The house is quiet when I reenter. Mom stares down into her teacup and Dad is pacing again. Finally he speaks,

            “We’re not going to Toronto.”

            Mom doesn’t take her eyes away from the surface of the steaming tea. She doesn’t make a move to drink it either. “Why did you tell the police that?”

            “In case they talk to him…” Dad trails off, whipping back around to look out the window again. “I want him to think we’re going.”

            “What good will it do?” Mom stands up and sets the cup down with trembling hands.

            “If I can catch him off his guard. If…”

            “Don’t go on. I don’t want to think about it.” She puts up one hand, interrupting him. “It makes me sick to think about it.”

            Dad goes to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, dipping his head down to kiss her cheek. “I’ll get to the bottom of this. Don’t worry.”

            Her voice is hollow. “I’m going to lie down.”

            He doesn’t answer. Just watches her leave, eyes on her back as she takes the stairs up to their bedroom, her slippers silent on the carpet.

            Again he resumes pacing, his feet stomping across the kitchen tiles. Louder and louder he stomps, faster and faster. Finally he stops in front of the sliding door, staring outside thoughtfully. He places one hand on the door and slides it open, stepping out onto the deck. His heavy footfalls sound hollow on the wooden boards.

            Dad crosses his arms over his chest and squints at the forest. You can’t see the house through the trees properly, not when the sun is setting. It doesn’t seem to matter though, Dad has his eyes fixed straight ahead. His entire body is rigid, the tension practically leaks into the air around him. After a minute he mutters angrily to himself and storms back into the house, banging the sliding door shut behind him.

 Time doesn’t seem to have any meaning anymore, so I’m not sure what day it is. Nakia must be at school. She used to skip classes and play hooky, and often I’d been convinced to come along with her. I smile, thinking about how bad she’d been for my grades. How distressed my parents had been when I started coming home with Cs and Ds instead of my usual As. It was her fault, but we’d had so much fun.

            I stand beside the kitchen sink looking absently out at the forest, thinking about the various shenanigans we’d got up to. Sneaking into bars with fake IDs and crashing parties. Going shopping when we should have been sitting in math class. It hadn’t been healthy, but every minute of it had been fun.

Memories have a way of making me sad now, so I try to push them away, to concentrate on something else. I turn and leave the kitchen, drift down the hallway peering into the empty rooms. No Caleb either.

            The den is a complete mess. The table is covered in playing cards, some of them lie in pools of sticky beer.  Candy bar wrappers and empty beer bottles litter the surface. The ash tray in the middle of the table stinks up the entire room, and a half smoked joint is propped up on one side of it. I eye the mess thoughtfully. Maybe it’s time for a test. Maybe I can learn to control the emotions that make things happen for me. It’s worth a try.

           I try to drum up anger, try to push Sam’s words of warning out of my mind. I won’t be trapped here with Caleb, I won’t let myself. But I do need to control this so I can do something other than drifting around the house uselessly. I need to be able to communicate somehow. Sucking in a deep breath I picture Caleb’s face. The curve of his jaw, the stubble on his chin, his sharp, bright eyes. His poisonous good looks. The flutter of anger starts in my stomach, and I grit my teeth and force myself to think about what he did to me. Remember, I tell myself, remember the gun…how he held it in his hand. Remember the feeling of nothingness, and the realization of what had happened. Remember the shower curtain, and how they dumped your body on the path like it was nothing.

            Now the rage is building in my stomach, a tight knot forms in my chest and my breath hitches. Stretching out my hands I place them flat on the surface of the table. I scream my frustration at it, pretending the table is somehow the source of all my anger. The wood vibrates under my hands. Soft clinking as the beer bottles knock together. The table continues wobbling, the shaking grows more violent. The bottles fall over, cracking together loudly, rolling down the length of the table and tipping off to crash onto the floor. I pull back, breathing heavily. Triumph courses through me. I did it. I made it move. 

            But how can I use this to communicate with Nakia? She was scared when I accidently made the lights flicker. This would terrify her even more. My heart sinks. All I can do is make stuff shake, or crash things over and break things. That isn't communicating, it's destruction. She'll think I'm angry with her. My mind races anxiously. How can I make her hear me? Caleb heard my scream. He’d heard it, faint, but muffled, he’d said. Did that mean I could make Nakia hear me? Did I have to get myself really worked up in order to talk to her? What if I sounded angry when I talked to her then? She’d be terrified.

            I sink to the floor and cross my legs, resting my chin in my hands, discouraged. There doesn’t seem to be a way to communicate without scaring the crap out of people. I can’t afford to do that though. I need them to listen.

I need Nakia on my side. I need her to hate Caleb and to want to tell the police about what happened. I sit up straight. Maybe that’s the key. I just have to keep driving Caleb off his rocker. Then he’ll either leave without her, or she won’t be able to take him acting crazy and she’ll go to the police. Or – even better – maybe I can make Caleb break under the strain and go to the police himself.

There are things that can go wrong with this plan, I know that. It’s possible that none of these things will happen. Both Nakia and Caleb might move out and leave me behind in this old empty house. But I have to do something. Whatever the outcome is, it will be better than just sitting around waiting for something to happen. That’s it then.

