Come When I Call You: The Violent and Dead, #1

PROLOGUE

I remember the first time it happened.

I woke up in the night, tearing blearily from a dream in which everything had seemed intensely familiar, only to find, as I stared at the sagging blanket above my head, that there had been nothing familiar about it at all.

My cousin Lucia wasn’t beside me. I lay still for a moment, listening, reluctant to slip out of the cocoon of warm covers to chase after her through the house, which was new but old, and strange with its bewildering number of floors and staircases and furniture rising up where you least expected it. I’d come over on the train by myself—I’d insisted on it—to keep Lucia company while my aunt and uncle dealt with all the surprises and bothers of moving into a new house. I took this duty very seriously, secretly thrilled to have graduated into that stage of childhood where I could be asked to be responsible for something, or someone. But after just one day of letting my cousin have her own way in everything, as my mother had instructed—which, as a clever and opinionated girl of eleven, had pained me more bitterly than anything I’d experienced before—now I wanted nothing more than to dissolve into sleep, even if it meant falling back into that strange dream. At least in sleep I didn’t have to pretend that her ill-advised construction plan for our fort was genius. At least in sleep I didn’t have to take part in another of her nonsensical games, which always relied heavily, maddeningly, on make-believe.

In sleep, I could do things my way, the right away. I yearned to have it back, this feeling of control, of knowing my own mind and following it. I yearned for sleep, but I couldn’t have it, not now.

I had to go find Lucia.

The daisy clock sitting on the floor beside my head read ten past two o’clock. I sat up under the tent of blankets and rubbed my eyes, eyeing the sliver of moonlight on the bedroom floor I could see through the opening of the fort. The gap in the blankets was just wide enough to allow a single eye to peer through and I did so, pressing my nose against the musty wool. As Lucia’s room came into focus in all its disastrous glory, I called out her name once, very quietly, the sound of my quavering voice making me feel foolish, especially since it got no reply.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed my way out of the fort (watching with some satisfaction as it collapsed behind me) and padded across the room and into the dark hallway with a confident step. If I was afraid of the dark, I wasn’t about to let myself know it.

I waded through the darkness of the sleeping house, peering hopefully into doorways and trying to ignore a weird itching feeling in my legs, deep inside the bone, where I couldn’t scratch. As I approached the end of the hallway—tiptoeing because I imagined, though I wasn’t at all sure, that my aunt and uncle’s room was down at this end and waking them seemed a catastrophe to avoid at all costs—I decided, quite disloyally, that if I didn’t find her on this floor I would abandon the search altogether.

This decision had only just solidified in my mind, and I was in the process of turning around, when I caught sight of a blur of white and stopped, pausing awkwardly mid-turn and wobbling for a moment on one foot, unsure if I should stay or go, if what I’d seen was real or if I’d just imagined it. Then I blinked and saw that Lucia was standing there in her purple and white owl pyjamas, wedged between a mammoth bookcase, which was empty, and a potted plant the size of a small tree. She eyed me avidly, her eyes round and liquid, looking very much like someone caught in the act—though I couldn’t immediately tell what crime she was committing.

Placing a finger over her lips, she gestured for me to come closer, which I did, easing myself into the small space beside her without a word. I could smell worn wood and dust and could feel her excitement—or was it fear? With Lucia it was always so hard to tell.

We’re hiding, she whispered.

Why? I asked.

Because it’s our turn, Lucia replied.

This was typical of a conversation with my cousin—she was always either stating the obvious or being frustratingly opaque—and I struggled not to roll my eyes. My mother had warned me about rolling my eyes. It was on the list of things a girl of eleven should not do to a girl of eight—a list which was, in my opinion, far too long, frustratingly specific, and designed to make me miserable.

Lucia’s curly hair was, as always, badly tangled and hung around her face in thick, twisted ropes that tickled my neck and made me fidget. The wedge of space really wasn’t big enough for two. I had to put my arm around her shoulders to stop myself from falling out of it, her side pressing into mine, her body’s cold stealing my warmth and our hearts slowly beginning to beat in time, as though we were becoming one being.

I watched her staring with riveted concentration through the leaves of the plant (no child I’d ever known, before or after, could focus as unwaveringly and disturbingly as Lucia) and was on the verge of asking her who exactly we were hiding from, when she sighed dramatically and pushed against me with her entire body, shoving me out.

