It’s the picture of Mama. The one Lee stole, all those years ago, the school photo. Mama is beautiful. Prettier than me, I think. She’s got a small nose, long eyelashes, black eyeliner. She looks sort of like if you crossed me and Savannah.
I squint, and sure enough, there’s a thin silver chain around her neck—the pastor was telling the truth about the necklace. You can only see it at the sides, and then it disappears into her shirt.
Lee reaches for the picture, but I clutch it to my chest, cover it with both hands.
“This is mine,” I tell her, calm but firm. “You stole this from me.”
She frowns, but takes the book instead. I slide the picture into the pocket of my jeans, alongside Savannah’s phone. My sister traces the letters on the spine of the Bible, opens it, flips through the first few pages. They’re ruffled from water damage, some ripped.
“In the beginning,” she says, “was nothing because nothing had been created yet. The world was empty and darkness was on the face of the deep.”
The font in Bibles is always small and cramped, and Lee is not reading slow and halting like she usually does. I’m impressed, until I realize her eyes aren’t following the words on the page at all. She’s reciting from memory. Maybe I stole the Bible from Grandma Margaret when we were both little? Maybe I read it to her?
But I don’t think so. I think I would remember that. This must be from before. The Cantrells.
“In the beginning was nobody,” says Lee.
“Is it hot in here?” I ask. We’re shaded from the sun, but my skin feels like it’s burning.
Lee tilts her head at me, reaches out to touch my cheek. I put the back of my hand to my other cheek. It feels warm. My forehead too.
“I don’t feel so good,” I say. My arms and legs have begun to ache. Not the satisfied ache after a hard run, but a sharp ache like my bones have been replaced with knives.
My sister sets the book down and crawls over to the big trash bag at the back of the cave. She unties it, pulls out a brown blanket. She scoots back over to me and tucks the blanket around my shoulders. It’s scratchy and smells worse than the book. I push it away. She should use it to cover her own nakedness. Not that it really matters this deep in the woods. No one to see. No one to make it into something wrong.
“Come on,” Lee says. “Don’t be stupid.” She wads the blanket up and pushes it against the cave wall. She shoves my shoulder, trying to tilt me over. I laugh but indulge her, flop sideways onto the blanket.
This is all new for her. I’ve always been the one who takes care of her, not the other way around. When she had a particularly bad cut, I brought Band-Aids and antibiotic ointments. When she sprained her wrist, I made her a splint out of sticks. I brought her shampoo for the fleas once. Anti-itch ointment for the flea bites when the shampoo didn’t work.
It was more than I could ever really handle, I guess. If she’d been able to come live with me and Aggie, she could have gone to a doctor, but of course she’d never let a stranger so much as get near her, let alone touch her, hold their fingers to her wrist, press a strange metal instrument to her chest.
Now, she scrabbles on all fours over to the cave entrance, leaps up, and moves out of sight.
“Lee?” I call, sitting up. The movement makes me dizzy. A moment later, she pops her head back around the side of the cave, backlit, the stringy hairs around her face dangling like vines. She waves a hand at me forcefully, indicating that I should lie back down.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Food,” she says, and then she’s gone again.
I picture her coming back with a bloody squirrel dangling from her mouth, and my stomach turns. My sister eats raw meat. She has for as long I’ve known her. I guess she’s just used to it, has built up a tolerance. If I tried, I’m sure I’d be sick. Sicker than I already am.
I lie down, on my back this time, and stare up at the ceiling of the cave.
There’s a crack down the middle of the stone, shooting up into darkness. The rock to either side of it is smooth and mottled with swirling patterns of white calcium deposits. In places the patterns look like faces. They remind me of the shadow girl on the wall on the high school. Well, here I am. I’ve crossed over into her world. When I stare at the faces they move. One opens its mouth as if to speak.
I squeeze my eyes shut. The waves are back, pulsing through me. The moldy smell of the blanket wraps around me. I breathe through my teeth, try to push the feeling down.
