The Sister Season

by Scott, Jennifer

  “Fell in what?” Maya asked, finally catching up with her daughter and putting her hand on Molly’s shoulder, trying to shush her. But the little girl wouldn’t calm down, wouldn’t stop screaming long enough to tell her.

  But Claire knew without the little girl saying a thing. She’d seen the extra set of footprints pressed into the snow after the first night here.

  “The pond,” she said, breathless, and bolted through the soy field, her feet unable to take her there fast enough.

  Attempts—V

  Today had to be the day. There was no way around it.

  The funeral would be tomorrow, and his mom had already told him that she would be packing their things tonight so they could leave straight from the cemetery. She wanted to get home. To Tai, to Christmas, to her students. And he couldn’t blame her. If he’d had anything waiting for him at home, he’d be ready to get back to it too. The farm was really depressing. Which he found highly ironic, by the way.

  So it had to happen today. He couldn’t keep playing around with it. Couldn’t keep getting interrupted. Couldn’t take that chance. If he were to wake up in a hospital room somewhere, alive, he’d be pissed off. Or worse—alive and damaged, unable to try again.

  He decided that his problem was that he was trying to be sneaky about it. Slipping out in the night and all that clandestine shit was action-movie-exciting but not very practical, especially around this place, where pretty much nobody stayed in bed, apparently. He looked too suspicious when he snuck around. Things would go off much easier if he just did it. Right in the middle of the day. Right in the middle of everything and everyone, just like he’d originally planned back home.

  Pills would have been much easier. But the pond was a great second choice. It would take him quickly, painlessly, peacefully. He wanted to die, but all that suffering he could do without.

  He’d spent most of the day making peace with his plan. He’d talked to his mom about shit that he wanted to do when they got back home, and even though he knew that their talk lulled her into this doe-eyed confidence that he was getting all better and oops, Mom, false alarm and I didn’t really mean it and all that stuff, he still felt good about it. He wasn’t terribly attached to his mom, but he liked the idea of their last conversation being a positive one. At least she would have that good memory. Even if she would figure out it was a lie.

  He’d even gone outside and played with the little cousins for a while. He wanted to roll around in the snow one last time before he died. He had other things he’d like to have done one more time before he died too. Go to a water park. Eat a steak. Jerk off with one of the magazines his dad hid behind the toilet. But he guessed those things didn’t matter anymore. Not really. Not when he was about to experience the bliss of being gone from it all.

  The kids were cute. Followed him around like a couple of puppies. Will, especially. The kid couldn’t say his words right and sometimes did some things that seriously made him look like a ’tard, but it was cool the way he mimicked every move Eli made, repeated everything he said. Molly was more of a bossy type. A know-it-all. A girl. But she was sweet, and she even kissed him on his cheek once when they were playing Snow City Avalanche (Will’s idea).

  But the cousins had gotten cold, had gone onto the sunporch to warm up. And he’d lain in the middle of the yard on his back, feeling the chill leak up through his coat. He’d stared at the sky, wishing it would just let loose on him and snow right then. Cover his eyeballs and gather in his nostrils, make him an abominable snowman. That would be the shit.

  But after a while his thoughts went where they always went—to the place where he was miserable. Where he was relentlessly made fun of. Where he was a loser. Where he was lonely.

  Where he wanted to die.

  Slowly, slowly, he pulled himself up to sitting, and then to standing, and then he was walking, walking, walking, faster and faster, propelled by purpose, and soon he was punching through the tree line where the melting snow made a mud mess out of the banks around the pond.

  He could see fading footsteps where Aunt Claire and Uncle Bradley had hung out last night. He wasn’t sure what was up with them, but he was positive that it wasn’t good, and that it had something to do with the root of why he ached so hard for a family that wasn’t there. In some ways he couldn’t blame his mom for being such a distant mom. How could she have possibly learned any better growing up in a family like this one? In that moment, he forgave her. He wished he would have left her a note telling her so.

  His fingers started tingling, a sensation that traveled down the length of his whole body. Soon he felt both numb and hypersensitive, like every nerve ending was being jabbed by a sharp stick.

  It was time.

  Taking a breath, he stepped out onto the ice, his foot immediately sliding on the slick, melty surface. He wheeled his arms to keep his balance, and took another, more careful, step. And then another, and another, the ice creaking and cracking around him. The sound jazzed him, made him feel energetic. Creaking and cracking was always the sound of something exciting—broken bones, the bogeyman, coffin lids closing, death, death, death.

  He kept his eyes closed, focused his energy on the steps he was taking. Step, step, step toward the middle, toward the end.

  Soon he felt as if he’d walked long enough and opened his eyes to find himself not too far from the middle of the pond, where the ice was visibly thinner and slightly puddled in some spots. He smiled widely, said what he could remember of the Lord’s Prayer just in case all that shit about heaven was real, and bent his knees to jump.

  Thunk. Some cracking but not much to it.

  Thunk! Harder this time. A crack snaking its way around the toe of his shoe. Very thin, singular.

  Thunk!! He put some muscle into it. Pulled his quads up high on the takeoff, landed with his heels. A loud crack resounded and a spiderweb of cracks surrounded him. One more and he’d be through.

