All our lives together, Rose won every fight with her words and with her might. Never once did I stand a chance. But now as my hands began to shake, as my heart banged in my chest, I stood and reached up and, with everything I had in me, I shoved her back. In an instant, she lost her footing and stumbled toward those stairs. For a moment, it seemed like we could stop what came next. She reached her hand out, and I grabbed for it, because I hadn’t meant for this to happen. But our hands didn’t catch one another in time, and so she tumbled backward down the stairs.
After Rose hit the cement floor with a great crash, a thick silence followed. I thought of that cassette tape when my parents’ voices had stopped, those tiny wheels spinning round and round as their words echoed in my mind: I guess what I am trying to say is that we are like any other parents. We are trying to raise our daughters with good Christian values in a world that is increasingly secular. A feeling of shame, a feeling of pure horror, filled me up at the realization of what I’d done. Useless as it sounded, I spoke to her down in the basement. “I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so so sorry.”
My sister did not respond, and the dread that this could be more grave an accident than I first understood took hold. I pounded down the steps to where she lay, her right leg bent in the most unnatural position. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Please tell me you are okay.”
“It’s my leg,” she said, and I heard in her voice that she was crying, releasing the kind of exhausted sobs I’d never heard from Rose before. “You did something to my leg.”
Those flyers on the bulletin board at the police station—in my panic, they came back to me. Hadn’t one advised never to move a person in the event of an accident? Get help—that was always the advice. I was about to go back upstairs to the phone and do just that when Rose spoke through her tears, “Remember that rule they always used to say?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Mom and Dad. The rule that we could always tell them whatever we were thinking or feeling, and they would do their best to understand. Do you remember that, Sylvie?”
“Yes,” I told her. “But let’s not—”
“It wasn’t true,” Rose said. “It wasn’t true.”
I didn’t want to talk about any of that now, but even so, I heard myself asking, “What do you mean?”
“When I was fourteen, I first told them. They encouraged it, after all, always repeating that dumb rule. But when I said I felt different from other girls, you know what they did? They acted like it was some sort of fucking possession. They prayed over me like one of those supposedly haunted people who came here in need of their help. And they told me to keep my feelings a secret. The more it didn’t change, though, the more they prayed. I tried to give them the daughter they wanted. I tried to be more like you. I brought all those boys home. But it didn’t work. So they sent me away to that home where I was supposed to get better. And you know what? I did get better. I met Franky.
“Even though Franky’s parents had sent her there too, she already knew the place was a joke. She made me realize there was nothing wrong with the way I felt.” Rose’s words sputtered out as her crying grew stronger. “ ‘Her coming was my hope each day,’ ” she said in a broken voice, “ ‘her parting was my pain; the chance that did her steps delay. Was ice in every vein.’ ”
“Rose, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But we’ve got to get—”
“Those are the words from that book you used to underline. Jane Eyre. I remember it, because it’s how I felt about Franky. And anyway, we planned to get out of there and save money and find some way to live a normal life together in time. But when I got home, I’d already been replaced by Abigail. So I gave up trying. And the fights with Mom and Dad—Dad, in particular—got worse. And so one night I’m out. And who do I run into but Albert Lynch?”
“I know,” I told her. “You don’t have to say. We need to get you help. And I told you, I figured it all out.”
“No, you didn’t!” she screamed. “Because I bet you didn’t figure out the way I felt in all of this, did you?”
The rage, the sadness—those things in her voice frightened me into silence.
“Did you?” she screamed.
I shook my head.