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The blue door looms imposingly over you, glass peephole glinting balefully at you.
Hesitantly, you reach out to push the doorbell. You hear it chime through the door, its cheeriness setting your teeth on edge.
A long moment passes, then another, soft predawn light giving way to bright slashes of gold spilling across the door’s weathered paint. Chloe shifts uneasily and jabs the doorbell again.
The door flies open almost instantly this time, revealing your father towering in the doorway, anger rolling off him in waves. “What the hell—” He chokes on his words, noticing you, and the anger is gone without a trace. His blue eyes fill up with tears and he holds out his hands, your name tearing from his throat like a prayer.
You fly into his arms with enough force to knock him back a few steps, but he doesn’t care and you don’t care because he folds you into his chest and he smells like fabric softener and salt and home. You’re safe, you finally realize, fingers hooking in his flannel. You’re safe.
The dam holding back everything you’ve bottled up and tucked away for an undetermined ‘later’ shatters in that instant. Every failure, every death, everything you could’ve done better or faster or smarter washes over you and falls away, purged, for the moment, through the horrible, barely-human sobs wracking your frame.
Distantly, the ferocity of your breakdown scares you. But your father just holds you tighter, rubbing your back as he cries right along with you.
When you finally pull back, your breath is still hitched and leftover tears spill down your cheeks, but you’re the lightest you’ve been since...since before William died, and you and Chloe were still playing pirates, chasing each other into the surf.
Your dad cups your face and brushes away the tear tracks, then his beard quivers in a smile, his own eyes red and puffy and full of so much love. You can’t help but grin back and wonder how you were ever scared of coming home.
He lets his hands fall away. “As much as I’d rather keep you where I can see you, I’ve got to start on breakfast, and you’ve got to go hug your mother before she implodes,” he says. It’s an imitation of his usual dry humor; his voice is a little too thick and he looks a little too vulnerable for his delivery to be any good.
But you laugh anyway, and scrub at your eyes. “Our ban from the kitchen still stands?” you tease. “It was just the once we almost burnt down the house.”
Your dad gives you a mock glower on his way to the kitchen. “Once is enough. There’s still scorch marks on the ceiling.”
You laugh again, reveling in how easy it is as you make your way to the living room, where you assume your mom and Chloe disappeared to.
The TV is on, but muted, when you walk in. There’s a panoramic view of Arcadia Bay’s ruins and the triages set up between them, clinical white squares among ashen chaos. The banner across the bottom of the screen declares two hundred dead.
Numbness tingles in your fingers. Two hundred. Two hundred, because of you. Because you chose Chloe. Chloe, who’s sitting on the couch, defeat evident in every angle of her lean body, back turned on your mother’s awkward, smothering brand of comfort. Chloe, who looks up when you enter, features grief-stricken. Chloe, who cries, but lives.
You’d do it again, without hesitation. That sort of scares you, too.
Then you’re wrapped up in your mom’s arms, breathing in fabric softener and printer ink, letting her card her fingers through your hair and fret over you. Chloe leaves without a word. Guilt settles in the pit of your stomach.
Your mom asks you again and again if you’re okay, if anything hurts. For perhaps the first time, you don’t mind reassuring her over and over, soaking up the affection.
Over her shoulder, the TV shows Arcadia survivors, dazed and dirty, holding onto each other like the storm was still raging and they’d blow away if they didn’t. You see the number again. Two hundred. This time it hits you square in the gut.
Your face gets hot and you go lightheaded, saliva flooding your mouth as acid burns the back of your tongue. You turn your head and swallow desperately, trying to not throw up even as another wave of nausea rocks you.
Two hundred. Mostly along the waterfront, you know. You saw the wreckage yourself; there was no way to avoid it, since the only way out of town was right down the main road. Joyce and Warren and Frank were there in Two Whales, and a few people you didn’t recognize. Truckers, probably, and a few fishermen. Outside or trapped in crumbling buildings were others: Evan and Alyssa, dozens of other people fleeing down the street, bodies crushed under warped metal and shattered wood. And it was Friday, so there were probably a lot more you didn’t see. Vortex members on the beach, skaters in the big warehouse parking lots by the water, other students just in town, visiting. Not to mention the dock workers, the fishermen, everyone in the small businesses along the waterfront. You don’t know if the homeless woman— why didn’t you ask her name?—listened to you and got out, or if the trucker you asked about Rachel skipped town, or if that woman who has to commute all the way to Newport was there instead of Arcadia when the storm hit.
Everyone you know in Arcadia Bay could be dead. Is likely dead. The thought sinks between your ribs and twists.
“Maxine? Maxine,” your mom says, her voice tight and wavering, tugging her fingers a little too roughly through your hair. “Are you okay?”
You’re not. You’re a selfish piece of shit. How could you do this to them? How could you do this to Chloe?
How could you not?
“Yes, Mom,” you lie, pulling back to smile at her. “For the fiftieth time, I’m alright.”
She buys it, giving you a watery, thin-lipped smile in return as she smooths your hair back one last time before releasing you. “Sorry, Max,” she says, not actually sounding very sorry. “You know I worry.”
You force a chuckle and bob your head. “I know.”
She smiles again and takes your hand, leading you back to the dining room. Her skin is dry and papery and it makes you distinctly uncomfortable; the last time she held your hand, it was leading you to the car after saying goodbye to Chloe before you moved.
Maybe she didn’t buy it, after all.
But she seems to be okay with not pushing, for once. That gives you time to at least figure out a convincing lie, if not an almost-truth real enough to placate her.
Your mother is still holding your hand as she takes her place at the dining table, where there’s already a cup of coffee—black, like you take yours—and her tablet, open to a bunch of legal jargon you still can’t make heads or tails of, despite her many patient explanations over the years. It should be comforting, you know. It should be, but your skin crawls and you feel trapped and this chair is entirely too much like the one in the Dark Room—
Chloe, sitting on your other side, puts her cold hand over yours, white-knuckled on your bouncing knee.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know, because you haven’t told her—you can’t tell her, not yet, not when you still see white floors and camera flashes in your sleep and wake up with itching wrists—but she’s still holding your hand and mouthing ‘it’s okay’ and ‘we’re safe’ to you.
You want very badly to kiss her, but you don’t. That’s not something you deserve, and you doubt it’d be welcome.
Instead you grin painfully and mouth back ‘I’m fine’, which you aren’t, and Chloe looks at you like you’re full of shit, which you are.
Your dad calls from the kitchen that waffles are done, and she replies ‘later’.
You nod dutifully, another lie, and she retracts her hand as you stand up to get food.
As cold as her hands are, yours are colder still in the absence of her touch.