The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

Diana lifts my shirt. Runs her fingers over the scars on my belly and presses the knife against my skin.

  * * *

  —

  When I come to, I am alone. I pat myself down, feel the blood on my shirt, sit up and lift the cloth and look down at my stomach. The cuts don’t appear deep.

  I get to my feet. Stagger over to the worktable to look for a rag to wipe away the blood and assess the damage. The worktable has been stripped bare. Diana’s flensing knives are gone, along with anything else with which I might possibly defend myself when she comes back.

  In their place is a mirror. I pick it up and see that the cuts on my stomach are not random as I would have supposed. They’re words, cut into my skin in reverse so that when I look in the mirror, I can read Diana’s final message clearly:

  THE END

  TWENTY-THREE

  THEN

  Jenny

  It’s over. Finished. Done. There’s nothing left to say. Nothing left to decide. The sooner Diana is locked away in a mental hospital, the sooner we can get on with our lives. I lost something precious the day of Rachel’s birthday party: an optimism about the future that I will never regain. Through all of the difficulties and challenges that Peter and I have endured because of our daughter, I’ve tried not to become bitter or cynical or hard. But now I can see that my optimism was misplaced. As long as Diana is free to go where she wants and to kill when she pleases, no one will be safe.

  Rachel insists that the girl at the roadside park was dead when she and Diana found her no matter how many times I ask. I don’t believe her. I know there’s more she’s not telling me, which breaks my heart. I’m used to Diana’s lies, but if I can’t trust what Rachel says, then I am lost entirely. Everyone says that the girl’s death was a terrible tragedy and laments the fact that if she had been found just a few minutes earlier, she might have been saved. I think the only thing that could have saved the girl was if she’d been found by someone other than my daughter.

  As Peter pulls to the curb in front of Dr. Merritt’s office and shuts off the engine, the first snowflakes begin to fall. Normally, the first snowfall of the season excites me. Today, the falling snow feels ominous; a portent of bad things to come. In a few months, this street will be unrecognizable, with snow piled along the sides higher than my head, the paths shoveled through them leading to this and other businesses like walking through a tunnel. Last winter, the snow was so deep that keeping our access road open was costing us a fortune, so in the end we gave up having it plowed and left our Suburban parked near the highway and drove the four miles back and forth to the lodge by snowmobile. Needless to say, we didn’t get out much last year, which is another reason I want to get the situation with Diana resolved. After the events of the past few weeks, I don’t think I could handle spending another winter snowed in with her.

  I look at Peter. He looks back at me. A gust of wind hurries the leaves along the sidewalk as if urging us to do the same.

  “Ready?” I ask because one of us has to break the impasse.

  “Ready.” He squares his shoulders and opens his door.

  I wave at the bookstore owner as we pass her window and follow Peter around to the side of the building and up the covered stairway to the second floor. I wanted to switch therapists after Diana’s diagnosis so we could start over again with someone new, but the population in the Upper Peninsula is so small and the subset of therapists able and willing to treat her is even smaller, so we didn’t really have any options. Still, I was uncomfortable around Dr. Merritt for a long time. I didn’t like that every time he saw Diana or interacted with her, he was judging what she said and did through the lens of his diagnosis.

  Now I’m glad we stuck it out. I don’t know who else we could have turned to for help. Who else could possibly understand the situation we’re in and what we’re about to go through. It’s not his fault that our daughter can’t be cured.

  We sit down in our usual chairs. Dr. Merritt’s waiting room is as comfortable as the man himself, a worn-around-the-edges, dark wood-paneled, bookshelf-lined oasis where patients can relax and feel safe. Normally, I do. But I can’t stop thinking about Rachel. Charlotte is going to take her to Manistique for the day to explore the Big Spring as a do-over birthday outing and has promised that it will be just the two of them, with plenty of one-on-one attention. I think she wants to make up for all the times she let us down. I’m still not ready to forgive her, but I couldn’t think of any other way to make sure that Rachel and Diana don’t go off together while we’re gone. Bringing Rachel with us today was out of the question. I am very good at pretending that everything is fine when it is not, but the idea of going shopping with her after the appointment and getting something to eat while not letting on that anything is wrong—it’s exhausting. I don’t know what the outcome of this discussion will be, but I do know that Peter and I are going to have a lot to talk about on the way home.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asks.

  “I’m fine,” I reply, though we both know that neither of us will be anything remotely approaching okay until today’s visit is over. Possibly not even then.

  The door to Dr. Merritt’s inner office opens.

  “It’s time,” I say without preamble after everyone is settled in our usual places because there’s no point in coming at the subject sideways. “Diana needs to be committed.”

  If Dr. Merritt is surprised by my pronouncement, he does a good job of hiding it. “And you agree?” he asks Peter.

  “I do,” Peter replies firmly.

  I’m grateful for his conviction, even if it took him a while to get to this point. After I found Rachel in the cage and told him what Diana was planning, Peter thought that I was letting my imagination run away with me. But the death of the girl at the roadside park changed all that. I’m a little disappointed that he couldn’t see that the safety of our daughter was at risk until something happened to another girl, but I’m willing to let that go in order to achieve our objective. For twenty years, Diana has ruled our family. Now it’s time for us to take control.

