Tessa drove, and Ada sat silently, her hands knitted in her lap, her pale fingers intertwined. They pulled into Charlie Strong's yard, the grey landscape meshing against the grey sky, distant plumes of smoke billowing, intermingling in the air with the sounds of steel and labor and sweat. Curly rushed up once they passed the gate, recognizing the car and expecting Tommy, his kind face puzzled when it was Tessa who stepped out of the vehicle, her heels crunching on the gravel.
"Hullo, Miss Tessa," he said, his gaze curious. "Did you- did you bring your lovely stallion today?"
"Not today, Curly, I'm sorry. He's at my father's stables, though, and you're welcome to visit him whenever you'd like." Curly's face brightened at that.
"Is Charlie around?" She asked. He shook his head.
"Charlie went to the Garrison, Miss Tessa, told me to stay here and keep watch."
Tommy had gone to the Garrison as well. So he was planning something. It was no longer her place to know what. She sucked a breath in through her teeth.
"Curly, do you think you could fetch something for me?"
Tessa kept driving, glancing over at Ada occasionally, but Ada never returned her stare, her large blue eyes scanning the scenery, flickering back and forth, gazing out of the window, lost in her own head. She didn't ask where they were going and Tessa didn't try to get her to speak, just watched her reaction to ensure that she wasn't making a horrible mistake. If Ada recognized the landscape, she said nothing of it, did not react to it, her stylishly cut brown waves, several shades lighter than her brother's, jostled slightly by the movement of the car. The drive felt longer this time around, perhaps because Tessa wasn't half mad with terror, tied up or clutching the hand of her dying father, but there was still a clenching tension in her stomach she was finding difficult to ignore. Eventually, they came upon familiar, sloping hills, scattered trees that became a sparse forest, a dirt road leading to a huge, abandoned house. Tessa stopped Tommy's car, taking in the scene, fighting with the vicious flashbacks playing behind her eyes. Beside her, Ada sat like a statue, barely even breathing, but Tessa thought she was probably doing the same thing in her mind, trying to push down the images and flashes and moments that somehow felt like they were still happening. Sometimes it felt like they were always happening, over and over again, like everything that happened since then was a dream and she would wake up at any moment alone in an abandoned bedroom, with her hands tied in front of her, restrained to a chair. Tessa opened the car door, got out, and went around to the back of the to the trunk, took something out and set it on the ground. Ada stayed frozen until Tessa returned to the passenger side and opened the door for her, holding out her empty, broken hand. The air was cold and made her thumb ache.
"Come on, Addie," she said, and Ada hesitated but then took her hand gently, clambered down, looking like a doe, innocent and beautiful, and it was incredibly difficult verging on impossible to imagine the same girl stomping a man's skull to shatters.
They walked to the house slowly, taking in the broken shutters, the open front door, creaking on its rusty hinges in the breeze. Tessa went in first, feeling like she was intentionally walking back into a nightmare, suddenly unsure, suddenly petrified. Her throat felt tight again, like she was being choked by the hands of a ghost. The dust in the entryway had been disturbed by footprints, boots and expensive shoes and one pair of three inch heels and one pair of bare feet. Imprinted there, like the imprint of a departed soul. Tessa moved into the house, and Ada stayed outside, just beyond the front door, watching Tessa disappear. She walked into the kitchen, past the parlor, past the smears of her father's blood painting the narrow hallway, dried a dark brown, ran her hands over the bullet-ridden table, still laid sideways on the floor, the cabinet that had been the only thing standing between her and death. That, and Tommy. There were empty shells on the floor like a paradigm of the sea shore, metal glinting like pearls in clams. She turned and walked back through the kitchen, down the hall, to the top of the stairs. She hesitated for a moment, feeling the same thing when she had attended her mother's funeral, her brother's, her grandfather's, a feeling so huge it felt unapproachable, a feeling she couldn't even begin to feel. She walked down the stairs.
