I rubbed my temples. Could you call a mental health hotline on someone else’s behalf, or did I just call the police and say I believed she was a danger to herself? You’d think I’d know the answer to that question, growing up like I did. “She’s been dead for a decade, Mom, and she was the only sister I ever had.”
“But she’s not dead anymore.” She was a half-step away from cackling.
“Mom, I know—I know things have been hard—”
“Caitlyn,” she snapped, and I shut up, just like I had since I was a little kid. “I know you think I’m crazy, and there are probably reasons for that, good ones, but—not this time. She’s alive. Somehow, she found her way back to us. She’s at the hospital right now. Clara Dennis just called me. Can you meet me there? I don’t think I can face this by myself.”
I was sitting on the floor, but I didn’t remember sitting down. My head felt light and airy, far away. “Mom. I don’t have my car.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Where are you, at your apartment? I assumed that was where you were having your snit. I’ll come pick you up. She’s alive again, Caitie. She’s come back to us.” The line went quiet. After a minute, my phone realized she’d hung up and flicked back to its keypad screen. I let it fall into my lap, and I stared at it for a bit.
It was the ‘Caitie’ that convinced me. She’d barely ever called me that when Sophie was alive, and never after she was dead. Somehow, that made it all real. Made it possible.
This sister of mine was dead, and is alive again; she was lost, and is found.
Mom was outside the apartment ten minutes later. I got into the car without a word. She reached across and clutched my hand so tightly that I felt the bones grind together, and then she was driving like a bat out of hell.
“Mom,” I said. “Are we really sure it’s her?”
She nodded. “Clara is sure.”
“The last time Mrs. Dennis—or anyone—saw Sophie, she was thirteen years old. How can she really be sure?” I was already sure, but it seemed like a question someone should be asking.
Mom gave me the same look that I imagined the disciples giving Thomas when he asked a few very logical questions. “Clara wouldn’t put us through this for no reason. That’s why Reverend Beecher called her first. She knew Clara would be sure.”
“Were you even friends with the Dennises when—everything happened? I thought they didn’t move to the area until later.”
Mom’s eyes darted to me, and then back to the road. The hands got a little tighter, if that were possible, on the steering wheel. “Why all the fear, Caitlyn? Don’t you trust in God?”
“God and I are good,” I said. “It’s other people that worry me.”
“Whatever happened, your sister has been through a lot. She collapsed just outside of town, and was found by strangers. She was brought in, and thankfully, all that’s wrong is fatigue and exhaustion. But we have no idea how she got here, no idea what she’s gone through to get here. She’ll be released as soon as we identify her, and take responsibility for her, and I will not tolerate you interrogating her the first time you see her in ten years.”
“It’s been a long time, Mom. A lot may have happened between now and then. Before we just bring her home, maybe we should talk to her, make sure she’s not —”
I wasn’t sure how I was going to finish the sentence, and she didn’t give me a chance anyway. “Stop it,” she said, her voice low and dangerous. “Stop it now.”
Well, the good thing about Mom essentially being out of money was that any treasure hunters would be greatly disappointed.
We didn’t talk any more as we pulled into the hospital lot, walked into the building, and took the elevators up to her room. Mom seemed to know exactly where she was going. I was caught up in memories of how I’d felt when I was last here. So confused, so worried. So weak, even though I was strong. I’d gotten a whiff of Mom’s perfume that day, and I’d nearly collapsed.
I was so much stronger now.
But at the door of the room where my sister was supposed to be waiting for me, I didn’t feel strong at all. What was I supposed to say to her? How was I even going to know it was her? Not trust-know, like Mom, who would accept any blonde stranger off the street as her daughter if it meant that the pain would stop, but really know, without a doubt. The things I remembered about my sister…it was an awfully short list. I remembered a girl who was a bully, in the small ways that most thirteen year-old girls are bullies, especially when their kid sister wants to be into all of their stuff and all their doings. I remembered looking up to her and wanting her to be my friend, even when she was being a spoiled brat. And I remembered, when Mom and Dad would fight, she’d sneak into my room and pretend like she’d heard me crying so she’d have an excuse to crawl into bed with me. I always went along with it. What else was I going to do?