             I’m going to break you, Caleb.

            My campaign to ruin Caleb starts with little things. It begins in the kitchen this morning. He sits slumped at the table, trying to chase away his hangover with black coffee. He’s staring at the far wall blankly, eyes drooping shut.

            What can I do first? I drift around the kitchen, bouncing from one idea to the next. Bang on pots and pans? Knock more empty beer bottles off the counter? Caleb shifts in his seat, drawing my attention. He stands up with a groan, like moving is an effort, and shuffles over to the refrigerator. A slice of light falls onto him when he opens the door, illuminating his face, casting a yellow glow over his features. His face is tired, his skin dull and blotchy. Dark circles surround his eyes, making them look sunken and hollow. It’s amazing what stress can do to the human body, and I intend to find out just how much he can take.

            Caleb leans heavily on the open door and squints inside. It’s a true bachelor’s fridge: Ketchup and hot sauce packets, two week old stale pizza in a greasy box, leftover Chinese take out and something at the back in a clear plastic container that seems to have taken on life of its own. He grabs for a bag on the bottom shelf and yanks out a loaf of bread. After rummaging through the shelf he finds a package of slimy looking deli meat, looks at it carefully and then shrugs. Apparently it’s passed the test.

Grimacing, I watch him as he makes his meat sandwich, filled with repulsion. The meat is obviously spoiled, and the bread is stale, but he’s probably too hung over to even notice. He sits down at the table and picks up the sandwich in both hands. Something wicked makes me reach out and swat at his hands.  I watch Caleb’s face. His mouth drops open and his eyes widen.

It’s like I’m watching in slow motion as his hands fly up and the sandwich explodes into the air. The slimy deli meat doesn’t make it far, it flips once, twice in the air and then drops back onto his lap, but the bread sails halfway across the kitchen. 

            Caleb’s face turns white, and I’m doubled over with laughter, holding my sides. He sits frozen, staring at the deli meat draped across his left knee, eyes huge. Then he shoots out of his chair, sending it thumping into the wall.

            “Oh god!’ he yells, scrambling over the kitchen tiles, “What the hell was that?”

            I’m disappointed when I find him in the hallway shrugging into his jacket, frantically searching in his jeans pocket for his car keys. The door slams behind him, leaving me standing in silence.

            The rest of the day is lonely, and I spend it drifting about idly. Nakia must be at school and wherever Caleb has gone, I don’t think he intends to come back for quite some time. Part of me wants to go see Sam at the river, but there’s something that holds me back, his words about a shadow growing on my face. Will he see a shadow now if I go to him? I can’t let myself be thrown off course. My plan is to break Caleb and drive him out, and I intend to stick to it.

            It’s starting to get dark when I hear the door slam. Nakia brushes by me as she walks through the door. She doesn’t seem to notice, shedding her jacket onto the floor she heads straight down the hallway and I hear another slam. She’s locked herself in her bedroom.

            Seconds later a car roars up to the house. I peer out the front window and see Caleb hop out and jog up the driveway. He bursts in, sending a rush of cool air through the house. His voice is loud as he goes into the kitchen and cupboards bang open and shut.

            “Right, okay. That makes sense.” He’s talking on the phone to someone, “Yeah, I’ll do that right now, thank mom.”

            The cell phone clicks shut, and Caleb’s footsteps disappear down the hall. So, he’s made up with mommy. I follow him, wondering what it takes for this woman to refuse to help him. Genocide? A pact with the devil? Apparently she’ll forgive him anything.

            Caleb yanks Nakia’s bedroom door open, and I hear her indignant squawk from inside.

            “Hey! Don’t just barge in!”

            Caleb does just that, making Nakia sit up on her bed, ripping her headphones out of her ears, “What are you…” she spots the garbage bag in his hand and falls silent.

            He doesn’t say anything, just stares at the pile of stuff in the corner of her bedroom. My stuff. “Okay,” he says. “We should have done this a long time ago. The crap goes, the ghost goes. Plus we can’t risk the cops searching the place.” He glares at her. “You should have done this a long time ago.”

            “Are you kidding me? It’s your murder.” Nakia folds her arms over her chest and glowers right back at him. “You clean up after yourself, I’m not going to.”

            Caleb takes a deep breath and strides over to the corner. He picks up the vodka bottle sitting on top of my purse, shoving it into the bag first. It clunks onto the floor in the bottom of the bag. He grabs my purse and begins to put it in the bag, then he stops to reconsider and turns the purse upside down onto the floor.

            The contents of my life are spread out over the carpet:

            A hair brush, make-up bag, keys and a mirror, headache pills…I look down at the dog-eared paper back that has fallen open on the floor, crushing and bending the pages. I’d been halfway through The Lovely Bones. Is that some kind of sick irony?

            Caleb combs through my stuff, and his expression is disappointed. When he opens my pink crocodile print wallet and thumbs through it, Nakia lets out a sound of disgust and walks out of the bedroom. I watch him through a haze of tears as he snorts in disgust and chucks the wallet into the garbage bag.

            “Not even five bucks,” he says.