And Graham, being the good friend that he is, is happy to oblige. He’s more than happy to do me this favor. An act of goodwill. A common courtesy, I think as he leads me past the tufted sofa and onto an unmade bed.

WILLOW

It was late. The house was silent. Joseph had come and gone.

I was awoken by a scream, a thick, throaty scream that forced me straight up in bed.

I remember the moon through the window, incandescent on an otherwise black night. I remember that there was silence following that scream, so much silence that I wondered whether or not it had only been a dream. I lay in bed, staring at that moon, willing my heart to slow down, my breath to return to me from wherever it went when I heard that scream. The clouds floated by the moon slowly, lazily, the knobby arms of the big, old trees now shadows in the night. They stirred in the air, their branches reaching out to touch one another, to clasp hands.

And then I heard it: the clink of a metallic key in the lock, the frantic turning of the door’s handle. What I expected to see was Joseph, his silhouette against the faint glow of some light from down the hall. But instead it was Matthew who tore into my room with a deranged look in his eye, his convulsive hand bearing a sharp knife that dripped blood across my bed as he said, “Come on, Claire. Get up.” And I reached for his outstretched hand and let him pull me from bed.

“You need to go, Claire,” he said to me, sweeping me close, tight, in a bear hug. “You need to run.” He tossed clothes into my hands: the sweatshirt and gym shoes, a pair of enormous pants, and told me to get dressed. “Hurry,” he said, his voice rattling.

“Why?” I asked, and then, “Where?”

“There’s a bag,” he said, “by the front door. A suitcase. It has everything you’ll need.” And he pulled on my hand and led me down the hall, through a house that was nearly silent, the door to Joseph and Miriam’s bedroom pulled closed. I cringed as I passed that bedroom door, fearful of what was or wasn’t on the other side.

I couldn’t decide what was worse: what was there or what I imagined to be there, though there was no way to know for sure.

“But what about Joseph?” I asked, though I knew, between the blood and the closed door, by the fact that Matthew and I were moving freely down the wooden steps—making no effort to mute the sounds of the squeaky floors—that Joseph was dead.

That the scream had belonged to Joseph.

That the blood on the knife was his.

He clutched me by the hand on the bottom step and forced me into him. He whispered into my ear, “I know what he did to you,” and I felt my legs give, knowing he knew my secret. Knowing he knew Joseph’s secret. Somehow it was a weight off, the fact that I no longer had to carry that baggage alone. I imagined, all those years, Joseph welcoming himself onto the bed beside me, and Matthew, on the other side of the wall, listening. I clung to Matthew there, at the bottom of the steps, not wanting to go, though he said again, “You have to go, Claire. You have to go now,” and unclasped my hands from the small of his back.

“Where?” I asked, my voice anxious and scared. I’d never been on my own before in my whole entire life.

“There’s a cab,” he said, “outside. Waiting. He’ll take you to the bus station,” and it was only then that I noticed the headlights of a car parked at the curb.

“But I don’t want to go,” I cried, my eyes darting to Matthew, ambiguous in the blackness of the night. “I want to stay with you.” And I clung to him like Velcro, wrapping my arms around his back and for a second he let me, just a split second, before he unclamped my fingers and pried me away. I was crying, this heaving cry that came from somewhere deep within. “Come with me,” I begged, weeping so hard that I had to force the words out between breaths. Come. With. Me. Matthew was the only person I had in the whole wide world. Momma had left me. Lily had left me. And now Matthew was leaving me, too.

“Claire.”

“Come with me,” I pleaded like the child I was. I stamped my foot and threw my arms across myself with a pout on my face. “Come with me, come with me,” and I tried pulling on his arm and dragging him to the door, toward that front door that stood open, the window to the side of the door smashed in, shards of jagged glass strewn upon the floor.

I froze solid for a second and stared.

This is how Matthew had found his way in.

“You have to go, Claire.” Matthew jammed money into my hand, a stack of cash, and hurried to grab the leather suitcase from the floor, towing me behind him by the hand. “Go now,” he said, “before...” but he didn’t finish. “Just go,” he said, but as he did, he pulled me close, absorbing me in his arms. He was shaking; he’d broken out in a cold sweat. He didn’t want me to go any more than I wanted to go. I knew that. And yet he thrust that suitcase into my fickle hand and pushed—actually pushed—me through the door, as I carefully stepped over the broken glass on my way out.

I looked back once, only once, to see him standing in the doorway, the knife hidden behind his back, his face bound in wistfulness and melancholy. He, too, was sad.

I remember that the night was crisp, something only my brain perceived, not the rest of me. There was the knowledge that it was cold—like someone told me or something—but I never felt that it was cold. Like I was sleepwalking or something, in a dream. I could hear myself sobbing like I was watching it on TV. An observer, not a participant. I don’t remember telling the driver—a short, shadowy man, nothing more than a muddled voice to me, a pair of eyes in the rearview mirror—where to take me. It was as if he knew. I got in the car and he sped off, down the choppy street, driving fast and jerky, and I remember thinking that he must have heard Matthew say to hurry or something because he was going so fast. Matthew must have told him. I clung to the door handle and braced myself for every turn, wondering if this is what it felt like when Momma died, when that Datsun Bluebird started spinning somersaults down the road.

The building that the driver pulled up to was short and gray, the word Greyhound written across the brick in big blue letters. It was on the corner of some street, a city street that was all but abandoned at this time of night. Outside, an older woman stood, with her sparse gray hair, puffing on a cigarette, her free hand thrust deep in the pocket of a flimsy coat.

“Seventeen dollars,” the cabdriver said with a grating voice, and sitting like a birdbrain in the backseat of that cab, I asked, “Huh?”

He pointed to the stack of money in my trembling hand and said again, “Seventeen dollars,” and I counted out the fare from the cash Matthew had handed me, and carried that leather suitcase inside, watching the woman as I passed by.

“Spare some change,” she said to me, but I folded up that money and squeezed it in my hand, real tight so she wouldn’t see.

Inside I found a vending machine, and the first thing I did was slip in a dollar and press the red button. A soda dropped down, faster than expected, and I took it and sank sideways into the rows of empty chairs. Out the window, it was still dark, the first whiff of daylight creeping up from the bottom of the sky. A grumpy old man sat behind the ticket booth, counting dollar bills into a register, grunting all the while he did so. I could hear a TV, though I didn’t see it, the sound of early morning news, traffic and the day’s weather.

I didn’t know what I was doing here. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. It hadn’t sunk in yet: the fact that Joseph was dead. Tears clung to my cheeks, my eyes feeling fat and puffy from crying. My heart hadn’t slowed its pace, a relentless gallop that made my head start to spin. Tucked beneath the sweatshirt, on a white undershirt, were splotches of blood that had spattered me when Matthew came tearing into my room.