“I told you I’m not hungry,” Sosie said with a little more emotion. “You can eat the worms and the ants and whatever else you find. There’s no need for you to get yourself killed going to the lake for me. I’m just not hungry.”
“But you still have to eat!” I squatted beside her, tired of her attitude. “Without food, you have no energy. Without energy, you can’t do anything but sit here in this stupid cave and die.”
“MAYBE I WANT TO DIE!” Sosie raised her body from the ground, her face stiff, enraged; her ratted hair made her look savage.
The sheer anger in her words shocked me and stole my breath away. For a moment, all I could do was stare into my sister’s blind eyes, desperately searching for words fit to respond to her admission, words fit to reflect how the admission made me feel.
“What do you mean?” It was all I could get out.
Sosie shook her head and laid back down.
“Momma is gone,” she began. “Daddy is gone. Everybody’s gone, Thais. I don’t know why you want to keep doing this.”
I felt sick; the things Sosie was saying I just wanted to close my ears up to, pretend I had never heard a word. Long ago I had felt this way, when I thought that going the way of our mother was the easy way out—the only way out—but since then I had given up ‘giving up’, trading it for strength and determination. I wanted to live, but more than that, I wanted to live with Sosie.
“You don’t mean that,” I said, knowing she meant it, and it cut me to the bone.
“Look at this world, Thais,” Sosie began. “There’s hardly anything left. For years we lived in peace with Daddy, but we were always afraid, always looking over our shoulders. We were prisoners, confined behind bars, with this great big world going on all around us that we could never see or touch or taste or experience.”
She drew her arm up and pressed her hand beneath her cheek, palm down, padding her face against the dirt.
I sat and listened, tears welling up in my eyes, because I knew that everything she was saying was true, that her argument made more sense than anything I would’ve been able to come up with.
“Before all of this,” Sosie went on, “I used to come home every day from school and rush to get to the television before you because I knew it would make you mad. I dreamed of being a model on that show. I thought: ‘If that one ugly girl can win, then I can win!’—(I smiled thoughtfully)—It was my dream, to be a model, to dress up in weird clothes that nobody ever really wore, and get my picture taken. I wanted to travel the world to exotic places and be on commercials.” She sighed, and the subtle reminiscent quality she’d displayed, disappeared. “Now not only will that never happen for me, much less any kind of life where I don’t have to look over my shoulder every second of every day, but I can’t even look over my shoulder at all. I have to depend on you to do it for me. And I love you Thais, I love everything about you—except when you snore”—(my smile was as faint as it was brief)—“but I don’t want to live this kind of life. I’d rather end it like Momma did.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and stopped blinking.
“What are you talking about?” I hoped I’d only heard her wrong.
“Oh, Thais,” Sosie began, her tone sympathetic. “I know how Momma died. I know she killed herself. I knew all along.”
Her confession took the breath from my lungs, the beat from my heart—I didn’t know how to feel. Should I be ashamed for keeping the truth about our mother’s suicide from Sosie? Or angry with her for keeping the truth from me?
I looked down at my dirty hands, aching fingers curled, empty, helpless, and all I wanted to do was embrace my sister for reprieve and forgiveness—but for Sosie, or for myself?
“How did you know?” I asked.
Sosie sat up and felt her way over to sit next to me. She draped an arm around my back.
“I heard Daddy that night,” Sosie began. “I heard him asking Momma why she did it.” She got quiet for a moment. “And you had nightmares. You’d call out for Momma in the night and ask her why she wanted to die, why she left us.” She gave my arm a gentle squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly, feeling a pang of guilt.
“For what? For not telling me you knew?” Sosie pushed air through her lips. “Come on, Thais. If that’s why then I guess I should be sorry, too.”
Quiet passed between us as we reflected on the moment, as we felt the weight of the same secret we had been hiding for so long from one another, lift from our hearts.
“Sosie?”
She looked over.
“I’m just as afraid as you are,” I said. “I don’t even know what we’re going to do next, but I have to believe that we can find something better, somewhere safe.” I reached out and laid my hand atop my sister’s. “I just want you to know that without you, I don’t think I could ever make it, or would want to. But at least give it a chance, give me a chance to find us someplace to go.” I squeezed her hand. “Who knows, we could find a city full of good people who live better than we ever did in these mountains.”
Sosie’s head shook in protest. “Not the cities, Thais,” she argued. “You know we can’t go to any of the Big Cities. If that’s what you have in mind then I’ll stop you right there. I’ll go no farther than this cave; I’ll die in this cave, right here”—she pointed at the ground—“before I let them have me.”
I squeezed Sosie’s hand.
“No, I don’t mean the Big Cities,” I said, trying to ease her. “Just someplace bigger and better than this place. There has to be something out there, there have to be good people left in the world.”
“There are,” Sosie said, and a small smile lit up her powder-white face. “There are two sisters sitting in a cave deep in the Kentucky woods. One of them is good, but the other one is good and beautiful and the strongest person the other has ever known.”
I felt my face flush with heat, and I smiled, and I hated every mean thing I’d ever said to my sister when we were growing up.
I kissed Sosie on the cheek. “You are the beautiful one,” I said. “You stink right now and you look like a madwoman with that wild hair and dirt across your face, but you’re still the beautiful one.”
Sosie laughed lightly, then she laid back down on the ground, wedging her flattened hand between her cheek and the dirt again. “It’s easy for you to say that because I can’t see myself,” she quipped. “I’ll never know if you’re only saying it just to make me feel better.”
But Sosie was beautiful, had a childishly round face like a cherub, with big doll-like eyes and full lips. And she was tall and slender, had an enchanting smile—Sosie was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
Before the night fell, Sosie gave in and ate the worms, and a small lizard I had caught skittering along the rock incline. It wasn’t big enough to split between us, so I lied and told her I’d caught two, cooked them and only pretended to be eating a lizard when I was eating earthworms.