The Damned Read Free Page B

Pouted. Blinked her eyes, the lids darkened by makeup the color of a bruise.
    â€œMiss me?” she said.

3
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    A fter the failed Cranbrook experiment, our family carried on as it had before, or tried to, which is to say we lived in even sharper anticipation of the Truly Bad Thing we knew was coming.
    Over the months that Ash and I moved deeper into teenagerhood our distinctions became more exaggerated. My friendlessness graduated into a kind of sustained performance art, a survival stunt like the swami we watched fold himself into a plastic box on TV and remain for days, silent and unmoving. As for Ash, her public charms grew even more assured, her private cruelties more disturbing. It wasn’t any side effect of puberty, either. She wasn’t “maturing.” She was becoming something else . And though my father, mother, and I never spoke openly of what that might be, I think we could imagine, with looming individual horror, the inhuman shapes she might choose.
    It only got worse after Mom died.
    Within days of our father coming home from work to find her in the bathtub, drunk and drowned—the very afternoon that followed the morning of our mother’s funeral—Ash asked if I would come tothe house of the boy she was seeing at the time, Brendan Oliver, and walk her home. It was an odd request on several fronts, considering we’d stood by a hole in the ground of Woodlawn Cemetery and watched our mother be lowered into it just two hours earlier. But this was Ash. Free of grief, of boundaries. It was all she could do to keep the trembly-cheeked “near tears” look fixed to her face at the graveside as long as she did before bursting out of the rented limo and running into the house to call Brendan and see if he was around and wanted to see her.
    He was. He did.
    â€œCould you come by Brendan’s later, Danny? I need to talk to you about something,” Ash said before she swiped her lips with strawberry gloss and headed out the door. It wasn’t a request. And I knew it wasn’t something she wanted to talk to me about, but something she wanted to show me.
    I made it to the Oliver house on Derby Avenue shortly after five and tried the front doorbell though I figured there was little chance of anyone answering. At seventeen, Brendan was even older than the other older boys Ash was moving between, a wide-jawed senior on the basketball team known for his success with girls. He was the sort of aggressive, taunting, self-certain kid who went unquestioned in his actions, a towering collection of physical gifts set to play for Ohio the next year, not so much above the law but, in our world, the law itself.
    All of this, along with the absence of his parents’ car in the driveway, meant that he probably had Ash to himself somewhere inside. He would be murmuring his commands in one of the curtained rooms. He would ignore the doorbell until he was through.
    It made me wonder what Ash wanted me here for. And as I thought about that, in an instant, the first real grief of the day arrived. The realization that my mother was gone forever came over me in a blanket that left me gasping and blind, reaching for the porch railing and blinking out at the street until its trees and awnings returned to focus. And when they did, I glanced back at the Olivers’ door to see the hall light behind the pane of decorative glass dim and brighten. A sound, too. The low hum of machinery.
    Ash had said something about Brendan’s dad having a workshop in the garage behind their house. Even as I started up the driveway toward it I was thinking, If I know there’s a workshop back here, she wanted me to know it . The conclusion that followed— If I’m going to look through the window, she wants me to —didn’t stop me from lifting my nose over the splintered window frame to peer inside.
    At first, it seemed like they were dancing.
    Wrapped close and swaying to a slow song I