Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  “I can’t,” I say. “I wish I could help. It’s not like I don’t want the same answers you do.”

  “Not badly enough, I guess,” Connors says.

  I flush with guilt, feel it settle hot and stinging in my gut. But it’s not enough to change my mind.

  We leave then. Connors ahead of me, his expression grave and disappointed as he holds the door. It’s fine. It’s over. Nothing more to see. Just the memory of that girl’s eyes, hovering behind my own. The gleam of the metal drawers, one of them hers. Mothers and daughters, she whispers in the back of my mind. Mothers and daughters and me.

  SIXTEEN

  Connors doesn’t try to ask me any more questions. I can stay at the station, he says, if that’s what I want, and he can try to call my mom. But I say no. I say get me back to Fairhaven.

  He takes me to his cruiser, loads me into the front seat with reluctance written on his face. I feel strange, like I’m melting. When we pass the scorched earth, the proof of the fire, I want to look away, but I can’t even blink. Every inch closer we get to Fairhaven, the closer Katherine gets to the surface. The harder she tests the lock of the door I put her behind. By the time we pull into Fairhaven’s driveway, I’m ready to throw up.

  “Ask her,” Connors says, putting the cruiser in park. “You’re the only one she’ll tell.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I’m already halfway out of the car, and we both know I don’t really mean it. I have questions for her, but whatever answers I get, I’m keeping for myself.

  I wait until Connors is gone before going inside, to make sure he’s really leaving. The door’s unlocked, the front hall dark and cool. It’s harder to hold on to myself now that I’m here. Here, where my mother and her sister grew up. Every room, every breath—they belonged to the girls, once. The twins.

  There must be a reason Gram’s keeping me in the dark, I tell myself. Please, let there be a reason.

  “Hello?” I call. My voice is hoarse, heavy. Like it knows the pain of this, even though I’m doing all I can to keep it at bay. “Gram?”

  “Up here,” comes her voice from the second floor.

  I go toward it. Step after step, my hand trailing along the banister. I’m awake, I know I am, but it doesn’t feel like it. I could still be there in that room, in the station, with the girl’s body out in front of me, her eyes liquid and black.

  The landing is empty, no sign of Gram. “Marco,” I call, and I hear Gram’s chuckle before she says, “Polo.”

  She’s in one of the rooms off the right-hand hallway, opposite the one leading to mine. I approach the open door, my heartbeat uneven, my breath coming quick. I hesitate before I go in. I have to be calm. Too much of me and I’m afraid Gram will shut down.

  From here I can only see a slice of the room, but it’s pretty much what I expected for Gram’s bedroom. A flowered bedspread stretched neatly over a lumpy mattress, and a chest of drawers tucked against the wall.

  “Can I come in?” I say, knocking gently. She’ll appreciate that, I think.

  “Of course.”

  When I step inside, Gram’s sitting at a vanity against the opposite wall, a pack of Band-Aids on the counter as she carefully tapes up a blister on her palm. For a moment I don’t say anything. Just watch her work, her expression calm in the mirror. She knows about the twins. About the girl. Right now. She knows she’s keeping these secrets from me and she doesn’t care. No guilt, no nothing.

  “Did you have fun with Theresa?” she says, not looking up. Oh, she can pretend, but she’s pissed I left the Miller house without her. I can hear it. “You’re back quickly.”

  I go farther into the room, the floorboards creaking underneath me. “I learned something,” I say.

  Gram meets my eyes in the mirror. “Was it, perchance, something about manners?”

  “No.”

  She turns to face me, one hand cradled in the other. “Well?”

  It hurts to look at her, but I make myself keep steady. Her face, passed on to her daughters. How many women have been in this room? How many has she kept from me?

  “Say what you mean, Margot,” she tells me, when I wait a heartbeat too long. “This cryptic nonsense is for other people. Say it plainly.”

  The anger in me roars to life, hot and quick. I’ve been holding it in since the station. And I know some of it belongs to Mom, but she’s not here now. Gram is.

