That night, they snuck out at midnight and went to the school, their boots crunching in the snow. With Beth’s hopscotch chalk, they wrote bad words on the wall of the school—words that Beth knew in theory but had never said aloud. They wrote them in blocky letters that didn’t look like loopy, girlish letters. When Beth got back to school after the break, she found that the boys had been questioned about the swear words, and two of them had gotten in trouble for it. No one ever asked questions of the girls.
Beth felt a little bit bad about that. But she knew what Lily would say: that the boys shouldn’t have bullied her in the first place. And really, Lily was right. Beth was a fast learner.
* * *
—
The Christmas Beth was twelve and Lily was fourteen, Mariana stayed home. They played Snakes and Ladders, which the girls were too old for, and Mariana drank through the entire game. By the end, she was slurring her words, tilted over on the sofa, drunk. The girls helped her upstairs to her bed, where she promptly fell asleep.
In the dim light of the bedroom, as half-frozen rain pelted the window, Lily looked down at Mariana, sprawled on the pillow. Beth watched Lily’s face, her eyes, as Lily watched the woman on the bed. Beth stared at the shape of Lily’s nose and chin, which were so like Mariana’s.
She had always known, deep down. Even when she didn’t understand how babies were made, when she didn’t understand anything about her own mother or her parents’ angry and complicated relationship, she had known. She still didn’t understand everything, but she’d guessed enough. “Your parents aren’t dead, are they?” she asked Lily, her voice soft, so as not to wake Mariana.
“No,” Lily said, still looking down. “They’re not. That’s just a lie your mother told you.”
“Our mother.”
The words hung there, meaning everything, changing everything. Beth’s feelings were enormous, too big for her to contain: excitement, dread, guilt, shame. But when Lily looked up at her, she saw no answering emotions in Lily’s eyes. She simply looked blank again.
“She doesn’t want you to know,” Lily said. “She brings me here every Christmas because she feels bad for abandoning me. It’s always too much for her. Then she does it all over again.”
Beth made the words come out, the ones that were harder to say. “And my father?”
“He isn’t my father,” Lily said bluntly. “I don’t know who my father is. I don’t know where he is. I don’t think he’s dead. I don’t know what happened between them or why. I plan to find out.”
“Maybe she’ll tell us someday,” Beth said. But they both looked down at the sleeping woman, her sprayed hair stiff on the pillow, and they knew it wouldn’t happen. Whatever had occurred was so deep inside Mariana that maybe she’d made herself forget it was there.
“She isn’t his,” Lily said, talking about Julian and Mariana. “She’s mine.”
No, she’s mine, Beth thought. I’m the real daughter, the one she had after she was married, the good girl. The sweet one. But she already knew she had lost that battle. There was no question about Mariana belonging to Beth. She belonged to the bitter girl, the one who wouldn’t be eaten.
“So what do we do?” she asked Lily—who was her half sister, and not her cousin or a distant family friend, which was how Mariana referred to her whenever she spoke about her to other adults. If any of the other adults suspected the truth, they were too polite to say anything. “Do we just keep pretending we don’t know?”
Lily reached out and traced a finger down the side of Mariana’s face. Beth fought off the instinct to punch her hand away, to prevent Lily from ever touching her mother. “For now,” she said, answering Beth’s question. “It doesn’t matter, really. I’m going to get what I want. Everything I want.”
“What do you want?” Was it to live here? To be a real daughter? Beth didn’t know if that was possible, or if Lily even would. Living here would mean living with Julian.
“I want lots of things,” Lily said. She looked around. “This house, for one.”
Beth had no idea how fourteen-year-old Lily would get this house, but she said, “I hate this house.”
“That’s because you don’t understand it.”
“It’s ugly.”
“It’s an abomination that shouldn’t exist,” Lily said, “and it knows it. That’s why I like it. It’s exactly like me.”
“You can’t own a house,” Beth said, tentative because she didn’t want Lily to get angry. “You’re too young.”
“Not for long.” Lily looked at Beth, really looked at her for the first time in a long time. “What do you want?”
I want you to get away from my mother, she thought. I want you to leave and never come back. But, no, she didn’t mean that. Beth was just afraid. She’d be lonely and desolate if she didn’t have Lily.
She needed Lily. Just like she needed Julian and Mariana. Beth had to get through another day, and another year, and she needed all three of them to get there. But she needed Lily most of all.
So she said the one thing she knew would work, the one thing that Lily was susceptible to. The one thing that would keep Lily on her side. “I want to be like you,” she said.
There was a moment when she wasn’t quite sure Lily believed it. And then her sister smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTY
December 1968
BETH
The Christmas Beth was fourteen, Lily came to the Greer house with a bruise on her temple and faded yellowy green marks under the skin of her cheekbone. Mariana pretended not to notice, but later that night both of the girls could hear her sobbing in her bedroom as Julian told her to stop, please stop. It’s my fault, Mariana said. All my fault.
Lily didn’t want to talk about it, but Beth knew that something had happened at her foster home. Lily wasn’t above faking bruises to get sympathy, but she wasn’t faking this. That year, she was quieter than usual and her eyes were hollow, her mouth set tight.
Surprisingly, Julian stayed home that year, the first Christmas he’d done so since Lily had first visited. Something about seeing Lily bruised and angry must have made him feel more comfortable having her around, as if she’d lost a round in their endless contest. They avoided each other and barely spoke, but Beth saw Lily’s gaze follow Julian whenever she saw him, and she didn’t like the look in Lily’s eyes.
That was the year David disappeared.
David was a groundskeeper. In the summer, there was a small crew of men who came to maintain the lawns and the gardens, but in the winter there was only David. He came at the end of every month and spent a few hours cutting out dead annuals, removing any snow and ice on the ground, and raking old leaves. He was supposed to come the day after Christmas, but he never showed. As days passed, it became clear that he was gone, and no one knew what had happened to him. Maybe he had suddenly left town. He was just a groundskeeper, though, so it was considered a minor mystery, shrugged off by Julian and Mariana and never spoken of again.
Lily went home on the twenty-eighth, and for once Beth was glad to see her go, glad to be free of the flat look in Lily’s eyes.
They didn’t find David until late April, his broken body on the rocks below the cliff. They couldn’t pinpoint how long he’d been there, but it had been months. It was declared a suicide, but Beth had an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Lily . . . But she had never seen Lily anywhere near David, never seen her look at him or talk to him. So, no, it wasn’t possible. What would be the reason? There wasn’t one.
Beth put her suspicions away and didn’t think about them anymore.
The next year, Lily’s bruises were gone and she was thinner, her cheekbones sharper, her hipbones as hard as diamonds. She was seventeen, a year from aging out of the foster system. “My new family barely pays any attention to me,” she said. “They let me do whatever I want.”
“What happened to your old family?” Beth asked.
“Bad things,” Lily said, and for the first time in months, Beth thought of David again.
“What bad things?” she asked as fear curled into the pit of her stomach.