Burn Our Bodies Down(49)

i won’t ask her

do NOT ask her

she’ll get that same look because maybe we grew out of going to the apricot grove to hide from mom (i wish we hadn’t) but we didn’t grow out of mini wanting to rip my eyelashes out every now and then so just don’t ask her

if she remembers let her keep it to herself



I look up from the page. Stare into the dark, across Katherine’s bed, into my own eyes in her dusty mirror. Mini—Gram said it was something she used to call my mom. So that’s her. That’s Josephine. And she hurt her own sister.

She was young when it happened, if Katherine is remembering right. And I’m sure it was an accident. After all, Katherine doesn’t seem afraid of her. Instead she seems bright, and quick, and all these things I can almost see in my mother, if they weren’t hidden in the places not meant for me.

The next entry, if I can call it that, is on the opposite page, running vertically down the margins. And all it says is:


good morning mini snored so loud that i have been awake since five thirty and i am going to put salt in her cereal to take my revenge and if i die i die



Sisters. Just normal sisters.

But I keep turning pages. I keep looking. Because there’s a piece of Mom in Katherine’s entries that I recognize. Was she always like that? Always defensive, always keeping people away from the things she thinks are hers? Katherine can tell me.

I have to turn all the way to the New Testament to find Katherine’s handwriting again, this time in pencil and harder to read, dipping in and out around a passage about charity.


we took the x-rays today and mine were fine but they talked about mini’s for a long time because i guess they were weird (which oh great one more thing to add to the “those nielsen girls sure are strange” script everybody in town seems to follow) (it would probably help if mom weren’t still keeping us inside practically all the time and dressing us like paper dolls from another planet)

dr howland sketched a copy of hers for her to keep because he couldn’t exactly give her the whole thing off the light board but she couldn’t even look at it

she threw it away so i grabbed it out of the trash and stuck it in here because i think she’ll want it one day and i wish i could tell her it’s fine that it doesn’t make a difference between us but she won’t listen

she made me sleep in the guest room for the night and it’s not fair because this isn’t my fault so why is she punishing me

when i tried to talk to her she just kept saying “now we’re not the same now we’re not the same” and i know what she means i know why that hurts because she’s mini and i don’t know how i’d recognize myself if i hadn’t learned to recognize her first but still

maybe it’s not such a bad thing maybe it’s fine you know maybe this means that we can be whatever we want and still love each other but i just don’t know how to tell her that

is it like this with brothers

we don’t have a brother the closest thing we had was richard but he went to college ages ago (probably when mini broke my arm actually) and he never seemed like this

mom would tell me the bible has all the right advice although she’s been saying that less lately but when we were like ten and eleven that was the answer to everything

“what does scripture say” like she didn’t think she could teach us how to be good people only this book could

i don’t think either of us is really a good person but maybe there’s time for that

or there would be if mini would just TALK to me i hate when she’s like this i hate when she disappears i miss her i miss her i’m pathetic



A pit opens in my stomach. I recognize too much of myself there, in that last line. Katherine, begging my mom to open herself even the smallest bit, and missing her, and hating it. She was always like this. I guess I shouldn’t take it personally, then.

Tucked between this page and the next is another piece of paper. That must be the sketch Katherine mentioned, the one of the X-ray. I unfold it, find it still crisp and white, preserved. The drawing is carefully done. A rib cage. Bones shaded and spindly. And an arrow, pointing to the heart where it’s tucked inside, on the left.

Wait. I’ve seen my own X-rays, at the doctor’s the year I got pneumonia. They didn’t look like this. The heart is on the left of the paper. That would put it on the right of her body, opposite where it’s meant to be.

I blink, surprised. Mom’s heart, mirrored. I had no idea. She never told me. And I guess she didn’t have to, but still. It seems important. Like something I should’ve known.

And it’s familiar somehow. I think back, scrape through every memory I can, and there—an opposite heart. Position inverted. I saw that at the morgue, written on the report for the girl’s body. Her heart is switched, just like Mom’s.

A shiver shakes through me. Of course everything knots together. I knew that. But this makes it impossible to ignore. Makes the possibilities I’d written off rear their heads. Maybe the inversion is genetic, is a marker that the girl really was Mom’s. That I’m not.

Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe there will always be something about this family I’m not meant to understand.

I fold the sketch and slot it back where I found it. In a minute I’ll go back to my room. Wash my hands, go down to dinner and try to forget everything that happened today. And when I go to sleep I’ll cross my fingers and hope I don’t dream about Mom’s voice mail message, about her saying sorry over and over again as she pushes her sister out of an apricot tree.