by Rory Power
“Please,” she says. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. So don’t ask me to make it make sense to you. It’s too much. I mean, I’ve got my mom asking me about Eli and my dad won’t even look at me, but God forbid we miss this fucking party, and—”
She breaks off as someone knocks on the other side of the stairwell door. I turn to look. Gram’s face peers through the gap I left, arranged in the sympathetic expression I saw on her when I got to Fairhaven.
“Everybody all right in here?” she says. Bright and soothing and perfect. This is the grandmother I came here for, the grandmother who did my hair and dressed me up, but now it puts me on edge. This is a performance. I can see that now. And if she’s like this, there’s a reason.
Tess sniffs and wipes her nose on the back of her arm. “We’re fine,” she says. “Sorry to cause a scene.”
“It’s quite all right.” Gram comes all the way in and presses the door shut, leaning her back against it. Keeping other people out, maybe. Or keeping us here. “They’re just sorting the mess. It’ll be back to normal in a minute.” She smiles at Tess, warm and inviting. It feels more real for how small it is. “It seemed like quite an emotional thing. There was . . . well, let’s just say there was some talk I recognized. About a situation I think you might be in.”
“What?” I say. A situation? But Gram doesn’t even look at me.
“My daughter got pregnant young too,” she says. I stare at her. How could she have guessed?
She crouches at Tess’s feet, and I watch her lay her palm on Tess’s knee. It’s what she did with me, in the kitchen.
Exactly what she did with me. A sick, heady feeling sweeps over me, leaving chills in its wake. This isn’t how it should be. “Gram,” I say, but she waves me off, eyes fixed on Tess.
“I helped her through that,” she says. “I can help you. You have options. Whatever you want to do,” she says. “There are a million roads open to you.”
It’s the right thing to say. But it sounds all wrong. Because Gram isn’t saying it to be good, or to be kind. Why would she choose now to look after Tess, when I don’t think she ever has before?
“And the father,” Gram continues, “whoever he is, he’ll support you. We’ll make sure of it.”
No, I think, sudden and clear through the fog, through the confusion. No, Tess, don’t, but Tess is already opening her mouth, and Tess is already saying, “That’s the problem.”
Gram’s brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“We should get back,” I cut in. Tighten my arm around Tess’s and tug, as subtly as I can. Don’t say another word. Do not trust this. She is playing you the same way she played me. “Your parents probably want to talk to you.”
She meets my eyes. I watch hers widen with understanding. “Yeah, you’re right.” Together, we get up and sidle around Gram, toward the door.
“No, wait a minute.” Gram stands up, brushes invisible wrinkles out of her skirt. “Theresa, is there a father?”
Is there one. Not who is he. How does Gram know to ask that question? Here I am, still trying to get my head around how this could happen at all, and Gram goes straight to the heart of it. Like she already knows.
Tess turns. Her voice hitches, comes out in a whisper. “Why would you ask that?”
And Gram. She looks at me.
It’s not much. The smallest thing, and she breaks away so quickly I think she couldn’t have meant to do it. But it rips through me, echoes in the empty spaces where my own father has never lived. Not even a question I wanted to ask. Why would I, when I had Mom to figure out?
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Gram says. “I’m just making sure you girls are all right. Let’s get you back to the party.”
I barely have time to move before she’s nudging the door open and ushering us into the community room with a hand at our backs, firm and unyielding. Music too loud, air too cluttered with competing perfumes. I need fresh air. I need Gram to not be watching me so closely, like she’s waiting to see what I’ll do.
More than that, I need to get to Mom. And when Gram looks away from me for half a second, I’m bolting for the door.
TWENTY-FOUR
Outside. Evening coming on. I steal a bike from the rack in the green and ride through town. Breathing hard, every blink warping the world. Nothing’s what I thought. No father, no father, and that never bothered me, and I wondered if he was out there, sure, and I thought sometimes about what he might’ve looked like, about what kind of face could have mixed with Mom’s and disappeared completely.
No face at all. Just her, and then me. Is that—
I pedal harder, try to press everything down. The Nielsens in those photographs, in the dining room. They didn’t look alike the way Mom looks like Gram, the way the three of us look like each other. And something is there, something is waiting for me to look it in the eye, but I can’t do it alone. I need Mom.
I don’t know exactly where she’ll be, but I figure there can’t be too many motels in a town this size. I’ve seen most of the west side with Tess, or in the truck with Gram. So I follow the highway east. Up ahead I can see a long, low building, white with blue trim and a small dusty parking lot. A sign flickers between VACANCY and NO VACANCY.
It’s the only motel I’ve seen in all of Phalene, so she must be here. I pull in, careening over the unplanted flower bed.
Mom’s car isn’t in the lot to tell me which room is hers. Did she go for food, or maybe to find me? I leave the bike on the sidewalk and rush into the office. A boy a bit older than me is at the desk, his feet propped up on an old box fan while he nurses a beer.
“Shit,” he says, tipping upright when he sees me. “I swear I’m legal.”
The gray hair. It catches people sometimes, when they’re not paying attention. “Sure,” I say. “I’m looking for my mom.” Don’t bother with her name. It’s probably obvious. “Which room is she in?”