Out here, in this hallway, she was Schrödinger’s Sister. She both was and was not Sophie, and I loved and hated her in equal amounts. If I walked through that doorway, she would become one or the other, and I would have to decide, once and for all, who my sister was to me. Did I love her for the good memories, or hate her for leaving a shadow that I could never grow out of?
Mom walked through the door. It was easy for her. I’d never been enough for her, just the second daughter who tried to fill her big sister’s shoes, and never pulled it off. Mom made a sound somewhere between a shriek and a cry, and I thought hard, I thought really hard, about running away. About taking off, and calling it quits.
It wasn’t even a possibility this time, though. I knew I was going in, I knew there was no other choice, but God above I wanted to pretend I had a choice. So I did. I counted to ten, listening to the sounds of joy from inside the room, and then I made my feet move. I made them walk steadily forward, until I was through the threshold, and then I made my eyes rise up off the floor.
The woman in front of me was old—ancient and drawn, with rheumy eyes and a mouth that quaked. She stared at me, her mouth gaping wide. Someone had taken her dentures, and her cheeks collapsed in over her empty jaw. She pushed at the mattress with her spidery hands, papery skin rasping on the sheets. It took a moment for me to understand. Somehow, she knew. She saw what I was, what I was going to become, and she was trying to get away from me.
A familiar sensation rose up from my feet, strengthening my knees, straightening my back, pulling my shoulders into place, and bending my lips into a smile. Or a rictus. There was no way to tell from where I was standing.
This was what I touched when I danced. This was what I felt when everyone looked at me, when everyone wanted me. This was power like I hadn’t felt in weeks.
A soft voice spoke my name, like it was the name of a Goddess. Like it should be spoken with reverence and worship. Like it was a magic spell. Strangely, it grounded me again, at least a bit. I turned toward the second bed in the room, the one closer to the industrial windows and the unbreakable—just in case—glass. I turned from the old woman to that bed, and I saw my sister. She was older, her features sharper and her eyes narrower, less trusting, even though her hands lay open on the institutional sheets.
“Caitie,” she said again, and Mom winced at the nickname from her spot at Sophie’s elbow, and I was just myself again, and I crossed the room and pulled a chair up next to the bed. As the aura faded, so did my absolute knowledge that this girl was my sister. She was some blonde chick in the right age bracket with high cheekbones, and the kind of nose that was called Roman if you were being polite, and big if you weren’t. I knew it; mine made a matched set with hers. But these weren’t uncommon features in New England; not even in our town.
I leaned back in the ugly, uncomfortable chair, and put my clogs up on her side rail. “So, Sophie,” I said, that death smile back in place. “Where you been?”
“Caitlyn Elizabeth Murphy,” Mom snapped at me. I ignored her, my gaze locked on Sophie’s.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, with a kind of saccharine layer that made me
think of frosting on a cheap cake. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you.”
“No, you probably can’t,” I agreed with a smile.
“Girls. Please,” Mom said, her voice laced with frantic energy. “We don’t have to do this. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can just be a family again, me and my girls.”
Sophie smiled the angelic little smile that had gotten her out of a thousand scrapes in her childhood—and left me squarely in the middle of them—right at Mom, who ate it up, just like she always had. “Apparently not.” She turned her eyes back to mine, and the smile faded quickly. “It’s fine. You deserve an explanation.”
My heart was pounding. My palms were cold, damp. Why? Because this girl was claiming to be my sister? Because part of me believed her? Because a bigger part of me wanted it to be true? Or just because I was staring at a crash scene? Whatever had happened, it had started with people being presumed dead, and had ended with just one of them coming back to life. Outside of soap operas, that didn’t tend to happen too much.
