The Sullivan Sisters

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  One, two, three.

  These were real.

  Four, five, six.

  Flesh and blood.

  Seven, eight, nine.

  Smaller, maybe, than other knuckles, but visible to her.

  Ten.

  Yes, these were real, she’d confirmed.

  So why was Murphy a ghost to her sisters?

  Was she such a good magician-in-training that she’d managed to pull off an invisibility trick, without even trying?

  Murphy, shut up.

  Murph, for the love of God, not now.

  Their words looped inside her ears, the final in a long line of dismissals. In Emmet no one asked how the day had gone, or how school had been. No one asked Murphy’s favorites, or dislikes, or whether life was easy or hard. It hadn’t always been that way, though.

  She treasured the old days of Cayenne Castle, the makeshift blanket fort, and her role as Prince Pepper. There were gut laughs then, and singing, and made-up stories. She’d been part of a shimmering kingdom.

  Then the Dark Ages had come—slammed doors, eye rolls at her jokes. Murphy hadn’t understood why. Is that what it meant to grow up? One moment her sisters hadn’t been that different from her. Then they got to high school, and Claire started saying, “You’re too little to get it,” and Eileen stopped saying things, period.

  They no longer shared a castle.

  They no longer shared anything.

  The others had simply forgotten Murphy existed. They’d left her to fade, fade, and one day disappear.

  The way she’d left Siegfried to starve, starve, and die.

  That was the trouble: Murphy was guilty too. She was more restless than ever, and, picking up the Tupperware coffin resting on her knees, she rose and crossed to the parlor sideboard. There she found The Three Musketeers. Sniffling, she opened the cover, flipping through its pages, wondering why it couldn’t be like this with her sisters: One for all, and all for one.

  As she flipped, a scrap of paper loosened and fell out, fluttering to her feet. Frowning, Murphy set the book aside and picked up the scrap. It was an ad for carpet cleaning, shorn in half.

  “Huh?” Murphy said.

  Then, turning the scrap over, she found the true clipping: an obituary.

  For John Enright.

  Dad.

  Murphy stared through bleary eyes at the text, frowning.

  “What,” she said, because what she was reading didn’t make sense.

  Was she delirious? Maybe. From the crying and lack of sleep. Or maybe this house was messing with her head. She set down the paper, rubbing away tears and lifting her eyes to the window.

  Wind had kicked up over the ocean, leaning into the house, making slow work of warping its floorboards and loosening its nails. This murderous place was decaying with Murphy inside. Decay—she could smell it, there was no doubt. A horrendous stench was leaking from Siegfried’s coffin, akin to a pizza gone rancid.

  “I’m sorry, Siegfried,” she said through tears. “I’m going to make it right.”

  Because, at last, Murphy knew what to do.

  The sun had gone down hours ago, and neither of her sisters had checked on her. From her place on the couch, huddled in blankets, pretending to be asleep, Murphy had watched Eileen slam open the front door and tear through the parlor, heading up the grand staircase.

  She hadn’t seen Claire at all.

  There was a part of Murphy—a wormy, wriggling part—that wanted to be smug. If her sisters chose to shout her down and exclude her, they deserved to be miserably mad at each other, too. Another part of Murphy—the better, bigger part—was only sad.

  Because she remembered Cayenne Castle.

  Even though those royal days were distant, she’d seen sparks of the sisters they’d been before, when they’d huddled by the fire, remembering the beach trip. Now that the storm was over, her sisters had instantly scattered, and they’d left her behind. Murphy, the spare tire. The baggage. The invisible one.

  The way it had been in Emmet. Same story, different house.

  The house on Laramie was silent. The parlor fire offered fewer crackles, clinging to the remaining splinters of wood, dying out. Murphy made work of counting her knuckles again, reminding herself she was real, no matter how easily her sisters passed her by.

  Operation Memory Making had failed. But in the growing darkness Murphy made a new plan.

  She’d known what to do since the moment she’d seen the sea from the Caravan’s back seat. She’d allowed herself to be distracted by a beachside mansion and whispers of murder. She’d failed Siegfried this long, but the failing ended tonight.