  “Avalanche!” he heard, and snapped his head around.

  The little cousins were on the ice again. Right where he’d caught them before. Will was at the top of the smaller-but-still-there drift, ready to jump, Molly on the bank right behind him.

  “NO!” he boomed, but even though his voice was loud, Will had already left the mound and was in midair. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he’d tried. Will landed on his butt on the ice, just hard enough to poke a small dent down into it. His eyes grew wide, startled, as the back of his pants got soaked, and he scrambled to his feet. But rather than run off the ice, in his panic Will ran straight toward the middle, arms outstretched for help.

  “Eli!” Will cried.

  “Stay there!” he cried back, trying to get to his cousin, but the adrenaline that had been racing through his veins moments earlier was making him shaky and he kept slipping and falling to one knee as he tried to close the gap. “Stop! The ice is breaking!” he yelled, and those were the last words he was able to get out as his left foot slipped in one direction and his right in the other. He went down, first on a knee, then onto his belly, just a few feet from Will.

  The ice opened and the pond swallowed them both.

  At first he was only aware of a feeling of being shocked. Had he not been holding his breath already, it would have surely been swept away from him in a gasp.

  He opened his eyes and could barely see anything. The pond was murky and brown, and the ice cover and dim sky made it almost appear black. He whipped his head around wildly, searching for his cousin, but in his panic he could see nothing. He racked his brain to remember what color Will’s coat had been—red? Yes, red. Definitely red—but he saw nothing red under the water.

  His lungs quickly felt as if they might burst and he clamped his lips together tighter, wanting to keep every bit of air that he could. He looked up, saw the ring of light where the hole they had fallen through was and kicked toward it, straining against the
ache that was starting to set into his bones. The cold. It was so damn cold.

  He broke through the water and took a deep, ragged gasp of air, coughed, took another.

  Distantly, he heard Molly screaming, and hoped she was staying off the ice. Please don’t let them both die because of me, he thought, and the very thought of Will dying under the ice squeezed his heart with such fear that on his next breath he dove back under.

  This time he felt calmer . . . or maybe he was feeling sluggish. The cold was doing it to him, he was sure. His arms and legs had begun to feel leaden, like it would take far more strength than he had to move them through the water. He struggled, felt jerky, felt like giving up, like closing his eyes and letting himself sink into the sediment at the bottom.

  But then a splotch of red just below him caught his eye.

  Will!

  Mustering every ounce of strength that he had, he flipped his legs up behind him and kicked toward the patch of color, stretching his arms out, his fingers splayed to catch whatever he could of his cousin, to get a hold.

  After what seemed like forever, his fingers finally brushed up against the collar of Will’s coat and he forced them to close. He clamped down and righted himself, then looked back up toward the ring of light, which seemed so impossibly far away, he was sure he’d never make it.

  It was the cold that was doing this to him. It was what he had been counting on, after all, wasn’t it? Cold that would seep into his very bones. Would make him stop moving, make him stop fighting.

  Make him die.

  Nineteen

  Claire wouldn’t know this until later, but her bare toes were already cracked from the cold and bleeding, leaving trails in the snow, even before she got to the tree line.

  She didn’t care about her feet, or about anything other than racing through the soy field as quickly as she could.

  Her nephews were down in that pond—the pond she knew in and out, up and down, like the back of a mermaid’s fin—and she had to get to them.

  She should have said something. That was the thought that kept circling, circling in her head as she dashed past the beehives. She should have told Julia that she thought Eli had been going down to the pond at night. That she’d seen footprints and that she’d thought she’d seen him in their father’s recliner at night too. That he’d been acting weird, testing his luck, testing his life, on the ice.

  But she hadn’t. She hadn’t done it, and why? Because there was a part of her that thought maybe he was just being a kid sliding around on the ice the way she did when she was little? Maybe. But she knew better. She knew, after one glance at Eli four days ago, that he wasn’t just a normal kid who thought of and did normal kid things.

  So why didn’t she do it? Why didn’t she tell like she’d said she would?

  Probably because if she told, it would mean she was involved. It would mean she was part of this family, part of a whole. And being part of a whole scared the holy living shit out of her, didn’t it? Maya was right. That was why she ran away to California ten years ago. That was why she preferred one-nighters with douche bag guys she’d never even look at twice in a sober moment. And that was why she was running away from California now.

  That was why she’d broken up with Michael.

  She had to stay disengaged, because being a part of a whole was scary. Being a part of a whole could mean hurt. Being part of a whole could get you knocked on your ass at the bottom of the stairs with two black eyes.

  But, God, how she wished Michael was there right now. For Eli, but also, more important, for her. She needed him. Even if that need scared the ever-loving shit out of her. Because she hadn’t realized it until she was sprinting toward the tree line with her heart in her throat, but facing life without him scared her even more.

  She plunged into the trees, her feet and arms pumping, her breath pulling in and out in great puffs. She felt numb all over. Not from the cold, but from fear. She could hear Molly’s cries, thin and distant, and Maya’s shouts not too far behind her, but nothing coming from ahead. Not a sound from the pond.