Mom, on the other hand, looked so panicked, her eyes darting back and forth between us, her hands clenching and unclenching the hem of her shirt, that I wondered if she might just get up and leave the room rather than listen. But, no, she finally took a deep breath, and resettled herself on the side of the bed away from my feet, dropping the side rail to get closer to Sophie. “You don’t need to justify anything to me,” she said, the emphasis on the last word neither subtle nor kind. “But anything you feel you need to share, I can witness.”
Sophie was turned almost all the way toward me, so Mom didn’t see her roll her eyes. A thousand days and nights of harassing each other fell back into place, and a strange certainty fell into place. No one had ever rolled her eyes with as much epic drama as my big sister. I choked out a laugh, and her eyes sparkled, and there was something there. It was faint, and it was trembling, but it was there.
“Some of it’s really fuzzy,” Sophie said, her voice quiet, soft. Her neighbor wasn’t aware of us, that I could tell; she was turned as far away from us as she could be without rolling herself out of bed. “It’s been a few years, and Dad wasn’t always clear, at the beginning, about what was happening. He woke me up early in the morning, said that we needed to go out for some groceries. And then he drove over to the lake, and met some guy who I had never met before, and never saw again. He got me, and a suitcase, out of the car, we got into the guy’s car, and then the guy helped Dad push the car into the lake. I was too scared to ask what was going on. I fell asleep in Vermont, and woke up in Saratoga. The guy was gone. I asked Dad about him, and he said it had all been a dream, a terrible nightmare, but we were waking up now, and the bad men couldn’t follow us where we were going. He sounded so happy when he said that. Like he really believed it.”
Mom reached out and took Sophie’s hand. Sophie let her, and tightened her grip, but her eyes stayed locked on mine, while she gave us the highlights version of those early years. Dad had told her that the Bad Men had Mom and me for sure, and all they could do was run. They moved every few months, using different names; she was loosely homeschooled sometimes, and other times, she was enrolled in public schools for a few months. She recited it like a to-do list, facts and figures instead of emotions. They’d traveled across the country, steadily and slowly, always on the run from the Bad Men.
“It was a couple of years before it occurred to me that something was wrong. We were in Chicago, I think, getting dinner in this pizza parlor, and there was this cute boy behind the counter. Dark hair, great eyes, and he kept giving me these great, flirty smiles. Dad had always been seriously opposed to me making any friends, really—said it would make it easier for them to track us down, and really, who bothers to make friends with the new girl when she’s constantly moving anyway?—but we’d been there for almost four months, and I thought maybe, just maybe, it would work out this time.” Her face darkened, a storm cloud passing over her pretty features. “Dad saw us making eyes at each other, and he dragged me out of there so fast that my Keds left skid marks. And then…well, he let me know what he thought of daughters who were completely ungrateful for everything their parents had done for them.” The tone of her voice left me sure that he’d used his fists to drum home his point.
Mom’s free hand was clenched over her mouth, and her eyes sparkled with the tears she didn’t want to shed. Not in front of her daughters. No, she needed to be strong for us. “Why did you stay with him?”
Sophie shrugged. Her eyes were stony and cold. “I believed him. I believed that you two were dead, or as good as, and that there were people after us. That they would try and steal me away from him if they could. And as crazy as he was—and I think I knew he was crazy by then, or at least was starting to strongly suspect—the evil you know is better than the evil you don’t.”
“If you were sure he was crazy,” I asked, “did you ever think that maybe he lied about us, too?”
“Honestly, no,” she said. “I always figured that was what had driven him off the rails, but it never occurred to me that he would have lied about it.”
“It might not have been a lie,” Mom said. “Not to him. Who knows what actually caused his break with reality, but he faked your deaths well enough to fool the police. That sort of thing requires planning. There was something wrong, and it was wrong for a long time before you two went out for groceries.” She looked over my shoulder while she collected herself. She was blaming herself for everything, thinking that she should have known about it. I didn’t even have to be psychic to pick that one up.
“Where is he now?” I asked. “Is he okay? Did he come back with you?”