  Murphy rose from the couch, crossing to the parlor’s double doors. She tucked Siegfried’s coffin into her puffer coat and, with one steeling breath, stepped outside into the wind. Her coat hood was pushed back almost instantly, forcing Murphy to tighten the toggles. After the false start she set out again across the wraparound porch, clomping down its steps into the front yard and then making her way down the steep, slick road, toward sea level. Down she went, and down farther still. With care, she stepped over a gaping pothole, reaching the base of the road. She followed the street to the beach, walking past a worn wooden fence until her feet were sinking into loose, damp sand.

  The sky was pockmarked by clouds, which occasionally parted to reveal a half moon. The ocean spread before Murphy—an eternal vastness, hemmed in by a pushing and pulling tide. The wind pressed into her, dowsing her face in salty cold. In the distance, a dog barked in vicious tenor snips.

  “Welp,” Murphy said. “Ominous as heck.”

  She didn’t know who she was talking to—Siegfried, maybe, or herself. She only knew she needed to talk, to keep her heart beating and her feet moving. If she could make this funny, she’d be all right.

  Murphy forged through sand, sinking ankle-deep with each step. Uggs definitely weren’t meant to be worn on the beach, but Murphy was through with excuses for why it wasn’t time to pay Siegfried his due.

  At last she came to the water’s edge. The tide reached for her, hungry, and water stained the tips of her sheepskin boots. She removed Siegfried’s coffin from her coat, holding it reverently in both hands. She didn’t peek into the Tupperware for one last good-bye. The smell would be too bad and, anyway, that wasn’t Siegfried in there, just shell and decomposing goop.

  Her breath plumed out, and she eulogized: “This is it, my dude. The final resting place. You were a good turtle and never hurt anyone. Rest easy in the knowledge that you were the perfect pet. It’s not your fault you had a sucky owner.”

  Murphy let guilt pour over her, like frigid water. She let herself feel it, deep down in her pores. She felt it for a full minute—breathing in, breathing out.

  Then, it was time.

  “Don’t mess it up, Murph,” she whispered, and with all her strength, she swung the plastic coffin back, then released it in a powerful arc, hurling Siegfried A. Roy into the sea.

  Maybe he would wash up on the shore; Murphy wasn’t clear, exactly, on how the physics worked. And sure, she knew Siegfried was a freshwater pet, not a sea turtle. In this moment, though, she felt she was doing him justice, returning him to the water, a place he belonged. For once, in his death, she was doing something right, and the weight of his shell and decaying body, wrapped in a candy cane napkin, was no longer suffocating her.

  Murphy’s feet were cold and her bare hands colder as she surveyed Siegfried’s watery grave.

  She wondered what time it was. If it was past midnight.

  A Christmas burial. What a nice and terrible thing.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry you were invisible, and I forgot.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  The world was quiet and dark, and Murphy’s thoughts were loud—so loud, she felt her head might explode. Her legs felt too weak to stand. She sat right there on the sand, legs crisscrossed, breathing in deep, the cold stinging her lungs. Shutting her
eyes, she laid back in the sand and listened to the drudging crash of waves.

  She pressed her fingers into the sand, one at a time:

  One, two, three.

  Four, five, six.

  Seven, eight, nine …

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE

  CAYENNE CASTLE

  It was December twenty-first, and the days of Cayenne Castle had been forgotten.

  The town of Emmet was swathed in gloom, mist spitting down on the spruces and cracked concrete, and the Sullivan sisters sat around a fake Christmas tree. Mom had made instant hot cocoa for everyone, and she wore a Santa-red toboggan upon her head. The TV was on, volume low, playing Frosty the Snowman, and discarded wrapping paper lay on the ground.

  They’d had another early gift exchange—though not one the sisters had planned. Mom had been the one to insist they celebrate early, since she wouldn’t be here on Christmas Day. She didn’t know what today’s date had once meant to Murphy, Claire, and Eileen. She didn’t know they were sitting in the ruins of a razed castle.

  Her smile faltered when, from the couch, she said, “You can go through your stockings, if you want.”

