SANDRA
“I always wanted a brother,” Eva says quietly. She pauses. “Mom would never tell me anything about my dad. She said I was born from a tube. But she was lying.”
“Now you know,” Alice says softly.
“I think . . . I think that’s all I wanted,” Eva says. “To know.” In the quiet, her mother continues sniffling into Caroline’s shoulder. “I wish she wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t her fault. I know it wasn’t.” Then: “I think I’m ready now.”
“Ready for what?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. For a second, I feel her trembling like a violin string, vibrating out a high note of fear and loss. “Ready for what?” I say, a little louder.
A sharp pain goes through me, a feeling like being socked in the stomach. Alice cries out. For a second, everything goes dark. When everything comes into focus again—the dining room, the bones of our staircases and the doors like jaws that open and close—I feel lighter, and emptier, too. Like I’ve just taken the world’s most epic dump.
“Eva?” Alice whispers. No answer.
She’s gone.
“Well.” I don’t know why I feel sad about it. But I do. I’m sad and sorry and jealous, all at once. “There you have it. Vivian and Eva. That’s two out of three missing children accounted for.”
“Stop, Sandra.” Alice’s voice is shaky, like she’s the victim, like I’m the bad guy.
“It’s too late, Alice,” I say. “There’s no use in pretending anymore.”
She sucks in a deep breath: a whistle through a teakettle. “What about you?” she asks.
“Not even for me.”
There’s a moment of silence. In that minute, I can practically feel our walls coming down, slowly down, pulled earthward by the pressures of gravity and decay.
Alice says, “Why did you tell me Martin shot you? For all these years, all our years together, you lied about it. Or did you really forget?”
“Does it matter?” I haven’t felt so tired since I was alive—too tired to keep the truth back, to stuff it into dark corners and keep it shored up behind heavy walls. It comes creeping out into the open, like a mouse sniffing around a darkened house. “You knew the truth all along. You were there.”
“I was there,” Alice agrees. “I was waiting for you to remember.”
“I remembered,” I say. It hurts to speak, to think, to remember. As if we’ve been planed and sawed down into splinters—as if everything is about to fall. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”
We’re quiet for a bit. Adrienne is still staring dull-eyed as an idiot. Trenton has torn her napkin to strips. All of them so clear and sharp, like individual cardboard cutouts. In that moment I’d trade places with any of them, just to have a beginning and an end.
“Why did you do it?” Alice asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” I say, although that’s not exactly true, either. I did it for a hundred reasons and for no reason at all. Because Martin told me I needed help and I knew it was his way of saying he was getting tired of me. Because I couldn’t stand to keep drinking and I couldn’t stand to stop. Because I was so tired that even sleeping didn’t help me at all.
But mostly because I was lonely. It was like living at the bottom of a pit. There was only one way out. “They’re digging,” Alice says. She’s gotten her voice under control. “Under the willow tree.”
“I told you,” I say. No point in lying anymore. I blamed Martin for not loving me, until the blame and what happened became the same story.
Everything comes up in the end.