Free Dwellers by Eliza Victoria

bodies are already buried?”
    We don’t answer. We don’t know.
    “What do you call yourselves now? Jonah? And Louis?”
    Silence, ominous and heavy, hangs over us, until I can take it no longer and I nod my head. Louis turns to stare at me as though I have betrayed him.
    Auntie places an elbow on the armrest and cups her chin. “The names of the brothers you have murdered.”
    The last word makes me jerk. “Auntie—”
    “Tell me about body-snatching,” she says, cutting me off.
    “It is,” I say, my heart hammering in my chest, “it is illegal.”
    “It is
immoral.”
She is not shouting—she never shouts—but my ears are ringing. “You have killed two young men in order to take over their bodies and their
lives, and what right do you have?”
    Words from our childhood. “We have no right,” I say.
    She nods. “You have no right.”
    “But Auntie—” Louis begins.
    “No exceptions,” she says, and in my head I hear an annoying uncle saying,
It is ‘thou shall not kill. Period’, not ‘thou shall not kill, unless
–’.
    Unless you meet a charming young college instructor who sexually assaults his students.
    “You need to hear why we did it,” I find myself saying.
    “I am not interested,” she says. “It doesn’t change what you have done.”
    “If we didn’t do it, you’d kill us anyway.”
    “Then you should have just faced death.”
    I wipe my eyes. Is there no mercy, no mercy at all? “And Celeste?” I say.
    “Celeste is dead,” Auntie says, as though everything is that simple. Just black and white.
    “I wish I can see the world your way,” I say.
    Auntie leans forward, crosses her legs, and folds her hands on her knee. I brace myself for a sharp rebuke, or better yet, a flick of her finger that will break my neck.
    But instead she says, “The family wants you back.”
    What?
    “What?” I say. “That’s impossible. After everything that’s happened, Father would never—”
    “Your father is dead.”
    I fall silent. I feel Louis’s hand on my shoulder. For a moment I feel nothing—my father and I had never been close—but I remember my mother, alone now in that big house, and I
feel an ache in my chest, the sting of tears behind my eyes.
    “It was his heart,” Auntie says and I think,
Pain is bad for the heart.
That night, my father must have suffered an insurmountable amount of pain.
    “With your father gone, you are now head of the estate.”
    I can’t imagine facing the family, facing my mother, with my new face, my new name.
    “Do they know,” I say, “what we did after we left?”
    Auntie stares at me for a few seconds and says, “No.”
    “Maybe you should tell them first.”
    “Your mother wants you back. I suppose a pardon is in order.”
    “And you’d allow that.”
    She stares and stares. “My opinion bears no weight in this matter,” she says.
    “Whatever happened to ‘no exceptions’?” I say, brave now, but not brave enough to push it when she doesn’t rise to the bait.
    I ask, “What will happen to Louis?”
    She still doesn’t reply, but I can deduce enough from her silence.
    “If we went back with you,” I say, feeling an ugly need to spell it out, “Louis will be put to death.”
    Auntie looks at Louis, looks at me. Still, she says nothing.
    “Either we will both be put to death, or we will both be allowed to live,” I say. “Because if I was pardoned and Louis was not, how will that look to the rest of the
estate?”
How can I be head of the estate if I have a face nobody can recognize?
    “You have to go back to tell Mother,” I say, “and ask her how she wants to proceed.”
    “I am hoping you can go back with me so you can tell your mother yourself.” She nods at the couch behind us. “But I see that you have loose ends to tie.”
    Ivy. Meryl. I wonder if Auntie knows about the basement, if she can read my mind, right now. As children we believed she could do that, which made her more terrifying in our