  Eileen’s arms were crossed. She studied the present in her lap—a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with colored pictures. Mom wasn’t aware, clearly, that Eileen hated the Pre-Raphaelites. That was no surprise, though. When would Eileen and her mother have had the time to chat about art?

  And Eileen knew what was waiting in her stocking: hand sanitizer, hard candies, tiny tissue packets. She was missing her morning shift at Safeway for this.

  Eileen studied Mom, whose eyes were darting from daughter to daughter. Her face was filled with weary hopefulness, asking them to tell her they were okay with this, that an early Christmas was as good as a real one.

  She was making an effort, with the cocoa she’d heated and the tinsel she’d put on the tree. It just wasn’t enough—hadn’t been for a while. Mom was a shell of a person these days, eyes watery, posture stooped. She claimed she needed this trip, the chance to relax. And hell, maybe that was true.

  Eileen didn’t care what Leslie Sullivan did with her life. That wasn’t her being petulant, either; she simply didn’t care about anything, save when she could get to Safeway, talk to Asher, and get a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for tonight.

  Murphy took down her stocking and poured out its contents, which included two boxes of Hot Tamales. Murphy couldn’t stand cinnamon, but she’d never told Mom that. Mom hadn’t asked.

  All she said was, “Thank you.”

  “Of course, sweetie.” Mom smiled warmly, and for a moment, Murphy’s heart leaped. Mom was looking at her. Did she see? Could it be like old times, when Murphy would sing an original song, and Mom would applaud? Would hear, and more than hear, listen?

  That’s when Mom’s phone went off, a text alert. She jumped from the couch, checking the screen.

  “Oh, God,” she said, touching her forehead, where a deep crease had formed. “Melodie says the traffic report is bad. I need to get going.”

  She rose from the couch, and as she did, Murphy’s hopes dissolved.

  “… should be enough meals in the freezer,” Mom was saying, bustling from the den to the kitchen. “I left twenty bucks on the fridge for one pizza night. I want you girls to treat yourself. And … am I forgetting anything?”

  When she returned to the threshold, her face was pinched, like she’d been told the exact time of her death. Murphy was used to this expression. When Mom was home—and that wasn’t a lot—she wore it constantly. Perpetually worried. Looking, not seeing. Hearing, not listening.

  Tears wobbled under Murphy’s eyes. She wiped the right but kept the left one wet. Maybe she wanted Mom to see she was sad. Maybe she wanted anyone to see her, period.

  Claire watched her mother, resentful of everything: the sweepstakes, the Lean Cuisines in the freezer, the predictable rain pattering on the roof. In New Haven, she was sure there were no rainy Christmases, but pristine, snowy ones. She’d thought she could escape dreary Decembers for good. She’d been wrong.

  Claire felt chilled to the marrow. Mom was leaving them for Christmas—such a Settler thing to do. Claire could picture Mom sunning herself on white shores next to waters that needed #nofilter. Not that she’d know how to take a good Instagram shot.

  Mom hadn’t even earned this vacation. She’d won it in the Local Market sweepstakes: a five-day, all-inclusive Bahamian cruise for two. When she’d gotten the call, Mom had jumped and screamed like an animal, and since she couldn’t choose just one daughter to go along, she hadn’t chosen any of them. She’d asked her work friend, Melodie. Melodie from Walgreens. It was unjust.

  “How many of the meals contain wheat?”

  Claire had followed Mom into the kitchen from the den. She watched, arms folded, as Mom rolled a suitcase toward the carport door.

  “What?” Mom looked up. Then realization flooded her pinched-up face. “Oh no. Claire. I’m sorry, I forgot your new … thing.”

  “It’s not a thing. I have a sensitivity. That’s why I’ve been having those stomachaches, I told you.”

  Mom was riffling through her purse on the kitchen counter. “Well, we don’t know for sure,” she said, distractedly. “You haven’t seen a doctor. This is from your Internet videos.”

  Claire dug her nails into her palms. Eileen and Murphy had joined her in the kitchen, Eileen loudly chewing a piece of gum.

  “I haven’t seen one,” Claire said, “because you won’t take me.”

