Authors: Eliza Victoria

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BOOK: Dwellers

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“I agree,” Leslie says. “But Louis can kill you in your sleep. And then he’ll come after me.”

“He knew about the body, Leslie,” I say. “If he were going to kill me, he’d have done it a long time ago.”

“But he didn’t know you were involved in Meryl’s death until now. That changes things, right, Louis?”

Louis stares straight ahead and doesn’t reply.

“He won’t kill me, or come after you, or go to the police,” I say. “You have the disc now. I believe that’s the only copy around. You destroy it. The only evidence
left will be the body, which, as mentioned, is in Louis’s basement. He will bury the body for us and he can finally stop this philanthropic caregiver bullshit and deposit me in a hospital.
Going to the police, or to Meryl’s family, will only complicate things for his life. Right, Louis?”

Louis’s voice is small. “Whatever you say.”

“See?” I say. I try to keep my hands from trembling. “Now, about Ivy.”

Ivy, crying, sits bent over her duct-taped wrists, eyes scrunched tight.

“Let’s take her to the basement,” I say.

LESLIE TAKES THE disc out of the box, drops it on the floor, and steps on it. Repeatedly. The shards glitter.

“Did that feel good?” I say.

Leslie looks at me for a few seconds without saying anything. Then, she smiles. “What do we do with her?”

“First,” I say, “we take her to the chest freezer and show Meryl to her.”

Ivy cries.

“Then you do whatever you want. I would love to do something and teach the girl a lesson but I can’t at the moment. So I guess I’ll just watch.” I sit back with a
satisfied smile. “My crutches are in my room.”

Leslie sits on the table again, cupping her chin. “Just like old times, huh,” Leslie says. Her eyes disturb me.

“But with crutches this time,” I say.

She laughs, tentatively at first, and then louder, slapping a hand on her knee.

“All right, wait here.” She gets up and heads to my room, taking the scissors and the gun with her. Without looking back she says, “If I hear one tiny peep from any of you,
I’m running back out and shooting all of you in the head.”

We do as we are told. I can feel Louis’s gaze burning the side of my face but I keep my eyes on my feet. I adjust the dial on my knee immobilizer and feel the pain crawl up my right thigh
as my leg descends. I need to do this. I need to be able to do this.

Leslie returns with the crutches. She tries to hand me both, but I tell her to hold one for me, for now. I put weight on my left leg, using the crutch to boost me up. I straighten and my vision
instantly turns gray. I crash back on the chair, hard. I hug the crutch like I would a buoy in the open ocean.

“You don’t look too good,” Leslie says.

“Wait,” I say. The living room sways.

“I don’t think I have the patience for this, Jonah.”

“Just,” I say, trying again, “wait.” I get up, much slower. My left leg screams but it holds. I keep my other leg bent. I reach for the other crutch. Leslie hands it to
me and jumps back as if I were a leper.

“There,” I say, the sweat rolling down my face. “Let’s go.”

I am standing but I don’t know how long I can stay like this.

Leslie has her gun pointed at me now. “Stay where I can see you,” she says, crouching to cut the duct tape around Ivy’s ankles. She leaves the scissors on the floor and yanks
Ivy to her feet by her bound wrists.

“You don’t trust me,” I say.

“No,” Leslie says. “I don’t know. You seem different.”

“It’s just the pain.”

The answer gives her pause. “You won’t make it down the stairs.”

“Watch me,” I say.

“Insatiable until the end. Lead the way, Professor.”

“See you later, Louis,” I say.

“Jonah—” he starts, but I don’t look back. I don’t engage. I start my arduous journey to the laundry room. I imagine the pain as a small white ball on my knee,
keeping it in one place, and pushing it out of the way. I hear Ivy stumbling and pleading with Leslie behind me:
Please don’t, please don’t do this. I won’t tell anyone,
please, just let me go.

I reach the plain white door and turn the knob but can’t stay on my foot long enough to unlatch it. “Get out of the way,” Leslie says, pushing Ivy in front of her. The gun is
aimed at Ivy’s nape. Leslie reaches over to release the slide bolt latch. The door swings open.

The basement is as dark as ever. A rectangle of light coming from the laundry room falls on the landing, illuminating the splintered hulk resting there.

“You didn’t even clear the cabinet?” Leslie says in indignation. I place my entire weight on the left side of my body and raise the right crutch, ready to swing at her head,
until Ivy raises her arms and drives her elbow back. Leslie bends over with a grunt. Ivy steps sideways and uses her right shoulder to push Leslie into the void.

A scream, a thud, the sound of breaking wood. Ivy loses her balance and falls on the second step, which creaks beneath her. I hear Louis calling from the living room: “What’s going
on?”

Leslie, face bleeding, half of her body wedged inside the remains of the cabinet, cries and screams and curses. “Kill her!” she says, and I know she’s talking to me.
“Kill her, kill her!”

I reach over and pull Ivy to her feet. It takes three tries. Between the second and the third try Leslie lifts her gun hand and shoots. The bullet travels up the stairs and hits the door frame.
Another hits the door as I slam it close.

