Pieces of My Sister's Life (28 page)

I sat on the bed, trying to think, trying not to think. I knew I should be feeling something—anger, hurt, maybe even hilarity. What a cliché, my boyfriend sleeping with my twin sister. I tried to laugh, a high-pitched trembling gurgle. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, but unspeakable images flashed behind them, sharpened by the darkness. Eve. Justin. His bed, Eve’s bed, my bed, rhythms and sounds.

A rush of heat seared through my chest. So this was what a heart attack felt like. Not just the clawing pain but suffocation, like hands squeezing my heart and lungs.

I hugged my pillow and tried to breathe, in out, in, out, curled my fingers, feeling her throat between my hands. I imagined Eve behind glass, clambering among the frogs in science class, waiting to be dissected alive. She scuttered, terrified, against the bell jar walls, mouthing
I’m so sorry
as she slipped into an ether sleep. And I stood, watching, scalpel in hand, and I smiled.

31

S
OMETHING WEIRD HAPPENS
with intense anger. It’s like your body can’t handle it all at once and so it comes in waves, black and salty. The anger swirls around you, over you, and then it sucks back, pulling away till you know there’s nothing left in you but skin and bones and rattling lungs that somehow draw in air.

I don’t remember anything from those first few days, that’s how complete the drowning was. I don’t remember what I did or what I thought. Did I look at Eve or Justin? Talk to them? I doubt it because what the heck would I have said? The first thing I remember was a few days later when I came up with the plan.

Not a plan really, but a desperation, and when it first came to me it certainly wasn’t something I intended to carry through. It kept me upright though, having something to center myself on, somewhere to dig my feet so the wave couldn’t overwhelm and carry me away.

It was late afternoon and LoraLee was out front planting tomatoes. I’d offered to go inside for the rusted pipe she used as a shovel. And looking out the window at the matted hair at the crown of her head, I reached for the ancient book. The book that had maybe drawn him to me. The book that would maybe bring him back.

I flipped quickly through the pages, searching for the chapter I’d seen months before, the idea that took the waves of anger and pressed them into a dense salty marble that lodged cold as ocean ice in my chest. And I centered myself on that coldness because really it was all I had.

LoraLee rocked back on her heels and I froze. She wiped the sweat off her brow, squinting her eyes against the noon sun. “Kerry? ’Neath the table, you sees it?”

I grabbed for the pipe. “I got it. Be there in a sec, okay?”

In the section titled “Poisonous Herbs” were pages on pages of crosshatched sketches, calligraphic script describing berries and leaves and essences. I scanned through, my stomach knotting at the black-cauldron-sounding names: mugwort, wormwood, witch hazel, bloodroot. Bloodroot. I fingered the picture of the white-petaled flower. Bloodroot grew in LoraLee’s garden, one of the first flowers to come up in spring. But the fragile petals got torn by rainstorms almost as soon as they arrived, and by April we had to weed the bare stems away.

I’d also seen them blooming at a marsh along Rodman’s Hollow. I’d picked a flower once for my hair and the orange dye had stained my hands for days. I could go there, I could find it. If I wanted, I knew I could. Esmerelda tempts her sister with a deadly sleeping potion, but with a twist the tables turn. The potion goes to Eve.

I slid the book back on the shelf, then brought the pipe outside to LoraLee. She watched me carefully as if she could see through the blankness in my face, but I smiled and bent to dig my hands in the earth. I wasn’t in my right mind, and yes, I knew this, but it didn’t matter. The plan filled the empty spaces where my heart used to be. It was a roller coaster of pain on fear on desperation, too much speed, too much momentum. For now it was the only thing that made sense.

It’s the wanting makes things happen,
that’s what LoraLee had said. And so I focused on the wanting and filled myself with red and bitter hatred.

It seemed every day I found new pictures of Justin, slipped into the slats of a mirror, hidden under my pillow, in my wallet. They were tucked in my school notebooks and framed on my dresser and night table. And as I pulled them out, buried them carefully into my shoebox like seeds waiting for spring, I remembered how I’d once gazed at them in the hours we were apart. Now I knew Eve must have done the same.

The signs had been there all along. From the beginning she’d given me pretenses and lies and I’d swallowed them like cod liver oil, never questioning, always believing it was for the best. The one person in the world I was supposed to be able to trust, like my father. Like my mother.

And I hated them all.

And I wanted Eve dead.