“He died,” she said, simple. I watched her, but her mouth and her eyes stayed calm, peaceful. “It happened about two months ago.” Pure serenity on her face. “We were in San Jose. Whatever cash he’d been using to finance us all these years, he was supplementing with shadier and creepier means. We’d moved twice in San Jose, and our apartments kept getting crappier. There were people coming, day and night.” She sighed. “I’m telling it wrong. You have to understand, he wasn’t like this all the time. He’d be perfectly normal, perfectly okay, for days, weeks even. And then something would set him off. Something bizarre. A guy with a green ball-cap, or a waitress whose name had the same first initial as the restaurant where she worked. And then it was all “you can only go up the stairs on every third rung, or they’ll know it’s you,” or “let the phone ring six and a half rings, and then pick up.”
“And we’d do it, I’d do it, because what else could I do? Run away, and sell myself? Try and go somewhere else? Where was I going to go? Call DCF on him, get myself put into foster care, and be some freak’s love toy until I turned 18? At least I knew how to cope with him. And I knew it wasn’t forever. And most of the time, he was my dad, who’d loved me my whole life. And then I turned 18, and how could I leave him? I didn’t have a real education, I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t know how to survive. I kept saying I’d do this, or I’d do that, and then I’d get out. And then I just kept staying. Because maybe this time, he’d be okay. Maybe this time, I’d get my dad back. Because he was all the family I had left anymore, you know?
“So one night, a couple months back, this guy comes to see Dad. Dad’s been wild the past few days, and I’m having trouble remembering all the rules. I figure we’re moving in a few days, and I’m okay with that. But I’m starting to really think, maybe this time, I won’t go with him. Maybe I just won’t be there anymore. But this guy walked into the apartment, and he looked like trouble, from the beginning. He looked like he was strung out, and like he was there to buy drugs, or something, so I went to my room and bolted the door. I could hear them talking, and they—they weren’t talking about selling drugs.”
Her eyes were far away now, watching the story unfold on the sheet in her lap. Her pupils were huge black holes in her eyes. There was a sheen of sweat on her upper lip. Mom was shaking, her hand clenched ove
r her mouth to choke back—what? A scream? Sickness? Something else entirely? “I got out of there. I—he was crazy. He would have done it, if it got him the money he needed to get away from the Bad Men. And I hear someone coming to my door, and I hid in the closet. Like a fucking baby. Like they wouldn’t have looked there. But Dad says something, and the man shouts, and then there’s screaming, all of a sudden, screaming like someone’s killing him, and I hid, because I didn’t know what else to do.”
She wasn’t crying. I didn’t know if I could have told that story without crying. I stood up so fast that I shattered her reverie. “I’m sorry,” I said, my own voice shaking. I leaned forward and kissed my sister on the forehead. “I can’t. I believe you. But I can’t listen to this anymore.”
I kept my shoulders back as I walked to the doorway again. I could feel Mom’s disappointment, her shame pouring down off her and spilling around my feet. But I was moving now, and I wasn’t going to stop.
Everyone at the nursing station was busy, no one was watching some girl trying not to lose it completely where everyone could see. My sister had just been describing my father selling her to some freak in their apartment. What kind of hell had she been living in? What kind of crazy hold had he had on her, for her to stay there? I pushed my feet down the hall, aiming to hit a bathroom or a waiting room or something before I lost it totally. I happened to find an empty room, and ducked in there, shutting the door behind me. Better to be sure. I found my back against the wall, and let it slide down until my butt hit the floor. I put my head on my knees. All those years, I’d thought she was dead. And instead—God. What a way to grow up.
Footsteps in the hallway. The door opened, and then closed. I didn’t look up, just waited for Mom to start explaining to me, in her calm, rational tone, about how I was letting her down, letting my sister down, letting all the women of history down. The deep voice that said “You left before the really interesting part,” shocked me, and I was on my feet faster than I knew I could get there, my fingertips itching with the need to sprout claws. I planted my hands on the center of Eli’s chest and shoved as hard as I could. It rocked him back on his heels, but that was all.
Clearer in the Night Page 19
