I'll Be You(62)

Halfway up the hill I felt a hand on my arm, stopping me. Elli, I thought. But when I looked up I realized that the hand belonged to the woman with the caterpillar eyebrows, the one who’d confronted me on the road during my first visit to the compound. Today she was wearing a yellow dress, and a new air of authority. She recognizes me, I thought, but the expression on her face was of consternation, not anger.

“Where are you going?” she whispered, her eyes flicking down the hill.

I thought fast. “Bathroom?”

She frowned. “Use the one in the lodge. Dinner is in five minutes. You’ll get a Sufferance again if you’re not careful. That’ll be three times this week.”

I thought fast. “But I have to get a tampon and they don’t have any down there.”

“You have one in your cabin?” She looked up the hill, her eyes falling on a bunkhouse with orange trim, as if measuring the time it might take to get there and back. “OK. I’ll get you dispensation. Ten minutes enough?”

“Sure.” The bell in the main lodge rang a second time. Around me, the women picked up their paces, scurried a little faster. Caterpillar Brows let go of my arm and jogged after them.

I turned and raced up the hill toward the bunkhouse with the orange trim, no longer bothering to try to make myself invisible.

And then, like an apparition, I saw her. Standing on the top of the steps just outside the door to the orange-trimmed bunkhouse, her white dress billowing around her, her naked head pink and vulnerable. Slack-jawed and disbelieving as she watched me ascending the stairs: My sister. My twin. My Elli.

“Sam?”

Her voice was tiny, barely a hiccup.

Right away I saw that we weren’t at all identical anymore. She’d grown thin since I saw her last, with hollows under her eyes and matchstick legs covered with inflamed bug bites. Her blue eyes protruded slightly from her skull, making her look ravenous and haunted. My poor sister. It seemed impossible that Suzy and Ruth and Caterpillar Brows had seen me as their Eleanor. But so often we see only what we expect to see. We are deceived by our own ingrained assumptions.

I stopped just below her on the stairs, out of breath from the climb. “Elli, what is this place? Are you OK?”

She was staring at the telltale dress I was wearing. “I don’t understand…you joined? And they let you come here already? They didn’t tell me.”

I touched the fabric of the dress, pulled it away from my body. “No. I just put this on in order to get in here.”

Her eyes were glazed, distant. “But your hair…”

I stepped closer, grabbed her hand. It felt like a hollow-boned bird, quivering in my grip. “Look. Did they tell you I came by earlier this week? With Charlotte. They wouldn’t let us in to see you.”

“You did? But…” Her voice trailed off and she stared down the steps toward the great lawn, where the last stragglers were racing toward the main lodge. She seemed to wake up then. “We have to get inside.” Her hand came to life, gripping mine as she pulled me toward the bunkhouse. Then she hesitated, reconsidered, looked around, her eyes fixing on a small building a little farther up the stairs.

“Let’s go to the bathroom. It’s got the only door that locks. We’ll be safe.”

We’ll be safe. With those three words I understood, with a sickening finality, that we weren’t safe at all.



* * *



—

The bathroom was a cold, concrete box that smelled like mold and bleach. The toilet seat had no lid and the ancient mirror was spotted with rust. Bugs crawled in through the louvered window slats. I imagined the generations of children that had gingerly crouched over that toilet, holding their breath, watching for spiders.

My sister locked the door behind us and then we stood there, motionless, listening for footsteps on the stairs.

“They’ll be up soon looking for me,” she murmured. “You’re not supposed to miss meals.”

“I pretended I was you. I told them I needed to get a tampon. They gave you ten minutes.”

She seemed to finally understand then; and she laughed, though it was on delay, a terrifyingly empty sound. “God, that’s so you.” The smile faded, replaced with hollow longing. She leaned in and whispered urgently, “How is Charlotte?”

Suddenly, I was furious with my sister’s pretense. “You mean Emma? She’s doing fine. Considering that she apparently went missing from Scottsdale four months ago and hasn’t seen her parents since.”

Elli went still, her eyes huge in her face. “Oh,” she said softly. I waited for her to continue, but she seemed to have lost the ability to string words together.

“Yeah, oh. For fuck’s sake, Elli. What the hell is going on? What are you doing here? Why haven’t you responded to any of my text messages?”

She flinched with each question. “They took my phone,” she said. “I haven’t earned it back yet. It’s my Sufferance.”

If she hadn’t seen my text with the photo of Charlotte’s Missing flyer, hadn’t read all those messages I’d sent, then who had been reading them? And, oh God, what were they planning to do with the information I’d unintentionally conveyed? I cursed myself for not considering this option. Of course they’d been monitoring her communication.