Burn Our Bodies Down(77)

“I’m sorry,” she says. I haven’t heard her sound old until now. It makes my heart clench, an ache I recognize from years with Mom. “I really am.” She reaches out, touches the edge of the cut she left me.

I step back. I don’t want that from her. I want answers. “They didn’t show up with Katherine and Mom, did they?”

“No. No, it was just the twins,” she says softly. “Until Katherine died. Until your mother put her back in the grove. Like planting a seed, I suppose.”

The truth of what happened like a black hole, both of us walking the rim of it. Katherine didn’t just die. Mom killed her, and she did it because Gram said someone had to.

“But Mom burned the grove down,” I say. A reminder to myself that Mom tried. She did.

Gram nods. “She thought it would be over that way. We both did. But the grove grew back, and it’s never really over, is it? You’re proof of that. They all are.” Gram settles back against the counter, and her shadow reaches out, blends into the dark. “It was easy enough when they were young. I could take them in, give them a few months of a good life before I put them down.”

I flinch. Putting them down—that’s exactly what it was.

“But they got older and older,” she goes on. “I’d find them in the grove and they’d be, well. Your age, I imagine.” Her voice goes tight, frustration wound through. “There was an order. There was a process. I had it under control.”

She never did. Not for a second. Doesn’t she understand? The apricots, teeth inside like pits. The corn, growing like blood and body. It’s everywhere. A whole living system, all of it linked together. She took those girls, made their cradle a grave, and it just kept tumbling over itself. Worse and worse. But she won’t admit it.

“I did,” she says. “I had it. And then one runs away right when you get here and—” She breaks off. I watch her swallow hard, watch her composure come back. “I was going to have another chance, with you. I wasn’t going to lose you like I lost Jo, after Katherine. I never thought I’d see her here again.” She laughs, the sound empty and harsh. “But what a lucky thing.”

“Lucky?” I wouldn’t call it that. I’ve never felt lucky in my life.

“That mess with the body, out on the highway. Your mother came here just in time. I was going to point the police to her and they’d leave us alone.” She wipes her palms on her skirt, adjusts the lie of it. “Then Theresa decided to make a scene.”

“It wouldn’t have worked anyway.” I smile, happy to have this over her. “Mom’s gone. She left.”

Gram snorts. “I suppose that’s no surprise. I’m surprised she came at all. She barely lasted two months here, after Katherine. I don’t think she could bear being here. Especially not once she knew about you.”

“And is that what’s next for me, then?” I say. “Another Nielsen girl?”

I don’t miss the way Gram’s eyes drop briefly to my stomach. “Not,” she says, “if we put a stop to all this. Which is what I was trying to do. I didn’t realize it was spreading past my land. If I’d known sooner…Well. I didn’t.”

“And you had to kill the Millers for that?” She looks a bit startled. I keep on. “I saw. I went to the house. Gram, how could you do—”

“I didn’t need all of them,” she says. “Just Tess. But it didn’t work out like that.”

Mr. Miller, wrapped around his daughter. The phone by Mrs. Miller’s hand. I will never forgive her for that. Whatever else I make myself understand, that will never be part of it.

The Millers—one name on that list of loose ends checked off. Then me.

There’s another, though. We both know it. Her.

I watch as she reaches into the nearby cutlery drawer and takes out a fork before spearing a bite of casserole straight out of the dish. There’s a weariness to her, so heavy she can barely stand upright.

Like planting a seed, she said about putting Katherine back.

But if that were true—if Katherine was really the start of everything—wouldn’t it be over by now? Mom knew enough. She’d seen the fire mark her sister’s skin. She’d seen what it could do. And she burned Katherine’s body.

I came along anyway.

There’s something else to this. I shut my eyes. Put myself back in the grove, at the nest of Nielsen girls. All of us with the same face. With mine.

But it isn’t mine, is it? And it isn’t Mom’s. I’ve always thought I looked like her, but the truth is that really, we both look like Gram. We both have her face.

Vera Nielsen, over and over again. Every one of us, just her. Mom, Katherine, me, those girls. Stranger than daughters. Stranger than sisters.

And of course it’s that way. Her genes, her DNA, warped by the chemical but still just hers—nothing else added in. Gram, and the rest of us. Branches off the root; patterns in the ink. Copies of the original.

I’m looking at Gram and I’m looking at myself, at my own face in fifty years. Watching myself as I turn to the sink and wash my hands again, as I try to get clean of Tess’s blood.

“I’m…,” I start. “We’re…” I can’t finish, but Gram nods anyway.