She peered at me, and I was rewarded with a trace more uncertainty in her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”
“I wish I did. I would like to remember hurting her. Mostly, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to learn how to be me. That she crawled into my head when I was too young to fight back and it’s taken me twenty-eight years to find my own thoughts, to be my own person. Our mother was crazy, Abigail. And we were too little to fight her. But we’re grown up now, and she’s dead. She doesn’t have to call the shots anymore. We can be ourselves. We can finally win.”
“I tried to kill her that night,” Abigail murmured, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were dead, I thought. And she was waking up and I couldn’t survive without you. I knew that, Charlie. Even back then, I knew I wasn’t that strong. So I picked up the lamp, and I was going to hit her. Except, next thing I knew, she kicked my legs and I fell to the floor, and while I was lying there, she picked up the lamp and whacked me with it.”
I jolted. I felt a shiver…no, a shock wave…move through my entire body. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was the insulin nose-diving my blood sugar level, or the seismic shift of a long-buried memory.
“I watched you die,” I heard myself whisper. “I…she…she killed you. With the lamp. I remember that. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t raise my arm, yell, beg, nothing. I was stuck on the floor, feeling so cold and so hot. And screaming on the inside. I remember that. Feeling my whole body scream and scream as you fell down and she got up, but no sound came out. Nothing happened. I screamed, and there she was with the lamp, raising it up, bringing it down. Killing you.
“I’d kept you safe for so long, Abby. You have no idea. The nights I fled with you through the woods, or shoved you under the bed, or hid you in the crawlspace. I’d failed with the others. Hadn’t been smart enough, strong enough. But with you…by the time you were three or four, I remember thinking I’d done it. I’d saved you and you were mine, and I loved you. I loved you, Abigail.”
My voice wavered, broke. My body started shaking uncontrollably while my thoughts scattered, flew apart, refused to come back together. Losing it. Blood sugar plummeting. Confusion, disorientation. Grief. Genuine grief. My baby sister had died. And in the crazy way my mind worked, I hadn’t remembered it, but I had known it. I believed I had watched Abby die and that had broken me in ways no doctor had been able to put back together again.
“But I didn’t,” Abigail said. Her own hands were shaking, the gun unsteady. I should move, take advantage.
I couldn’t get my legs to respond. Instead, I reached for the wall, feeling the world lurch again, desperate for balance.
Hadn’t practiced for this, I thought. Hadn’t prepared for this complication.
“I lived,” Abigail continued, her voice hoarse, both accusing and mournful. “She took me away and it was terrible and awful and I prayed for you every night, Charlie. You were my big sister and you’d promised to save me and I prayed for you. Night after night after night. Then I was ten, and the first man, and it hurt. I cried and begged for you to save me. But you never came. You never saved me. Instead, I turned fourteen, and sold myself to a professional pervert just to get out. Except it wasn’t quite enough, so I had to kill him. Except that wasn’t enough either, so I had to track her down and kill her, too. I thought I’d feel better then. But it turned out, that still wasn’t enough.”
I stared at my sister. “You killed our mother?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “Tell me when.”
“January twenty-one. You killed her January twenty-one.”
“Yes. Finally, you understand. I used her own pillow and did it just the way she taught me.”
I wondered if I should feel horrified. I wondered if I should feel grateful. “But…it should’ve been over then. That should’ve been enough.”