There’s a rustling and I open my eyes and she’s back. She’s not holding a squirrel carcass, but a can of Campbell’s soup.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask. It seems so out of place here. Did she pop into the local forest 7-Eleven, pay the deer cashier in pebbles?
She crawls into the cave, turns the can upside down, and starts scraping it against the rock floor. Most of the label has peeled off the can, but I can make out the letters C-R-E. Cream of mushroom? Cream of squirrel?
My sister scrapes the can back and forth. The muscles of her upper arms stand out, taut and ropy. She might be thinner than me, but she’s way more muscular. Bare as she is now, I can see there’s hardly a curve on her. All angles and bones, almost like a boy. That’s another way we’re different. I got my first period three years ago, when I was twelve. I figured she’d get hers around the same time, gave her an awkward explanation of tampons one night, brought her a few. But my sister has never bled.
“What are you even doing?” I ask her. There’s a wet spot forming on the stone where she’s scraping the can. She stops, turns it right side up, and pushes the lid with her fingers. There’s a moment of resistance, then the lid pops inward with a splash.
Malnutrition can keep you from getting your period. I looked it up once. But the pastor is wrong. He’s got to be. How can she be malnourished, when she’s as resourceful as this? I didn’t even bring her this soup, didn’t teach her how to open cans. She must have scavenged it, figured it out on her own.
She scoots over and tries to tilt the can to my mouth. I notice how her wrist bones stick out. Her fingers, though bony as the rest of her, look tougher than mine, thick with callouses.
“Hey,” I say, taking the can from her. She watches me expectantly. She’s not smiling, exactly, but her eyes are a little wider than usual. It makes her look younger. Softer.
I take a cautious sip of the soup.
It’s cold and nasty and too thick. Feels like snot. Tastes like snot. I retch. Set the can down too quickly, spilling half of it.
I try to say, “I’m not hungry,” but I barely get the I out before my stomach lurches. I scramble to the entrance of the cave and just make it before I vomit again.
There’s not much left in my stomach, just a thin dribble of liquid and some bile. It burns my throat on the way out. I break out in a cold sweat. My limbs shake. The world is spinning.
When it’s over I feel better. Scraped out. Heavy limbed. Exhausted. But better.
I crawl back over to my sister, who hasn’t moved. She’s looking at me differently now, eyes more guarded, posture wary. I slump over onto my side, rest my head on the wadded blanket.
Lee reaches out and brushes some hair off my forehead. I close my eyes. She rubs her palm slowly across my forehead, back and forth. It’s weird but sort of soothing. Something about the rhythm of it. Makes me feel like a baby. “Where did you get that Bible?” I ask her. I open my eyes. She’s got a scrunched expression, lips pursed, but she keeps stroking my forehead.
“Did someone give it to you?” I ask.
“It’s mine,” she says fiercely, as if I threatened to take it.
I can tell if I push I’ll just make her angry. I close my eyes again. “Remember when you first came to see me?” I ask instead.
“Yes,” she says, voice returned to neutral. This is a happy memory.
“How did you find me?”
“I saw you.”
“Where?”
“The window.”
I’ve asked her versions of this question many times, and she’s given the same answer. It isn’t a proper answer. It doesn’t explain how she knew to come to Margaret’s backyard. Who knows, maybe there’s some truth to the things people say about twins.
I mean, I definitely can’t tell where my sister is through magic. And even when I’m around her, I often have no idea what she’s thinking. Especially now.
But it’s true that I feel different around her than I do around anyone else. More comfortable. More myself. I don’t have to pretend, don’t have to keep secrets. I can just exist. “You must have been lonely,” I say, “before you met me.”
I find that, somehow, despite everything, despite the pain in my wrist, the little spark-sharp aches in my limbs, I’m beginning to relax. It’s only midday, but I’m exhausted and sick. Rest is probably what I need.