“Your mom?” He frowns. “There was someone in the farthest room, but—”
“Thanks.”
Down the walkway, past rooms behind weathered blue doors. Finally I reach the last one. The door stands slightly ajar, so I just barge right in.
I stop. I must have the wrong room. This place is empty. No bags, no stuff. The sheets stripped from the bed and piled in the corner like somebody was about to change the linens.
But I’m in the right place, because it’s there, in the middle of the mattress. The Bible. The one I left in our apartment in Calhoun. The matching one to Katherine’s, back at Fairhaven.
Mom was here. And now she’s not.
Panic rising in my throat, choking off the air. Her stuff must still be here. She can’t have left. It’s fine. It has to be fine.
I run to the dresser, yank open the drawers. Empty, empty, empty. Okay, Margot. Deep breaths now. She wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t make you the first promise she’s ever made and then break it just like that.
I check the bathroom. The shelves are bare, the towels dumped in the bathtub. They’re damp. The shampoo is balanced on the side, the top still open. She was here.
“Mom?” I yell, and I know it’s ridiculous, I know she won’t answer, but I won’t let that in. “Mom!”
Just an echo as my voice bounces off the tiles. I barrel back into the bedroom. The gleam of the Bible’s gold embossing in the last of the light feels like a needle in my side. This was her room, but her stuff’s all gone. Because she packed it up. Because she didn’t wait. She left. And she took her whole life with her.
Her whole life, except me.
Every breath tearing something open in me, every second more painful than the last. She’s gone. Mom’s fucking gone. She packed up and she’s not coming back.
She promised. She promised she’d stay. And I believed her. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I really thought she’d still be here when I was ready to come back. I really thought it was different with us this time, that maybe we could finally understand each other.
For a mome
nt I’m not sure what to do. Where to put the thrumming hive of anger living in my body. It’s a gift, I tell myself. She finally gave me what I always wanted. My own life, away from hers. Celebrate.
I’m lit up with it, a rage sizzling in my body. I pick up the nightstand. Throw it against the wall. It’s nothing, made of nothing, and it splinters into pieces. The Bible next. I hurl it at the mirror over the dresser. Shattered glass tumbles to the floor, scatters around my feet. So what if it cuts me? What’s one more way to bleed?
How could she do this to me? We’ve spent all this time tearing each other apart, but we stayed, we stayed together, and now she bails? Now, when I need answers? Now, when I need help?
She can’t have left. She can’t, she can’t. If anybody was gonna leave it was gonna be me, but it wasn’t, really, because I’d never let go of her, not as long as I had a choice. And I said I always wanted space from her, I told myself that every day in that apartment, wishing and hoping for a day without her voice in the back of my head, but I didn’t fucking mean it, because she’s my mom and I love her and I cry so hard my muscles tremble, cry so hard it sounds like a scream.
My mother, my mother, my mother who never wanted me.
“Come back,” I hear myself whispering. Come back.
When I look up it’s nearing sunset, and there’s a cool breeze sweeping in through the open door. He must’ve heard me, that boy in the office, but he hasn’t come to check. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t either.
Slowly I pull myself to my feet. Wipe the snot and tears from my face with the edge of the motel comforter. I can break all I want, but eventually the only thing left to do is get back up. Get back up and find the answers I need on my own. I’ve been doing it for years. I can do it again.
I pick the glass from the carpet. Gather up the biggest pieces of wood from the broken nightstand and drop them in the trash can by the door. Hang the towels over the shower curtain rod so they’ll dry better. Splash cold water on my cheeks to bring the redness down and tuck my curled hair behind my ears until I look closer to fine.
Back in the bedroom, I take one last look around before heading out. I should stop by the office to apologize. But something catches my eye. A square of white, sticking out from the Bible where it’s splayed facedown. It’s not the picture of Mom in front of Fairhaven—I took that with me when I left Calhoun—and it’s not the money I left for her. It’s something else.
I crouch, steady myself on the bed and pick it up. It’s an envelope. Margot, written there in her handwriting. Shaky and lopsided, so different from Gram’s.
I look around the room, the wreck I made of it, and swallow a hot rush of shame. She left me a note. Not that it makes any of this much better. But she did leave me something.
That something turns out to be a photo. Mom and Katherine, posed on the Fairhaven front porch, standing on either side of Gram. One of them in shorts and a T-shirt, hair long and loose. The other in a plain dress with wide straps. My breath catches in my throat—the face of girl in the dress is scratched out. So strong and so deep it rips all the way through.
On the opposite side of their mother, the other girl is looking at her sister, a fierceness to her face that I recognize from my own heart. That must be Mom. Mom from Katherine’s diary, who scratched out her sister’s face, who kept this photo because she cherished what she’d done.
Except. I look closer. I know my mother’s face better than I know my own. And it’s off. Just a little, but off. Everything on the wrong side. The freckle by the corner of her eye, the curve of her widow’s peak.
My mouth goes dry. That’s not my mom. That’s Katherine. And the girl with her face scratched out is Josephine.
Everything hits me at once. Every word written in that Bible at Fairhaven—hers. Every bit of guilt and fear—hers. It was Katherine who scratched out those photographs. Katherine who broke my mother’s arm, not the other way around.
