Dwellers (2 page)

“You didn’t force me to help you,” he says.

I THINK LOUIS thinks we are secluded and safe, as though he has already forgotten what real seclusion means and what my former life is like. (Look at me, breaking Rule No. 3
again.) The hush of a huge century-old ancestral house, surrounded by nothing but trees and fields, that’s what seclusion is. At night, I still dream of gleaming wooden floors and capiz
shells. The narrow passageways surround the living room and lead to the kitchen. I follow these passageways but cannot find their end.

4

THERE ARE TWO girls on a bed. There are two girls on a bed. One wears a white shirt—a man’s shirt—and the other is naked, save for a pair of pink panties.
They face a barred window. They are both kneeling on the bed. I am sitting in one corner of the room. I should be able to see their faces in profile but I can’t. It is as though I am looking
through a camera eye with the frame cut off. I can see them clearly from the chin down. The girl in the shirt touches the naked girl’s breast, slides her palm down her bare stomach, and
slides her fingers under the garter of her pink panties. Her free arm is around the naked girl’s neck. The naked girl is trying to pull the other girl’s arm down. The naked girl is
crying.

I wake up and all of the lights are off. The clock reads 2 AM.

A dream. It is just a dream. I sit up. Normally I dream of the big house and Celeste. The twins. But this dream is different. It doesn’t feel connected to me.

Louis steps into the room with a flashlight. “Blackout,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He yawns. “The entire street is dark.” He places the flashlight on the study
table.

“I had a dream,” I say.

Louis doesn’t say anything except, “Hm”, probably thinking he already knows what the dream is about.

“It’s not about Celeste,” I say.

“You shouldn’t say her name,” Louis says. He pulls out the chair from the study table and sits on it.

“There were two girls. I think one of them is sexually abusing the other.”

“Jesus, Jonah.”

Louis and I have talked about this exhaustively. We are what we remember. Or what we choose to remember. If we lose our memories, we lose ourselves. But where do memories reside? Are they
tangible objects you find in the organic brain? Do you take them with you when you leave your body, or are they left with the corpus? Do they simply disappear, like steam? Or are they more like the
boxes in the attic or the ruined dresser cabinet in the basement? Things that can be abandoned and later inherited.

“Do you think it’s Jonah’s memory?” I ask.

He yawned again. “Maybe.”

“I hope Jonah is not a monster.”

Louis laughs, to my surprise. “Maybe he just saw it in a movie. Online. Someplace. You find the most depraved things online.”

That is possible. “I hope so,” I say. “You’re tired, Louis. Go back to sleep. Thanks for the flashlight.”

“I hope the blackout ends soon,” Louis says before he closes the door. “We have meat that might go bad.”

THERE IS STILL no electricity the next morning. I have coffee and bread and NSAIDs for breakfast. I wheel myself to the window to catch a breeze. No such luck. The humidity is
unforgiving. I watch Louis stand near the bars of the gate and listen to a couple of women fanning themselves, neighbors commiserating, speculating on the cause of the power outage.

“Transformer blast,” Louis reports back to me. It’s too hot to do anything. Louis sits, languorous, on a chair in my room and stares at the ceiling. I hunch over a book. The
skin covered by my knee immobilizer starts to sweat and itch. We don’t talk. What is there to talk about when you can’t talk about your past?
Remember that time when we had a power
outage for two days, and we had dinner in the garden with all the grown-ups? We wore our best suits and felt like grown-ups ourselves.

We can’t talk about that.

We notice the smell around lunchtime. Louis has wheeled me out of the room into the dining area despite my protestations. Beef stew.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“You need to eat something.”

I haven’t eaten much of anything ever since the hospital. Louis gives me a look. I sigh, pick up a spoonful of beef, eat it, and chew. It should be enough to placate him, I think. He
frowns. I try to eat more but cannot find pleasure in it. I have no appetite. My hands hang limp at the end of the wheelchair armrests. I watch Louis finish his meal.

That’s when I notice it. A faint stench in the air, like rotten meat.

“Do you smell that?” I say.

