Elle and Irene don’t miss their family like some of us do. Their single mother did her best, they say. She worked two jobs to support their little family. She didn’t blink at finding out she had a trans daughter. She fought for both of them—right up until their magic came out. Then she panicked. Then she shut down.
Frank found her through one of his friends, or maybe their mother found him in a whisper network. Elle and Irene don’t know for sure. What they know is that when they were twelve, they held hands and watched their mother drive away and never saw her again. She’d done her best, and they appreciated that, but they refused to miss a mother who abandoned them.
I don’t remember watching my parents drive away. I don’t think I realized they were leaving. I was distracted with Jane and Winnie and Brooke, girls I didn’t know would become my sisters.
Elle and Irene don’t miss their mother, but they love their birthday. At the lake house, we can’t get ice cream cakes, but Frank will provide ingredients for regular cakes. Elle and Irene can’t have their pick of any movie, but Frank will roll out the TV and the big twins can choose from any of the twenty-seven DVDs. Birthdays are also our best chance for sleepovers. Frank will let us make the living room into a huge blanket fort on a birthday, so long as it’s all cleaned up by noon the next day.
For their sixteenth birthday, an unexpected treat changed all the usual plans.
Frank was gone. He left for an extended trip of nearly three days, and we were right in the middle, so we all felt confident enough to haul the cake and blankets and a picnic out to the lake in bright sunlight. Elle and Irene swam in their underwear, moving through the water like fish. They coaxed Violet and Jane in, but the rest of us were content to sit at the edge and let the water lap at our feet. The air rang with shrieks.
Later, we gathered around the towel-wrapped Elle and Irene and sang “Happy Birthday” over the three-layer cake Brooke had made. When we returned through the tunnel, arms entwined, we swayed as if drunk. Our laughter echoed all around us. There was no movie without Frank there to roll out the TV, but we made the biggest blanket fort yet.
It’s easily one of the happiest memories I have of the lake house. It might be the happiest any of us have.
Remembering it makes it all the more painful to watch Irene, who’s abandoned the flower to pull up a chair to the living room window and keep an eye out for any sign of Elle returning.
Frank, true to his word, gave us things to distract us while he’s out searching. He gave us extra assignments. For my part, that means another twenty problems on permutations. He rolled out the TV and Violet and the little twins have set up camp with Anastasia. Again.
Everyone feels a little differently about their parents, but I’m in the same camp as Winnie and Violet: we miss them. When it’s dark and we’re alone and the house is quiet, we hope for the impossible.
We hope they’ll come back for us.
When I watch Anastasia, usually it makes that hope a little brighter. If she could wait for that long and still find her grandmother, maybe we can get our families back, too.
Right now all I can see is everything I can’t have, and everything I’m losing. So I return to working permutations instead.
Irene only glances away from the window to check the flower. Anastasia turns into The Princess Bride turns into Mamma Mia. I find myself wishing, not for the first time, that there was more variety in our movie collections. Twenty-seven DVDs, and not one horror movie, or drama, or tragedy. It’s virtually all princesses and happy endings and The Fast and the Furious. Jurassic Park is the scariest one of the bunch. It’s not that the movies are bad. It’s just the sameness. It’s the repetition of twenty-seven movies that are all striving to make us feel the same positive emotions.
Today, it feels like an especially stark representation of the repetition of our very lives. The chore lists, the tests every Monday, getting up in the morning and seeing only the same nine faces, only the same book collection, only the same twenty-seven DVDs.
Frank specifically tried to prevent cabin fever, and it sure shouldn’t be setting in this soon, but I can feel it. Between Frank’s decree and my promise to Brooke, I have no escape. I’m ready to climb the walls or jump out a window.
The urge to do just that is actually so powerful—I recognize it, it’s what Irene and Elle call intrusive thoughts—that for several minutes, I have to sit perfectly still. I know that if I move, the momentum will send me crashing through glass and running, bloody and scratched, out into the forest, never to be seen again.
