Willow

by Julia Hoban

  Willow doesn’t know why her throat hurts. She can’t understand the way her eyes are prickling all of a sudden.

  It’s just a book!

  She throws the paperback across the room, where it hits the wall before landing on the floor with its pages all askew.

  “Mouka touka hashatouka . . .”

  Willow is stunned. Her face turns white and she grips the corner of the candlewick bedspread as her mother’s voice floats up the stairs. It takes her a moment, then she realizes that it’s Cathy singing to Isabelle. David must have taught her the song, an old Russian lullaby that their mother used to sing to them.

  She gets up from the bed and walks into the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face. She stares in the mirror for a few seconds, looking at herself as if she were a stranger.

  Who is this?

  She supposes that to anyone else she looks exactly the same as she always did, except for her hair, that is. She doesn’t have the energy or inclination to fuss with it like she once did, so she just wears it in a braid that hangs halfway down her back.

  But she doesn’t recognize herself. Maybe her face isn’t any different, but the look in her eyes is. Worse than dead, their expression is simply blank. She reaches out a hand to cover them in the mirror. She remembers the reflection that used to stare back at her. Those eyes weren’t dead.

  Willow had never known that she used to be happy. It had simply never occurred to her that her life had all that she would ever need or want.

  The one thing that can make Willow laugh these days is how much she used to take things for granted. In the past, little hurts, like doing badly in school, or getting dumped by a guy, really used to throw her. How was she to know what was lying in store for her? She shakes her head at how foolish she used to be, getting upset because her favorite dress got lost at the cleaners, or something equally stupid.

  Stupid!

  She has an urge suddenly to smash her head against the mirror. Wipe that silly expression off her face. She knows she can’t, though. Not here, not now. Not with Cathy downstairs, and David just coming in the door.

  Instead, she regards herself calmly, then screws up her mouth and spits at her reflection with as much venom as she can muster.

  Willow knows she’s being melodramatic, but so what? The spit trails down the mirror and she’s confronted, once again, by a pair of dead eyes.

  Who are you?

  This isn’t the Willow that she’s lived inside for the past seventeen years. This is someone else.

  A killer.

  A cutter.

  Willow turns away from the mirror. Spitting at herself. That’s juvenile, straight out of a B movie, and really, accomplishes nothing. But cutting, that’s something else again.

  She stares down at her arms for a moment. If someone were to look carefully, the angry red marks underneath the fine cotton of her blouse would be clearly visible. But nobody ever does look carefully.

  She rolls up her sleeves and examines the most accessible cuts, then opens the medicine cabinet and takes out a tube of disinfectant. She’s scrupulously careful not to let her wounds get infected. She doesn’t need the complications. Already Cathy’s been giving her strange looks. She keeps asking why Willow wants to borrow long-sleeved shirts when it’s such a beautiful, mild Indian summer. She doesn’t understand that Willow, who used to be so concerned with what she wore, now selects her outfits with one criterion only: Will her clothes cover her scars?

  Taking care of her stuff isn’t the easy task it once was either. She can’t just toss her dirty things into the communal laundry hamper. The other day she had to bury one of her own bloodstained blouses in the park. She simply can’t risk leaving things like that around. Losing the shirt didn’t bother her, but she hated digging around in the dirt. Later on, when she was walking home, she was sure that she saw a Rottweiler playing with it.

  Willow hears the phone ring. It’s just about Markie’s favorite time to call. Quickly, without thinking, she reaches behind her and turns on the shower.

  “Willow?” Cathy calls. “Phone for you! Markie.”

  She leans out the bathroom door. “Yeah, sorry, I’m in the shower!”

  That should take care of that. She leaves the shower running, takes off her jeans and shirt, and sitting down on the floor of the bathroom, she spreads some of the antiseptic cream on a particularly nasty-looking cut.

  It takes a while, at least ten minutes, but finally she is done ministering to her wounds.

  “Willow?” David calls. “Dinner!”

  “Coming,” Willow calls back as she turns off the shower. She puts her clothes on, wincing a little as her jeans stick to the cream. Of course it would make much more sense to bandage all of them, but the gauze would look too bulky under her clothes.

  “Hey.” She tries to look lively as she enters the kitchen.

  “God, your hair dries fast.” Cathy smiles at her.

  “Oh, yeah, uhh . . . Shower cap, didn’t even bother to unbraid it.” Willow smiles in return. It’s something of an effort. Just the thought of sitting down and eating dinner is more than enough to wear her out completely, because it’s the one time of day that she can be sure of coming face-to-face with the only other surviving member of her family.

  It shouldn’t be like this. Seeing her brother should be the lone bright spot in the otherwise bleak landscape that is her life, and yet it simply isn’t so. Because somehow, that rainy night last March didn’t just end her parents’ lives. Somehow—as surely as if he had been in the car with them—she lost her brother that night too.

