The Shuddering

splitting one of the chair legs in half with a single swing. “What do you mean ‘new owner’?” sheasked. “This place is still for sale.” She blinked at Ryan when he failed to respond. “Right?”
    Ryan cleared his throat and continued to kick at the table leg.
    Jane looked up at the ceiling, as though suddenly overwhelmed by her brother’s lack of response. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
    “Nobody told us,” Ryan said, defending his decision to crash the place.
    “And yet you knew.”
    “I looked it up.”
    “Jesus, Ryan.”
    “What?” he asked with a shrug. “Nobody called us for the keys. It was an innocent mistake.” Ryan stopped what he was doing, a look of sudden realization crossing his face. “Oh my god,” he said. “I just figured it out. Pops sold the place to those gray alien assholes. That’s why they’re so pissed.” He leveled his gaze on her sister when she failed to be amused. “Who cares?” he asked her. “Like anyone should ever come up here again.”
    “And how will they know that?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe by the body parts on the deck?”
    Sawyer slid onto the ottoman in front of an overstuffed armchair, picturing an unsuspecting hiker stumbling onto April’s body after the first thaw. He pressed his hands against his face, his elbows kissing his knees.
    Both Jane and Ryan went quiet, though Ryan kept working. He grabbed the ax Sawyer had abandoned and brought it down against the coffee table’s top with a crack. Sawyer winced at the noise, trying to figure out why he had brought April up here at all. Sure, they had had their issues, but what the hell did he expect to happen with Jane being here? Why couldn’t he haveloved what he had rather than wanting what he had lost? It was pathetic. He was pathetic.
    Jane slid onto the ottoman next to him.
    “Are you okay?” she asked. He felt her hand on his back but couldn’t handle the contact. Standing, he left her there, her arm floating in the air. Ryan stopped chopping, and Sawyer watched him give his sister a questioning look while his back was turned, the reflection in the window giving the twins away.
    “Hey,” Ryan said after a moment. “What’s up?”
    “What do you mean, what’s up?” Sawyer asked, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.
    “I told you, you have to stop thinking about it,” Ryan said. “I know that’s an impossible request, but we have to focus here. “You feel guilty. So do I.”
    “I don’t feel guilty ,” Sawyer’s tone was barbed with disdain, but that was exactly it. He had yelled at her. That was why April had taken off into the snow. He had made her feel as though she hadn’t mattered to him as much as his friends did, and she had run away. The ax hit the floor next to Ryan’s feet with a heavy thump. Out of the corner of his eye, Sawyer saw Jane coil her arms around herself.
    “Listen, this isn’t exactly what you’d call a normal situation,” Ryan said. “This whole thing is fucked up, but right now you have to let it go.”
    “Let it go,” Sawyer echoed, turning to face his best friend. “You know what’s going to happen if we get out of here? You’re going to go back to your fancy apartment and three weeks from now you’ll be on a plane flying out to the Swiss Alps, because the show must go on. The world will go back to normal for you, because that’s what you’ve set it up to do. And I congratulate you on that; I really do. Shit, I’m jealous that after all of this is said and done, you can write it off as some terrible nightmare; youcan tell this story at parties and impress girls you have no genuine interest in.”
    Ryan’s jaw went rigid.
    Jane squeezed her eyes shut, her nails digging into the upholstery beneath her.
    “But you know what I get to do? I get to go back to my shitty apartment only a few hundred miles away—so close that I’ll be able to smell this place for the rest of my life. And when I get there, I’ll unlock my door, I’ll walk into my room, and I’ll see all of April’s stuff strewn everywhere, because she always sucked at housekeeping. Her clothes, her jewelry, her books all over the place; and when I look away in attempt to find a patch of wall that doesn’t have her written all over it, I’ll see a crib…a fucking crib , still in the box, waiting to be put together for a baby that will never be born.”
    Ryan’s gaze snapped to Jane, but all she did was nod faintly—the