“They can’t hear us, right,” she said.
“I don’t think so, no.”
Yeah, probably not given the whole Chillie situation from this morning.
Sissy walked up the center of the stairwell, listening for the creaks that always happened when she’d done that before. The fact that there were none made her grab the shirt she was wearing and twist the fabric over her heart.
None of the living could hear her voice … and she didn’t leave footsteps in any tangible sense…
Never before had the division between the quick and the dead seemed so real.
At the head of the stairs, she looked left. Right. Straight ahead.
She went into her parents’ room first, seeping through the closed door on the left in a way that creeped her out.
The first thing that registered was her father’s snoring. Rhythmic. Low. Like an engine revving.
And then she saw her mother’s hair, messy on the pillow, highlighted by the illumination from the security lights outside.
“Mom …?” she heard come out of her mouth.
Her mother stirred in her sleep, head rotating back and forth, matting things further.
Sissy had to cover her mouth and look away.
On the nightstand, in front of the alarm clock that her mom set every night and turned off every morning, there was a book, a Bible … and a picture frame facedown.
Sissy went over and, without thinking of all the reasons she might not be able to move the thing … picked it up. The face that stared back at her was her own, and she remembered just where and when the picture had been taken—at a field hockey game while she’d been on the bench, thanks to a sprained ankle. She was staring at the action, her brows down, her profile sharp, one hand up by her chin.
It was hard to imagine now getting that jazzed over some dumb-ass high school game. In fact, she couldn’t access those feelings at all, failing utterly in the attempt to step back into that old, familiar laser focus about a ball being paddled around by a bunch of chicks with sticks. Such a silly pastime, running around on the grass for no good reason, squads of teenage girls getting hyped over their score, their plays, their team’s progress in their division and the rival they’d just had to beat…
All those sleepless nights before big games, the rampant joy after a win, the stinging, lingering burn of a loss.
Such bullshit, she thought as she put the frame back as it had been. Such manufactured drama to exercise the emotions of people whose lives were steady and secure enough to require artificial tension and stress and “big deal” moments.
Starting in the center of her chest, anger curled up inside of her, ushering out the sense of loss and replacing it with … something that was foreign to her, but oh, so very vivid.
In the flush of that new sensation, Sissy stood over her parents for the longest time, hands on hips, head down, eyes tracing the pattern of flowers on the bedspread.
She knew why the image of her was facedown. It wasn’t because she had been forgotten. Just the opposite, in fact.
“God … damn this whole thing,” she whispered.
Eventually, she knew she should go, and gave her mother and father a last look. They were aware that she was here, she thought. Just in the same way Chillie had stopped short when she’d screamed, her mother was getting more and more agitated in her sleep, and her father had stopped snoring, his brows cranking down hard over his closed eyes, his head, too, tossing back and forth.
No reason to torture them by sticking around. Besides, she wasn’t sure it was healthy for her, either. She was just getting more and more pissed off.
Leaving the room the way she’d come in, she found that her savior had come up the stairs and was waiting just outside the door. Too jazzed up, she stepped past him without a word and went across the way to her own room.
Her door was shut as well.
On the far side of it, Sissy stood stock-still, hands on her hips, anger surging even further. Just as in her parents’ room, light penetrated the thin draping over the windows, bringing out of the darkness her twin bed, her desk, her bookcases, the posters on her walls, a bluish hue tingeing everything, thanks to the color scheme.
How strange, she thought.
Instead of feeling some huge overload of emotion, some visceral connection to herself … all she did was remember her senior class trip to Italy. She’d gone on it because her friends were going and her parents had told her this was one of the most important opportunities of her life … yada, yada, yada. When she’d gotten there, she’d liked the architecture, sure, and the food had been nice, yes, but the museums? God, the museums. Endless corridors and high-ceilinged rooms filled with statues and paintings and artifacts, the lot of it all populated with people so reverent, it was like they were in church.
Those tour guides and the docents and the chaperones from school had spoken names like da Vinci and Rembrandt and Van-something-or-another like they were quoting the prophets.
Sissy had made an effort to get into it all, but hadn’t been able to go much further than noting that, yup, it was a painting. Or, yup, that was another marble sculpture that was missing an arm.
Her prevailing sense had been that none of it related to her life—and the same thing was happening now. The big difference, of course, was that these were her things, not relics of a vast past lived by strangers.
Had been her things, she corrected.
She went over and opened her closet door.
The waft of flowery perfume and body lotion made her recoil as if it were a bad smell. And as the overhead light came on automatically, the shirts and dresses and pants that hung in an orderly row off the dowel were like items in a retail store, not anything that she’d ever worn.
She couldn’t take any of these, she thought as she rifled through her old wardrobe—and in retrospect, it had been ridiculous to think she could. If she raided this closet, someone would notice what was missing—and that was a theft, wasn’t it.
No, these were not her things. Not anymore.
Pivoting away, she thought, no, not her bed, her desk, her room, her clothes.
Still her family … but she didn’t belong with them, either.
She left without a second glance, and out in the hall, she met the eyes of the silent man who was clearly guarding her. “I want to say good-bye to my sister.”
As he nodded, she thought, wow … was this really good-bye?
Was she never returning here again?
Sure felt like it.
Going to the door that was cracked open, she pushed the wood panels with her hand. Her sister’s room was on the back side of the house, and as such, there wasn’t as much light. So dark inside. Too dark.