But if I can get through thirty seconds, I can get through one minute, and if I can get through one minute, I can get through five, and then I can breathe again. I can stare at the permutations worksheet for at least fifteen minutes—maybe twenty!—before the intrusive thoughts barge back in.
It’s heading into late afternoon when a low moan from Irene transforms quickly into an anguished wail that brings all of our attention to her. Even Brooke turns when she sees the rest of us doing it. Irene doesn’t seem to notice us at all. She’s just staring at the shelf of flowers. The back of my neck tingles with dread as I turn to look at what I already know I’ll see.
Elle’s snapdragon is drained of its color, and is clear glass.
“Shit,” I whisper, which is maybe the most unhelpful response I could have had.
Irene doesn’t say anything. Even her wailing has trailed off. She’s so quiet that it’s scary. I can’t feel anything out of her—not anger, not grief, not anything. She isn’t trying to reach out to us with her magic at all. She’s gone into total radio silence.
It’s nearly another hour before Frank returns. Brooke has pulled the little twins into helping her make dinner, hopeful that doing something with their hands will be a better distraction than yet another movie. Violet sits with Irene, neither of them speaking.
My post is near the window, standing very still, trying to get through one minute at a time. Every minute I don’t dive out is a victory.
It’s behind a wall and down the hall a little, and my back is to it, but the basement door seems to burn into me nonetheless.
It was only the dryer. It had to have been only the dryer.
Frank’s return doesn’t change much. Violet sits a little straighter, and Brooke stops chopping, but no one else moves. He looks at each of us, then the flower.
He deflates.
He looks disappointed, but . . . I wouldn’t say he looks surprised.
Unless I’m imagining that, or projecting. Yes—that’s it. I’m projecting my fear and paranoia onto him. Seeing what they want me to see.
“What a horrible week,” he says. “We’ll just have to stick even closer together, won’t we?”
I’m suddenly furious that he includes himself in that we. We is me and my siblings. We is my family, the only family I have left. We doesn’t include the man who lost my sisters, who I could rip to shreds right now—
Frank rubs a hand over his face and sighs again. My anger shifts, and my heart breaks. Elle said that he probably felt guilty over failing Jane, and then Winnie. How much worse must that failure feel with Elle—his favorite? Isn’t he my family, too? He’s the one who gave me a home when my parents left.
It’s a blessing when he walks away without a word, retreating to his rooms. If I don’t have to look at him, I don’t have to try to sort through what he is to me. Not right now.
He doesn’t come back out for dinner, and we all go to bed early. Whatever fight we had is drained of its potential. Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow, the motivation and energy—vivacity? Verve? What’s the best word for this?—will return. In that distant, magic tomorrow, we are driven and powerful and we will find our sisters.
That’s not the tomorrow I wake up in.
When I wake up, it’s dark. I’m trembling and breathing fast from a nightmare. It was the same as always—a car, water, screams—but different, too. This time, I’m in the lake. Our lake. As water rose over the windows, I loo
ked through them and saw Elle floating outside the car. Her arms are outstretched, beckoning me, welcoming me into the water. She smiles and the last thing I see is all of her too-many teeth.
Find me.
I detangle my spine and limbs and crawl out of bed. I put on my glasses. My steps are careful. I skip every creaky floorboard and stair. Only the shadows watch me slip silently into the little twins’ room.
The wall opens as easily as a promise is broken.
I walk down, down, down, fingertips running through the grooves Jane left in the wall. Elle had to have left something behind, too. We just haven’t found it yet.
I am a shadow.
I am a spirit.
I emerge into a moonless world, but not a dark one.
The forest is alight.
Lightning bugs fill it by the dozens, by the hundreds. They beckon me, and I answer.
The forest floor is damp. It must have rained in the night, just a little. The air is filled with the smell of—what was that word? A really good word, one of Jane’s favorites.
Petrichor.
