Page 20 of Mud

Then the man jumped.

On the inside, I screamed, just as Poppy did. On the inside, I closed my eyes and brought my hands in front of my face and stood up—what the hell do you think you’re doing, showing us a man jumping off a building?!

On the outside, I remained as still as ever.

And the images continued to change.

A bull was all alone in a dry field, walking slowly, about to lose balance and collapse any second now. When he heard us—I was sure he did—he turned, and we saw thathalf of his head was missing like someone had cut it clean off.

Blood. Bone. His wide dark eye…

This time, Poppy didn’t scream, either.

From there, the images got more and more disturbing.

What was this sick, twisted game they were playing, and why was Madeline allowing Poppy to be exposed to this? I gotme,but Poppy? She would never.

Except here we were, and I still couldn’t make myself look away. I wanted to. My instincts demanded it—just look away at the wall!But my eyes were glued to that magical screen as it changed images, and I couldn’t even tell you why.

A lion, tired, being devoured by hyenas. A snake eating the body of a dead woman in the woods. A man with an axe in his hands, chopping wood in front of a house in the middle of nowhere—except the view zoomed out again and we saw that it wasn’t wood he was chopping; it was bones. He was breaking skull after skull after skull…

All of it was scary, no doubt. All of it terrified me, and it was going to probably repeat itself in my nightmares for weeks to come—but that wasn’t the end of it.

Because then the image showed a picture of Madeline and her husband, my grandfather who’d died two years before I was born.

They were young in that picture—my grandmother had brown hair, but her face hadn’t changed one bit. Her eyes looked just as cold then as they did now, and her lips were painted the same red, and she looked like she believed her time was being wasted as she stood next to her husband for that photograph.

Then the image changed to them standing in front of a cribwith a baby bundled up inside, sleeping, and Madeline was pregnant. Her face was swollen, no rings on her chubby fingers—she could have been only weeks away from giving birth—and she still had it in her to look like all of the world was a waste of her time and she wished to burn everything to the ground.

But then the image changed once more, and I forgot what it was like to breathe.

It was them, my grandparents, and their daughters, mine and Poppy’s moms, when they were teenagers, possibly our age.

I’d seen these pictures before, of course, and I looked a lot more like my dad than I did my mom, whereas Poppy was the spitting image of her mother, who also looked a lot like Madeline. You could tell the three of them were family if you saw them side by side, but my mom and I didn’t quite fit. She looked like her dad, and I looked like mine—except for the freckles on my face and the beauty marks that were almost identical to hers.

The image changed once more, and this time I screamed again—on the inside. I screamed and thrashed and sobbed like a baby where nobody else could see but me.

The picture on the magical screen was that of our mothers and their husbands on their wedding day. They’d gotten married at the same time, and now they sat in a carriage opposite one another, the beautiful couples, smiling, eyes sparkling,happy.

My dad was there, his face so soft but sharp at the same time, his eyes boring right into me. I was daddy’s girl through and through, so much so that Mom complained sometimes—or maybe I’d just made that up to give morelifeto our relationship that hadn’t lasted at all? After all, I’d been only six when they died, and my memories of them were so hazy. Barely a handful.

But my dad had been my best friend, and I’d never quite found another. He did my hair and played unicorn fairies with me and read me my favorite tales and used me to scare Mom shitless every chance he got.

Now he was there. I’d been avoiding looking at his pictures for the past year now—no idea why. Maybe I just hated having to think about the fact that I didn’t know him, not really. I didn’t know either of them. I didn’t know my own parents, and it hurt.

It hurt now, too, to see them there, hand in hand, smiling. It hurt but it also felt good because I realized I’d missed them. I’d missed their eyes on paper. I’d missed their smiles, the way they made me feel. So safe. So loved.

Then the image was gone, the magic disappearing from the air completely.

Tears pricked the back of my eyes, but I fought them back by simply continuing to stare at nothing—or maybe at the polished doors that had hidden behind that magical screen. I kept my eyes open and took my mind elsewhere and kept my muscles relaxed because Madeline was still here. When we were done, I planned to go straight to my room, to the picture album I kept in my closet, and I planned to look at all those pictures I’d been ignoring for so long. Then I could cry for as long as I needed.

It was okay. I had the pictures. I could look at them all night, and then tomorrow, too. It was Sunday, anyway.

David Hill stood up.

“Thank you so much for that, Penelope. Would you mind giving us a moment now? I’m sure you could use the rest—I’ve drained you with my questions.”

I looked at him. Poppy looked at him. Madeline looked at him.

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