Good Girls Lie(113)
She’s older. I mean, we all are, but I’ve aged a bit more than she. Granted, I’ve spent more time in the sun and she has a monthly appointment at the La Mer spa, dropping thousands at a time on treatments, but eleven years isn’t much time.
Still, she looks good. Fit. Healthy. A few barely perceptible lines on her forehead, the blond hair carefully highlighted now instead of natural. Still tall and elegantly proportioned.
Today is her thirtieth birthday.
She didn’t use her special day as an excuse to get out of the scheduled trip—she’s too responsible for that. She doesn’t mind spending the day alone. Though her wife protested, she wants the time to herself. To think. To reflect. A nice overnight flight to London, pampered by the flight attendants on British Airways. Life could be worse.
Life can always be worse.
This plane is set up with four seats across–one by each window, two in the center. She prefers to sit in the center seat, 2C, so I’ve chosen the one next to her as if we’re traveling together. The seats become beds, our legs angling away at a 30-degree angle, leaving our heads only a foot apart. It is fitting, really, when you think about how much time we spent plotting and planning.
I listen to her every word. I know her every move. She thinks she’s protected, but she’s not. She never was.
The pills were meant for me. I mean, this is no way to live, skulking about, lurking, spying on my lost sister, watching her lead the life I should have had. Some call it stalking, but when it’s information gathering, I think spying suffices.
I collected them assiduously the entire time I was watching over Piper as she lay dying, poor girl, before they realized the meds weren’t working and switched her to the Fentanyl that robbed her of the last bits of her sanity, then the slow drip of morphine that eventually killed her. Took her a few years to finally give it up.
A pill for you, a pill for me. Though I’ve never taken one, never indulged. It would have been so much easier if I had. They are strong, so strong they made Piper see dancing unicorns and butterflies—a better thing to see, I suppose, than the dark edges of a cloak and the reflection of your own wasted face in the scythe.
The police moved in and out of her room in the rehab facility for weeks, the crow-eyed woman and the bear of a man, thinking she would remember how the fire started, what she saw that day, but her memory was seared away like the last of her flesh. They thought they could solve three mysteries at once if they understood her garbled words—Becca, Camille, the fire. They assumed I turned to ash like the rest of the school.
They were wrong.
I should have just killed the poor girl, put her out of her pain. But I wanted to keep my sister close, somehow, so I became Piper’s titular caretaker. The BFF from school who wouldn’t leave her side. Where was her real BFF? After a single, brief visit at the beginning, Vanessa never came again. Which made it easy to pose as her.
Was I doing penance? Perhaps.
The nurses loved me. No one doubted my sincerity. No one thought twice about my devotion to my friend. Lucky for me, I suppose.
No, I never gobbled down her pills, as much as I wanted to, as much as I knew they’d make my pain go away. I’ve been saving them for the proper time. For a while, I thought I might take them all at once, standing on a stone bridge, watching the snow kiss the Seine. Perhaps I would change my mind at the last minute and throw them into the gray water. Perhaps I would keep them taped to the back of the bathroom mirror in the flat I would rent, let the delicious temptation of them sing to me day after day.
And then I saw her, quite by chance the first time—the first time—in the street, those red-soled heels clicking as she navigated desiccated dog shit on the grate in front of her Upper East Side brownstone, and I knew exactly what to do with the pills.
Takeoff is smooth. Dinner is served. The meal is tasteless, cardboard; drenching it in salt doesn’t help a bit. I sip the wine, a meager cabernet—really, I expected better, almost a shame to even call it so—drink a cup of the freshly overbrewed tea, then wait for the bathroom lines to clear before taking my bag and stepping into the tiny space.
Eight pills? Nine? How many will it take to kill a woman of her size? I have forty. Forty pilfered OxyContin. One for you, sweet sister, one for me. I was afraid the security agent was going to ask to see the prescription bottle, so I used one of my old antibiotic bottles, excavated from the shoebox under my sink, the label so faded the date and name are indiscernible.
I twist open the top and shake one into my hand. Large, cylindrical, chalk white. Lick the edge, savoring the divinity in the acrid taste on my tongue.
Mmm. Death tastes so good.
It takes me a full five minutes to grind them into a fine powder with the heel of my shoe—not red-soled, I’ll have you know—and return to my seat.
She sees me then, though she still has no idea who I am. I am gracious, as expected.
“Good flight?”
“Is that a question?”
Rude.
I want to launch into the speech I’ve rehearsed, the conversation to make it seem like I’ve only just recognized her, a hand on her arm, lightly, gently, my mouth in a tiny O of recognition.
Wait, aren’t you the woman who went to the private school that burned down? I know I saw you in the papers recently, with the former dean, what’s her name?
Westhaven.
That’s right. She’s a big-name author now. Wrote a novel about the school. Married to some young buck she was seeing, oh, wasn’t that the scandal?