The lightning bugs gather around me. Their light tingles a little, like the sun on a very bright day telling you it’s time to put on more sunscreen. I smile, thinking of how Winnie always ignored that warning and inevitably ended up red, peeling, and whining about it. The tingle should worry me, but it doesn’t. The prospect of a lightning bug burn almost excites me.
They pull me. Not physically, but by drawing their light away.
I follow the lightning bugs, eyes in the sky, in the leaves.
“Derry?”
I whip around. That was Elle’s voice! I know my siblings’ voices like I know my heartbeat, and that was Elle.
“Elle?” I call back.
She says my name again—“Derry”—but it’s soft and scattered and for a moment I think it comes from the lightning bugs. They’re blinking at me.
“Do you know where she is?” I ask them. I wonder, briefly, where Claire is. Does she exist when I’m not here? Does she have to load up, spinning, like a DVD that wasn’t prepared for you to hit the menu button during the previews?
The lightning bugs twinkle on deeper into the forest, faster than before. I have to run to keep up. I keep my eyes on the cloud of stars, afraid to lose them. All around me I hear Elle calling my name.
“Derry!”
“Derry?”
“Derry . . .”
I don’t look down until my feet hit something new. Not dirt. Not sticks or rocks or grass.
The lightning bugs draw my gaze downward.
I see Elle. Her arm, the skin so pale and cold it’s nearly blue. Her glassy eyes.
I stumble backwards. My vision goes hazy for a moment, and I’m pulled kicking and screaming back into reality.
16
There’s something red leaking through her shirt. Elle is in her pajamas.
And there’s red.
There’s so much red.
I crouch and try not to touch her skin—but I feel bad for that. It’s Elle. I shouldn’t be scared of my own sister. Still, I shudder when my fingertips make contact with cold skin as I pull up her shirt just enough to reveal the wound.
Something sharp dug into her abdomen. Something sharp dug in and in and in and bled her out.
I stumble away, but I shouldn’t be scared, she’s my sister, but there’s so much—
I fall, hitting the ground hard. I notice for the first time that it’s muddy. It must have rained sometime in the night. It’s taking so long for me to understand everything I’m seeing and feeling. Only now, with mud on my hands and knees and clothes, do I realize that Elle’s shirt was damp when I touched it.
How long has she been lying out here in the rain?
I rub my hands across my face, not caring about the mud. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t tell Frank. He won’t accept another instance of me being outside like this. I don’t think I can even tell my siblings. Frank would notice something was wrong, and we’d be back at the original problem: I can’t tell Frank I found Elle without telling him I was in the forest.
If I can’t tell anyone, then I have to leave her here, but I can’t imagine that either. She’d be alone and unprotected. But this isn’t like before, not like that day in the forest with Jane, not like the man we buried.
Elle deserves more than to be dumped in a messy grave and left behind like a dirty secret.
“Claire?” The name comes out hoarse and broken. Claire appears all at once, as if she’d always been standing in front of me. She doesn’t say anything, or seem surprised to see Elle. She just waits. “What happened? Did you see?”
She doesn’t answer. If she saw anything, she’s not going to tell me yet.
“Figures,” I mutter. There’s a spark of anger at her silence, but it’s muted, dulled by grief like everything else. I can’t yell and scream. I’m not even sure yet if I can stand. “Will you . . . stay with her? Just until I can come back.”
Claire nods, and says, “I’m sorry.” I don’t look back when I leave. I trust that she’ll stay.
The flower-lights I bring up on the tunnel walls are dimmer than usual, just enough to see by, and they shrivel as I pass. When I look back, I can only see half a dozen of my muddy footprints before the darkness takes them.
My feet are dry enough to not leave such obvious tracks by the time I reach the little twins’ room. Just spots of dirt flaking off.
Each step up the stairs is numb and laborious. I know I should hurry. I need to change, bury these muddy clothes deep in the hamper, get the drying mud off my legs and hands.
Frank could wake up, could be awake for all I know, and I can’t be found like this.
Elle is dead.