  She bulldozed through the thicket, not worrying about branches hitting her arms, her hands, her face, not worrying about following any sort of trail—really at this point just a barely worn path where mushrooms would crop up in the fall and squirrels would skitter during the spring and summer. She saw the edges of the pond up ahead. She thought she heard a splash. Maybe a ragged grunt. A breath, maybe? A sound of life? The thought propelled her even harder. She ran faster, faster than she’d ever run before. Faster than she’d ever even thought she might be able to run. Her feet sank into the mushy snow and she thanked God that she’d been running on a beach every day for ten years, and momentarily had a sense of purpose. Maybe this was the real reason I was led to California, she thought. To prepare me for today, for this very moment. Maybe this was predestined.

  Claire wasn’t a religious person by any means, but she guessed that God wouldn’t predetermine the death of two children. No way. This had to be a failure on someone’s part. Maybe Maya’s and Bradley’s. Maybe Julia’s. Probably her own.

  Or maybe this was just what happened when you let yourself into the Yancey Farm. You got hurt. Maybe the place was cursed.

  She heard the splash and grunt again, a breath being expelled and then sucked in, just as she pulled up onto the bank, her heels pushing deep holes into the mud as she ran.

  She didn’t stop or even slow down, though she tried to be aware, to take everything in.

  There was something on the ice. Something red. A child’s coat? Dear God, Will’s coat? Soaked, and discarded next to a jagged hole about four feet across.

  Not far from it was Will, waterlogged and shivering, pale, in his shirtsleeves, coughing. He lay on his side on the ice near the bank, his cheek pressed up against it. Hypothermia. The word blared through her mind. He was so little; it wouldn’t take long, and all kinds of bad things happened with hypothermia, right? Frostbite, heart attack? Death?

  She whipped her head around. Eli was nowhere to be found. She’d heard a grunt, a breath, some splashing a few seconds before. Was he still in there? The water had to be thirty degrees, and who knew how long Eli had been in it? He might not last much longer.

  Whose child did she choose? Which sister? Julia, who had confided in her, who was silently suffering this very possibility every day, that her son might die? Or Maya, the one who had just lost her husband, the one cowering from cancer, the one who had only moments before finally begun to trust her, to let her in, the tiniest bit?

  The choice seemed impossible and unfair, but in the end it was the fact that Will was still breathing that made her turn and rush toward the hole in the ice.

  Her whole world got grainy and slow, like she was seeing everything in a dream or through a strobe light. Like one of those ridiculous bars Judy was always making her go to, where they’d wear children’s glow necklaces and drink potent mixed drinks out of tall plastic mugs that flashed blue, green, red lights as if a parade were coming through.

  She felt as if she couldn’t see, couldn’t take it all in, but later she would be able to recall every vivid detail, every tick of every second perfectly. It would keep her up at night. Rack her body with sobs.

  She fell to her knees next to the hole and plunged her arms into the water. She felt something that might have been hair, but not enough to wrap her fingers around. She dropped to her belly and stretched so that her arms were submerged up to her shoulders. This time she thought she might have bumped against skin, but it was cold, so cold, and she couldn’t be sure what she was feeling. She thought something brushed against her arm. A hand? Was that a hand? But then nothing more.

  She heard Maya coming close, her cries and sobs and gasps all intermingling into one ugly sound. It was the sound of a terrified mother. The sound of worst fear, realized.

  “Will!” Maya shouted. �
�Oh, my God, Will!” Claire glanced back. Her sister was on her knees on the edge of the ice, pulling Will into her lap, her face frantic and horrified. “Where’s Eli?” They seemed to be the only words she could wrap her mouth around. Over and over again. “Where’s Eli? Where’s Eli?”

  Claire braced herself for the cold. She felt it in her chest. Grief. Dread. Fear. She sucked in a great lungful of breath and ducked her head, raised her arms and pointed them toward the hole.

  And then she slipped headfirst into the water.

  Twenty

  The water was so cold her immediate reaction was to want out. To scramble back up the side of the broken ice and call for help. To give up, let fate take over.

  Her yoga pants, so restricting just a few hours ago, felt like nothing against her skin. No protection. No warmth. Her feet stung and ached and floated little trails of blood through the murky water. Her arms felt heavy and slow.

  Still, she angled herself downward and opened her eyes, searching for a sign of her nephew. Bubbles would be nice. Bubbles would be miraculous.

  She didn’t see him.

  She looked up toward the top again, hoping he’d found the air pocket that always seemed to reside between the ice and water. Hoping she’d see kicking legs, a head tilted up, sipping in oxygen. But again she saw nothing.

  Claire knew every centimeter of the pond, and she knew that where the ice had broken was above a fairly shallow portion of it. Deep enough to swallow two children, for sure, but shallow enough to reach the bottom in one breath.

  Using every ounce of strength that she had, she kicked straight for the bottom. God willing, she wouldn’t find Eli there. God willing, he’d be hiding out in the woods or back home in front of the fire by now and this all would have never happened at all. A dream. A really, really bad dream.

  Please don’t do this to Julia, she prayed as she kicked her ever-slowing legs, propelling her toward the bottom of the pond. Please don’t rip my sister’s heart out.