The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(49)

“Not here?” I asked.

“No, and they said she was bipolar. Gave her meds. My dad made good with the teacher and the school. And a week later, she was back in class. No report filed with the police, nothing on her school record. It was as if it had never happened. But by the middle of November, she started skipping school. Ran away for two nights. One of our neighbors found her in the ravine behind our house—she’d been camping out in his shed.”

“Jesus.”

“She’d gone off her meds. Not that they were the right ones. But that’s when I first noticed the cycle thing. She gets agitated, withdraws, gets agitated, withdraws.… And by the time Thanksgiving weekend rolled around, she was agitated. Talking to herself. Constantly startled and on edge. Making a lot of weird gestures. Stopping in the middle of sentences.

“We were having family over that afternoon,” he continued in a lower voice. “And I was in the kitchen, arguing with my parents about her. My dad didn’t want my grandmother to see Jillian like that. He was talking about checking her back into the hospital for the holiday, and my mom was defending her, and I was arguing with both of them. And Jillian walked in on it.”

He cracked his knuckles and looked away toward the slowing traffic, so I couldn’t see his face. But the tension stiffening his arms was telling.

“It all happened so fast,” he said. “Everyone was yelling, and then I saw the knife glint in the kitchen light, and Mom was bleeding through her shirt. Dad wrestled Jillian away, and she wasn’t Jillie—not in her eyes. She was someone else. But there wasn’t time to … do anything about it. Mom was bleeding out on the floor, and Jillie had gone catatonic. Dad told me to lock her in the basement. He thought she might run again. Maybe try to hurt someone else.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, so I pressed. “What happened to your mom?”

“Dad and I followed the ambulance. They had her in surgery for an hour. The knife didn’t puncture anything important. Mostly muscle damage around her shoulder. That’s why if you ever see her at political events with my dad, she waves funny—she still can’t lift her left arm all the way.”

I recalled seeing a couple of ignorant comments about that online before I stopped snooping around for stuff about the Vincents, but I didn’t say this, and he continued his story.

“Once we found out Mom was okay, I went back home to check on Jillie. Dad told me not to unlock the basement until he got back. But she wouldn’t answer, and I couldn’t hear her moving around.”

He slowly shook his head several times, reliving it all in his mind, I supposed. When he spoke again, his voice was so gravelly I could barely hear him. “I walked downstairs, calling for her. I couldn’t find her at first. When I flipped on the light in the game room, all I could see was blood. On the carpet, her clothes … I couldn’t tell where it was all coming from. I found the neck wound, and she was still breathing, so I called 911 and tried to stop the bleeding. But it was coming from her wrists, too. I thought she was dying in my arms, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Several things clicked into place: Jillian’s scars; my drawing of Minnie, dead, with her forearm dissected in exactly the same place; Jack fainting at the sight of it.

Now I was breathing too fast. I wanted to touch him—console him somehow. But was that what he needed? What was I supposed to say? I didn’t know. But I tried to picture the girl I’d just seen—chatty, nervous, and almost shy—doing everything Jack had just told me. I couldn’t.

“There was never any break-in,” I said.

He shook his head. “That was to keep the press out of it. My dad’s opponents would go nuts if they knew it was really Jillian who’d stabbed my mom. They still found out that she’d been hospitalized, but the ‘official’ reason was stress and trauma due to the supposed break-in, and my dad’s staff then came up with the cover story about Jillian going away to boarding school in Europe. The press bought it, and everyone forgot about her.”

I didn’t say anything, but after a few moments Jack dropped his head and mumbled, “How did no one see the knife? We still can’t figure out how that happened. Dad knocked it out of her hand. I saw it for a second. If it hadn’t been so chaotic … I just…”

I took a deep breath, hugged my stomach, and leaned forward to get closer to him. “If it hadn’t been so chaotic, she might’ve found another way. If not that day, then another. You seriously cannot be blaming yourself for this—you don’t, do you?”

“No. I mean, I know better. Logically. We all go to family counseling every week. So believe me, I’ve looked at it from every angle. Our therapist says it’s survivor guilt—I got the good genes, and she got the screwed-up ones. It’s worse because we’re twins.”

“But you can’t change that. And she’s better, yeah?”

“Better, but she’ll never be okay. She won’t have a normal life. She won’t ever go to school again, and she won’t get married or have kids. And even though I saved her once, I can’t always be there. I think about going to college, and I don’t know how that will work. What will she do if I can’t see her for an entire semester?”

“You could go somewhere local. See her on the weekends.”