The Night Sister

“Poor thing,” Mama said, and Rose nodded sympathetically.

“Maybe this butterfly isn’t just a butterfly,” Sylvie had said to Rose just after dinner, when they were alone in their room, looking at the broken-winged butterfly on Sylvie’s nightstand.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember Oma’s stories?” Sylvie had asked, her eyes growing wide.

Rose nodded. She did remember. She remembered that Sylvie had been frightened to death by Oma’s stories, so Oma had stopped telling them to her and shared them only with Rose.

Oma had come to visit last year. They’d spent weeks getting ready: cleaning the house from top to bottom, setting up a cot in Mama’s sewing room, asking excited questions about what she was like, this grandmother they’d never met, coming all the way from England.

“This is your grandmother,” Mama had announced as the old woman climbed out of the backseat of Daddy’s car, shouldering a large patent-leather pocketbook, wearing loose white gloves stained yellow at the fingertips.

She took the girls in, studying them from head to toe, turning them, touching their faces and hair. Then, apparently finding them acceptable, she gave them each a kiss on both cheeks. “You call me Oma,” she said, her accent different from Mama’s. When Rose asked Mama about it later, she explained that her mother was German but she’d married a Londoner.

“How come we’ve never met her before?” Rose had asked.

“Because she’s a busy woman. And crossing the Atlantic is no small feat. Especially since Oma hates to fly. She came in a boat.”

Oma sucked on horehound candy, wore sweaters she’d knitted herself, and taught the girls to make apple cake.

One morning, Rose woke up with her hair in tangles. Oma clucked her tongue and went to work brushing it out.

“Perhaps you’ve been visited by a mare,” she said.

“A mare? Like a girl horse?” Rose asked.

Oma shook her head. “Your mother hasn’t told you girls about mares?”

Rose and Sylvie shook their heads.

“Mares are human during the day, but at night, they change into all different creatures. One minute, they’re a person; the next, they can be a cat, a bird, or a butterfly.”

Sylvie, listening from her own bed, said, “That’s made up. It’s another of your fairy tales.”

“You think so?” Oma said, continuing to gently work the tangles out of Rose’s hair.

“Are they good?” Rose asked.

“Sometimes. But sometimes they turn into terrible monsters with teeth and claws. They come to you in the night, give you bad dreams, tie knots in your hair, suck your breath away. If you’re not careful, they’ll swallow you whole.”

Later, Rose wished Oma hadn’t told them about mares. Not because she was scared, but because of Sylvie. Her sister had been so frightened that she started having nightmares.

One morning, when Mama was comforting Sylvie after one of her bad dreams, Sylvie told her about Oma’s stories, about how, ever since, she couldn’t stop thinking that every person she met, every animal she saw, might secretly be a mare.

“Even though I know it can’t be true,” Sylvie said, sniffling. “It couldn’t be true, right, Mama?”

Mama was furious with Oma.

“I will not have you poisoning the minds of my children,” Mama had hissed at Oma. She said it had been a mistake to invite Oma at all. Rose tried to eavesdrop on the argument from the top of the stairs after she and Sylvie had been sent to bed early, but caught very little of it. Oma left the next day and went back to England.

Rose was mad at her mother for sending Oma away, but mostly she blamed Sylvie—if Sylvie hadn’t been such a scaredy-cat tattletale, Mama would never even have known.