Moving to the wall, she heaved open a door, which until that moment I’d thought was a window, and put her hands on her hips.

You’re supposed to be seeking, she said exasperatedly into the dark. "That means looking, not hiding. Looking."

The doorway was black and empty, as far as I could tell, and watching my cousin berate the empty air left me feeling, all at once, that I had had enough.

She turned back toward me, her tiny form heavy with irritation, and I matched her expression perfectly, the two of us facing off in a bizarre, midnight competition of indignation.

I explained the rules to him, but I don’t think he gets it, she said.

I was on the verge of blurting out that it didn’t matter to me if her imaginary friend understood the stupid rules or not because I didn’t want to play her stupid game anyway—this double-use of the word keenly purposeful—when I looked over her shoulder and saw to my surprise that there was someone standing there after all.

He looked to be about eight or nine, Lucia’s age, with puffy dark hair and a serious face. He was wearing some kind of school uniform—a blue button-up shirt and black pleated pants—and stared at us, his eyes gigantic and eagerly bright, but said nothing. This silence, coupled with his sudden appearance out of the dark, wiped every logical question out of my mind. I found myself wondering instead how he’d managed to avoid learning the rules of hide and seek, a game so common and overplayed in my lifetime that I almost envied him.

He wants to play outside, Lucia said and it was the way she said it, so casually, as though going out to play in the dead of night was utterly commonplace, that finally pushed me over the edge.

As the older cousin, the clever one, it was my job to say no and to suggest some other, safer, saner game. I saw Lucia eyeing me, waiting to see which way I would go, the beginning of a smile curling her lips.

I told him my cousin Anna doesn’t like to break the rules, she said.

Her words echoed in my ears. I felt myself bursting free of something, a bubble that had encased me throughout that long day. I couldn’t resist the temptation to contradict her, to prove her wrong, to be the boss, even if it was what she wanted, even if she was bating me.

I grinned at both the boy and my cousin, my eyes lighting up to match hers, our faces mirrored once again, though hers was tinged, just slightly, with triumph.

Fine, I said. Follow me.

Outside, the wind howled and the air smelled of rain about to fall. I’d put on jeans, rain boots and a jacket, while Lucia had only bothered with a down vest and slippers. I could already see the mud splattering the back of her pyjama bottoms, the slippers turning from pink to brown, the telltale evidence mounting, but I didn’t care. I was infused with a reckless energy, the gusts blasting against my back seeming to grant me super speed as I careened across the lawn, caught up in the wonderful thrill of breaking the rules.

The house sat on a corner lot and the front lawn was enormous, sloping downward toward the street. Its front walk was bordered with thorny bushes that looked like miniature trees, and an oak stood at the very edge of the property, its reaching branches hanging over us as we ran about and called to one another, the wind stealing out words before anyone could hear.

Lucia bossed the boy around and he complied to her every whim, agreeing so automatically that I started to believe he might be mocking her. To Lucia’s obvious delight, he played the games she wanted how she wanted, as I never would—letting her make up new rules and insert unlikely obstacles and foes with elaborate backstories—without ever complaining that nothing made any sense, without so much as a flinch.

As I stood catching my breath for a moment, my back against the brick wall of the house, I watched them hanging from a branch of the oak, like two shirts forgotten on the line. The boy’s eyes followed Lucia everywhere and he never shied from her, even when she scolded him—You can’t fly. You’re an angel without wings!—even when she stamped her foot and made herself a nuisance. It looked, just a little bit, like love.

On our way out the door, when the boy had run ahead, I’d asked Lucia about him. She’d only said he lived down the street, he went to the Hebrew school, and he got a bike for his birthday every year—which, she said, didn’t seem fair since her mother, afraid of car crashes, wouldn’t let her have even one. His house was next door to her new friend Natasha’s. She didn’t explain why she’d let him into the house in the middle of the night, and I didn’t ask. To me, it fit in perfectly with all the other bizarre things Lucia got into her head, like gluing grapes to the trees in her bedroom wallpaper—the apples had been too heavy—or catching mice to use as pets for her dolls—though, to her disappointment, we hadn’t found any.