“Jonah!” Leslie screams. I teeter on my left leg as I slide the bolt in place. “Jonah, what are you doing? Don’t leave me here! Jonah,
help me!
”

“Let’s go,” I say. Ivy and I move back into the living room. I cannot feel my legs. I drop the crutches, fall on the couch, grab the scissors Leslie has dropped on the floor,
and cut the tape around Ivy’s wrists. She takes the scissors from my shaking hands and frees Louis from the chair.

Leslie is right; the soundproofing in the basement is excellent. We cannot hear her anymore.

“You did the right thing, Ivy,” I say. Ivy sits on the floor, crying like an infant. Louis holds her for a while, pieces of duct tape still clinging stubbornly to his arms.

“Are you all right?” Louis asks me.

“We need to get out of here,” I say.

“I need to call my brother,” Ivy says, and realizes something else that makes her cry harder. “She ruined the disc!
Meryl!
She’s—”

“It’s all right,” Louis says, stroking her magenta hair.

I must have passed out because the next time I open my eyes Louis is pushing the crutches to my chest. “One last time, Cousin,” he says, placing an arm around my waist. I am on my
feet again. We walk out of the house, into the rain, and into Ivy’s car.

“Leslie is going to shoot herself,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away. “Isn’t she?”

“I hope not,” Louis says.

“She will,” I say. I feel tears on my cheek, and I try to understand why because they don’t seem connected to anything I am saying.

“Where are we going?” I ask, but I don’t hear the answer. Next thing I know, we are parked somewhere indoors. Louis and someone else—
a guard?
I see a glimpse of
uniform—are lowering me onto a wheelchair. I hear the guard saying “Long time no see, sir,” with cheer in his voice. I am rolled into an elevator, down a hallway, and into a dark,
musty room.

“Where—” But I think I know where. Louis turns on the lights and draws the curtains. I see that I am in a living room with a leather couch and a huge TV. I look out the window.
Jonah’s apartment has a good view of the city. Good, because everything looks so far away. The rain has stopped, and the stars are starting to come out.

Louis hands me a glass of water. I hear him opening doors, trying the keys on anything that’s locked. I drink the water and only then realize how thirsty I am. “Jonah lives
here,” I say, and Louis says yes.

He is gone for some time. When he comes back, he sits on the couch and says, “There is a small room at the end of the corridor. I thought it was a storage closet. There is an old desktop
computer in there. Photos.” Louis looks like he is going to throw up. “Discs.”

I take a deep breath.
Of course.
I nod.
I see.

Louis says, “I sent Ivy a message. I told her to give us an hour before calling the police.”

He places two bottles of mineral water and four prescription bottles on the glass-top table in front of the couch. The bottles bear Jonah’s name and the generic names of the pills within:
hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, and alprazolam. Painkillers. Anti-anxiety. Sleeping aids.

I think of my sister.
Our parents’ love has a hard edge to it.
Celeste said that, before Uncle Pedro ruined her.
They cherish us at arm’s length
, she said, and think of
our inevitable deaths not with anger and denial in their hearts but with a calm acceptance. Because there is a power greater than our life force. Because we dwell in borrowed bodies. Because
nothing is ours.

If you die now
, Celeste said,
I will be furious. You deserve to have someone in your life who will say,
This is not okay.
You deserve to have someone who will be angry when you
die.

I have gone past anger, but no, no, this is not okay.

“I am so sorry, Louis,” I say.

“I’m sorry, too,” Louis says. “I wish things would end a different way. But here we are.”

These are the ways we can escape this mess: find another body, or go back home and hope the family will accept us once again.

But I am so tired.

Pain is bad for the heart, my mother used to say.

“I wish I could sleep,” I say.

What I wish, really, is to turn back Time.

Louis opens the prescription bottles. “We can start with the alprazolam,” he says, taking a handful of pills and passing them to me.

“What do you think comes after?” he says. “Or is that a pointless question to ask?”

Nothing. What follows is what came before we were born—nothing.

And that is all right, Celeste.

“Still here?” Louis says, peering at my face.

“I think,” I say. I glance out the window. The sky is starting to change color. Is it morning already?

Louis has opened one bottle of mineral water. The pills sit on the palm of his hand, white and sharp, like teeth.

I suddenly remember my twin brothers, pushing me out of the kitchen and laughing.

I reach out and place a hand on Louis’s arm.

There is a knock on the door. Faint. Tentative. Perhaps it is Auntie, finding us again, and for the last time. Perhaps a neighbor, or Ivy, or the cops. Perhaps my mother. Perhaps there is mercy
in the end, after all. “Wait,” I tell both the door and Louis.

Wait.

About the Author

Eliza Victoria’s fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications and have won prizes in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Philippines Free
Press Literary Awards. Her two previous books—a short story collection called
A Bottle of Storm

Clouds
(2012)
and the science
fiction novel
Project 17
(2013)—
were both published by Visprint and are available in digital formats from Flipside Publishing.
Project 17
was a finalist for
Best Novel at the 33rd National Book Awards (2014). For more information, please visit http://elizavictoria.com.