My hands tremble as I open the envelope again and take out the rest. A bundle of paper, the texture thin and familiar. It has torn edges, is covered in careful letters inked in the spaces between the Scripture. This was ripped out of the Fairhaven Bible. The one I thought was Katherine’s.
The pages unfold, and I lay them out on the carpet. Mom left the rest of the book there, in her old room. She took this. She took her sister’s Bible like a memento. And she took these pages from her own. What’s in here that she wanted to keep?
I take a deep breath. Start reading.
it finally happened
i did it. i’m so sorry. i did it. i killed her. i’m so sorry mini. i’m so sorry i’m so sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry mini you have to forgive
katherine
katherine katherine katherine Katherine Katherine KATHERINE KATHERINE KATHERINE
Mom killed her sister. Killed her sister and wrote it down. It’s not a surprise, exactly. Not after what she said in the driveway. But that doesn’t make it any easier to take.
I rest my fingertips on the place where Katherine’s name turns ragged with grief. Everything I read back at Fairhaven—that was Mom, her fears and her worries, and if I were her, if I saw what she saw, maybe I’d end up where she did. I’m angry and I’m hurting, but it’s always there in me. The reaching. The want to understand her.
Well, this is what I was after. Whether I like it or not, I think we’ve been standing on thin ice our whole lives, this thing she did waiting underneath us.
I set my shoulders, keep reading.
why didn’t mom see why didn’t she understand why did she make this mine to do
i have to tell i have to tell someone but mom doesn’t want to hear and nobody does because nobody loves her the way i love her
i know it’s loved now past tense and everything but it never will be, not really
i will love my sister and i will wish we’d died together i will always wish it could have been just us forever
And what she got was me. I couldn’t have been much of a replacement for the sister she wanted to die with.
we turned eighteen. this is important. i know that even if i don’t know why.
things have been weird with us for a while but it was our birthday. it was the day we became the two of us. i wasn’t gonna let it be anything but ours.
we’ve been sleeping in different rooms. her in our old room and me in the guest room across the house, since the thing with the pictures (and everything after). i woke up and i got dressed in this hand-me-down from her, a dress she stopped liking and i started wanting. we’ve always been the same size. the same everything.
i thought it would make her happy. i need to say that right now. i thought that it would make her happy to see me in something that was hers.
i went into our room. mini katherine was still asleep. she’s been sleeping so much since she got sick. mom says it’s been a year, in and out of school, people talking about those Nielsen girls and their Nielsen mother, but i know better. since our sixteenth. that’s when something happened to her. that’s when she stopped being able to stand up, stopped keeping down food and started coughing up something that wasn’t quite blood.
so i woke her. i just wanted to see her. to talk to her. i would have climbed in bed next to her and stayed there all day. but she was so mad. she just wanted to sleep, or to not be near me, or both. i don’t know. i’ll never know.
i tried to get her to sit up. we could convince mom to let us watch TV, i think i told her. and she just started crying. she got out of bed and her legs were weak and her skin was so pale it was like she was disappearing right in front of me.
most of what she said i don’t (want to) remember. but she told me that she hated how it was, that she hated our birthday because it only reminded her more how different we are now. we’ve had this fight before. it never sounded like this. she’s never brought up the x-rays before. i thought she’d forgotten, honestly. that was my mistake.
“we’re different all the way inside.” i remember that exactly.
we have known this for years. that we are like mirrors of each other, everything flipped. and i have never, ever cared.
but it matters mattered to her. because we were twins until we weren’t, until she got sick and i didn’t.
here, she said, and she picked up the prayer candle mom had lit for her and left on top of our dresser. and she said:
“i know what happens to me.”
she must have meant the fire. i saw it the day of our sixteenth. i was right. i was.
then she said:
“come here”
and i went. i would go anywhere she wanted me to. i watched her lift the candle. i saw that burn on her fingertip from our sixteenth birthday, saw the white lines spiraling across it and i promise you i’m not lying when i say i wanted them for my own. if that would make her happy. if that would get us back to how we were.
she pressed the flame to my cheek like someone putting out a cigarette. i can feel the burn there still. the skin is starting to scar, and i don’t think it will ever fade.
i screamed. i’m sure i did. she let go. and i left. ran away, really.
she stayed upstairs the rest of the day. i didn’t see her. mom didn’t say a word about our birthday or about anything but she sat me down in the kitchen and patched up my cheek. she was gentle and she was steady and it still hurts.
i told her how the scratches got on the dining room table. i told her everything. i said, i remember saying, “something’s not right with her.” i said that. mom knew what i was talking about.
and what she told me was that someone would have to put an end to it. “sooner’s better than later. she’ll only get worse. it’s the best gift you can give her.” i’ll hear that for the rest of my life. i’ll always wonder what a different mother might have said.
it took me all night to decide what to do.
i think it should have taken longer.
i didn’t know how i was going to do it when i woke her up. i didn’t know anything. i probably should have planned. but i went into her room and this time when i woke her she just seemed like herself. like me. and she said “i’m sorry” the second she opened her eyes.
