4 Liney To Fight #3
“Yes, I’m sure you enjoy nothing in the process,” I spit back, standing myself. The energy between us crackles once again. “This life suits you, not me. I didn’t ask you to bring me to a suffocating spit of land away from everything! Everyone! We missed our own parents’ funeral!”
“And our own!” she snaps back. “By Thomas’s hand or the gas. Where else would you have gone to escape him? Gallivanting around town, buying bonnets and flowers like a schoolgirl?”
I want to tear her hair out. Scream in her face. Hurt her so she knows what it’s like to be without control. And I know she feels the same.
“There’s something in you, Mary Eleanor. Something vile.” Each word is a spit of venom. “You kept me in the dark. Gave me empty hope. Don’t lie.”
It feels good to say aloud. I lost myself to melancholy. I forgot how the churning waters of self-righteousness can bring life back into me.
Elle’s eyes bulge. She curls her fingers inward. A portrait of restraint.
“All of this,” she says, each word a brick in the wall she’s always building and tearing down between us, “I’ve done for you.”
No matter how carefully Elle has hidden us from the world, she can’t hide herself. She’s not miserable on this island. She doesn’t miss home, or dancing, or good food and better gossip. Only one of us is suffering while the other plays make-believe keeper.
If our parents are dead, why stay here? I could return, couldn’t I?
Thomas haunted our world, but it was our parents who kept him there. They’d use him as a threat to keep Elle in line. Mr. Seymour would not approve of that, they’d say at the mildest inconvenience. Elle, my dearest, you will not act thus when Mr. Seymour arrives.
Elle shrank when the wedding drew near. Our mother promised me it was normal for most brides, that she herself had been so nervous before her wedding day that she’d locked herself in her room for days on end.
I hated watching my sister transform from the willful, intelligent, intense girl I knew into a silenced waif.
If anything, our parents’ deaths have freed us of those obligations, as terrible as it is to think. Is it only her ego that keeps us here or something else she hides from me?
Has done for me?
It’s too much. Every nerve in my arms tingles.
I reach forward and turn the table over.
I surprise us both with my strength as our supper smashes to the floor.
The plates upturn, splashing fish scales and sour asparagus stems on her precious dead man’s clothes.
Behind her, a few seconds after, something metal on the kitchen counter clatters—a knife, maybe?
Elle shrieks but stands frozen, a cod skin slipping down her trouser leg.
I bolt around her, lunge for the stairs, and run up.
My breath hitches in my throat at the sudden exertion, twice in one day, but I don’t stop.
Her fingers swipe for the hem of my dress.
I reach the storage room door and swing it open, dodging her grasp.
I twist as Elle once taught me after a dance instructor taught her, years ago in a stolen life, and slam the door in her face.
The lock! Chamomile chimes. She’s ecstatic at my show of agency. I bolt the door as Elle pulls on the handle.
“Caroline Anne Forsyth! ” Elle hollers, banging on the door. “Open the door!”
“A taste of life without me!” I call out, coughing between the words. “Enjoy!”
My breath quickens into a shallow wheeze. I can’t catch it as my chest tightens into a vise. I need air. The storeroom’s musty interior presses in.
Chamomile is lost in her glee. I shouldn’t have listened to her. My blood freezes as quick as it boiled. I check my fingers, and even in the dim light from the edges of the door, I can tell their tips are turning blue.
“Ungrateful brat!” Elle yells, but my head swims and I can’t answer. “You want to turn everything we have to ash? For what? To return to the wolf I saved you from?”
Each breath is shallower than the last. I try to say her name, but nothing comes out.
“I’m your only family.” Elle’s voice overflows with venom and something else. Tears? “I’m the only one who can keep you safe. I’ll do whatever it—”
“Elle,” I cough out. I lean against the door as my chest heaves without air. “Elle, I can’t—”
My head spins, and then I’m falling before I can brace myself. I collapse in a heap against the door, too low to reach the bolt. The ice in my veins stutters my heart.
Is this how I die? Fighting my sister, opening old wounds, trapped by my own constitution?
I wave weakly to Chamomile for help. She stops celebrating and cocks her head to the side until her tight, shining curls touch one shoulder delicately.
“Go on,” Elle fumes from the other side of the door. “You can’t…?”
“Breathe,” I rasp, barely audible even to me.
We aren’t done with you, Caroline.
Did I hear that or think it? Everything is a numb fog. Chamomile moves closer to me, then beside me, then past. Through the door. She’s left me here. Alone again. Is this my mind preparing itself for the end? Will I see my parents much sooner than I hoped?
A thud, like a heartbeat, knocks me farther down against the door. As my breath descends from shallow into nothing, I close my eyes and pray one small, rare prayer. Might as well.
Let me see her. She needs me.