning after the box arrived, and thought I’d heard my mother’s laughter—the unrestrained, high-pitched giggle that used to make people expect a child or a teen instead of a full-grown adult woman with a child of her own.

The same thing had happened around the ten-year anniversary. Flashes of memories that could not be mine:

Walk down the porch steps, and I’d see a little girl in a nightgown doing the same, the scene in sepia tones, like an old photograph. Ride the bus to school down the tree-lined street, and see a cluster of volunteers trudging through the thick foliage, searching for me. Close my eyes at night and see my mother with her hand to her neck as she called my name into the emptiness.

These memories did not belong to me. They were images from the news. Stories from the articles. From my mother’s book.

This was another truth I discovered back then: A story about you doesn’t necessarily belong to you. It belongs to the writer. To the witness. To the teller.

When they say: The girl from Widow Hills, remember? What they were reaching back for weren’t your memories—they were their own.

I was too young to really remember, and too much time had passed anyway, the trauma buried under so many layers that it existed only in