The Water Cure(56)

I thought of Lia and Llew standing among the trees, face to face, or lying down in any place they could find, and I was jealous, not because of him, but because of what it felt like to be seen. To be known. So I closed my eyes and lived through her for a second, tried to spark up the dormant connection of our minds with something approaching guilt.

Thumb to the cheekbone. Palm cupping the ear. The birds, their jittery song. Cicadas, the background thrum of the sea, oppressive heat. Llew is quiet. He understands that seduction has to happen if he is going to get her to risk her life. That the light has to touch down in the right place. The heart must be willing. The heart must be a traitor.

But we are all traitors in some way. Once Llew was sitting next to me and he put a hand on my knee when nobody else was in the room. I lifted it up at once and he replaced it. It wasn’t funny. I lifted up his hand again and scratched him, hard. And he was shocked. His eyes, narrowing, told me he wasn’t a person used to failing.

I stuck closer to Sky than usual after that, surprised her with my attentions. I thought I saw him appraise her once, a quick consideration – eyes from head to toes. That was enough for me. Yet when I told her not to be alone with him, she looked horrified at the very idea. Lia was the only one who was not afraid. Or more accurately, she was a person made brave, made desperate, by necessity, and finally I can understand this.

I can see how it went. What else was there for me to do besides observe, watch my sisters as they changed around me? Llew keeping close to Lia, trailing her movements in the dim evening light, through windows as we stretched. The reaction started with his arrival. It was inevitable, unstoppable.

Then the boredom. I could sense it radiating off him as the heat built, in the insolence of his body as he lay by the pool. He pulled away from her. He stopped his looking. Lia had proved a disappointment. She was just like every other woman. Eager and tender-hearted. That knot of grief in her chest begging to be undone.

It is not a crime, to lose interest. Perhaps even he did not recognize the particular cruelty of his actions.

The anger of the women seemed a force from outside them. It was an anger that welled up deep in their chests. Without it, they would not have been able to survive. I personally have always welcomed it. The moments of power. The burning in my stomach.

Be angry, I wanted to tell Lia. She moved around the house in an underwater trance. I recognized it too well. She couldn’t see that I was trying to protect her. She couldn’t see that Llew was nowhere near perfect, that he was just slippery-eyed and opportunistic. In her strangeness, she deserved far more than the ordinary. Even I, knowing nothing about anything, knew he was ordinary. Knew he should be trembling in front of her. Don’t be grateful! Be angry! Be tough! I knew she was capable of it. It made his reduction of her all the worse. To see my sister like that, weak, when in many ways she is the strongest of the three of us.

I still remember the love therapy when I was ordered to hold a flaming candle against my palm for as long as I could. But the smell of the melting wax terrified me. I was not used to feeling or showing terror. I remember you and Mother looking at each other as I cried and trembled, as if you had isolated something.

Lia took the candle instead. That year, she was my loved-most, and I was hers. The irons had aligned. Double the love. Double the luck. She hesitated only a little before moving her other hand to the flame. We all watched as the fire licked at her skin and the wind moved the sand over our bare feet. One thousand and one. One thousand and two. One thousand and three.

There was a small charred hole in her palm for the next month. It wept yellow water and Mother washed it with antiseptic twice a day. Lia didn’t cry once.

There is much I owe my sister.

Lia and I are the only ones to go downstairs, looking for Llew. We insist Sky stays behind. The gun is too heavy in my hand. There is no sound or sign of him. He could be hiding already, could have sensed the change in the atmosphere. Lia shakes next to me. There is no way to make this easy for her.

In the dining room, I rest the gun on a white-clothed table and flex my hands. We move to the doors to search for his shape on the water, on the beach. Between the kitchen, reception, the dining room, the ballroom, there are too many doors into this house, more than we could cover even if Sky were here too. Think, I tell myself. Think.

‘Maybe he’s in the pool,’ Lia suggests.

‘No,’ we hear a male voice behind us say, and of course we turn to find Llew holding the gun in his hand, eyes on us.

Maybe he did tremble in front of her, in private, when there was nobody to see, nobody to pretend for. I cannot pass judgements on the love of other people. I have done a lot of wrong.

Long afternoons in her room. My sister’s wide, unpretty smile. I only imagined them to see if I could visualize harm being done to her. And I tried to recall how Llew went around afterwards. Whether he walked like someone falling in love. Because you did. Your steps slowed. Your eyes became heavy, you became forgetful. That’s when I knew we were in trouble, a trouble deeper than I could have dreamed of.

‘Are you going to explain why you’re carrying this around?’ Llew asks. He is smiling. He is a fucking piece of work.

‘Just in case,’ I say. I meet his eyes. I want to spit on the ground in front of him.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Where’s James? I can’t find him anywhere.’

We are silent.

‘Where’s James, girls?’ he asks again, much louder, no longer smiling, and I am sick of him – I am sick of the men, of how they reduce us, how even now I am cowering.