Theme Music Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2019 by T. Marie Vandelly

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Vandelly, T. Marie., author

  Title: Theme music / T. Marie Vandelly.

  Description: New York : Dutton, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048002 (print) | LCCN 2018058062 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524744717 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524744700 (hc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.A5876 (ebook) | LCC PS3622.A5876 T48 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048002

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mother

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  When I was still in diapers, yet to be stripped of my innocence and tooth hopeful, my father excused himself from the breakfast table, made a casual exit out the back door, crossed to a fabricated shed hunkered in a bone-dry cradle of honeysuckle in the far back corner of our lot, fetched an axe, and dragged a muddy rut back across the dormant lawn. He reentered the kitchen, extra warm and cozy thanks to a turkey in the oven, looked upon the bewildered faces of his adoring family, and butchered them all. Well, not all, of course. I lived. Though I do believe I died a little that day.

  The reason he did it is almost as mysterious as why I was spared. Perhaps I was too young to be hated so utterly. Being only eighteen months, I couldn’t have pissed anyone off that royally. Maybe my father couldn’t bring himself to kill his baby girl. Maybe he came to his senses as he yanked the blade of the axe out of my brother’s back, my mother’s chest, the kitchen counter, the linoleum flooring, the refrigerator door, any one of the four walls . . . In my younger, darkest days, I believed that I had been spared to live a never-ending life of torment, one last act of cruelty before my father took a butcher knife from the kitchen drawer and dragged it across his throat.

  Not that this was told to me as a bedtime story. It wasn’t all “chop, chop, chop went the mean ol’ giant,” lullaby, and good night. Most of the grislier details were saved until I was old enough to handle it, when I could distinguish right from wrong, fact from fiction, the living from the dead, supposedly when I was in the third grade.

  It was suggested that my mother took the brunt of the attack while trying to save her four children. Her blood tasted the worst, though I only imagined her blood in my mouth. Crime scene photographs showed that a dark fluid had puddled on the tray of my high chair, Froot Loops floating about like tiny life preservers. I pray I wasn’t so dim to have continued to eat, but the annihilation of an entire family might have taken a while, so I may have gotten hungry. Try as I believe she did, my mother could not have stopped him. Her hands were cracked open to the wrists like scallop shells. Maybe she tried to catch the axe as it took a swing at one of her sons. Maybe she had been begging for our lives with clasped hands when the blade cut through to her chest. Whichever is true, Debbie Wheeler died from a great hurt to her heart.

  Another theory is that my eldest brother might have been the first to die. Being fifteen, Josh stood the best chance of fending off the attack. Let’s take care of this little problem straight off was what Billy Wheeler probably thought as he gripped the hilt to get as much force behind his swing as possible.

  Next, only because it seems chronologically sound, would have been my eight-year-old brother Eddie. As an expert dodgeball player, Eddie would have known that a moving target would be harder to hit. Or perhaps terror held him perfectly still while his head was lopped off. It was found in the corner next to a ten-pound bag of potatoes our mother had bought for Thanksgiving dinner. How it got there is anyone’s guess.

  You would have thought my father would have gotten into the swing of things by then, but it still took a dozen or so hacks to bring down his four-year-old son. They found Michael under the table, holding on to our mother’s foot with the only hand he had left.

  I was found by a neighbor boy, Rory, a friend of Josh’s who had stopped by to collect him for the annual Thanksgiving Day tag football game down at the high school. When no one answered his repeated knocks, he let himself in. He told the police that the music struck him first. Not the blood, not the savagery, not Eddie’s severed head in the corner, but the heartrending desperation pouring from the speakers in the living room. He covered his ears before it even occurred to him to cover his eyes.

  1

  The Wheeler family home was for sale. I couldn’t believe it. For all my preoccupation over what had transpired in that house, it had never once occurred to me to pay it a visit, or that it might still be standing. In fact, most of my thoughts about the house, and what occurred there, were just those, thoughts. As with most all disturbing nightmares, I banished these horrors to a cerebral purgatory that was unreachable by mere curiosity. On the few occasions I summoned the nerve to type that dreadful address into my search bar, something always stopped me. Like searching the internet for some soft-core porn, you might get more than you bargained for.

  The house wasn’t much different from the listings it was pinched between: white aluminum siding with charcoal-colored shingles, double mulled windows, and a three-step concrete stoop, a blacktop driveway with a two-car garage . . . Same as a hundred others I had scrolled past. But this particular nondescript house glared just a little brighter than the rest in the Zillow template it was set in. Enough to stop my scrolling finger dead.