It hadn’t seemed strange at first, but now it did, if only briefly, as I watched him flitting in and out of the light, and glimpsed a scrape on his temple and a rip in his shirt, as I noticed that while I shivered he never seemed to be cold, though he wore no jacket, and that he never needed to catch his breath.

But this wondering lasted no more than a moment and then it vanished as I joined in on their game of tag, forgotten before any real concern could form.

Eventually Lucia began to tire even of her imagined games and nothing would satisfy her. The boy ran across the street and back and it seemed as though he wanted to be chased, wanted to be caught, but no matter how quickly Lucia moved she could never get him. I could see her agitation mounting and sensed danger, because Lucia was used to winning every game, every time, as though it was her birthright—I understood this, because so was I. But I’d just spent a whole day suppressing the obsessive need to be the best, the only, the winner. Lucia had not.

As I watched the boy step out into the street again and stand there, shuffling his shoes, I knew, perhaps even before he did, what he was about to do. Even before he smiled crookedly and turned, crossing the street and running up the lawn, through the door in the fence, right into the backyard of the house opposite, I was reaching forward to grab Lucia’s arm.

Don’t! I said, and to her credit Lucia did hesitate, her foot raised above the curb, her pale face turned toward mine.

I shook my head once, because this was too far, this was so much against the rules I could taste it.

I saw my cousin take this in, a slight furrow in her brow telling me she was considering, for a second, those consequences she normally ignored, before she gave in and launched herself into the street after him. There was nothing for me to do but follow.

There was a sleeping dog in the yard. He raised his head but didn’t bark as we ran through, making straight for another door in the fence across, a door hanging open like a beacon. Lucia slipped wildly on the damp grass in her slippers and yet never slowed her pace, the back of the boy always one yard ahead, driving her forward with an energy which, after forty minutes of play already gone, I didn’t quite possess.

Soon she pulled ahead, and I was left alone to fly through one backyard after another, my only consolation being that there were no fences after that first and I could plainly see the two of them ahead of me, one dark head and then another, as I skirted pools and tripped over lawn chairs, and in one yard nearly ran straight into a large stone statue of a naked woman holding a pot full of foul-smelling flowers.

I caught up with Lucia in the last yard on the street, which was full of hanging bedsheets. I saw her shadow against the white sheet first, her windblown curls a fuzzy halo around her head. Ducking under the sheet, I came to a stop next to her, holding my side and wheezing. The boy was lingering hopefully on the grass across the way.

I can’t catch him, Lucia said. I don’t think I ever could.

The idea that earlier the boy had been letting her win, that all of us had been, possibly for her entire life, seemed to perplex her to immobility, and she stared at the boy across the street for some time, as though calculating how completely he was out of her reach. Then, without another word, she turned and began to walk slowly back to the house, along the street this time.

What about him? I said of the boy.

What about him, she replied, without breaking her stride.

I looked back at the boy. He was still watching us, his arms swinging as if he wanted to come after us but couldn’t quite make up his mind to do it. He kept looking over his shoulder, as if he heard his mother calling him, and finally, with one last crestfallen glance at my cousin, he scurried over the grass and up the street, disappearing from view so quickly that when I blinked he was already gone.

It occurred to me that the whole time we’d been with him he’d never spoken a word.

The next morning Lucia was contrite and overly affectionate—as was her habit after the mischief was done—though she didn’t have to be because, by some miracle, we’d managed to avoid getting caught and punished. She insisted on sharing my chair at breakfast and offered to play any game I wanted—eyebrows wiggling, poking her tongue through a hole in her smile left by a missing tooth—but I was sullen and cranky after our late night and wouldn’t acknowledge her, which only led to a bout of bickering. Instantly, my aunt ordered us out of doors.

For lack of a better idea, we wandered down the street to see Natasha, Lucia’s new best friend, because she was good at skateboarding and could teach us all the best moves, and there was always her dog to play with.

Last night’s wind had died down, but the rain had never fallen. The clouds overhead were heavy and close as we approached Natasha’s house and saw her sitting on the steps, doing nothing. She was a plain-looking girl with a mousy ponytail, currently coming undone, and an alarmingly freckled face.

