Sharp_Objects

“Camille,” he said, picking at a tail with a tiny fish fork, “you’re making your mother ill. I’m going to have to ask you to leave if conditions don’t improve.”

“How am I making her ill?”

“By tormenting her. By constantly bringing up Marian. You can’t speculate to the mother of a dead child how that child’s body might look in the ground right now. I don’t know if that’s something you can feel detached from, but Adora can’t.” A glob of fish tumbled down his front, leaving a row of greasy stains the size of buttons.

“You can’t talk to her about the corpses of these two dead little girls, or how much blood must have come out of their mouths when their teeth were pulled, or how long it took for a person to strangle them.”

“Alan, I never said any of those things to my mother. Nothing even close. I truly have no idea what she’s talking about.” I didn’t even feel indignant, just weary.

“Please, Camille, I know how strained your relationship is with your mother. I know how jealous you’ve always been of anyone else’s well-being. It’s true, you know, you really are like Adora’s mother. She’d stand guard over this house like a…witch, old and angry. Laughter offended her. The only time she ever smiled was when you refused to nurse from Adora. Refused to take the nipple.”

That word on Alan’s oily lips lit me up in ten different places. Suck, bitch, rubber all caught fire.

“And you know this from Adora,” I prompted.

He nodded, lips pursed beatifically.

“Like you know that I said horrible things about Marian and the dead girls from Adora.”

“Exactly,” he said, the syllables precisely cut.

“Adora is a liar. If you don’t know that, you’re an idiot.”

“Adora’s had a hard life.”

I forced out a laugh. Alan was undaunted. “Her mother used to come into her room in the middle of the night and pinch her when she was a child,” he said, eyeing the last slab of sardine pitifully. “She said it was because she was worried Adora would die in her sleep. I think it was because she just liked to hurt her.”

A jangle of memory: Marian down the hall in her pulsing, machine-filled invalid’s room. A sharp pain on my arm. My mother standing over me in her cloudy nightgown, asking if I was okay. Kissing the pink circle and telling me to go back to sleep.

“I just think you should know these things,” Alan said. “Might make you be a bit kinder to your mother.”

I had no plans for being kinder to my mother. I just wanted the conversation to end. “I’ll try to leave as soon as I can.”

“Be a good idea, if you can’t make amends,” Alan said. “But you might feel better about yourself if you tried. Might help you heal. Your mind at least.”

Alan grabbed the last floppy sardine and sucked it into his mouth whole. I could picture the tiny bones snapping as he chewed.

A tumbler full of ice and an entire bottle of bourbon purloined from the back kitchen, then up to my room to drink. The booze hit me fast, probably because that was how I was drinking it. My ears were hot and my skin had stopped its blinking. I thought about that word at the back of my neck. Vanish. Vanish will banish my woes, I thought loopily. Vanish will banish my troubles. Would we have been this ugly if Marian hadn’t died? Other families got over such things. Grieve and move on. She still hovered over us, a blonde baby girl maybe a hair too cute for her own good, maybe just a bit too doted on. This before she got sick, really sick. She had an invisible friend, a giant stuffed bear she called Ben. What kind of kid has an imaginary friend that’s a stuffed animal? She collected hair ribbons and arranged them in alphabetical order by color name. She was the kind of girl who exploited her cuteness with such joy you couldn’t begrudge her. Batting of the eyes, tossings of the curls. She called my mother Mudder and Alan…hell, maybe she called Alan Alan, I can’t place him in the room in these memories. She always cleaned her plate, kept a remarkably tidy room, and refused to wear anything but dresses and Mary Janes. She called me Mille and she couldn’t keep her hands off me.

I adored her.

Drunk but still drinking, I took a tumbler of liquor and crept down the hallway to Marian’s room. Amma’s door, just one room down, had been closed for hours. What was it like growing up next to the room of a dead sister you never met? I felt a pang of sorrow for Amma. Alan and my mother were in their big corner bedroom, but the light was out and the fan whirring. No such thing as central air in these old Victorians, and my mother finds room units tacky, so we sweat the summers out. Ninety degrees but the heat made me feel safe, like walking underwater.

The pillow on her bed still had a small indentation. A set of clothes was laid out as if covering a living child. Violet dress, white tights, shiny black shoes. Who’d done that—my mother? Amma? The IV stand that had tailed Marian so relentlessly in her last year was standing, alert and shiny, next to the rest of the medical equipment: the bed that was two feet taller than standard, to allow patient access; the heart monitor; the bedpan. I was disgusted my mother hadn’t purged this stuff. It was a clinical and utterly lifeless room. Marian’s favorite doll had been buried with her, a massive rag doll with blonde yarn curls to match my sister’s. Evelyn. Or Eleanor? The rest were lined against the wall on a set of stands, like fans in bleachers. Twenty or so with white china faces and deep glassy eyes.

I could see her so easily here, sitting cross-legged on that bed, small and sweat dotted, her eyes ringed with purple. Shuffling cards or combing her doll’s hair or coloring angrily. I could hear that sound: a crayon running in hard lines across a paper. Dark scribbles with the crayon pushed so hard it ripped the paper. She looked up at me, breathing hard and shallow.

“I’m tired of dying.”

I skitted back to my room as if I were being chased.

The phone rang six times before Eileen picked up. Things the Currys don’t have in their home: a microwave, a VCR, a dishwasher, an answering machine. Her hello was smooth but tense. Guess they don’t get many calls after eleven. She pretended they hadn’t been asleep, that they simply hadn’t heard the phone, but it took another two minutes to get Curry on the line. I pictured him, shining his glasses on the corner of pajamas, putting on old leather slippers, looking at the glowing face of an alarm clock. A soothing image.