out the material about two years ago and made the panels herself. She’d needed help putting them up, and she and Sissy’s father had gotten a stepladder out and worked together for an hour, changing the hardware that was screwed into the walls, anchoring the rod, clipping the tops of the drapes into the hooks.
Sissy and her sister hadn’t paid any real attention to the efforts or the result—Sissy had been on her way out to a friend’s house and had offered only a passing, “It’s great!” as she’d run out the door.
Now she wished she’d been a part of the whole process.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself back from the warmth she’d taken advantage of. And then she stepped away from her savior. Like the relentless searching of her empty data banks, getting stuck in neutral in the middle of this room was going to get her nowhere. She had come to see her parents in their slumber, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
Except first she looked around again. Inhaled deeply. Went over to the bookcase with all the family photographs on it.
She had to blink away the tears, but she made herself stare at each of the images: If she couldn’t handle two-dimensional photographs, how the hell was she going to get through standing over her family?
“This is easier than that.”
“What?” came a deep rumble from behind her.
Okay, guess she’d said that out loud. “The wall. However hard this is, it’s got nothing on that prison. I have to … remember that.”
After a moment, Sissy squared her shoulders and walked over to the base of the stairs. Gripping the handrail, she felt the smooth wood and leaned to the side. Down at the base of the balustrade’s footer, there was the dipsy-doo, as her father had called it, the little ring around where the fixture curved into a circle. At the center of it, there was a space on the floor that was uncarpeted and hidden unless you looked down from this angle.
Every year, her parents had insisted on doing an Easter-egg hunt in the house for her and her sister—and that tradition, which had started in their toddlerhood, had continued even as they’d gotten older. It was always done inside—after all, in upstate New York, outdoors was usually not an option, assuming you didn’t want to wear a parka with your Sunday best. And her father had always used “live eggs” as opposed to those hollow plastic casings that you could fill with stuff. Didn’t seem right otherwise, he’d maintained.
Everything had usually gone well … except for that one year. Within a day or two of the hunt, an incredible stench had lit off in the house, the nose-curling horror worsening by the hour and permeating throughout—talk about your once-more-with-feeling on the hunt thing.
It had been to no avail, however. No one had been able to find the egg.
They’d had to have the place fumigated and were about to start knocking through the Sheetrock to see if some critter had taken one of her father’s “live ones” into the walls of the living room when an unlikely solution had presented itself.
On four legs.
The neighbor’s dog had discovered the dead body. Brought in as a Hail Mary, with no hope anything would help, the terrier had zeroed in on the offending item immediately—and found it in that two-square-inch space at the base of the dipsy-doo.
They’d had a good laugh about that for years.
Sissy looked over her shoulder. Her savior was standing pretty much where she’d left him—except that he’d turned to face her.
“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
