I never lived near a beach before. Miss Lilly took me far away from my home, just as she must have sent Ava’s brother far away from here. Nua and I didn’t even get a chance to check any computers at the library. I wonder if the rude woman at the desk would’ve even let us without Ava’s signature or fingerprint or something.

We lived in a rundown area of the city, on the outskirts. It was more like a town than the city; it’s what I was imagining when Bayan suggested we “go into town.” Our house had no air conditioning. It was always hot, but the boys we housed didn’t care. They’d rather be there than with their wives. We had around fifteen or twenty stowaways at any given time. My parents were hardly ever home. My mother worked three jobs and my father worked one, in order to bring in enough money to keep us all fed. Abigala took odd jobs, too, in between her reporting stints, to bring home any extra cash she could. My parents wouldn’t let me look for work. They didn’t want me going into the bad parts of town by myself, only to have me never come home again. And for all their hard work, still here I am.

I miss them. My mother was always out working, so my father was home more often than her. He took care of me. He used any spare coins we had to buy me and Abigala small toys and told us to share with the boys we sheltered. They felt safe there, too, which made me happy every single day. My mother would come home late at night, exhausted, and come into my and Abigala’s room, brushing the hair away from my forehead, and when I was awake I would smile. She loved us, and she loved every single boy that passed through our house. She hated the world that we lived in, and did everything she could to show Abigala and me that it was wrong.

I miss it there. I’d rather be there with my parents and my sister than here with Ava and Nua and Keol. I’m sick of tiptoeing around Miss Lilly and I want to get out of here. I think about the conversation between Bayan and Sloan. I know who Penny is now but I still don’t know who Sloan is and why they were talking to Bayan; of course, it has dawned on me that if Sloan can sneak onto the grounds, I can sneak off.

Behind the backyard a little ways away is just woods. I can see the trees from my bedroom, and they stretch back, far. I have looked in the little cabinet that Bayan had opened that night. All that’s in it is a button, backlit so that I know it’s on. I wonder what it does.

“It controls the fence,” says Keol.

We’re in my bedroom. He’s lounging on Nua’s bed, and I’m on mine, picking at a bowl of blueberries and occasionally throwing one up in the air for him to catch in his mouth. He opens his mouth now, and I toss one at his face. It misses, bouncing off his nose, and he catches it in his hand, pops it in his mouth, and coughs. “You’ve seen the fence, it goes all the way around the house and marks off Miss Lilly’s property all the way to the water. The button electrifies it.”

“Electrifies?”

“Yeah,” says Keol, opening his mouth again, and this time I aim right. He chews, thinking, and then says, “It’s usually always on.”

I want to ask him about Sloan, but I don’t.

And so I’m stuck.  I want to go home, but I can’t leave here; I can’t go home and I don’t want to leave.  After lunch I wander around the library for a little while, and then get bored because I keep thinking about the big library in the city.  Miss Lilly is out in the afternoon, going into town for a meeting or something, and Ava and Keol spend the whole evening and into the night stretched out in the second floor living room, watching a show on the television.  Nua and I go to bed before them, I think, but it’s dark in our room when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night.

I look at the clock on the little table between Nua’s and my beds.  It’s a little past midnight, and Nua’s fast asleep, but I can hear water running in the bathroom.  I lie back down, thinking it’s either Ava or Keol and neither of them want me bothering them, and then I hear a sound that’s grown familiar to me these past few weeks: someone trying to hide a cough.  Then it turns into a retch, and I sit up again, getting out of bed.  

The bathroom door is slightly ajar, but the lights are off.  I turn them on, and Keol winces, wiping the back of his mouth on his hand.  He’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the door that leads into Ava’s bedroom, and then he reaches over and flushes the toilet.  I stare at him for a moment, and finally ask quietly, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says.  His voice is hoarse, and he grimaces as he slowly pulls himself to his feet.  I raise my eyebrows.  “Does she know you’re throwing up in the middle of the night?”

“She doesn’t need to,” answers Keol as he washes his hands.  Then he reaches for his toothbrush and says, “Go to bed, Aberworth.”

So I do, wondering if I should tell her myself, but I’m still slightly afraid that Keol’s gonna kill me, so I don’t.  But I still want to talk to him, so the next day after lunch I wander for a little while, looking into the guest bedrooms on the second floor.  Nua’s watching television in the second floor living room, and I don’t bother him.  I find Ava in the living room on the first floor, on her laptop, her cat curled up next to her. 

I lean against the wall separating the living room and the dining room. “Where’s Keol?”

She looks up at me, and then shrugs. “Dunno. Why?”

“He’s usually always with you.”

