Chapter III. 2007 #3
“You really think I don’t feel that pressure, too?
That my entire childhood wasn’t a parade of being a godly example?
” She began ticking off on her fingers, the sting she felt turning to anger that Brianna would ever think she didn’t feel those same demands.
“Of cultivating a meek and quiet spirit, of being modest, of being obedient, of being virtuous, of keeping out the world’s temptations, of arming myself with the word of God.
” It felt as if her father’s words were pouring out of her, his voice merging with hers as she let that never-ending list die out.
“As if people haven’t been waiting for me to mess up since I was old enough to form half a thought. ”
“You don’t get it, Camilla. Even if you did mess up.
What then? A slap on the wrist? A few days on Retreat, and then you get to come back, and Daddy tells everyone how he brought you back to God, and now you’re this magic, perfect example of exactly the sort of woman we’re all supposed to be.
The epitome of everything the Sisters aren’t.
The whole reason he tells the story. And then you get back to doing exactly what you want.
Getting what you want. Lather, rinse, repeat. ”
Camilla’s hands shook. With humiliation.
With anger. With a cold acceptance she didn’t want to own.
Because Brianna was right. Her role in life was to serve as her father’s paragon.
Forever falling and being lifted back up by the tenets he preached.
Hellfire forever licking at her back without tasting its cold burn.
A wife. A mother. The angel in the house.
“And what about me?” Brianna dropped her voice to a whisper.
“If I make a mistake? Make a choice that’s just for me and not for God, or my future husband, or the kids I’m not even sure I want?
” She drew in a shaky breath and wiped at her face.
“No one asked if I wanted to go to college after we graduated. No one asked what I wanted to do with my life. Not even you, Camilla. No one asked if I wanted to go to law school and then go into practice in the city. None of that is an option for me because my father wouldn’t allow it.
There’s no backup plan. No coming home again.
No redemption. In this world, I marry Wendell Crampton because he’s from the only other Black family in Hawthorne Springs and God forbid anyone ends up with mixed grandbabies.
In this world I go to Bible study and try my best not to land myself on Retreat and die wondering if I could have been anything more. ”
Above them, the trees groaned in the wind.
An otherworldly cry that set Camilla’s skin prickling as she tried to take in everything Brianna said.
As she tried to see Brianna’s life as one set on a trajectory any different from her own.
The limitations and demands as any more than what was her own birthright.
The scales demanded to be tipped one way or the other, and she was blind in her anger.
Limited in her ability to understand. She could not see beyond her perception of their sameness. Even if it was not and never would be.
“Do you honestly think I don’t feel the exact same way? I don’t have options either. None of us do. They made it like this.”
“Oh, fuck you, Camilla. Fuck you and your pretty, white, blond-girl mentality in your pretty, white, blond-girl town. Let’s just see how equal it is.” She whirled, pushed herself into the forest, and was gone.
Camilla watched her go. She waited for her frustration to cool, but there had been too many years of it. Too many days had passed with no reasonable outlet. There was no space for Brianna’s accusations even if they warranted examination. Even if in the depths of her heart she knew they were true.
Behind her, everyone was still fighting, but she wanted nothing to do with it.
Let Noah and Sam pound each other into pulped piles of skin.
They deserved it for what they’d done. They didn’t live under the long shadow cast by the Dark Sisters.
The threat they posed for every girl born in Hawthorne Springs and then baptized into The Path.
She hoped at least one of them had gotten his nose broken.
She waited for a moment, letting the wind push her hair off her shoulders, and then walked back to her car.
Brianna’s Audi was already gone, but she’d expected it to be.
Even if there was a part of her that hoped when she came through the trees, she’d see Brianna waiting for her there.
But there was only the other cars and the wind, and she drove home without turning on the radio.
The house was still dark when she let herself in, and she trudged up the stairs in the velvet quiet, the night settling over her like a veil.
She showered quickly, the water almost scalding because she wanted to feel the sting of it, a reminder she was still inside her own skin and not floating somewhere in the ether.
Her phone set to silent, she crawled into bed with her hair still damp and her body heavy.
Sleep hovered somewhere just beyond her, and she settled into that liminal space where her thoughts tilted into an almost recognizable strangeness.
Buried somewhere beneath those dim shapes came the sound of her parents stumbling upstairs, their laughter punctuated by the low rumble of her father’s voice, and then silence once more.
She sank further down and then she was asleep.
SHE’D EXPECTED A hangover. At least a headache or a general queasiness that only coffee and something dripping grease could cure, but she woke feeling as if she’d spent the previous night sipping chamomile tea and reading her Bible.
She burrowed further under the duvet as the rush of all that happened came flooding back.
The tongue. Noah and Sam. Brianna. And buried beneath it all, her mother’s renewed intentions to keep Camilla away from the Purity Ball.
Even if her body felt fine, she decidedly was not.
Tomorrow was Sunday, which meant her father would spend the day locked in his office preparing his sermon, and her mother would head into the city to spend hours at Phipps Plaza only to return with complaints that the service at the Chanel store wasn’t what it used to be and maybe a bag or three.
Then another dinner at yet another church leader’s house that Camilla would not be invited to. Same shit, different week.
She didn’t want to bother with her makeup or hair, but she did it anyway because she knew if her father did venture out of his study, he would immediately notice and begin questioning her reasons for falling out of her usual routine.
So, she lined her eyes, straightened and curled her hair, and then padded downstairs, her phone in hand.
The kitchen smelled of coffee and roses. A crystal bowl on the island overflowed with expertly arranged white blooms, and the coffee pot was wonderfully full.
She’d not bothered to check her phone yet, not quite ready to deal with the realities Brianna set before her, but woke the home screen as she took down a mug and then shuffled to the coffee pot.
