SANDRA
“I always wanted a brother,” Eva says quietly. She pauses. “Mom would never tell me anything about my dad. She said I was born from a tube. But she was lying.”
“Now you know,” Alice says softly.
“I think . . . I think that’s all I wanted,” Eva says. “To know.” In the quiet, her mother continues sniffling into Caroline’s shoulder. “I wish she wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.” Then: “I think I’m ready now.”
“Ready for what?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. For a second, I feel her trembling like a violin string, vibrating out a high note of fear and loss. “Ready for what?” I say, a little louder.
A sharp pain goes through me, a feeling like being socked in the stomach. Alice cries out. For a second, everything goes dark. When everything comes into focus again—the dining room, the bones of our staircases and the doors like jaws that open and close—I feel lighter, and emptier, too. Like I’ve just taken the world’s most epic dump.
“Eva?” Alice whispers. No answer.
She’s gone.
“Well.” I don’t know why I feel sad about it. But I do. I’m sad and sorry and jealous, all at once. “There you have it. Vivian and Eva. That’s two out of three missing children accounted for.”
“Stop, Sandra.” Alice’s voice is shaky, like she’s the victim, like I’m the bad guy.
“It’s too late, Alice,” I say. “There’s no use in pretending anymore.”
She sucks in a deep breath: a whistle through a teakettle. “What about you?” she asks.
“Not even for me.”
There’s a moment of silence. In that minute, I can practically feel our walls coming down, slowly down, pulled earthward by the pressures of gravity and decay.
Alice says, “Why did you tell me Martin shot you? For all these years, all our years together, you lied about it. Or did you really forget?”
“Does it matter?” I haven’t felt so tired since I was alive—too tired to keep the truth back, to stuff it into dark corners and keep it shored up behind heavy walls. It comes creeping out into the open, like a mouse sniffing around a darkened house. “You knew the truth all along. You were there.”
“I was there,” Alice agrees. “I was waiting for you to remember.”
“I remembered,” I say. It hurts to speak, to think, to remember. As if we’ve been planed and sawed down into splinters—as if everything is about to fall. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”
We’re quiet for a bit. Adrienne is still staring dull-eyed as an idiot. Trenton has torn her napkin to strips. All of them so clear and sharp, like individual cardboard cutouts. In that moment I’d trade places with any of them, just to have a beginning and an end.
“Why did you do it?” Alice asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” I say, although that’s not exactly true, either. I did it for a hundred reasons and for no reason at all. Because Martin told me I needed help and I knew it was his way of saying he was getting tired of me. Because I couldn’t stand to keep drinking and I couldn’t stand to stop. Because I was so tired that even sleeping didn’t help me at all.
But mostly because I was lonely. It was like living at the bottom of a pit. There was only one way out. “They’re digging,” Alice says. She’s gotten her voice under control. “Under the willow tree.”
“I told you,” I say. No point in lying anymore. I blamed Martin for not loving me, until the blame and what happened became the same story.
Everything comes up in the end.
TRENTON
A sister. Trenton had—or used to have—a sister. He wished he’d known earlier.
He was alone in the dining room. The woman, Adrienne, had gone to wash her face in the bathroom. The ugly cop, who had skin just as bad as Trenton’s, was waiting outside in Adrienne’s car. Everyone agreed she was in no state to drive; there was talk of getting her a place to stay the night, until a relative could come and get her. Caroline had gone to change her clothes, and Danny was waiting outside her bedroom door, like Caroline might shimmy down the drainpipe and make a break for it. Trenton thought Danny was enjoying himself, even if he was pretending to be sad and apologetic. He probably didn’t get to arrest people very often.
Poor, lonely Eva. Trenton had always wanted a younger sister—had dreamed of it, especially after Minna moved out and went off to college and left Trenton alone with his mother. He would not have tortured her, as some older brothers did, or locked her in the bathroom after he’d used it or put her in headlocks until she screamed for mercy.
He would have showed her how to catch toads by making a cup of his hands, as Minna had done with him when he was very small. He would have taken her to the creek behind Mulaney’s so they could root out newts together, shrieking over a sudden flash of orange belly; he would have told her stories at night, saving the scary ones for when she was older.
Adrienne emerged from the bathroom. Her shirt clung to her shoulders where it was damp. Trenton got quickly and clumsily to his feet. He hadn’t expected to see her; he had assumed she would go out the way she came in, through the hall. But of course she didn’t know the house.
He felt embarrassed in her presence—embarrassed that he got to live, when he had wanted to die; that her daughter had died, when she had wanted to live. He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words felt insufficient. What would that mean, coming from him? From anyone?
Instead, they stood there in silence. Trenton was aware of the slow drag of time, the air in the house stifling, thick with funeral smells.
Adrienne spoke first. “You have her eyes,” she said. “Beautiful eyes.”
Trenton didn’t know how to respond. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.
She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. Trenton remembered the first time he had seen Eva’s ghost in the greenhouse—the dry rustle of her voice, like autumn leaves tumbling over a barren riverbed. He was as sad now as he had been then—sadder, even, than he had ever been for his father.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I?”
“You will,” he said, although he didn’t really know. He felt a subtle shift, as if the air had suddenly begun rotating in the other direction. This was why people lied: sometimes, it was only the stories that mattered.