The Dead House

Prison. What a nice euphemism for the loony bin.

“Jaime, we weren’t in jail. You know that, right? We were in a kind of hospital getting better after the accident.”

“Mrs. Bailey says that you have to be locked up because your personality is wrong.”

Word for word, Dee. My. Personality.

Is.

Wrong.

I took Jaime’s hands. “My personality isn’t wrong. And I don’t think Carly’s personality is wrong. Do you?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Bailey thinks our personality is wrong because she thinks one of us shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to do something for me, okay?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face. I was her big sister. I would make everything right again. I would take a world that had become bent and confusing overnight and smooth out all of the wrinkles. Her hope is a noose around my neck.

“Whenever the”—insert: Dickball—“Baileys talk about me, I want you to close your ears. Close them like you close your eyes, and don’t listen. They don’t understand. They think they do, but they don’t.”

“But I can’t close my ears. I don’t have earlids.”

“Oh, you do,” I said earnestly. “They’re inside your head. If you imagine them closing, they will.”

Jaime considered this for a moment. “Okay.”

“Now, come on, enough about the Baileys,” I said, rolling my eyes. She giggled. “Tell me about you, about friends—everything!”

She wrapped her little arms around my neck, and I helped her onto my lap.

“I started school, and I like it a lot. I have a friend called Mandy, and she likes me and lets me play with her dolls.”

I frowned. School? Already?

“Oh, yeah?” I prompted.

“She has a Bratz doll that has hair that can grow, and a Barbie doll with a tail like a mermaid, and…”

She told me the minutiae of her life, and I felt as though I had never heard anything more interesting or vital in my whole existence. I soaked up every little detail—about her new crayons (green was her favorite), the dresses she got to wear (disgusting, frilly concoctions to make her look like a doll), the shopping trips she and Dickball Mrs. Bailey took into London, and the dollies that Mandy let her play with.

“Do you have a picture of Mummy and Daddy in your room?” I asked her abruptly, because it suddenly occurred to me what the Baileys were doing. They weren’t merely giving an orphan a place to live; they were adopting her, absorbing her as their own, sucking out her Johnson and injecting their Bailey! It explained the dresses, the “keep away from Carly” mission, the “Carly’s personality is wrong” mantra—it explained why she had started schooling so young. Indoctrination.

“I don’t have any pictures from before.” The words slipped out like a bubble, too fragile to resist the destruction of dry air.

It was like a glass smashing against a wall.

“Who do they think they are? They won’t allow you to have a photo of your dead parents? That’s sick!”

“I don’t want one,” Jaime said in a little voice, her eyes already swollen with tears.

I. Don’t. Want. One.

A sledgehammer couldn’t have hit me as hard.

I whispered my reply. “What?”

“I don’t like to remember.”

“Remember them?”

“Remember what happened.”

It was like an electric shock to my head. “You remember the accident?”

She looked away, and although she didn’t nod, I saw the answer in her haunted eyes.

“Jaime… tell me. I can’t remember. Tell me—”

“Dr. Lasny said not to talk about it.”

“Dr.—Dr. Lansing?”

Jaime nodded.

Betrayal. Betrayed. I was betrayed. Dr. Lansing is in this whole thing with the Baileys—working to make Jaime forget me and to never come see me! She only caved when I threw a tantrum and made things hard for her! They want Jaime to forget me!

I grabbed Jaime by the shoulders. “I’m your sister! I’m the oldest now they’re dead, and you have to listen to what I say! You will not forget me!”

She cried out—a small, piercing shriek—and began to weep. I dropped her arms, instantly sorry, and gave her a big hug. She sobbed until she fell asleep, her head padded on my chest. I lay on my bed with her, taking in her little-girl smell (it had changed since living with the fake parents, but not so much that I couldn’t smell the real her underneath).

“Don’t forget me,” I whispered in her ear, holding her hand—a tiny version of my own.

We lay together for an hour or so, and I thought about how things used to be. Carly discarding me in our room, always the same. Cuddling up with Jaime in her bed for a while, reading her a bedtime story—always “The Frog Prince”—and then going out into the night after (maybe) a brief chat with Mum. Looking down at Jaime sleeping beside me now, I felt the loss of that normal all over my body like an ache. I could have stayed like that forever, but she jolted awake, dizzy and confused.

“Where am I?” she asked. She was shivering.