“Only when he wants to be,” she says with a slight grin, and pats the seat next to her. I join her on the couch, and she kicks her feet up on the coffee table and leans her head back, closing her laptop. She yawns, and then I yawn, and then she pulls her lighter out of her pocket and lights a cigarette. “Want one?”

I look at her in slight surprise, and shake my head. She snorts, taking a long inhale, and then exhales hard. Smoke shoots out of her nose. I make a face. “Why do you smoke so much?”

She shrugs, putting her cigarette between her teeth, and puts her laptop to the side. She stands and stretches. “Something to do.”

Shiv the cat rolls over onto her back, waving her paws in the air, and Ava scratches her head. I smile a little. “It really doesn’t taste good.”

“Does to me,” she answers.

“Because you’re addicted.”

“Did you come here to ask me something?” she asks, looking up at me, “or to just…”

She waggles her fingers at me, and I smile slightly. “Oh, I don’t know.”

She smiles as well, and then walks around the coffee table and starts to pace. I put my feet up on it, watching her, and she exhales smoke again before saying, “I don’t know how much I can help you, Aber.”

I smile, although I don’t feel it. “I know.”

“Do you.”

I shrug. “There’s nothing here. And there’s nothing about Abigala anywhere.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“I know,” she says in frustration, running her fingers through her hair. “I just wish I could do more.”

I stand as well. “Don’t worry about it, Ava, I didn’t really have my hopes up.”

She turns to me, taking her cigarette out of her mouth. “Why?”

“I dunno,” I say. “Your mother.”

“I’m not like my mother,” she says quietly. I shrug. “You have three husbands.”

She laughs humorlessly, and crosses her arms. “You think I wanted this?”

I look at her, feeling weird in my stomach. This isn’t how I wanted this conversation to go. “You want Keol.”

“And he wants me too. I don’t see the problem with that.”

“But he didn’t agree to marry you. He had to, just like Nua had to and I had to.”

“And I ask you again, you think I wanted all of it?”

“No,” I say truthfully. She smiles slightly, and looks at Shiv on the couch, and then says, “Did you want to have sex with me?”

I blink, and feel heat rushing up my neck. “What?”

“Did you want,” she says again, slowly, “to have sex with me?”

I don’t answer.

“Because you know that you didn’t have to, and I don’t want you to hate me for it. But if you have something that you want to say, you can say it.”

“No,” I say. “Yeah, I wanted to, then.”

“And now?”

I blink, looking at her. She holds her cigarette in between two fingers and inhales on it, and then says, “How do you feel about it now? Do you regret it?”

I don’t respond.

“Do you think less of yourself? Do you wish you hadn’t participated in the final piece of our marriage, that linked us together? Especially,” she says, laying a hand flat across her stomach, “if it worked?”

I look at her, dread starting to creep into me. “Did it?”

“No,” she says with a sigh, and then takes a deep inhale on her cigarette again. “But what if it did?”

She looks at me, her eyes cutting right through me. “How do you feel about having children, Aber? With me?”

“Would you sell them away?” I ask quietly.

“My sons?” she says, putting her cigarette back in her mouth. “I hope not.”

“I don’t want children,” I say quietly. “I’ve never wanted children, not in this world.”

“But you’re not at home anymore,” she says gently. “You’re here, with me. Our children would have a better life than you did. Or the boys you knew growing up.”

“My life was fine,” I say, feeling anger in my stomach. “I had my family. I had my sister and my parents, and we were doing good in the world. What did you have, except your mother and her locks and her keys?”

Ava stares at me, and I regret it.  I probably wasn’t supposed to know about those, and god, now that I do, I’ve mentioned it to her, I wish I didn’t say that out loud.  But then she just nods, as if that was what she was waiting for me to say this whole time.  “You know about the locks?” 

I just look at her, and she takes a drag of her cigarette.  “Who told you?”

I don’t answer.

“Which one?” she asks quietly, and I exhale, shaking my head, then say softly, “Nua.”

“How does Nua know?”

“Keol must have told him,” I answer. “He said your mother wanted you to use them.”

I can’t tell what expression is guarded behind her eyes. She exhales smoke hard out of her nose, and then walks through the cloud. “Fine.”

“Fine what?” I ask, and she laughs slightly, not looking at me, but waves her hand. “Come on.”

And I follow her. We don’t go very far, only into the foyer, the hallway with the stairs in it. And in the middle of it, she stops.

I look at her. “What-”

“Sh,” she says. “You want to see them?”

I don’t answer, and she takes it as one. “I thought so.”

“Ava-”

“Shush,” she says again, tossing her cigarette on the ground and stepping on it. It lies there as she goes over to one of the cabinets on the wall. She pulls a small ring of keys out of her pocket and throws open the door.