  This feeling is with her always. Their relationship has been so fractured that for all intents and purposes she could be living with a stranger. In a way it is almost more difficult to bear than the loss of her parents, they are dead and gone forever. But to be in constant contact with her brother, to the person that she was once closest with, to the single person spared her—to see him, talk to him, and yet have no connection with him whatsoever is more painful than she could possibly have imagined.

  Sometimes Willow tries to convince herself that things will return to normal between them. After all, there have been times in the past when they didn’t get along. He is ten years older than she is, and that age difference hasn’t always made for an easy relationship.

  Willow thinks back to when she was five and he was fifteen. Back then David didn’t like having a little sister. He wanted to be out doing his own thing instead of babysitting, and Willow hadn’t liked him much either. But things had changed as they got older. Sometime around when she turned ten or eleven, things had evened out somehow, he’d become her confidant, her friend, her protector. Suddenly it had been fun to have a brother who was so much her senior.

  If Willow tries hard enough, she can pretend, for moments at a time, that she isn’t living with David, that she is merely visiting the way she might have last year, say whenever her parents’ attention threatened to become suffocating, when their involvement in her life felt oppressive rather than comforting. At times like that she would stay with David and Cathy for the weekend, much to the envy of all her f riends.

  Willow spends a lot of time thinking about those weekends, about what things had been like then. David had just been finishing graduate school. He and Cathy had been about to become parents. Everything had seemed perfect.

  But Willow has smashed her brother’s picture-perfect life as surely as she smashed her parents’ car. Cathy didn’t want to go back to work. She hadto go back instead of staying at home with Isabelle like she had planned to. Instead of preparing for his classes, David has to worry about money all the time. He has to worry about how he’s going to make ends meet. He has to worry about Willow.

  In many ways this is a burden that he appears to accept easily. He is so strong, so considerate, so capable, his treatment of her is so unfailingly correct that to the outside observer it must seem as if nothing is amiss. He is absurdly polite to her, it as if she is a stranger wh
ose welfare has been entrusted to him, and he handles that responsibility with the utmost seriousness. But there is a wall of glass between them.

  David never, never talks about the accident. His conversations with her are limited to the minutiae of her daily life. Even when they are forced to discuss logistical things, like how much of her library salary has to go toward household expenses, or when they should put their parents’ house on the market, he manages to avoid any suggestion of how it is that they’ve found themselves in such an extraordinary situation.

  At first Willow was sure that it was just a matter of time. That David would eventually confront her. She kept waiting for him to yell at her, scream, shake her, do anything but treat her with such aloof courtesy. But as the months wore on, it became increasingly clear to her that he had no intention of ever talking about what had happened.

  She doesn’t feel like she can broach the subject on her own either. If David doesn’t want to talk about it, it can only be because of how painful the topic is, and Willow refuses, absolutely refuses, to hurt him more than she already has.

  Still, his coldness toward her upsets her terribly; it is the worst condemnation that she could endure. And yet she is fully in accord with his assessment of her: She is no longer his little sister, she is their parents’ murderer. Why should she expect any other treatment? Why should she even expect him to be as kind as he is?

  “How was school today?” David asks as she sits down. Cathy passes her a cardboard container of cold sesame noodles. Obviously tonight is Chinese.

  “Fine,” Willow says. She dumps some of the noodles onto her plate with a sigh. She knows that that answer isn’t good enough, that David expects a complete and full accounting of everything that she did, but she’s so tired of lying to him, she just doesn’t have the strength anymore. She stares down at her plate. The noodles look like worms.

  “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t really know what fine means. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in your classes? Didn’t you just have a quiz in French? How did that go?”

  A quiz? The only thing Willow can remember about French class is seeing that other girl with the scratches on her arm—that, and the fact that she’d run out of class so that she could indulge in her extracurricular activities.

  But she can hardly tell David about that.

  Oh right, the quiz. . . . They did have one the other day, Willow realizes. She must have mentioned it to David at one of their nightly grilling sessions.

  “We . . . I didn’t get it back yet. I answered everything, at least.” This happens to be true, but it was the merest stroke of good luck that she’d been able to finish the quiz, given that she’d barely even opened the textbook.

  “All right.” He nods thoughtfully. “What about your other classes? Is there anything special I should know about?”

  Sigh.

  Willow wishes that Cathy would interrupt him, change the subject somehow, but she’s busy feeding the baby some noxious-looking concoction, so Willow has no choice but to answer.

  “No—well, I do have this paper to do for that class I’m taking with the Bulf inch. . . . You know, the one about myths and heroes. . . .”

  “Well, that should be easy enough for you,” David says. “Do you have a topic picked out already? When is it due?”

  “Uh . . . no. No topic, not yet. . . .” Willow avoids his eyes. She has a topic, all right, and not one of her own choosing. How can she tell her brother that the teacher has asked her to write about the themes of loss and redemption as shown in the relationship between Demeter and Persephone? She can’t, she just can’t look him in the eyes and talk to him about another motherless child. “It’s not due for three weeks anyway, so I have some time to come up with one. . . .”

  “What about the library? How was that today? Any better? Is Miss Hamilton being nicer to you? Do you want me to talk to her?”

