In an Instant(50)

Bad idea, Dad. Bad, bad idea.





60

I return to Chloe to wait with her until Vance and my dad arrive, praying she’ll take a nap so I can tell her to leave or at least attempt to prepare her in some way for what is about to happen.

She’s in the bathroom, and I’m shocked to find her freshly showered and her hair newly buzzed—the black erased, her head now crowned with pretty copper fur. Her foot is propped on the toilet, and she is shaving her leg. Her iPod on the sink blasts “Lovesong” by the Cure, and she hums along.

I am stunned. It’s like someone zapped her with happy juice and transformed her back into my slightly narcissistic, carefree sister.

When she is finished shaving, she opens the vanity cabinet and looks through our amazing collection of nail polish until she finds the one labeled Ruby Rebellion, and my stomach grows cold as things become clear. It’s a color she bought when we were with my mom shopping for back-to-school clothes.

My mom held it up and said, “Now there’s a color for hookers and harlequins.”

It’s the reason Chloe chose it, and it’s the reason she’s chosen it now.

I watch as she carefully paints her deformed toes, the seven that remain swollen and peeling, the nails cracked and yellow. The red is gruesome, eruptions of blood from tattered wounds.

I no longer worry that Vance’s visit will put her over the edge. Chloe is already there. She walked to the other side the night I sat with her in the cold, and she never came back. Something irrevocably changed in her, a resoluteness not of despair but of something much less malleable, a maladaptive reaction to her lack of control that night. She willed her heart to stop, begged for death, but her pulse continued to beat. Now she has the power to determine her fate, and that’s exactly what she intends to do.

She’s really messed up, and nobody knows it. They think it’s her fingers and toes. I thought it was Vance. It’s neither.

I scan her room for clues to why now. No answer exists except Why not now? It’s probably as simple as the fact that my dad and mom are gone and she is alone. Perhaps this is all she’s been waiting for.

She finishes the top coat, admires her morbid creation, then switches her iPod to play Metallica’s “Fade to Black,” bopping to the music as she applies her makeup. She takes her time, and I wonder what is taking my dad and Vance so long, now wishing for them to get here.

Her makeup complete—her eyes traced in coal liner and shaded smoky gray, her foundation thick and ghostly, her lips painted the color of wine—she dances to our closet and chooses a knee-length satin white dress that was originally Aubrey’s. It was bought for Aubrey’s debutante ball when she was sixteen. She outgrew it a month later, and it became Chloe’s.

It’s a little loose on Chloe, but it looks better that way, making her appear waifish, the ivory satin swimming around her arms and draping off her thin hips.

She is pulling up the zipper when the doorbell rings. At first she ignores it, but when it rings again, she pirouettes out of the closet and scrambles down the stairs, surprisingly nimble and unaffected by her missing toes.

“Mo,” she says when she pulls open the door.

Mo’s eyes pulse once as she takes in my sister’s bizarre getup: the white dress, her burgundy lips, the mortician foundation, and her ruby-painted toes.

“Hey, Clover,” Mo says, her face revealing nothing.

“What’s up?” Chloe asks.

“I need your help.”

Chloe’s mouth skews to the side. “I’m kind of busy,” she says without irony.

“It can’t wait,” Mo says, the slight quiver in her voice betraying her alarm over realizing she might have arrived in the nick of time. “Please, Clover, you’re the only one who can help. You need to come with me.”

A beat of less than a second that feels like an hour passes before Chloe shrugs, and Mo pulls her out the door.

Chloe doesn’t have shoes on, but they’re not going far, only to Mo’s backyard half a block away.

They walk across the Kaminskis’ thick, manicured lawn to the deck that overhangs the beach below. In the corner is the Jacuzzi. Halfway there, Chloe stops and her head tilts. I hear it as well. High-pitched peeps and squeaks that make my heart jump.

Mo walks ahead of her and lifts the corner of the tarp that covers the Jacuzzi to reveal a shoebox holding four kittens no larger than gerbils. The littermates cluster around each other, crying and stumbling over one another, desperate and sightless.

Chloe doesn’t step closer. Instead her toes curl into the grass, clenching the earth.

She’s still too far to see them, but their tiny screams are deafening, the sound a torturous, nails-on-chalkboard kind of horrible—God’s way of protecting the young, a unique decibel of desperation reserved for babies that is impossible to ignore.

Mo carries the box to the grass and sets it at Chloe’s feet, causing Chloe to look down.

“Oh,” she says, dropping to her knees. “Look at them. Poor little things.”

Mo lifts her face to the starlit heavens and mouths, Thank you.

“Where’s their mother?” Chloe says, using her forefinger to stroke the back of a gray kitten who is meowing up a storm as he blindly scrabbles over his siblings.

“I don’t know,” Mo says. “I found them near the steps.”