Louis looks up. “I’ve used up all of our meat in the stew,” Louis says, but enters the kitchen anyway to check.

“Well, it’s not coming from the refrigerator,” he says.

“But you do smell that, right?”

“Yes.” He sits at the table again but stands up after a moment, agitated. “Shit. Where is that coming from?”

Louis places the dishes in the sink and leaves the dining room. I wait, listening to him walking around the house. He stops walking after a few minutes, but doesn’t return to the room. I
wheel myself out.

I find him in the laundry room, where the stench is stronger. It smells like leftover rice left out in the sun. The door leading to the basement is straight ahead. The plain white door has, in
addition to the doorknob, a slide bolt latch that looks newer than the rest of the house. Louis unlatches the door and the smell hits us like a wave.

“Damn,” I say, covering my nose with the collar of my shirt.

“What
is
that,” Louis says. “Did something die down there?”

I can see the dresser cabinet seven steps down, right at that point before the winding staircase turns.

“You can’t go in there,” I say. “You might get hurt.”

Louis goes down the seven steps with a flashlight. “I still can’t see anything,” he says. He goes back up, sees me there and gives me a look as though seeing me for the first
time. “Do you want to go back to your room?”

“I can wheel myself back, you know,” I say, slightly miffed. “And you’re not going down there.”

“I’ll be careful,” he says. He goes out and disappears for a long time, and comes back with a hammer, safety goggles, and a pair of rubber boots.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I say.

“I wish I had an axe,” Louis says, putting on the goggles and the boots. He goes down the basement stairs.

“Why do you need to go investigate?”

“If there’s a dead animal down there it’s going to stink up the street.”

I hear splintering wood, a boot crushing through a board. Louis curses. “You might cut yourself,” I shout through the doorway. The hammer goes down. The glow of the flashlight
disappears further down the staircase.

“Well?” I say. I hear squeaks against a cement floor.

“Old furniture,” Louis says. He grunts. “It smells really bad down here.”

“Dead cat?” I say.

“It smells like shit and bleach.”

“Did you say ‘bleach’?” I say, but Louis doesn’t reply.

For a minute I couldn’t hear anything. Then heavy footsteps, boots crashing through wood. Louis emerges from the dark basement, ashen-faced.

“What?” I ask, wheeling myself back. He puts down the flashlight and the hammer on the floor and slams the basement door shut. He pulls off the goggles and sits on the floor with his
back to the door. He covers his face with both of his hands and tries to breathe.

I’m frightened. This is no dead cat.

“Louis?” I say, softly.

“Oh my God,” Louis says, dropping his hands from his face. He looks at me. “There’s a chest freezer down there.”

My heart stops.

“There’s a dead girl in it,” Louis says.

5

WHO ARE THESE people, really? Louis and Jonah—who are they? For the first time since we arrived in this house, I am disturbed by the lack of photos on the walls, the lack
of framed certificates, words to live by, the lack of life.

The girl in the chest freezer is naked and emaciated, Louis tells me. Sunken cheeks, ribs poking through. Fingers like claws. She looks both old and young, at once a child and a grandmother.
Louis finds it impossible to guess her age, though he immediately thinks of the words
anorexic
and
teenager.
She is concealed beneath melting blocks of ice.

Today marks the third week since I left the hospital. How long has she been in that freezer?

Who hid her there?

We puzzle over the detail of the fallen dresser cabinet. Someone went to the basement, toppled the cabinet over, and left how?

Louis says there is a large window over the freezer, large enough for an adult to crawl through. The glass panes have been painted over with brown paint. It’s locked from the outside and
leads into the backyard. All right: so someone came from outside, toppled the cabinet over, and went back out the window? Clearly the cabinet was pushed to discourage people inside the house from
exploring the basement.

“Is that why they were driving so fast?” I say. I remember us in the SUV. I remember the sedan with Louis and Jonah (though we didn’t know their names then) zooming out of a
street and appearing in front of us, suddenly in the way, suddenly giving us a way out of our old life.

They were driving fast because they were escaping the scene of a crime, a scene we have now inherited.

“We need to get out of here,” I say.