My sister stops rubbing my forehead. Instead she traces one finger in a line from my hairline down to my nose. It gives me a little shiver, but it’s kind of nice. Then she traces another line across my forehead the other way, like a plus sign. Or a cross. I wonder what it means as I drift off to sleep.
* * *
—
I wake in pain. All over. I try to sit up and pain shoots through my back. I groan. The ground is hard. My neck is stiff. My wrist throbs.
I pull myself up, pushing off the puffy gray coat that my sister must have draped over me while I slept. I’m alone in the cave now. There are long shadows stretching out along the stone floor. The sun is low, but not quite set, so I can’t have slept for more than a few hours. It’s still Sunday.
“Lee?” I try to crawl to the entrance, but I can’t put any pressure on my left wrist, so I just kind of scoot, until the ceiling slopes high enough for me to stand.
“Lee?” I call again. There’s no answer.
I have to pee, so I walk a little ways out into the forest, shimmy my jeans down to my knees, squat with my back against a tree.
I know it’s kind of gross, but I’ve always felt that pissing in the woods is one of the most satisfying things in the world. It’s best in winter, after it snows. Your body is hot, ninety-eight degrees, and so the pee comes out hot too and melts the snow, wisps of steam rising off it like little piss ghosts.
If I felt better this would be fun. An adventure. I’ve daydreamed about it a thousand times. What it would be like to live in my sister’s world. I’ve often wished we could spend longer than a few hours together at a time. Wished I could see more of her life, could share more of it. I’d contemplated schemes, in the past, to sneak off for a whole weekend. A fake away-meet for track? A pretend field trip? But I’d never gone through with it. Always settled for dreaming about the day when I was finally eighteen, finally out of high school, finally in charge of my own life.
So, yes, in a way this was something I always wanted. But I never wanted it to happen like this. Never wanted to be forced into it, with everyone against me and the secret of my sister out.
Has the pastor told everyone what he saw? Do they believe him?
I’m feeling light-headed, so I return to the cave and lie down again. I roll my left sleeve back, gently unwrap the bandage. Underneath, my wrist is so swollen that it’s not even narrower than the rest of my arm anymore. I try resting a finger on it gently, and it feels like it’s on fire. The pain is as strong as ever.
There a swoosh of leaves, and my sister’s back. She’s clothed again, wearing a dress I recognize as one I gave her about a year ago. I bought it myself, for two dollars at Goodwill.
It’s a simple T-shirt dress, the fabric printed with fat red-orange flowers and neon-green leaves on a background of black. Across the chest in giant glittery gold letters it says SASSY. I’m not sure if Lee actually knows what that word means, but I knew she’d like the glitter.
She kneels beside me, eyes bright, body relaxed. She’s got her plastic heart purse again. She unzips it, turns it upside down. Out fall a bunch of saltine cracker packets, the kind they give you at restaurants to go with soup. I used to sneak them into my pockets when I was younger and bring them to her. The crackers inside these packets are totally smashed, nothing but crumbs.
Lee holds one out for me to take but drops it when she catches sight of my wrist. I didn’t rewrap it yet. She puts out her hand, touches the wound.
I scream. The pain is shocking, shooting up my arm. My sister scuttles backward.
“I think I need to go back,” I say, when I catch my breath.
“No,” says Lee, predictably.
My wrist is infected. That much is clear. I’d been trying not to think about it. But it’s not getting any better.
“I need to go to a doctor,” I say.
“No!” She’s angry now, shoulders tensed.
“This is your fault, you know.” She has no right to be angry. I’m the one who should be angry. “You bit me.”
She reaches for my wrist again, but I yank it away.
“I need to go home,” I say, and just the thought of that is enough to fill me with longing. Warm bed. Soft sheets. The plastic stars on my bedroom ceiling are nothing compared with the real ones, but they keep the rain out, keep the cold out.
It is starting to get cold.
“Home,” my sister says, stabbing a finger at the floor of the cave.
