Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,38
they always recovered.
Orion wasn’t so sure this time. Mary Lou had been coughing like this for weeks.
“I was allowed at school until I began to show,” she continued, her voice rougher than before. “Then I was homeschooled. Mom said it was mono.”
Mary Lou rolled her eyes like a teenager would. It surprised Orion. She always seemed older than she was, wise beyond her years. Orion understood why now.
“Everyone knew, though. I was so mad.” Mary Lou looked down at her hands. The nails were bitten down to the skin. “Embarrassed. Johnny was distant. He tried to be supportive, but he was a teenage boy with dreams of leaving our town in his rearview and I was giving him an anchor he didn’t want.” She looked at her ankle, fiddled with the chain.
“He was bound by honor his parents instilled in him.” Her eyes went to Orion. Glassy. Tears ready to be shed. “I secretly hated her the entire time she was growing inside me,” she whispered, shame saturating the words. “I wanted an escape of my own. To see the world. To truly live. In my darkest moments, I stood at the top of the stairs, hovering my foot in the air, planning on falling.”
She stopped talking for a while. A long while.
Orion waited. She’d learned how to do that. It was all they did now. Waited for the next torture. The next horror. Waited to die.
“But I didn’t,” Mary Lou continued, puncturing the silence. She smiled sadly. “I had her two weeks early. She was perfect. But she cried all the time. She wouldn’t latch onto my nipple. I was sad. Missed my prom. I loved her with all my heart, but my heart was tired. I knew my parents saw that. I needed a break.” She paused again to cough.
“That’s when they took me. The Things. I had a fight with my parents. About finishing high school. I wanted to go back, my mother wanted me to be a housewife and mother. I lost it. Screamed. Then I packed a bag, walked out. I had only intended on going away for a few hours. Making a statement. But . . .” She trailed off.
Orion could fill in the blanks. She’d heard bits and pieces of the story before, all the ugly sides of Mary Lou’s seemingly perfect upbringing.
“They wouldn’t believe I just left,” she whispered, hope that was yet to die threading through the words. “They couldn’t. Maribelle didn’t have a mother. She doesn’t know me. I just want you to make sure she’s okay. I need you to make sure she’s okay, Ri.”
“You’ll do that,” Orion said with a sureness she didn’t fully believe. “You’ll do it when we all get the fuck out of here. You hear me?”
Mary Lou didn’t respond. Instead, she looked upon Orion lovingly, as a mother would her daughter, and stroked Orion’s hair behind her ear, smiled her brilliant smile.
They took Mary Lou later that evening.
And they never brought her back.
The interrogation room blinked back into focus, the fluorescent light overhead flooding Orion’s senses.
Orion didn’t know how long she’d been trapped in that memory. The shrink said flashbacks were a symptom of PTSD. But this hadn’t felt like a flashback. It was like someone had snatched her out of this room and hurled her back into the past. She could still smell the stench of The Cell. Her legs ached and her stomach protested with hunger.
It took her a while to get her bearings. To remind herself that her stomach was full, her ankle was empty, that she was free. Eric was staring at her with patience. Understanding.
Maddox showed concern. Was he waiting for her to break down? Fall apart?
Orion sipped her coffee. It was cold now. Tasted bad. But nothing tasted worse than her rancid memories, regret ripping the skin from her tongue.
“I can’t say for sure how many,” she said, taking care with the words, with her tone. She did not want that look of pity. To be treated like a grenade about to go off. “But there’s more than three.” She swallowed roughly, thinking of them all. Some had lasted years. Others mere days. Orion had come to understand life was kinder to those ones, gifting them with death. She had come to entertain the idea that it was her last name and the sins in her genes that kept her alive all these years.
She glared at Eric. “How is it that two men can bury bodies of countless