Hilltop House

Epilogue

Cora looked out at the gray skies and rolling slate waters beyond. Her steaming cup of coffee sat untouched, and she still wore her mittens, though she'd folded and buttoned back the tops so her fingers were bare. She examined her nails, the deep black-red color on them, and sighed.

"Hey!" Brian slid into the booth across from her, removed his hat and let his dark blond hair spill out haphazardly. "I'm glad we're doing this. I miss you already."

"It hasn't even been two days."

"Yeah, well I was sort of getting used to you and your mom living downstairs."

"You didn't think it was awkward, having family dinners after we'd been making out wherever we could hide?"

He widened his dark eyes behind his glasses, smiled knowingly.

"Besides," Cora added, "you're moving out soon, anyway."

"I wish you'd move in with me." He turned to the waiter who'd arrived and asked for a coffee.

Cora waited for the man to walk away, then leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You're going to be close, just off the campus, right? I'll be over there all the time." Brian met her halfway and gave her a quick kiss above her cocoa, which she drew nearer herself when they parted. Turning the mug pensively, she added, "My mom needs me."

Brian sat back against the bench. "I know. I'm not really that selfish. You need to be with her." He hesitated, then asked, "How's she doing?"

"It's a process. Therapy is helping, but she's been about twenty years overdue for it, so it's going to take time. I mean, Brian, she's told me some, about my--about Paul--and it's so messed up. He basically abused her, and--" Cora closed her eyes, swallowed a sip of her cocoa more to encourage herself than to enjoy it. "I was so concerned about myself that I never saw her; I never saw who she was. I know: I was a kid, it wasn't my fault--I've got my own therapist. But I just feel . . . well, it's all so sad. I guess that's what I feel for her: sad. That she was dealing with him alone all this time. I wish she'd told me, so I could've been there for her."

"Hey, you were. You're the reason she kept going."

Cora sighed, unsure whether she agreed with Brian but knowing he was trying to help. "At least she's got John, too," she said. "He's been a good friend to her. Maybe someday . . . maybe she could know what it's like to have someone care about her the right way."

A silence settled between them, but it was a comfortable one. Cora contemplated the boy across from her, was grateful for him. She'd liked him since she'd met him, and he'd pulled her from a burning house, after all; that wasn't something one easily forgot.

Burning house . . .

He seemed to read her mind. "Are you sure you want to go back? I mean, you didn't want to go up there, the past several weeks you've stayed with me."

The girl chewed her bottom lip, absently turned the little poison ring on her finger, adjusted one of the clips holding back her newly-cropped hair. "It was different. I was too close, it's . . . I just feel like I need to. One time, and then I'll never go back."

An hour later, Cora sat in Brian's truck, her hands shaking imperceptibly in her lap. They were parked at the bottom of the hilltop, looking up at the space where the house used to be. The porch still stood, and the stairs leading up to it, and beyond that were some bits of wall and framework still standing forlorn, dusted in recent snowfall and splintered against the backdrop of leafless trees and white sky. The girl wasn't sure what she felt, being so close to it. Brian was right--she'd avoided it for the weeks she and her mother had lived with him and Alan before finding an apartment. She'd not felt drawn to look at it, had been too close. But now, knowing she wasn't going to return, and knowing, too, that it was going to be razed at some point in the near future, she had a compulsion to see it one last time.