We have moved back to the dining area. Louis is massaging his forehead. It is starting to get dark.

“We don’t have a car,” he says. “You are injured.”

“But we can’t stay here.” It is starting to get dark and I am terrified.

“We wouldn’t have known about the chest freezer if the electricity didn’t go out.”

“What are you saying?”

“If the power comes back we’ll be okay.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll go,” Louis says. “But we’re doomed if that’s the case. A neighbor will call the police and report the smell. They’ll discover the body in
the basement, and the man who delivers our groceries will be questioned and he’ll tell the police who we are.”

This damn body. This damn face.

Louis says, “We’ll be on the run.”

Again,
I say in my head.

“And we can’t really run that far.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I say.

“I know.”

“Isn’t it ironic that I try to escape and I end up anyway in the body of a –”

“Don’t,” Louis says. “Just don’t.”

There comes a time when you just need to let the tears fall. To Louis’s credit, he keeps his gaze averted, giving me some privacy. (Irrelevant, really, in my case, when I can’t even
give myself a bath or even hobble to the urinal by myself.)

“Maybe they didn’t do it,” he says. “Maybe Louis and Jonah are innocent.”

The electricity comes back in the early evening, and I do not know whether to be relieved or alarmed.

WE CAN’T SLEEP. Though I have not seen the dead girl myself, Louis has described her to me, and this may be worse than actually seeing her in person. She looms large in my
mind. I imagine her putrefaction—her skin sliding off her flesh and breaking open, putrid and green; her eyes bulging as her body bloats with gases.

Louis goes up to the attic with a flashlight. I sit away from the opening, thinking he might start throwing boxes down the pull-down staircase.

“What exactly are you looking for?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Louis says. “Clues.”

He rattles around up there like the largest rat alive. Twenty minutes later, Louis comes back down, covered in sweat, cobwebs, and dust. He sees me and shakes his head. Nothing.

“Mostly old books and papers,” he says. “But I haven’t looked properly. It’s too hot.”

I wheel out to the living room and wait for Louis to finish washing his face and arms.

“What are you expecting to find?” I ask as he sinks into the sofa.

“Do you think she was killed here?” Louis asks.

“What?”

“If she was killed here,” he says, “she might have left something. A bag. Shoes.”

“She was naked, you said.”

“Yes.”

“Someone’s already burned her clothes,” I say. “Buried them. There are no more clues.”

But we keep on searching, even as we go through the rest of our day. Louis is in the kitchen cooking but I can hear him opening all of the cupboards, I can hear him walking around the house as
something simmers on the stove. I am in my room, ostensibly reading a new book, but I open the cabinet, pull open the shelves, and look through the detritus. We can’t let it go. It’s
like an echo that keeps nagging at us.

There is a gap between the wall with the window and the back of the low bookshelf in my room.

To look behind the shelf, I have to crouch on the floor, sit up, and peek, or pull the shelf away from the wall. I can do none of these things.

I wheel myself to the door. “Louis!”

“What?” He sounds like he’s in the laundry room again.

“Come over here a minute.”

I direct him to the bookshelf when he gets to my room. “Can you see if anything slipped into the gap there?”

“Did you drop a book?” he says. I don’t answer.

“Move back,” he says, trying to pull the shelf away. It doesn’t budge immediately. He tries again and the shelf moves an inch.

“Damn it.”

“It’s all right,” I say. “Never mind.”

But Louis is stubborn. After a few minutes, he pulls the shelf far enough away from the wall to fit his arm through the gap.

He pulls out a brown planner covered in dust bunnies. A planner with a leather cover, thick with inserts.

Louis hands it to me. I brush away the thick film of dust and open it. Out falls a university ID. Louis bends to pick it up. The name on the ID is Meryl Solomon.

We stare at it as if it could cause an explosion.

Is Meryl here?

“Oh my God, Louis,” I say.

But the college girl smiling from the square of plastic has flesh on her bones, round cheeks, a big smile. Health. Not the near-skeleton in the freezer.

“Is that her?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can hardly remember her face now.” He reads the name of the school. “This university is not far from here.”