  6211 Catharpin Road, Franconia, VA.

  Yep. That was my old address. The one Aunt Celia had in her address book with a line drawn through it. My old phone number had been in there, too, inked out but still legible. When I was younger and still lived with my aunt, I had dialed the number a thousand times, but always hung up after the first ring, afraid of what might answer.

  A slight chill ran down my spine as I leaned closer to study the business-card-sized photograph.

  I always imagined the house in a collapse of dusty lumber, the spine of a chimney jutting out among the rubble like a fractured bone. A KEEP OUT warning stabbed in the front l
awn, not a RE/MAX signpost. Though it was no more than a thirty- to forty-minute drive away, being on the other side of the beltway, it might as well have been in Beirut. I had asked Aunt Celia to take me once, and she had specifically said that there was nothing to see, which to me meant the house was gone.

  But it wasn’t gone. She just didn’t want me to know it was there. Like everything about my family, Aunt Celia thought I couldn’t handle the gory details, when in reality, she was the one with the weak stomach. She had paced the room to tell me how my family died, one hand over her mouth, one covering her eyes, and bemoaning my need to know every step of the way. I just wanted to finish my homework assignment before Futurama started. The “My Family Tree” template had been preprinted on yellow construction paper. All I had to do was write in the names. I knew my family was dead, so that hadn’t been news to me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t complete the assignment. I also knew from my cousin, Leah, that their deaths were “really gross,” but Leah thought everything was gross. Up until then, I thought it was just a car-crash type of gross. I wasn’t prepared for Aunt Celia to cut down my family tree with an axe. As I touched my pencil to the leaf marked “Father,” Aunt Celia snatched up my assignment, wrote a note to my teacher, and stapled it shut. By the time I thought of a few hundred thousand questions to ask her, the Q&A part of our conversation about my family had closed, and remained closed for the duration of my childhood.

  That included the house.

  The shutters and front door were a different color than they once were. I wasn’t sure if I liked the cottage red. They were hunter green in the one exterior snapshot I possessed. I wondered where that picture had gotten to—probably dumped in a box somewhere along with all the rest. When I was growing up, Aunt Celia doled out family photos like they were part of my allowance, reluctantly and not without a heavy sigh. Though Aunt Celia claimed each picture was the last she had, there always seemed to be one more hidden away somewhere. Most of the pictures were taken inside the house around the holidays, but one group shot was taken on the front stoop of the house I was currently scrutinizing online. I could almost see the shadow of us sitting on the front steps. Michael sulking under his ball cap, my mother burping me over her shoulder, Josh and Eddie hamming it up with fierce grins; the blur of my father as he slid into frame just before time ran out.

  I hovered the cursor over the View tab, afraid to click. I felt a bit like a child who’d found a gun in a shoebox under her parents’ bed. Now I had found it, I might as well touch it. Now I’d touched it, I might as well pick it up. Now I’d picked it up, I might as well point it at my face. The lure of such accessible danger was irresistible. Something deep inside that wanted you to slip your finger around the trigger and pull. Not because you wanted to harm to yourself, but just that you suddenly could.

  I clicked the tab.

  “This lovely three-bedroom home is spacious and full of upgrades,” the ad proclaimed. I scanned a vaunt of features and conveyances that sounded impressive, but were really just the basic necessities of life: water heater, heat pump, washer and dryer, refrigerator, garbage disposal, dishwasher . . . “Just minutes from the metro, this trendy neighborhood offers convenient shopping and local restaurants.”

  Yeah, I thought, if you considered Hardee’s, Wawa, and Food Lion trendy. I had vague knowledge about the area. Nothing worth the trip across town, except the DMV and an outdoor concert arena. My boyfriend, Garrett, and I had seen Kid Rock there last summer, but most of the shows were outrageously expensive, unless you wanted to sit in a drunk pile on the lawn, which I did not.

  At the very bottom of the page, in lettering too small to read without cranking the zoom level up to 200 percent, was the caveat emptor:

  “Stigmatized Property.”

  Though this sounded innately bad, even if you didn’t know exactly what had stigmatized the property to begin with, a list of potential side effects of what exposure to said stigma may cause should have been included: Confusion, nausea, blurred vision, a sudden and inexplicable desire to murder your family, headache, suicidal thoughts, irregular heartbeat, psychosis, dry mouth, bleeding from—well—everywhere, and, in some rare cases, decapitation has been reported. Do not use drugs or alcohol while inhabiting this property.

  Having built up an immunity to all of the above, I picked up the phone to dial the agent. Garrett wouldn’t mind. He didn’t think we could afford to buy anything worthwhile, and wanted me to stick to rentals, but this one was just a hair outside our guesstimated price range. I could always get a second waitressing job to make up the difference. Anyway, a quick look-see couldn’t hurt. I didn’t tell the agent who I was, only that I was house hunting and wanted to take a quick peek. Would I like to see it today? Why, yes, I would. Three o’clock? Marvelous. Did I need directions?