  “May I ask why?” Dr. Merritt’s voice is as carefully neutral and non-accusatory as you’d expect of a mental health professional. “Has something happened?”

  “I think—we think,” I add as I reach for Peter’s hand to show that we are in complete agreement. I take a deep breath. “Peter and I believe that Diana has hurt someone. Badly.”

  I tell him about the incident at the roadside park, and how I suspect that Diana was involved because two weeks earlier, she tried to kill her sister.

  Dr. Merritt leans forward with his elbows on his desk and steeples his fingers under his chin. As I describe how I found Rachel in the cage in the woods and Diana’s flensing knives and the pot of boiling water, he looks shocked. I feel like shooting an “I told you so” glance at Peter, but I don’t.

  “Does Rachel know what Diana was planning to do to her?”

  “She still thinks they were playing a game. Diana won’t admit to anything, either. She says they were acting out a fairy tale, and the knives and the pot of boiling water were props. I think she killed the girl at the roadside park because I foiled her plan to kill her sister. Not out of revenge, but as a substitute, a workaround.”

  Diana doesn’t feel revenge, or hatred, or jealousy, or any of the other emotions that would normally motivate someone to kill. Hers was a crime not of passion but of convenience, which makes what she did so very much worse.

  I tell Dr. Merritt everything. About the times when I know that Diana hurt someone, and the times when I only suspected that she did. I tell him how we caught Diana dissecting animals when she was eleven, and how this led to her learning taxidermy. I tell him about the reason we moved to the lodge in the first place, and about the toddler who died in our backyard pool. I tell him things that I have never told Peter. How Diana pushed me off the cliff because she wanted to
kill our unborn baby, how before I looked out the windows in our home in Ann Arbor and saw the boy at the bottom of our swimming pool, I saw that Diana’s clothes were wet.

  “I didn’t know she pushed you,” Peter says. His voice breaks. “I didn’t know you believed she drowned that boy in our pool. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  What he’s really saying of course is Why didn’t you trust me? I wish I had an answer. Why, indeed? Because I thought I knew better than him? That my maternal love bonded me to our daughter more strongly? That I understood her, and he did not? None of the reasons that I could possibly offer feel as though they are justified. As I list all the unspeakable things that Diana has done, I can see that by protecting her, I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  “I don’t think she drowned him,” I say, sidestepping his question, “not deliberately, anyway. I think he fell into the pool and Diana didn’t know what to do. She might even have tried to pull him out, and that’s how her clothes got wet.”

  I catch myself and stop. I can’t believe I’m still making excuses for her. Talk about old habits.

  “Or she might have thrown the boy in,” Peter says bitterly. He stares at me as if I am a stranger, then takes a deep breath and turns to Dr. Merritt. “So, what do we do next? How do we get Diana committed?”

  “About that,” Dr. Merritt says slowly, and my heart drops. I’ve spent enough time talking to him to know that there’s going to be a problem. “I have to be honest. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree that something needs to be done, but the truth is that having Diana committed would have been a great deal simpler if you had taken this step before she came of age. The law gives parents broad authority over their minor children, and this includes signing them into rehab or to a mental hospital. But once a person is past the age of majority, the laws are weighted heavily in the individual’s favor. If you think about the state of the mental health industry in the past, you can understand why things have swung so far the other way. A hundred years ago Peter could have put you in an insane asylum for no reason and you would have had no recourse.”

  I can’t believe it. We waited too long. The opportunity to commit Diana ran out before we were ready to take that step.

  “There’s nothing we can do?”

  “I’m not saying there’s nothing you can do. I just want you to be aware of the challenges.”

  “Which are?”

  “The law provides two justifications for taking away someone’s rights, which is what you’ll be doing if you have Diana involuntarily committed. The first is to protect the citizenry from harm, such as when police impose a curfew in the event of civil unrest. The second is when the law takes away someone’s rights to protect that individual from harming him- or herself. It’s important to recognize that this latter justification does not apply in a case where someone might harm someone else, which is your concern. Parens patriae powers apply only in cases where the person in danger can’t help themselves, such as when the state takes children from their abusive parents. It’s also used by family members to exercise legal control over adults with developmental disabilities, or to get a schizophrenic relative off the streets, or to take charge of an elderly parent or a spouse suffering from Alzheimer’s.”

  “So, if we could make the case that Diana was a danger to herself, we could get her committed?” Peter asks.

  “That would help. But unfortunately, in Diana’s case, it’s still not that straightforward. The invocation of parens patriae is intended to result in care and treatment, which isn’t true for Diana because there is no cure for psychopathy, and no treatment. It all comes down to balancing the powers of the state against a person’s individual freedom, and typically judges rule in favor of the individual. I was involved in one case in which social services wanted to commit a homeless, mentally ill psychotic woman because she had been eating her own feces. The American Civil Liberties Union brought in an expert witness to testify that the woman was not a danger to herself because eating feces wouldn’t kill her. They won.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I don’t disagree. But if you were that homeless woman, you might feel differently.”