  “There were two,” I say, stepping forward so Gram has to look up at me. “Mom and Katherine. Twins.” There is so much more I could say. Me and that girl, maybe my cousin, and you lied over and over again. It would feel good, but it wouldn’t get me what I want. I have to take it slow. Bit by bit. Answer by answer.

  I can practically see her deciding how much to give me. Deciding whether she can lie. She must realize she can’t. After a deep breath, it rolls out of her. “Yes,” she says. “Your mother and her sister. Jo and Katherine.”

  It feels like the first sweep of a fan on a summer day, like cracking a window in our Calhoun apartment when Mom’s out and she won’t know. Not good, exactly, but welcome all the same.

  Now for the next part.

  “I know you told the police Katherine ran away,” I say. “But I also know you never looked for her.” I can feel my energy draining. This is too much. “You must know where she is, Gram. You have to.”

  “Nowhere,” Gram says. So softly it’s worse than if she’d screamed. “I’m sorry to tell you this. I really am. But she’s dead, Margot. She has been for a long time.”

  I was bracing for disappointment. For Gram to call Katherine a mystery and leave it at that. But this? It feels like drowning. Like the end. “No,” I say. “That’s . . . You told the police . . .”

  “I did,” she admits. “It wasn’t the truth. She died in that fire. Just before your mother left.”

  The apricot fire. Mom said Katherine started it, and Gram said she ran, and I can’t fit any of it together. I can’t. “Why would you lie to them?”

  “They would never have understood.” She smiles, reaches out to me. “Not like I know you will.”

  “I don’t,” I say. “And I don’t believe you, either.”

  A flash of pure annoyance crosses Gram’s face, startling me, and her hand drops. “Believe me or don’t,” she says sharply. “Neither one will bring Katherine back.”

  “Back from where? Where’s her body?” Prove it. That’s the Nielsen family motto, after all. You’re hurting? Prove it. You deserve something better? Prove that too. “If she really died in that fire, why didn’t they find her?”

  “Those,” Gram says, standing up, “are questions for your mother.”

  No. No, I am done with everybody passing me off to someone else as their problem. “Why? Katherine’s your daughter.”

  “Yes,” Gram snaps. “She was, in fact, my daughter, and she’s dead, and I don’t particularly enjoy talking about it. So perhaps we could be kind to one another and leave the subject alone.”

  I wish being kind were what mattered. But there’s too much here that’s not right. Too much I need to know. “Please,” I say. “Gram, you have to give me something.”

  Gram sighs, shuts her eyes for a long moment. “All right,” she says, when she’s looking at me again. “I can show you their room, at least.”

  It’s at the far end of the hall, behind a door with a silver knob. Gram brought the key with her from her room, and I stand back as she unlocks it, her touch lingering as she eases the door open.

  “Would you like me to go?” she asks. “If you want to be alone—”

  “No.” And it sounds like I ripped the word right out of me. “Please don’t.”

  I need someone here to see it with me. I need someone else so I know it’s real.

  Inside. My heartbeat loud in my ears. The only sound in the world.

  The first things I notice are the beds. Two of them, narrow and neatly made up. The headboards are matching—iron scrollwork, like the one in my room, but black instea
d of white—and the covers are the same. Yellow and white stripes, with a smattering of flowers across the top.

  A large window sits between the beds, letting in the afternoon light. It faces away from the Miller house, looking out at the highway. In front of it, a large nightstand with two drawers is dusted clean. Two closets. Two vanities, the mirrors fresh and blazing with sun. Everything matching, everything just so.

  “Which side was my mom’s?” I ask.

  Gram clears her throat. “Do you know,” she says, “I don’t remember.”

  I start to laugh. It’s too loud, too much, but I can’t keep it in. She doesn’t remember. Or she does, and she’s lying, and that’s just as bad.

  “Margot,” Gram says. “You might have had a bit too much sun.”

  She sounds concerned. She sounds like she means it. And if she thinks I’m going to take anything she says at face value ever again, she’s out of her mind.

  I crouch in front of the nightstand. Two beds, a drawer for each. I reach out to the left one, pull it open to find a crumpled receipt and a pair of red plastic sunglasses.