Lucia skipped up the stairs without hesitation, but I held back as was my habit when I didn’t know someone, and also because I could hear somebody crying in the house, a man, and it disturbed me. I was old enough to know that anything that could make a man cry like that had to be dire indeed.

What is it? Lucia asked.

It’s Daniel, Natasha replied, her chin trembling. He died.

I felt nothing at these words besides a vague regret at having come by to witness a tragedy that had nothing at all to do with me. Lucia’s reaction was very different. She shot to her feet and stared at the top of her friend’s head, grasping the skateboard we’d brought to her chest so hard that it left a welt in her neck where the edge bit into her skin.

I had the strangest sensation then, as though someone was watching me as I said what I did next, though there was nobody around but us.

Who’s Daniel? I asked.

Daniel, Natasha said, pointing to the house next door. He was hit by a car outside his school yesterday afternoon.

Here she pointed in the other direction, the direction we had run, over garden hoses and varnished decks, through weeds and sandboxes, to a corner where we’d seen a Synagogue peeking over the gabled roofs, a corner where I’d seen him turning, as though he heard someone calling him, before disappearing.

He asked me if he could borrow a tennis ball on Wednesday but I said no. She wiped at her cheeks. I called him a little troll and chased him out of our driveway.

I’d always prided myself on being a kid who could control her emotions at those moments when adults would notice it, not crying at the part when the horse drowns or the father dies, holding still when others ran from a snake in the schoolyard. I’d liked being praised for my level-headedness, my strength, liked how my mother called me her little warrior. But I had to admit that nothing that had ever happened to me before had made me want to burst into tears and throw up, possibly in tandem, as these words from the mouth of a girl I hardly knew.

I looked over at Daniel’s house where a line of cars had pulled up. Nobody seemed to want to pull into the empty driveway where a bike was lying on its side in the middle of the cement.

We walked slowly back to the house in much the same way we had the night before, except now the street and the houses seemed unrecognizable to me, both too tall and too small at once, as though they were growing and shrinking whenever I turned my head. The leaves we kicked in front of us seemed to clink together like marbles. If I hadn’t been following Lucia, I might have missed her house altogether.

A hired man was moving boxes in the garage, my uncle directing him in that overbearing way he had, scolding him for taking this box instead of that one. I looked up at the branches of the oak tree we’d climbed, following them up to the second floor of the side of the house where there was a door floating in the middle of the brick wall. I remembered an argument my aunt and uncle had had the day before over a balcony that had been removed and a door that was unsafe because it led to nowhere and if someone opened it they’d be met with a deadly surprise.

I’d liked those words, deadly surprise. They had seemed so cleverly morbid at the time.

Girls, my uncle said with the usual tone of shock he reserved for Lucia—as though he thought, or wished, she had disappeared in the night. What have you been doing?

Lucia looked at her shoes. I looked up at my uncle wearily. I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.

I might have been eleven and the older, cleverer one, but I had no words for what we had been doing.

ONE

It snowed on the day Helen Jamison died. I watched through my dorm room window as the back playing fields filled with white, like sugar being poured into a bowl. The dorm was full of the sound of leaving, as it had been all week—drawers being opened and closed, the slamming of doors, the clatter of suitcases being dragged down the stairs—only today it was joined by a chorus of weeping.

It was the last day of the winter exam period and most of the kids were already gone. Helen had been on her way home that morning, late and running to catch a train, when she was hit by a car on Granger avenue. She was flung through the air before smashing through the windshield of a truck coming in the other direction. I wondered if her body had slid to the ground right away, or if it had stayed there, stuck in the glass, like a rag stuffed into the hole in a broken window to keep out the wind. On any other day, I would have had the answer by lunchtime—boarding schools are hives of gossip. They’re a lot like dysfunctional families that way—but not that day; the school was closing down, the students rushing away from Helen’s death as though it were nothing more than a period at the end of a dreary semester. I almost regretted my choice to stay at school over break with Penelope. It would be less fun now, with Helen’s ghost hovering between us, threatening us with melancholy, keeping us awake.

Though, of course, I didn’t believe in ghosts.

By late afternoon I was tired of listening to the sound of Penelope sobbing. She’d been crying since breakfast, her head a sweaty tangle of gold on the pillow, her bleary eyes