Burn Our Bodies Down(50)

eighteen





i wake up still in my clothes from yesterday, Katherine’s Bible on the nightstand, the photo I found in Mom’s propped up behind it. One of them dead, the other haunted.

I roll onto my back, stare at the ceiling. Gram said Katherine died before I was born. Before she could have a daughter who’s my age now. So where does that leave the girl in the field? Not a cousin, and apparently not a sister. Nothing Gram will talk about. Nobody’s again, nobody’s but mine.

This is only my second morning waking at Fairhaven, but it feels like years since I got to Phalene. The fire, the girl, Katherine. I thought it would be easier without Mom, thought I’d find the answers I want. But all I’ve found are bits of the wreckage she left and more questions.

I will not spend another day here in the dark. I will not let Gram lie to me again.

I change and head downstairs. She’s already in the kitchen when I get there, standing at the stove, shucking corn and watching a pot of water as she brings it to boil. Fairhaven stretches out on either side of this room. Dark corners and locked doors, and I remember yesterday morning how I thought the house could show me something Gram didn’t want me to see. I was wrong. This is the only part with any truth hiding inside. The only part that matters—the rickety table and Gram at the counter, a tiny smile just for me.

“You feeling better?” she asks. “You were quiet at dinner. last night.”

I was. Wolfed everything down and went back upstairs as soon as I could, because I couldn’t stand it, sitting there with her like everything was fine. I can’t stand it now, either. She’s keeping things from me, just like Mom. A lifetime of people deciding for me what I need to know. That stops now.

“What were they like?” Gram’s proved she won’t give me anything about the girl from the fire, so I start with the twins. Katherine told me some of it in those entries. But I need to hear it from Gram.

“The girls?” she says, looking up from the corn. I examine her for some relief, for something that suggests she’s happy to be telling me the truth. There’s nothing. Nothing I can recognize, anyway. “They were inseparable. I suppose most twins are.”

That’s not what I’m here for. Not some rosy picture of two girls in matching dresses, laughing and holding hands. There’s no way that’s how it really was.

“But they must have fought,” I say. I don’t bring up the Bible, the broken arm. Maybe Gram’s already read everything in there, but as long as I never find out for sure, I can keep it just for me.

“Of course they did.” Gram picks up another ear of corn from the pile and begins to shuck it. I grimace, remembering the texture of it from the field, the way some of the ears split and spiraled around each other. “Some days they were Mini this and Mini that, and some days Katherine wouldn’t stop stealing your mother’s clothes.”

Mini. Again. “Is that what Katherine called Mom?”

Gram drops the corn into the pot, and she doesn’t even wince as some of the boiling water spatters onto her skin. “They shared it. They shared everything, most of the time.”

But nobody shared a thing with me, did they? Not about this. So I try something else.

“How did the fire start, anyway?” I ask, sitting down at the table.

Gram raises an eyebrow. “Which one?”

“The apricot grove. You know, the ‘accident,’?” I add sarcastically.

“There is no need to take that tone.” She pokes at the water with a wooden spoon, frowning. “Who knows why that sort of thing happens?”

“It’s just a little weird,” I say. “Two fires on the same farm.”

“Well, the world is wide and full of happenstance,” Gram says. I don’t bother calling that the bullshit it so clearly is. I’m not getting anything here.

She pulls an ear out of the water by her fingertips and sets it on a plate, sprinkling salt over it. “Eat.”

“For breakfast?” It comes out sharp, my frustration taking hold of me. She finds a way out of everything. Every single thing.

“We all make do with what we have.” She lays it on the table in front of me and waits, like she’s expecting to watch me until I finish. I ignore the plate and get up instead, going to the fridge. Gram gives a small exasperated sigh, and I hold back a smile. Maybe I can’t get the truth out of her, but I know I can piss her off.

The fridge is alarmingly bare except for two sticks of butter, a plastic bag of wilting green beans and rows and rows of bottled water. None of this will do the trick. I want something I’m not supposed to have. I want to show Gram how much her rules mean to me. I shut the fridge and swing open the freezer.

“Margot,” Gram says, “please leave that closed. It’s not for you.”

But I’m not listening. The freezer is stuffed full of apricots. Not an inch of space left for anything else. Some of them packed in plastic bags, some of them still fresh enough that when I reach out to touch them, they give under my fingertip. I want to ask about them, but the whole thing is weird enough that I don’t even know what the question would be.

Gram takes hold of the freezer door and nudges me out of the way, shutting it firmly. “That’s enough of that,” she says.

It’s the sputter of a car engine that keeps me from arguing. I recognize that sound. The whine, the choked growl. How many times have we scraped together enough money to get it fixed? How many times has it broken down again?