Was this what happened with serial killers? An accident, an anger goes too far and suddenly they’re pushed into the realm of murder. I’d broken an invisible wall the night of Ryan Maclean’s death, pushed through an uncrossable boundary now open and waiting for me to cross again.

The trail through Rodman’s Hollow was stifling, no trees to shade it from the sun; just the impossibly vivid green of the hillside and the purple asters with their dusty sweet pollen splashed everywhere too bright. Round a bend and over the hill, and there was the pond, a fairy pond circled by smooth stones. The water was still, reflecting gray against the hazy sky, skirted by mosquitoes and water striders. And there was the bloodroot, headless, each with one leaf wrapped around its reddish stem, yellowing with heat and age.

I knelt and plucked a stem, opened the small aspirin bottle I’d brought and slipped the stem inside, then tore another stem and another from their roots. Four stems pressed into a bloody mash inside the bottle. When I’d finished I wrung my hands in the lukewarm pond, watching the water swirl with fading color. But still the evidence stained red on my palms, as if the job was already done.

Moonlight cast shadows over stone and grass, through curled fingers of tree branches. The first settlers were buried here, the Dodge family, the Roses, the Balls, some of whose descendents still lived on the island. How would it be to die knowing your children would live on this land you’d discovered? And your children’s children, on and on forever, the most lasting of legacies? Look at Daddy’s legacy. His legacy was death.

I knelt by his grave, the simply carved headstone, name and date, beloved father. I rested my cheek against the chiseled edge, feeling an overwhelming emptiness. I’d lost him, lost Justin, so how could I live if I lost her too? And I almost turned back, ran home and forgot.

Almost.

But in the end there was really no choice. The decision was not my own. It was desperation. It was love and hate that ground together against my gut and made up their own mind.

And that night before I went to bed, in the airiness of waking sleep, I cooked. A cast-iron pot on the electric stove, a bubbling stew with a smell so rancid it bit inside my nose. Only cooking, a meal that may or may not be eaten, eaten by her, eaten by me, by him. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was the cooking and the possibility of an end.

I stared at the men in their dark suits, leather binders tucked against their chests. Nobody ever wore suits on the island, not to work, not to the fanciest restaurants. And even watching from the bottom of the dark well where I now lived, I knew something was happening.

They were walking from Town Hall, talking in low drones, three of them and then another two emerging with First Warden McCoy, hopping into gray sedans and driving up the road. I stood a minute, staring at the license plates. Washington, DC. I had to go home.

There was a line outside the Book Nook. Always this time of day there was a ritual trek of off-islanders who waited for papers delivered on the ten o’clock ferry. They’d come to the island to get away, but still felt obliged to search for the
Boston Globe
or
New York Times,
news from the cities they’d left. Today, though, the line stretched around the block, more islanders than mainlanders. And there was old Mrs. Scott, Mrs. Scott who never left her front porch, who had her groceries delivered by neighbor boys and thought newspapers were an infringement on her peace. But there she was, leaning crooked on her walker and talking to Mary Bates, her low-drooping eyes bright with the thrill of scandal.

I started quickly up the hill, legs weighted with trepidation, strode across the street towards home, then froze. Officer Carerra’s Jeep. Parked in our drive. And I felt a sudden loosening around my diaphragm, like relief.

I opened the front door, glanced from Eve to Brad Carrera and back, suddenly longing to let myself melt and flow beneath them, to confess.
What do you think I am, both of you? I’m worse
.

Eve watched me, her eyes wide and wary, then folded her hands under her chin like a plea. “They found a body,” she said. “All that time they thought Ryan Maclean ran away, he was actually dead.”

A body. I saw him as he had been, mouth filled with water, arms floating and reaching for us. I licked my tongue against the insides of my teeth in rhythm,
one
-two-three-four,
one
-two-three-four.

“So why are you here, Brad?” Eve said. “Why’re you telling me?”

Brad Carrera took off his wide-brimmed hat, held it at his chest. “This isn’t official police business at all, but now there’s a body I think I need to ask some questions just for my own peace of mind.”

My eyes felt like they were coated with thin sheets of ice. I forced myself to look away, to smile, to start towards the stairs like the conversation had nothing to do with me. And then I saw it.

There on the shag runner to the stairway were three mahogany-colored spots, smudged into the fibers. And on the stairs a thin-dripped trail. How hadn’t we noticed it before? I glanced to Brad and back to the floor. I held my breath and drifted to stand over the spots, blocking his view of the stairway.

