Burn Our Bodies Down(68)

Except. I look closer. I know my mother’s face better than I know my own. And it’s off. Just a little, but off. Everything on the wrong side. The freckle by the corner of her eye, the curve of her widow’s peak.

My mouth goes dry. That’s not my mom. That’s Katherine. And the girl with her face scratched out is Josephine.

Everything hits me at once. Every word written in that Bible at Fairhaven—hers. Every bit of guilt and fear—hers. It was Katherine who scratched out those photographs. Katherine who broke my mother’s arm, not the other way around.

My hands tremble as I open the envelope again and take out the rest. A bundle of paper, the texture thin and familiar. It has torn edges, is covered in careful letters inked in the spaces between the Scripture. This was ripped out of the Fairhaven Bible. The one I thought was Katherine’s.

The pages unfold, and I lay them out on the carpet. Mom left the rest of the book there, in her old room. She took this. She took her sister’s Bible like a memento. And she took these pages from her own. What’s in here that she wanted to keep?

I take a deep breath. Start reading.


it finally happened

i did it. i’m so sorry. i did it. i killed her. i’m so sorry mini. i’m so sorry i’m so sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry mini you have to forgive

katherine

katherine katherine katherine Katherine Katherine KATHERINE KATHERINE KATHERINE



Mom killed her sister. Killed her sister and wrote it down. It’s not a surprise, exactly. Not after what she said in the driveway. But that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

I rest my fingertips on the place where Katherine’s name turns ragged with grief. Everything I read back at Fairhaven—that was Mom, her fears and her worries, and if I were her, if I saw what she saw, maybe I’d end up where she did. I’m angry and I’m hurting, but it’s always there in me. The reaching. The want to understand her.

Well, this is what I was after. Whether I like it or not, I think we’ve been standing on thin ice our whole lives, this thing she did waiting underneath us.

I set my shoulders, keep reading.


why didn’t mom see why didn’t she understand why did she make this mine to do

i have to tell i have to tell someone but mom doesn’t want to hear and nobody does because nobody loves her the way i love her

i know it’s loved now past tense and everything but it never will be, not really

i will love my sister and i will wish we’d died together i will always wish it could have been just us forever



And what she got was me. I couldn’t have been much of a replacement for the sister she wanted to die with.


we turned eighteen. this is important. i know that even if i don’t know why.

things have been weird with us for a while but it was our birthday. it was the day we became the two of us. i wasn’t gonna let it be anything but ours.

we’ve been sleeping in different rooms. her in our old room and me in the guest room across the house, since the thing with the pictures (and everything after). i woke up and i got dressed in this hand-me-down from her, a dress she stopped liking and i started wanting. we’ve always been the same size. the same everything.

i thought it would make her happy. i need to say that right now. i thought that it would make her happy to see me in something that was hers.

i went into our room. mini katherine was still asleep. she’s been sleeping so much since she got sick. mom says it’s been a year, in and out of school, people talking about those Nielsen girls and their Nielsen mother, but i know better. since our sixteenth. that’s when something happened to her. that’s when she stopped being able to stand up, stopped keeping down food and started coughing up something that wasn’t quite blood.

so i woke her. i just wanted to see her. to talk to her. i would have climbed in bed next to her and stayed there all day. but she was so mad. she just wanted to sleep, or to not be near me, or both. i don’t know. i’ll never know.

i tried to get her to sit up. we could convince mom to let us watch TV, i think i told her. and she just started crying. she got out of bed and her legs were weak and her skin was so pale it was like she was disappearing right in front of me.

most of what she said i don’t (want to) remember. but she told me that she hated how it was, that she hated our birthday because it only reminded her more how different we are now. we’ve had this fight before. it never sounded like this. she’s never brought up the x-rays before. i thought she’d forgotten, honestly. that was my mistake.

“we’re different all the way inside.” i remember that exactly. we have known this for years. that we are like mirrors of each other, everything flipped. and i have never, ever cared.

but it matters mattered to her. because we were twins until we weren’t, until she got sick and i didn’t.

here, she said, and she picked up the prayer candle mom had lit for her and left on top of our dresser. and she said:

“i know what happens to me.”

she must have meant the fire. i saw it the day of our sixteenth. i was right. i was.

then she said:

“come here”

and i went. i would go anywhere she wanted me to. i watched her lift the candle. i saw that burn on her fingertip from our sixteenth birthday, saw the white lines spiraling across it and i promise you i’m not lying when i say i wanted them for my own. if that would make her happy. if that would get us back to how we were.