The Twelve

“I’m your mother! You do as I say!”

“I want Dani!”

She had filled a hand with dry beans. Before Lila could react, the little girl reared back and launched them with astonishing, hate-fueled force into Lila’s face. More beans spattered on the floor behind her, a clattering rain. She leapt to her feet and began to tear through the apartment—yanking books from the shelves, batting things off tables, hurling pillows into the air.

“Stop it this instant!”

The girl picked up a large ceramic vase.

“Eva, no—”

The little girl heaved it over her head and brought it down like somebody slamming the trunk of a car. Not a crack but a detonation: the vase exploded into a million ricocheting shards.

“I hate you!”

Something was happening, something final. Lila knew this, just as she sensed, in a deeper layer of her brain, that all of this had happened before. But the thought went no further; the hard edge of something hit her head. The girl was throwing books.

“Go away!” she screamed. “I hate-you-I-hate-you-I-hate-you!”

But as Lila watched her mouth forming these terrible words, they seemed to be coming from somewhere else. They were coming from inside her head. She lurched forward and grabbed the little girl around the waist and hoisted her off her feet. The girl kicked and screamed, wriggling in Lila’s grip. All Lila wanted was—what? To calm the girl down? To get ahold of the situation? To silence the screaming that was tearing through her brain? For every ounce of force Lila applied, the girl replied in kind, shrieking at the top of her lungs, the scene ballooning to grotesque dimensions, a kind of madness, until Lila lost her footing, their combined centers of gravity tilted backward, and they went down hard, crashing into the dressing table.

“Eva!”

The little girl was scooting away from her. She came to a stop against the base of the sofa, glaring furiously. Why wasn’t she crying? Was she hurt? What had Lila done? Lila approached her on her hands and knees.

“Eva, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it …”

“I hope you die!”

“Don’t say that. Please. I’m begging you not to say that.”

And with these words tears came at last to the little girl’s eyes, though not tears of pain, or humiliation, or even fear. I will despise you forever. You are not my mother and never were, and you know that as well as I.

“Please, Eva, I love you. Don’t you know how much I love you?”

“Don’t say that! I want Dani!” Her tiny lungs expelled an amazing amount of sound. “I hate-you-I-hate-you- I-hate you!”

Lila clamped her hands over her ears, but nothing would block the child’s cries.

“Stop it! Please!”

“I-hope-you-die-I-hope-you-die-I-hope-you-die!”

Lila tore into the bathroom and slammed the door. But this accomplished nothing: the screaming seemed to come from everywhere, an obliterating roar. She fell to her knees, sobbing into her hands. What was happening to her? My Eva, my Eva. What have I done, to make you hate me so? Her body shook with pain. Her thoughts were swirling, tumbling, shattering; she was a million broken pieces of Lila Kyle spread across the floor.

Because the girl wasn’t Eva. No matter how hard Lila wished to make it so, there was no Eva; Eva was gone forever, a ghost of the past. The knowledge poured through her like acid, burning the lies away. Go back, Lila thought, go back. But she could never go back, not anymore.

Oh, God, the terrible things she’d done! The terrible, awful, unpardonable acts! She wept and shook. She cried, as her father always said, stroking paint on his little boats, a river. She was an abomination. She was a stain of evil on the earth. Everything was revealed to her, everything was of a piece, time stopped and moved again in a reassembled continuum inside her, telling its history of shame.

I hope you die. I hope you die I hope you die I hope you die.

Then something else was happening. Lila found herself sitting on the edge of the tub. She had entered a state beyond volition; she chose nothing, everything was choosing her. She opened the tap. She dipped her hand into its current, watching the water flow through her fingers. So here it was, she thought. The dark solution. It was as if she’d always known; as if, in the deepest recesses of her mind, she’d been performing this final act, over and over, for a hundred years. Of course the tub would be the means. For hours she’d sunk into its warmth; whole decades had passed in its comforting immersion, its delicious erasure of the world, yet always it had whispered to her: Here I am. Lila, let me be your last deliverance. The steam swirled upward, clouding the room with its moist breath. A perfect calm encased her. She lit the candles, one by one. She was a doctor; she knew what she was doing. Soy medico. She stripped and examined her naked body in the mirror. Its beauty—for it was beautiful—filled her with memories: of being young, a child herself, emerging from the bath. You are my princess, her father had teased, rubbing her hair to dry it and hugging her in the soft warmth of a freshly laundered towel. You are the fairest in the land. The recollections flowed through the water. She was a child, and then a teenager, in her blue taffeta dress with a fat corsage pinned to the shoulder, each picture morphing into the next until finally she beheld a woman, full of maturely youthful strength, standing before the mirror in her mother’s wedding gown. The bodice of delicate lace, the descending curtain of shimmering white silk: how her life in all its promise had seemed captured in that image. Today is the day I will marry Brad. Her hand fell to her belly; the wedding dress was gone, replaced by a vaporous nightgown. A morning sun was streaming through the windows. She turned and, in profile, cupped the voluptuous curve of her belly. Eva. That’s who you’ll be; that is who you are. I will name you Eva. The steam was rising, the tub nearly full.

Brad, Eva, I am coming. I have been away too long. I am coming to be with you now.

Three blue lines pulsed at the base of each wrist: the cephalic vein, winding upward around the radial border of the forearm; the basilic, commencing in the dorsal venous network before ascending the posterior surface of the ulnar side to join the vena mediana cubiti; the accessory cephalic, arising from the tributory plexus to merge with the cephalic at the back of the elbow. She needed something sharp. Where were the scissors? The ones Dani, and all the others who had come before, employed to trim her hair? She tried one drawer of the vanity and then the next, and when she came to the bottom, there they waited, gleaming with sharpness.

But what was this?

It was an egg. A plastic Easter egg, like the ones she’d hunted in the grass when she was just a girl. How she’d loved the ritual: the wild dash over the field, her little basket swinging in her hand, the dew on her feet and the slow accumulation of treasure, her mind envisioning the great white rabbit whose nocturnal visitation had left behind this bounty. Lila cupped the egg in her palm. She felt the faintest rattling within. Could it be…? Was it possible…? But what else could it be?

There was only one answer. Lila Kyle would die with the taste of chocolate on her tongue.

60

Treachery. Treachery.

How had the insurgency gotten so close? Could somebody please tell him that? First the redhead, then Vale, and now Lila’s attendant, too? That quaking mouse? That anonymous nobody who looked at the floor whenever he entered the room? How deep inside the Dome did the conspiracy reach?

To Guilder’s vast irritation, the redhead was still at large. She’d killed eleven people making her escape; how was that even possible? They’d never even learned her name. Call me what you like, she’d said, just don’t call me early in the morning. Jokes, from a woman who’d been beaten continuously for days. As for Sod, Guilder, in hindsight, was forced to concede his error.