  I can’t picture Mom wearing those. Can’t picture her ever being young enough, vivid enough. Maybe this was Katherine’s side.

  But then I open the other drawer. And there it is. A Bible, the same white cover, the same gold embossing. Just like Mom’s.

  I know what I’ll see when I open to the first page. But I do it anyway. Shaking hands, a hitch in my throat. And there it is.

  For my daughter on her twelfth birthday.

  —With all my love, your mother. 11/8/95

  No verse about a cup, about what the Lord wills. I don’t know enough about what it meant in the first place to understand why it’s not here. But the same handwriting. The same birthday. The same.

  A sob breaks out of my chest. I shut the Bible, fling it away from me and sit heavily back on my heels. Josephine and Katherine. Sisters, and twins, and one of them my mother, and here is the room they lived in. Here is where they slept, where they grew. My mother’s first and dearest secret. Gram’s too.

  “It’s all right,” Gram says from behind me. So softly, and it soothes me even as I try to shrug it off. She lied to me, I think, holding on to it hard, because if I’ve got anger wrapped around my bones, that’s how I’ll get through this.

  “It’s not all right.” I lean on the bed next to me as I stagger to my feet. When I turn around, Gram is still in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest.

  “I would have told you,” she says, still so quietly that her voice drifts through the air like dust motes, golden and aimless. “But it should have been your mother. And she said that she hadn’t. That she didn’t want you to know.” She steps toward me. “Besides. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  My mouth falls open. “What?”

  Gram’s eyes are steady on mine, and for a moment I see Mom in her so clearly. The will so strong I could throw myself against it for a hundred years and never do anything more than break my own bones.

  Mom turned it in on herself. Used it to keep every door closed. Gram isn’t quite like that, but I recognize it all the same, and I feel an ache so hard I’m afraid it’ll never ease. Mom. I love her, I love her, because sometimes she’s mine.

  “Katherine died before you were born,” Gram says now, one hand just barely reaching out to me. Every time she says so, it sounds more and more true. “It was all over before you even got here.” A smile, warm and open. “It doesn’t matter, Mini. It’s all right.”

  “Of course it matters,” I choke out. “What the hell, Gram?”

  “There’s no call for that,” she says, but I’m done with this. She’s not who I need right now.

  Purpose urging me forward, through the collapse waiting for me in my body. Gram calls my name as I hurry past her, down the hallway and back out onto the landing. I pause for a moment, brace myself on the banister and try to take a deep breath. But my lungs feel heavy, feel like they did during the fire when the smoke was weaving thick. The feeling won’t break until I get hold of Mom.

  The landline is in the kitchen. I rush down the stairs, Gram’s voice echoing after me. Whatever she’s saying, it doesn’t matter. Mom. I have to talk to Mom. To yell, and to cry, and to I don’t know what, but I have to hear her voice. I have to make her hear mine.

  The phone nearly slips out of my hands as I snatch it off the charging dock. Palms too clammy, fingers too quick, and I misdial twice, but soon the phone is ringing and the speaker is pressed to my ear. Ring after ring, endless. Gram arrives in the kitchen doorway as I wait, and she looks so sorry for me that I can’t bear it. I push open the screen door and go out onto the back porch. She doesn’t follow.

  It’s still ringing. The Miller house in the distance, afternoon spread like butter between. If I were Tess, none of this would be happening. If that were my life.

  But it’s not.

  The line clicks, and my heart jumps in my chest, but Mom doesn’t pick up. I don’t know that I expected her to. Instead I get her voice mail, and the sound of her voice feels like a punch to the gut.

  “Sorry,” she says. “It’s Jo. Leave a message.”

  Sorry. Of course she starts with sorry. To everybody but me.

  The beep comes more quickly than I expect, and I’m not ready.

  “Hi,” I say, feeling immediately like an idiot. I take a breath in, wincing as it catches. I don’t want her to think I’ve been crying. I haven’t.