“Peace of mind,” Eve said. “Okay then, you just let me know how I can give you peace.” Her voice was slightly strained, but not so much that you’d notice if you weren’t looking.

“See, the two of us, we may be the only people know what-all went on between you and the congressman. And I’d rather not bring it out if there’s no reason for it. Too many people might get hurt by it, we both know that. All I want for my own peace is that you tell me you had nothing to do with him drowning.”

“Of course I had nothing to do with it! His wife told the cops he was drunk and I guess he went out to the beach, fell off the bluffs. Sounds straightforward to me. Unless, I don’t know, maybe he felt so guilty over me and that girl he raped and what he did to his wife that he jumped off. I ended things between us a long while before he disappeared.”

She was a good liar; her eyes flashed with anger, no hint of fear. God she was good, but of course I already knew that well enough.

“You know I had to ask, right? First thing I thought when he disappeared was how maybe you and him were planning some kind of secret rendezvous. And I wanted to talk to you but I didn’t want to start a stir, what with things being in enough of a stir already.” He twisted his hat in his hands, as if he was steering a car. “Or hurt you either, you know I still feel something for you. We had a good time while it lasted.”

“Yeah we did, didn’t we.” Her voice was soft, like she was speaking to a child, or a lover.

“Guess I’ll always feel a kind of something for you.”

She smiled widely, too brightly. “Me too.”

“Anyways, it’s best for everybody involved if there’s no more controversy. I’m sure there’s people who’ll think this is suicide and some people who think it was his wife offed him. But long as there’s no proof, we all just got to assume it was some kind of dumb-ass accident.”

“Guess he was kind of a dumb ass,” Eve said.

Brad combed his fingers through his hair. “Guess what matters with the congressman is that the autopsy report shows it was definitely a drowning.”

“Well sure it was.”

“No foul play we can find, and there’s ocean water in his lungs.”

Eve’s smile faded. She turned to me. We watched each other, unblinking. “What’s that mean exactly?”

“Just means it’s the water that killed him. His body was pretty beat up, contusions just about everywhere from him falling off the bluffs. Knocking him out, I’d guess, which must be why he drowned.”

“He breathed in water?” Her voice was hoarse.

“Well that’s what drowning is, right?”

Just then the front door swung open behind me. Justin stepped into the foyer, his eyes wild. “I saw the car. What’s going on?” He was going to confess; his voice was clenched too tight.
There was water in the lungs. We did it. Tell him we did it.
I backed away up the stairs. Justin looked up at me, his lips tight, then turned back to Eve.

Eve shook her head, her face pale. “Brad was just leaving, weren’t you, Brad. You just came to relive the good old days.”

“You sonofabitch.” Justin’s eyes seemed naked, unguarded.

Brad raised his eyebrows. “There a problem here?”

“I think there is. Sixteen years old is statutory rape, or didn’t they teach you that in the academy?”

“She was the one went after me first, Justin. This was completely mutual.”

Eve’s eyes flicked from Brad to Justin and back, her lips pressed between her teeth.

“Yeah, I’m sure the cops’ll buy that.” Justin smiled. “Oh, wait, you are the cops.”

“Look, stop your little jealous tiff here. I know what you tried when me and her were still together. She told me how you were after her even back then when you had no right, but it’s your business now, I’m through with it. You can have her.”

What he tried?
I made a noise, a kind of muffled gasp. Eve glanced up at me, then sidled to the door and out onto the porch.

Brad watched her go, the screen door clanging shut behind her, then set the hat back on his head, the wide brim and odd tilt making him look slightly ludicrous. “What she’s like, Justin, she’s like a fireworks display. Thrill a minute and oohs and aahs, can’t look away, but once it’s over, all that’s left is the smoke. Your ears are ringing, your neck hurts like hell, and all you want to do is just pack it all up and go home.”

Justin glared at him, the hatred like a scar marring his face. I couldn’t watch it, couldn’t watch, so I walked down the hall to the bedroom. I gripped the edge of the dresser, my teeth clamped.

Ryan Maclean had been breathing. He’d breathed underwater, which made all the difference, meant it wasn’t only Justin who’d killed him but all of us, heaving the body over the stern, watching him float, letting him sink. In this bedroom I’d stood over him and checked for a pulse, felt nothing except the warm sweat on his neck, and then I’d pronounced him dead.

“Kerry…”

I flattened my hand against the dresser.