  “So, our hands are tied.”

  “When it comes to having Diana committed, yes. But there is another approach. If you truly believe that she had something to do with the girl’s and the toddler’s deaths, you can go to the police. Tell them what you suspect and let them investigate. If Diana is found innocent, you’ll have peace of mind. If she’s guilty, then the law will do what it’s supposed to by removing a dangerous individual from society.”

  I hardly know what to think. It took Peter and me weeks to agree that Diana should be committed to a mental hospital. Turning her in as a murder suspect never crossed our minds. I can’t bear to think of our daughter going to prison because of us. At the same time, I can’t bear to think of her hurting someone again.

  Dr. Merritt looks at his watch. The gesture is subtle, but the message comes through. He’s given us all he can. Others are waiting. Others with problems that need his expertise and his guidance, though I seriously doubt that any of the people in his waiting room are dealing with a problem as difficult as ours.

  We stand up, shake hands, promise to let him know what we decide, and go down the stairs. It’s still snowing. Two inches have fallen during the time we were parked.

  “Do you want to get something to eat, or should we try to beat the weather and head straight home?” Peter asks after he brushes the snow off the car and we get in.

  “Let’s go home.” I don’t want to watch others leading their normal, everyday lives while we try to decide whether or not we should hand our daughter over to the police for murder.

  Because this is where we are going to end up. I know this with my head, even if my heart is not yet ready to admit it. I’m not alone in my struggle. Parents of psychopaths often have a hard time admitting that their children are dangerous. They deny, minimize, refute, excuse. Even if they are intuitively aware of their child’s sinister side, they tell themselves their children aren’t evil because they wish or need this to be the case.

  But I’m done making excuses. I am not that parent. Not anymore.

  By the time we pass the entrance to the Marquette Branch Prison on the south side of the city, the wind blowing off the lake has whipped the flakes into a frenzy. Most residents don’t give the prison a thought when they pass. Until today, I hadn’t, either. I try to imagine my daughter inside. Diana loves the forest, loves being outdoors. Impossible to envision her living within the confines of a jail cell. I picture her growing more and more frustrated and bored, then becoming violent when her boredom boils over, fighting against her incarceration and breaking rule after rule and negating the possibility of her ever getting out, and push the thought away. Instead, I think back to the day that she was born. Such a happy, hopeful day. Full of joy and possibility. If I had known then what I do now, would I have done anything differently? Certainly, the answer has to be yes.

  But I didn’t know. I couldn’t. All any parent can do is make the best decisions they can using the knowledge that they have at the time. Applying that principle going forward, it’s clear what our decision has to be. There is nothing more that we can do for our daughter. This truly is the end.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NOW

  Rachel

  THE END. Two words. Six letters. Oozing with blood and dripping with meaning. Diana has always viewed life as one continuous experiment, the central question not the scientist’s why? in a quest for understanding but the far more prosaic what? born of simple curiosity. What will happen if I put this pillow over my baby sister’s face? What if I cut our rope swing nearly through and then contrive for my sister to grab it? What will happen if I put my sister in the trunk of Max’s car when we sneak off to the Cobblestone Bar to listen to music? Will she survive the trip, or will she succumb to carb
on monoxide poisoning? What if I show her a clump of poison sumac and tell her it’s regular sumac? In Diana’s eyes, the only reason I exist is so that she can see how close she can come to killing me.

  And now her experiment has come to its end.

  I use a rag to wipe the blood from my stomach and leave it and the mirror on the worktable. The cuts Diana made are only scratches. Barely enough to break the skin. I don’t know why I passed out when she made them. Lack of food and sleep perhaps, combined with the stress of seeing White Bear stuffed and mounted as the centerpiece in her workshop, the ultimate achievement for a taxidermist who had previously preserved only small mammals and birds. My heart aches with the revelation that I shot him, even if I was coerced into doing so and it was Diana’s finger that pulled the trigger. I suffered so much at my sister’s hands. My parents must have known that something was seriously wrong with their older daughter. They should have done a better job of protecting me. I understand that many parents are unwilling to deal with a problem child and end up denying or minimizing their bad behavior—even becoming so swept up by the dangerous child’s charms that they actually favor them over their less exciting and charismatic siblings. But understanding why my parents didn’t look out for me doesn’t make it right. They should have seen what was going on, should have taken steps to stop it. It should never have come to this. My parents lost everything at Diana’s hands. Now I’m about to lose everything as well.

  Worse, I’ve made it easy for her. Diana has four thousand acres in which to hide the body of a person who it could be argued never made it here. My therapists may have presumed that I was going home, but I didn’t tell them where I was going. For all anyone knows, I hitchhiked my way out of state and into oblivion. Even if someone saw Trevor pick me up, they wouldn’t necessarily know who he is to be able to track him down and ask him what became of me. It saddens me to think that my life has had so little impact that Trevor and Scotty are the only two people on earth who might possibly miss me.