“This is your fault,” I say again, nearly shouting. “You’re the one who went crazy.”
But it wasn’t completely crazy, was it? I finally ran away. She got exactly what she’s always wanted.
Maybe that’s what this was all about. Attacking Henry. Breaking my window. Coming to the church. Letting the pastor see her. She forced me into a corner. Forced me to choose one way or the other.
It was risky all right, but it worked.
She’s won.
“I’ll come back,” I say, unsure if I really mean it. “Okay? I’ll go and then come back. Run away for good. Like you wanted me to.” I could do it right. Pack some clothes. Some food. It would be hard to get away. They’d be watching me. And the police…
But I can’t think about that now.
“I just need to get some medicine,” I say, “and then I swear I’ll come back.”
“Medicine?” Lee asks.
“Yes,” I say, frustrated. “Otherwise my wrist will get worse and I’ll get sicker and sicker and then I’ll die.” I don’t even think that’s a lie. People died of infections all the time in the old days. I’m feeling feverish again, hot and achy, and it scares me.
“Medicine,” Lee repeats dully. Her body language now isn’t threatening, isn’t even angry. Just miserable. Folding down into herself.
“I don’t know the way,” I say. “You have to show me.” She lets a little huff of air out of her nose and her shoulders sag. She droops her way over to the cave entrance, gestures for me to follow.
“I’ll come back,” I tell her as I drag myself after her, relieved. “I promise.”
* * *
—
We’ve been trudging uphill for what feels like forever. The sun is gone now, the cloud-covered moon doing little more than outlining the darkness. We are going slowly, walking instead of running. I feel weak, exhausted. My lips are cracked from dehydration. My throat burns. My sister jogs ahead of me, circles back to tug on my right arm.
She makes me stop. I’m relieved, ready to sit and rest. She points out something in the dark, low to the ground. I can’t tell what it is. A spiderweb? She steps over it. I do the same and then I see it. A string, thin as fishing line, looped between trees. One of her traps?
We keep going. I wish I’d grabbed the puffy coat. I’m shivering, although maybe that’s more from the fever than the cold. I scan the tr
ees, hoping with every step to see the lights of Lester up ahead. I can barely think of anything but the pain. It’s all I can do to keep myself moving.
Up ahead, my sister pushes through some brambles. I stumble after her and find that we’ve come to a small clearing, maybe fifty feet across.
In the center of the clearing is a camper.
Or what used to be a camper, anyway. It seems to have sunk into the landscape. There’s moss growing over the roof, weeds reaching up to the windows.
“Where are we?” I ask. Lee has paused a few feet from the camper. This isn’t Lester, isn’t home, isn’t anywhere I recognize. If this is another hideout of hers, then she’s really been holding out on me.
Even in the dark, I can see that the siding is stripped away in places, streaked blackish in others. The whole structure appears to have partially collapsed at one end and been rebuilt with plywood, logs, and tarp. I smell smoke. Something is on fire.
“Medicine,” says Lee.
“What?”
In response, she picks up a rock and throws it at the camper. It hits with a clang, knocks a hunk of siding off.
“Stay here,” says Lee, pointing at me. Then she turns and runs, full speed, into the darkness.
“Wait,” I gasp, stumbling to follow. My limbs are heavy. My head spins. I lurch, fall to my knees.
The door of the camper swings open and warm light pours out like honey. There’s someone standing there. They’re backlit, so I can’t see any details. Just a shadow in the shape of a man.
I freeze.
The man leans to the side, then straightens holding a lantern in one hand. The flickering light floods the clearing, throws his features into relief. He’s got weird hair, hacked oddly around the ears. A long brown beard.
I’ve never seen him in the bar. Never seen him around town that I can remember. He’s a stranger. He’s squinting at me.
I push myself, shaking, to my feet.
“Jolene?” he asks.
I’m too startled to move, to speak, to run. All I can do is stare.
Some Kind of Animal Page 14