  “It’s me,” I say, and the goddamn injustice of having to say that, of having to remind her of her daughter, suddenly lights me up. It’s like that with me, sitting curled in my chest, until the smallest spark and the wick catches. I left, I know it was me who left, but where is she? Where’s her concern? Why wouldn’t she come after me? “Margot. Your daughter. The one you let just disappear two days ago. Remember me?”

  As fast as it lit up, it goes out. I’m too tired. Too sad. Too buried under the things she kept from me.

  “I’m calling,” I say, “because I’m at Fairhaven and I found out, Mom. About Katherine. Why didn’t you tell me about that? About her? Why wouldn’t you want me to know my family?” I tip my head back, stare up at the porch light and feel a tear slide into my hairline. “I don’t understand why you’d keep that from me. Do you really hate me that much? Do you really want to punish me that badly?”

  I know what her answer would be: Not everything is about you. Not even this.

  There’s nothing left to say. I hang up. And I wait for a long time on the porch. For my heart to slow down. For everything to make sense. For this to hurt less. But that never happens.

  SEVENTEEN

  Gram is in the kitchen when I go back inside, steam billowing around her face as she leans over the water boiling on the stove. She’s making dinner. Steamed potatoes and some kind of casserole. My stomach turns over at the thought of it.

  I wind up outside the twins’ room without meaning to. Half of me sure I never want to see it again, and the other so desperate for any clue to my mother and her life here that I could climb into her bed and never move.

  I open the door gingerly. The air’s gone dark, the sun too low to reach inside the room. That makes it easier to take my first step in. The floorboards groan, and I’m sure Gram hears it. I’m sure she knows where I am.

  Carefully, I sit on Mom’s bed. She always sleeps on her left side, and in this room it would put her facing her sister. The Bible, Katherine’s Bible, is on Katherine’s bed. I reach across the gap and brush the cover with my fingers. Alive or dead? I can’t be sure. And Gram’s lied to the police over and over, lied as many times to me.

  The thing is, I have to believe someone. I have to pick an answer and call it the truth, because sitting here, drowning in doubt—it’s not doing me any good. That was real grief in Gram, when she asked me to let it go. Real mourning for a real death. Even Connors seems to believe that Katherine’s dead.

  He doesn’t think it’s the whole st
ory, though, and I don’t think it is either. And there’s someone who can tell me more of it—Katherine. After all, Mom kept proof of her old life in her Bible. I wonder what Katherine hid in this one.

  I ease it into my lap. When I open it, dust rises from the cover, and the spine nearly splits in half. It’s been well loved, this one. Nothing like Mom’s. I flip past the message from Gram and turn the pages one by one, their gilt edges slippery against my fingertips. There are scribbles in the margins of some pages just like there were in Mom’s. Gram must have made them take Bible study, or taught them herself.

  I’m into Exodus when I see the first one. Tucked between two lines of Scripture, so small I can barely read it in this light. I fumble on the nightstand for the lamp switch, and when it flickers on, a handful of moths dart into the air, hovering before they land again on the lampshade.

  do you think we can ask the romans to crucify mom next

  Next to it, in different pen, there’s a tiny smiley face with Xs for eyes. I catch on a laugh, and an image slips into my head: Mom and Katherine, sitting on the porch, Gram pacing in front of them as she lectures them about Scripture. Katherine writing a note to her sister, and Mom reaching across when Gram’s not looking to draw her response.

  A family, together and together.

  There must be more. More like that, little conversations and pieces of the past that I can take for my own. I flip through more pages, another, another. Please, I think. Just a sentence. Just a phrase.

  I get more than that. Nearly a third of the way through the book, scrawled in blue ink across passages about burning cities. Katherine is talking. To someone, to God, to herself, and I push them out of the way. Katherine is talking to me.

  i remembered it today which is weird because i feel like if it was really that important it wouldn’t have been so hard to find but i was sitting there in bible study (hence the bible) and mom was going on and on and on and i was staring out the window at the apricot grove and i was so so hungry like i don’t know how they didn’t hear my stomach just going absolutely batshit but i was staring out at the apricot grove and i remembered me and her out there together