  “No! I mean, thank you, but no. She’s fine, really. . . .”

  An idea occurs to Willow. David wants to know how things went at the library? Maybe she should tell him about that guy she met, well, Guy, in fact. She wonders if possibly, just possibly, his reaction to this piece of news will be different from the way he responds to her daily recitations regarding school and homework. The responsibility of being in charge of her education may be new to him, but this kind of thing, well . . .

  Willow remembers a time last year when she went to meet David at one of his classes. A fellow graduate student, not realizing that she was a sophomore in high school, had asked her out. Their father had not been at all amused, but David had thought it was hilarious.

  “I . . . I met someone in the library who was in one of your classes last year.” Willow says this tentatively. She’s floating the idea out there, kind of like a test balloon. She wants to see how he’ll take it. She wants to believe that somehow, some way, he’s capable of unbending toward her, and that perhaps, talking about the kind of thing he used to tease her about might just be the key.

  “Really?” Cathy says. She sounds interested and she glances at Willow as she continues unsuccessfully to try to get Isabelle to eat. “What was their name?”

  “Male or female?” David says at the same time. He looks at her over the rim of his glass. His tone is anything but lighthearted.

  Oh boy. . . .

  “It’s a guy. . . . Well, actually, his name is Guy. I thought that was kind of funny.”

  And nice too. It’s a nice name.

  “Guy?” David is thoughtful. “I think I remember Guy—he’s still in high school, isn’t he? I guess that’s all right. . . .”

  Oh for God’s sake!

  “He was taking my class to get some college credit,” David continues. “He’s very smart, and a lot more hardworking than most of the regular students I get. Believe me, I wish I had more like him. So what did he have to say for himself?”

  Now that sounds a little bit like the brother she used to know. Maybe this was a good idea after all, except even as she thinks this, Willow realizes that she herself is no longer capable of lighthearted conversation. How can she even answer such an innocuous question? What can she possibly say?

  He asked why I was living with you and I told him that I killed Mom and Dad.

  Of course they did talk about other things, but those topics are also off limits. Maybe last year Willow would have felt free to tell David that Guy likes that bookstore downtown, but now she can’t. She can’t because any mention of that place—which David loves—would trigger too many memories of their father. He was the one who had first taken them there.

  “Umm, I think he said that we looked alike. . . .” Willow looks at her brother in despair. It’s impossible not to notice how tired he is, how worn, how empty his own eyes are.

  She wishes so much that she could take that emptiness away.

  But then she remembers something else Guy said. Something that it won’t hurt her brother to hear, and she grasps at it like a lifeline.

  “Oh, you know what, I almost forgot.” She tries to sound enthusiastic. “He thought that you were a great professor, I mean, he kind of went on about that.” It’s not much, it won’t bring their parents back, it won’t make his life easier in any appreciable way, but it’s the best she has to offer.

  “Really?” David says slowly. Maybe he’s not bowled over by the news, but he does seem a little interested, his eyes look a little less dead.

  “Really.” Willow is emphatic. She tries to think of something else to say. Some way that she can elaborate, expand the compliment. “I think he said that he was seriously thinking of going into anthropology, I mean, major in it when he gets to college. He said that your class had convinced him that’s what he should be doing.”

  Of course he’d said nothing of the kind. Willow has no idea what he wants to do. And anyway, if anything had influenced him, it was Tristes Tropiques, not her brother. But still, she can’t help feeling a glimmer of satisfaction as she watches David’s expression change.

/>   “Oh come on!” Cathy exclaims suddenly. She puts the spoon and the jar of baby food down in frustration. “I can’t get her to eat anything.”

  “Well, what do you expect?” David asks as he picks up the jar and examines it closely. “Organic strained peas? Who would like that? She has good taste, that’s all.” He gets up and lifts Isabelle out of her high chair. “Wouldn’t you rather have some spare ribs?” he asks the baby.

  “Oh David, please!” Cathy gives him a look.

  “Okay, I’m not being serious. But how about ice cream? She can eat that, can’t she? There’s nothing wrong with ice cream—we even have some too.”

  “There’s a lot wrong with it,” Cathy says, exasperated.

  “But you’d like it, wouldn’t you?” He holds Isabelle above his head as he talks to her. “I can tell that you’re going to be a girl who likes her chocolate ice cream. Oh c’mon.” David turns back to Cathy. “It would be kind of fun to see if she likes it.”

  Willow isn’t jealous of her niece, not exactly, and she certainly has no desire for her brother to talk to her the way he does to an infant. But as she watches the way that David plays with Isabelle, as she sees his face finally light up, it is borne in on her, for perhaps the thousandth time, that she has losther brother.

  Willow pushes the Bulfinchaway listlessly. It’s one in the morning and in spite of the fact that she’s been sitting at her desk for the past four hours, she’s managed to accomplish almost nothing. Not only has she gotten no work done, not only is she too restless to fall asleep, but she’s starving, hardly surprising since she barely touched anything at dinner earlier.