All Fall Down Read online

  What were they going to do?

  Later, when the children had been put to sleep, Sunny again snuck from her room to travel the dark corridors on silent feet. Not to hunt for snacks this time, not to linger in front of her dreaming father whose touch was too familiar even though she thought he didn’t mean for it to be, and she knew he minded what happened far more than she did.

  No, this time she ran from the house, knowing she had to get out or bring down the walls with her screams. She looked over her shoulder at her father’s house, where she wasn’t supposed to be a child. Lights bloomed in the bedroom windows. They looked so warm, and she was cold. Shivering. She’d come out without a coat, hat or gloves, and the boots her mother had given her were still too big and not very warm. That was okay. She deserved to be cold. Sunny tripped down the deck’s wooden stairs and into the snowy backyard. Cold wetness went up over the top of her boots and inside, burning first before it numbed. She ran down the sloping hill and slipped in the snow, going to one knee before catching herself.

  Where was she going? Where could she go? There was a street and beyond that another. The highway. A town. At some point, she could find her way back home to Sanctuary. The thought made her shudder. Her family was gone and without them, it was just a place.

  Liesel had said there was no silent room, not here. Sunny could understand why Liesel had been appalled by the thought of it; it had been a cruel place. Sunny herself still shuddered with memories of the few times she’d been forced into it.

  For the first time, Sunny understood exactly what Papa had meant when he said sometimes everyone needed a little silence.

  She tried to find some now, but though she tried hard to push aside the world around her and focus on the one within, she couldn’t manage to block out anything. She thought about how she’d floated. Too many misdeeds weighed her now. Too many sweet treats, no matter how she’d told Liesel they didn’t need to eat them. Too many hours of television programs. Too many hot showers when she ought to have bathed quickly but had luxuriated instead.

  Up in the night sky, stars didn’t twinkle. They just shone. The night her mother had pushed her out the door, Sunny had looked up at those very same stars, but they looked different now. Farther away. They didn’t seem the same as the ones that had watched over her in Sanctuary; although she knew they had to be the same because though there were millions of them in the sky, they didn’t change.

  She’d only been out here a few minutes, and already she couldn’t feel her feet and fingers. Her children were in that house, so she needed to go back inside if for no other reason than that, but it wasn’t as if they weren’t safe there. Liesel and Christopher wouldn’t let anything bad happen to the children. Bliss would probably be crying for her by now, and Sunny’s breasts ached, full with milk that let down when she remembered it was long past feeding time. It wet the front of her blouse all the way through her sweatshirt.

  At the bottom of the hill, the house looked somehow even bigger than when she’d been right next to it. Here were trees, small ones with cages around them. Maybe the kind that grew flowers. Someone had planted them on purpose, not like the big trees in the woods that grew there all on their own. These were for show, and though they were of the earth, were still material. Still fancy, just for decoration. Not quite as much a waste of resources as some of the other things Liesel and Christopher had in their house, but not as useful as a fruit tree.

  A figure loomed up out of the darkness. One hand raised. For a horrifying, wonderful moment, Sunny thought it was her mother and had taken two or three steps toward it before she knew it couldn’t be. By that time she’d reached the woman offering her hand to the darkness, and she discovered it was…a statue.

  The barest caress of light from the house illuminated her, but Sunny’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, so she could see it was a woman’s shape. Kneeling, not holding out her hands as she’d thought, but with wings. The woman knelt, her face buried in one arm against a pedestal. She was weeping.

  Weary of casting herself in stone the way this woman had been carved, Sunny wept, too.

  Her tears were scalding hot, but only for seconds before they froze and plucked at her skin when she swiped them away. She touched the stone woman, who should’ve been covered with snow but wasn’t. The stone was smooth, not rough like Sunny expected. What was she doing here? Why a stone woman in a little grove of trees, set in someone’s backyard?

  Then it struck her. More decoration. No purpose, no point, no use. Just for show.

  Sunny laughed out loud, the sound sort of raw and painful, which was also how it felt. Did it matter what Liesel and Christopher did? If they were wasteful or fancy, even if they raped the earth and used fossil fuels and didn’t recycle? If they stuffed their vessels solid full with corn syrup and chemicals? What difference did any of that make, really? It had made none to her mother.

  “I miss you,” Sunny said. “Mama, I miss you so much, and I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Everything will be all right, Sunshine. Listen with your heart, and you’ll be okay.” The voice, soft and sweet and purely feminine, whispered like a tickle in Sunny’s ear.

  She stopped laughing, stopped crying. She gulped down snot and tears, thick and nasty, then spat another mouthful to the side. She touched the stone woman again. She closed her eyes. She listened.

  It wasn’t Papa’s voice, the way Sunny had always thought it would be, and it wasn’t her mother’s voice, the way it hadn’t quite been before. This time she thought she recognized it.

  “Everything will be okay, Sunshine.”

  It was her own voice.

  “What will we do?” she said aloud. “What will I do?”

  What would she do, to stay here with her children? To protect and provide for them. What choices could Sunny make?

  The answer came, not in words but in a smooth burst of understanding that dug into her core, husked her out and left her empty…but lighter. So, so much lighter. Light enough to float, maybe even someday to fly. What would she do?

  Whatever she had to.

  Chapter 24

  Working from home wasn’t working.

  Liesel had spent the day with her laptop, roaming from room to room to find a quiet spot to work and finding none. For children who were so wonderfully well-behaved, those kids made an awful lot of noise. Add to that the fact Sunny seemed too scared to lift a finger to do a damn thing without asking permission, and Liesel had been interrupted ceaselessly.

  Christopher, on the other hand, had arrived an hour later than expected, bright-eyed and smelling of sweat because he’d taken the chance to stop off at the gym on the way home. It might’ve been a fight, but Liesel was just too freaking tired to raise one. That was, until her husband, who’d been listening to her list of complaints, decided he had the solution.

  “I don’t see any other way to do it.” Christopher’s voice was muffled from inside the fridge. He came out with beer in one hand and a container of chip dip in the other.

  Liesel always bought Heluva Good French Onion Dip for him, but after the debacle with Sunny throwing out all the food, she’d made the concession of trying to make her own with sour cream and French onion soup mix. It had been nearly impossible to find a prepackaged mix that didn’t contain corn syrup or any of the other half-dozen ingredients Sunny had said would kill them. She’d ended up mixing together a random assortment of spices and dried-onion flakes instead.

  “Of course you don’t.” Liesel leaned against the kitchen counter, watching as he went to the cupboard for a bag of potato chips. “Why would you? You’re not the one who has to quit.”

  Christopher settled himself at the bar and tore open the chips. He opened the container without even looking at it, dug a chip in, ate it. Grimaced and muttered a curse. “What’s this? This isn’