  “Sweetie, I told you, with the insurance—we can book an appointment starting next year, but the out of pocket for tests—”

  “And they’re not just Internet videos. There are plenty of books, too. Everyone knows about gluten.”

  Mom stopped riffling. It seemed as though she were steadying herself, possibly counting to ten.

  “I get that, Claire,” she said, slowly. “And I’m sorry I forgot. The pizza place has gluten-free crust, though, don’t they?”

  Claire felt the need to scream. Mom was being kind, but she wasn’t getting it. That’s the way it had been for years: Though Mom was here, she wasn’t here. She’d given them presents and cocoa and tried to make things nice, but in the end, she was leaving them, at Christmas, for a cruise. And the most unjust part was this: Mom, a Settler, was getting her dream come true. And Claire’s dream? It had been dashed to pieces. That was something to scream about.

  Screaming wasn’t Exceller behavior. Harper Everly had taught Claire that, long ago. But this once, Claire broke down.

  “Okay, go, then,” she said. “You obviously don’t want to be with us for the holidays, so leave. Sunbathe and drink your piña coladas with Melodie. Be the Settler you are. Just go!”

  Claire had detonated a bomb, and she wasn’t going to stay for the aftermath. She stormed away to her bedroom and slammed herself inside.

  “Oh, God,” Mom said hoarsely, shutting her eyes. “I don’t want to leave her this way.”

  Her shoulders slumped, toboggan gone askance. She looked drained of life.

  Don’t leave this way, Murphy thought. Don’t leave at all.

  Mom’s phone went off, blasting a polka-style tune. Murphy saw that the screen read MELODIE.

  “I … really need to go,” Mom rasped, ignoring the call. “There’s no telling, with the traffic in Portland, and … girls.” She looked pleadingly to Murphy and Eileen. “It’s just gluten, right?”

  Then it happened again. Mom noticed Murphy.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “why are you crying?”

  Murphy wiped at the tears and shrugged. “I dunno. I’m … fine.”

  The exhaustion in Mom’s face intensified. “I asked you girls about this. We went over everything.”

  That was true. When Mom had gotten the phone call informing her that she was the lucky winner of the Bahamian Cruise Sweepstakes, she’d called Murphy and her sisters into the den and explained.

  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance,”
she told them, “but I don’t have to go.”

  How were you supposed to say “don’t go” to that?

  So Murphy hadn’t. None of them had.

  She wiped more tears and said, “I’m totally fine.”

  Mom nodded hesitantly. Murphy could see she needed to believe.

  “You have the emergency numbers,” Mom said, as though that made it better. Then she opened her arms to Murphy.

  Hugging Mom felt like hugging a ghost—embracing a presence not fully there.

  Eileen raised a hand when Mom turned to her, and said, “Not my thing.”

  A flash of hurt crossed Mom’s face, and she glanced toward the hallway where Claire had run off, barricading herself in the bedroom. There was conflict in her light eyes—a decision unmade. Then, sighing, Mom turned to her purse and pulled out a printed plane ticket.

  The time for deciding was, it seemed, over.

  Mom rolled the suitcase out the carport door, down the driveway, and toward the family’s old-as-rocks Subaru.

  “This is bullshit,” said Eileen, not loud enough for Mom to hear.

  Eileen didn’t care, maybe, but it was bullshit. She took a final look at Leslie Sullivan opening the driver’s side door. When the car started, a song blasted from the speakers: Mariah Carey crooning about what she wanted for Christmas.

  “Bullshit,” Eileen said again—softly, to herself.

  She turned from the scene and walked away.

  “Wait!” Murphy called. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?”

  But Eileen already had.

  Murphy stayed where she was, hugging her jean jacket against the cold. Mom rolled down the window and waved one gloved hand out.

  “Bye, sweetie!” she called. “I’ll see you in five days!”

  The day after Christmas.

  Murphy waved as the car backed out of the driveway and clunked off the curb. She squinted against the rising sun, watching the Subaru fade into the horizon. Then she kept standing there, watching, waiting … for what? A twist ending? A real-life magic act?

  It didn’t come.

  “It’s fine,” the last standing Sullivan sister told herself. “It’ll be fine.”