Seven missed calls from Noah. Four texts.
Call me as soon as you can.
It’s important.
Camilla?
CALL ME. EMERGENCY.
She paused, the coffee splashing over the edge of the mug and burning her hand as worry pooled in her belly.
She leaned against the sink, the vigor she felt that morning draining away as she turned on the water and thrust her hand beneath.
Around the burn her skin was freezing, and her guilt rose up hard and fast.
What if the fight had been worse than she thought, and Noah or Sam was in the hospital?
What if something happened to Brianna? A car crash or she’d never made it home?
Her imagination spun through the possibilities, each one somehow worse than the last. Nausea rose up her throat, thick and hard, and she fought against the urge to vomit.
Inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth as she pulled up Noah’s number and brought the phone to her ear.
Not even a full ring sounded before the call connected, and Noah’s voice came through.
“Did she call you? Did Brianna call you?”
Her heart seized. In the multiple calls and texts from Noah, there’d been nothing from Brianna. If anything had happened, she would never forgive herself for how they left things between them.
“No. What’s wrong?”
“She’s on Retreat, Camilla. They took her this morning.”
The words swept over her, but she could not process them. Her mind had gone dull, the burn the only thing that connected her to the world.
“What?”
“She wasn’t answering her phone, so I went over to her house, and they were loading her up in one of those Range Rovers.
You know the ones. Her parents wouldn’t talk to me, but they took her, and I don’t know for how long, but you could find out, yeah?
” His voice wavered and went gentle. The way it did when he was training a nervous dog.
All soft words and softer hands. “Ask your dad how long she’ll be there? ”
Again and again, her mind tried to process what he’d told her, but the reality of it slipped away.
If Brianna’s parents sent her on Retreat, that meant they knew about the party.
And if they knew about the party, they knew Camilla had been there, too.
And Brianna had been so angry—they both had been.
It was only a matter of time before the accusation and punishment fell on Camilla, too.
Everything Brianna said last night would become a fulfilled prophecy.
Her last words still rang in Camilla’s ear.
Let’s just see how equal it is.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Camilla, don’t—” Noah began, but she disconnected the call and slid her phone onto the counter as a headache stole through her temples.
Brianna was making a point. Sacrificing herself in the name of exposing a truth Camilla refused to admit.
And now, they would both suffer. The only question left was how long until they came for Camilla?
All there was to do was wait.
Her father’s office door was still closed and the house quiet as she let herself back into her bedroom and crawled under the duvet. When they came for her, she would be here. She settled and let the waves of pain emanating down her body carry her into unconsciousness.
SHE WOKE DISORIENTED, her limbs heavy. Her dream tugged at her, pulled her back down, but her head was a bloated, disconnected thing, and she could not fall back into that hallucinatory world.
Her body felt damp and cold. Her lethargy like a weight on her chest as she tried to untangle herself from the snarled remainders of sleep until, finally, they fell away, and she was gasping and staring into a teeming dark she didn’t understand.
Above her, the sky was a hollowed-out reminder of the bedroom where she was supposed to be.
She was outside, knelt before the tree where they had the party. Confused, she stared up at it, her fingers reaching to trace over the bark as a reminder she was awake. That this was real, and she’d been sleepwalking.
The bark ran in discordant lines, looping back in on themselves before scattering.
It looked like heads hacked off at the neck.
Like mouths opening wide to scream. A hellscape wrought in wood.
Shuddering, she withdrew her hand, but she still felt the sensation of the bark against her fingers, the outline of those yawning mouths that could draw her in and swallow her bit by bit.
Some animal part told her to run, to leave this place, but her body remained inert, her lips parting as she tipped her head back and looked up at the tree like a supplicant come to beg for the unspoken things in her heart.
As if it could hear and ease her guilt over what happened with Brianna.
The branches splintered outward, the leaves glistening darkly, and she suddenly wanted to take them in her mouth and bite down, their juices coating her tongue.
She listened as the night fell down around her, watched as the tree bent and shifted in the wind, and then opened, parted its shaded veil so she might see what it hid. There, among the branches, the amorphous outline of two faces stared down at her.
Her heart stuttered, a strange, terrible heat running over her skin, and she moaned—low and guttural—but still she could do nothing more than look up as the faces dipped toward her.
Their mouths were dark, awful smears against pale faces, the jaws distended and stretched as their eyes gleamed with a viscous, milkish sheen.
“It’s just a story,” Camilla whispered, but it didn’t matter.
If this was a nightmare, she was awake inside it.
She could not move. Could not scream. Could do nothing more than stare up at those blank eyes.
At the tangled braid that connected the Dark Sisters and made them one body.
At the blank hollow of their mouths. Their broken, missing teeth.
They were the monsters. Camilla was the thing that was supposed to run.
She cried because she could not scream. Terror mixed with fascination as she gulped air and wondered if her heart would stop just from looking at them.
If she would carry this image into heaven and be cast out because God would not bear to have even the memory of such a horrific thing enter into His kingdom.
The leaves shook, those pallid eyes blinking as they saw into the meat of her.
Their eyes slid over every inch of her skin, and she hated it.
The torture of their gaze, how hungry it was.
Surely, they would swallow her whole, those jagged teeth tearing at her skin bit by bit until she was nothing more than a smear of blood and bone.
It would be a righteous punishment. The pastor’s daughter gobbled up like some wicked child in a fairy tale.
Overhead, a branch cracked, and the Sisters reached for her, their mouths open in a desperate, hungry plea.
Camilla’s body lurched backward as her muscles came to life, her lungs expanding painfully as she drew in air and then, finally, blessedly, screamed.