I press my lips together. She runs her eyes over the contents of the closet, glances over her shoulder at me, and says, “Pretty, isn’t it?”

I don’t answer.  There’s nothing inside the cabinet except a huge hook on the wall and a silver key ring hanging from it.  There’s also a little drawer inside, and she beckons me over with her finger as she slides it open.  Inside are little pieces of metal, and I can’t really tell how they work, but each one has a keyhole in the middle, so I can guess what they are.

“This one was mine, actually,” she says, running her fingers over one. “At least, according to my mother. When I was younger, and not married yet, and still thought I could ever talk some sense into her. But I must have given her lip one too many times, because there were a few times when she didn’t want to put up with me, and just left me in my room for a few days.”

My fists clench at my sides. The pile of ash is smoking slightly on the wooden floor.

“She thought I should put one on Keol’s door, and not take it off. So that I could just lock it anytime I felt like it. She thought he was getting a little too...oh, you know. Keol,” she says, turning back to me. Her eyes dare me to answer. I don’t.

“She has so much stuff,” says Ava quietly, nodding to one of the other cabinets on the walls around us. “To keep us in place, and to keep us quiet. She’s got her sleeping pills, her locks, her electric fence that runs right down to the ocean.”

She reaches up and takes the ring of keys off of the hook delicately, and twists it in her fingers to watch the light catch. She looks at me. I still don’t say anything, and she walks towards me. Her eyes flash, daring me to say anything, do anything, but I don’t. She dangles the shiny silver keys in my face, and laughs low, humorlessly. “Keol loves the city, you know.”

I didn’t.

“We used to go in a lot, just to get away from her. But she didn’t like it. Especially because her entire professional life revolves around keeping people like him away from people like me.”

She’s walking. She moves to my left, and I can hear the keys jangling. Suddenly she pushes me from behind, and she reaches around me to open what I thought was a closet door. And suddenly I’m inside, and suddenly the door is shut, and it’s pitch black.

“So how could she let me wander around in public with a husband who looked free?” She tsks with her tongue. “No. Wouldn’t do. So she brought us down here and opened the closet and asked Keol which one he wanted on his bedroom door.”

I reach my hands out, and they immediately hit wood. Nua mentioned this, too. But I can’t even move in this thing, my arms can’t even go out by my side. I lean against the door that she has just closed, but she must be leaning against it too, or she put a lock on it.

“And I told her no,” she says. Her voice is close to the ground. She must be sitting. “No, I would never even give myself the opportunity to lock people away whenever I wanted. It’s humiliating. It’s degrading. It’s...”

I slide to the ground too, leaning my head against it. She sighs from the other side. “It’s dehumanizing.”

I close my eyes; nothing changes.

“She told me not to care about that. They’re mine, she told me, she said, ‘Your husbands belong to us.’ And then she said that speaking of husbands, plural, when was I going to take another one?”

Nua is not here yet, I realize. This is before my time and before his, when it was just Keol, stuck alone in this house with his wife and her mother.

“And that’s when I left. I left the foyer, left him alone with her, and went upstairs. I waited for him,” she says softly. “But he didn’t come to my room that night. So I went to his. He wouldn’t let me stay.”

I reach out in front of me, and touch the wood again.

“He told me no. I didn’t even know that he knew that that was an option.”

I hear her moving, I think she’s standing up.

“But the next morning he came to see me, when the sun was still coming up. His eye was all black and puffy and there was a red mark around his throat, but he wouldn’t tell me what she did. He just laid down next to me and put his head on my stomach and cried.”

My heart clenches. Ava opens the closet door softly, and light pours in again. She looks down at me. “He thought it was his fault. He wasn’t good enough, not for me, so I needed more. More than him, better than him.”

She reaches down for me. After a moment, I take her hand. She pulls me up. “He thought I was mad at him. I told him I wasn’t, that I just hated him like usual. And he laughed and fell asleep and so did I and then a little while later Bayan came to wake us up and tell me that she had another boy for me to marry, ready and waiting.”

I stare at her, pressing my lips together, and then she turns and puts the big silver key ring back in the cabinet. She closes it and locks it, sliding her own key back into her pocket, and finally she looks at me. “But it’s not enough, is it? It’s never been enough.”

I watch her leave. She doesn’t look back at me.

What am I supposed to say to that? Nothing, apparently, as she has left me. I go out of the closet, and look inside now that I can actually see. It must only be about five square feet and only a little taller than me or Ava or Keol. I wonder if he’s ever been inside of there. I go upstairs and bury myself in blankets in my room. I sleep through dinner, but Nua wakes me up when he comes into the room later that night. He tells me that Ava didn’t come down for dinner either. He has an expression on his face. I close my eyes so I don’t have to look at it and sleep again.