At the bottom, and then past the door to the cell, there was a spray of blood against a wall, partially blocked by where her father had been, and then, only a few feet away, another, this one splattered. She looked at the violent art, the story it told, more of it on the floor, and wondered at the amount of red fluid the human body contained, considered, ever so briefly, watching it seep out of her own wrists, just to see how much there really was. The air smelled of it, like it was coming out of the very walls, like the house itself was bleeding. She walked back out of the cell, up the stairs, back to where Ada stood, in the same spot where Tessa had left her, staring at the house.
"Do you want to come in?" Tessa asked her, and Ada stood completely still, for five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. Then she nodded, very slightly, her small face white, her chin set.
"Come on," Tessa said, softly, reaching out her good hand. Ada took it, gripping onto Tessa so tightly she thought she might break her other thumb, but Tessa didn't mind. They walked slowly up the stairs, Ada's breath shuddering, down the hallway, stopping at the dark round stain on the floor next to the door that held the broken bed. Ada stared at it, like she thought it was going to move, or disappear, or do something, but she wasn't sure what. It didn't. Tessa wondered how long she should stand, silently, and let the scene replay in Ada's mind, if it was healthy for her to be picturing it for this long, reliving it, but then Ada reached out and opened the door to the bedroom, stepping inside before Tessa could decide if she should try to stop her. Tessa hesitated outside of the door, trying to imagine how she would feel if she were in Ada's position, if she would want to be alone, and failing, grasping desperately at her uselessness. Eventually, she decided it would be better for her to be there and Ada to not want her to be, than for her to not be there when Ada might need her, so she followed the other girl into the room.
When she entered, Ada was kneeling on the center of the dusty floor, facing the broken four poster bed, her arms wrapped around herself. Tessa had to bite her still-healing lip to stop the tears from springing into her eyes. The side of Ada's face that she could see, and the expression on it, the lost, lost expression, hurt worse than her thumb, worse than her neck, hurt like seeing her brother's pale face in his casket, hurt like putting flowers on her own mother's grave. Tessa settled on her knees next to her, and for a moment, it looked like the two women were praying at the foot of the bed together, but if God saw them or heard them, he said nothing in reply. And then Ada's face cracked and scrunched and she let out a hollow, choking sob, and then another, and crumpled into Tessa's arms like a body hit by a bullet, and Tessa held onto her and rocked her and stroked her lavender-scented hair, her tears falling down onto Ada's mahogany waves.
Ada's cries slowed, then stopped, her shaking shoulders coming to a gasping rest. A tear dripped off of her nose as she pulled away, and she swiped at it, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and smearing her makeup. Tessa tried to put on a brave face, for the both of them, like she didn't have tear tracks down her cheeks as well, like being back in this house with Ada didn't make her blood run cold, didn't make her want to hide herself away from the world until she no longer belonged to it. They stood and left the room, neither speaking, and walked down the stairs like they were completing some ancient, wordless ritual. When they got back to the car, Tessa picked up the two silver cans she had gotten from Curly, unscrewed the tops. The air smelled like fumes and open, grey sky and past-but-still-present terror. Ada watched her go back into the house, was still watching the doorway a few minutes later when she reappeared, her cans nearly empty, petrol splattered on her pretty dress. Tessa trailed a line of liquid out to where Ada was standing, the black car gleaming faintly behind her, then threw the cans back at the house as hard as she could, and they bounced off the shattered windows, landed at the run-down entrance. Tessa pulled out a book of matches, and handed them to Ada, who took them with freezing but steady hands and met Tessa's eyes and said, "Thank you," so quietly Tessa almost didn't hear her even though they were right next to each other, and then she took a match and lit it, the light from the little, bright flame illuminating her face for a moment, catching and dancing in her eyes, and then she dropped it onto the dirt at her feet, at the dark, wet line that led back to the house, and they stood side by side as the farmhouse went up in smoke.