The bathroom doors, like every other door, have locks but no keys. Not even Frank’s doors are kept locked. It’s all about knowing which unlocked doors you can go through, and which are tests.
I strip. There’s a full-length mirror on the back of the door. I stare at myself, head cocking slowly to the side, a little too far. Like an owl. My feet and legs are filthy. I don’t think the dirt that came off as I walked was enough to leave a trail unless you know what you’re looking for, and one of my chores for tomorrow is the sweeping. That will be okay.
My knees are a little scratched up from scraping against whatever rocks and debris hid in the ground. The cut on my shin isn’t deep, but it is bleeding and I’ll have to bandage it. I’ll want to wear pants and longer skirts until it’s all healed, and that will be hell, warm as it’s been. We have air-conditioning but Frank won’t turn it cool enough and I run hot.
Vast and pale, my stomach hangs gently over my upper thighs. Short dark hairs circle my navel. I put a muddy hand right where Elle’s wound was. My breath is coming and going too fast. I’m hyperventilating. Mud is drying into dirt under my fingernails so thick that I can feel it. My skin is cool, but warming up.
I’m thinking Elle will never touch anyone or feel anything ever again.
It takes two washcloths and multiple passes to get all the mud and dirt off me, and then another to swipe it up off the floor. I bury them and my clothes under the laundry from the rest of this week. That’s Violet’s job this week, and they aren’t going to tell on anyone when they find the dirt.
I’m not exactly competent in first aid. I never had to be.
Better than Band-Aids.
We have bandages somewhere. I dig around under the sink and come up with a box of plain beige Band-Aids. My mom used to buy the ones with princesses and kittens.
It takes five to cover up the cut. There was probably a better way to do it, but I don’t know it and this will have to do.
I grab one of the really big towels out of the bathroom closet and wrap it around myself for the walk back to my room.
I don’t make it two steps down the hall before I’m snagged—not by Frank, but by thoughts. Irene’s thoughts. They pull me toward her bedroom, and with one glance inside I know sh
e doesn’t realize she’s projecting them. She’s asleep. Her dreams radiate off her in such dark waves that I can actually see the magic. They wash over me and leave my heart both wrenched and pounding with grief and fear.
Violet appears in the doorway, and holds a finger to their lips. I nod in understanding.
‘Can’t sleep?’ they sign.
‘No.’ That’s the simplest answer right now. I have to do an awkward arrangement of arms and terrycloth and squeezing to keep the towel up while I sign, but I manage it. ‘Is Irene okay?’
‘She’ll be okay when she’s awake,’ Violet signs. ‘Her body needs the sleep, so it took her down, but her mind . . .’ They glance back at her, then to me. ‘She’ll be okay when she’s awake.’
‘Are you okay?’ I ask. The momentary exposure to Irene’s nightmares has left me shaken, and Violet’s sharing a room with them.
They nod. ‘I’m used to it. Her dreams are like this. They’re not usually this bad, but they tend to be noisy.’ They see the confusion on my face, the question—how did I not know? ‘They don’t usually make it outside the room. It’s really shortwave stuff.’
‘Can we help her?’
‘Elle could. Elle always knew what to do when Irene had nightmares, but it was some twin thing. Twin magic. Nothing I know.’
We both look at our sister helplessly.
‘You should get some rest,’ Violet signs finally. They close the door, and Irene’s nightmares cut off for me.
I walk away, my brain muddled and confused. When I get snagged again, it’s by crying. Brooke and Winnie’s room is across from mine and Jane’s. I didn’t even notice their door was partially open when I came up. I was too in my own world.
Brooke doesn’t see me, but I see her. Her hand is over her mouth in an attempt at silencing herself, or at least making those great, racking sobs a little quieter. The room looks so empty, as if Winnie’s absence is visible. Why didn’t I ever talk to Brooke about that? I know what it feels like to go from sharing a room to suddenly being alone. I know the void it creates. We should have been leaning on each other.
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