  As a matter of fact, I did.

  * * *

  • • •

  I WAS ELEVEN when my cousin, Leah, asked me to kill her. I think about that day from time to time, but like what happened to my family, I never allow myself to dwell on much beyond the fact that death had occurred. I remember the terror I felt, the overwhelming guilt, but not her face. I couldn’t stand to look at it. But as I stared into my shot of whiskey, killing time at a local bar and gathering nerve until my appointment with the real estate agent, my mind bloomed forth Leah’s face like a ray of sun on the single rose I had laid on her headstone. The rose had endured rain, wind, and leaf blowers for twenty-seven days. Then it was gone. As I scurried around tombstones in search of it, Aunt Celia, tear-streaked and shivering in a thin sweater, insisted I stop. “It’s gone, Dixie! Just forget about it!” I knew she meant Leah. And I did forget, easy as that. Ice cream sundaes had done the trick.

  I hoped alcohol might, too.

  I fought the memory even as I searched for it, squinting around the back of my brain until my eyes adjusted to the shifting, murky light of denial. I saw Leah clearly, cruelly. How the skeleton under her skin had yanked down her eyeballs to find passage through her face. How her bleached fingers gripped the fold of the bedspread like the edge of an icy cliff. How the pillowcase, folded around her bald head, was just as sick and gray as she was. Slid deep into the cavity of her mattress, she blinked up at me. A grim smile slid forth freakishly large teeth. There was a calm to her normally scared batty eyes that frightened me more than anything.

  “I’m so sick, Dix,” she had whispered.

  “You’ll get better,” I said, averting my eyes as an anemic tongue slipped out to wet her lips. Rather than openly grimace, I looked to the storm outside the window. A sludgy leaf hit the glass. It left a murky handprint as it fluttered away.

  “Not this time,” she said, then smiled brightly to horribly add, “I’m dead meat.”

  She was. I could smell it on her breath.

  “But you have that new doctor,” I tried. Aunt Celia had talked about Leah’s new doctor like he was Christ risen: “A miracle worker. The answer to all our prayers. I tell you, he’s a godsend.”

  “He can’t help me.” Leah confirmed this with a cough. “No one can. I heard them talking about it. I’m going to die no matter what they do.”

  “You got better before when you didn’t think you would,” I offered.

  “I don’t want to get better! I’ll just get sick again. I can’t take it anymore!”

  Her thin fingers clamped a shackle around my wrist. So strong I cried out. I was just about to point out the strength she still had when she wrenched my cheek into the side of her pillow. The stitched corner was like an elbow to my eye.

  “You have to help me, Dixie. Please.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Hold the pillow over my face,” she said equably, as if she had asked me to hold her cup of tea, or her hair as she threw up. A regular request when she still had hair to hold, or the stomach to keep down a sip of tea.

  “But you won’t be able to
breathe.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  I snatched my hand back, rubbing the sting of the sweaty bracelet from my wrist.

  “Please, Dixie,” she begged as I backed away. “No one else will do it.”

  “I won’t do it, either.”

  “But you have to.”

  I shook my head.

  “Couldn’t you just try?” She pushed onto her elbows, then fell promptly back. “If it doesn’t work, I won’t ask you again. I promise.”

  I turned for the door. “I’m getting Aunt Celia.”

  “No, don’t.” She sighed, defeated. She curled a finger to motion me back. “Forget it. I didn’t think you would do it, anyway.”

  I stepped back to the bed. “Do you want to watch TV?”

  She yanked my shirt so hard my shoulder popped through the collar. I tried to pull it back into place before my nipple was exposed, but before I could, she dragged me to my knees at the side of her bed.

  “You don’t get it, Dixie.” Her face had superheated to an angry boil, except her lips, which were as white and thin as ice. “You don’t know what it’s like to be this sick. You don’t know what it’s like to just lie here waiting to die. I pray for more pain sometimes because I know it means I’m getting close. I thought last night was it. I hurt so bad I knew I would die. But then I woke up and felt a little better. But I’m not better! I’m just not dead. I don’t want to be in pain anymore. Dying’s all I can do. You have to do this for me, Dixie. You can do it. I know you can. You have it in you.”

  I looked back at the door. “But I’ll get in trouble.”

  “You won’t get in trouble,” she said, eyes bugging with optimism. “I promise. She won’t even know what happened. I’ll just be dead. It’s going to happen anyway, so why not now?” When I looked down to consider this, she smoothed my shirt back into place. “This is nice. Is it new?”