Chapter XI. 2007 #2
But the door, like her father’s, was closed. Her heart sank as she approached, her hand coming to rest on the handle, the shift under her grip gentle so it made no sound.
Locked.
She placed her palm against the door, her fingers curled into the wood, a bright irritation itching at her throat as she swallowed and forced herself to whisper rather than scream.
She brought her lips close to the door. “Mom?” Waited for a breath and then another, but there was no response.
She lightly scratched her fingers over the wood, fairy tale lines ringing in her head. Little pig, little pig, let me in.
She glanced over her shoulder, expecting to find her father looming over her, his face a calm mask, but the hallway was still empty.
Maybe it was as her father told her. Maybe her mom did have a cold and was resting, the door locked to ensure Angela wouldn’t come barging in to complete some chore.
But Angela had never done that. She watched each member of the Burson family carefully, noting their comings and goings to ensure whatever cleaning took place in their private rooms did so without their knowledge.
Quiet and unobtrusive as a mouse. It was the reason she’d lasted as long as she had as their housekeeper.
She blended in. An invisible hand that did all their dirty work and kept silent.
“Mom?” she hissed, daring to jiggle the handle, but her mother did not respond. Could be she was asleep. Could be she was too sick to get up. Too sick to even respond, her mouth and tongue covered in sores. But her father wouldn’t have lied to her about that, would he?
She couldn’t help thinking it though. Her mind kept drifting to that diseased thought as she went slowly back down the hallway, hoping she would hear the door opening behind her.
It didn’t.
She wanted to call Brianna, who had gone home two days before.
To check in on her and see if she was any worse.
To ask her how it went with her family when she got home.
To tell her that her mother was sick with a cold and she hadn’t been able to talk with her.
To hear her voice. To tell her they were still in this together.
But her phone was likely locked away in her father’s office.
Looking for it would only get her in trouble, and the landline wasn’t an option.
Too easy for someone to listen in, and she and Brianna had never been the sort of friends to come up with a secret language for just the two of them.
Theirs was a language of pointed glances and lifted eyebrows paired with knowing smirks, not some bastardized version of Pig Latin.
Instead, she took a shower hot enough to leave her skin red and blotchy.
Scrubbed her face. Her legs and arms and back.
Shaved everything that needed it. Skin care.
Body cream. The need to make everything slick and smooth a momentary distraction from that closed door at the end of the hall and what lay behind it.
For a long while, she did not sleep. When it finally came, an insistent pull, she dreamed of a sudden, sharp pain. Of blood in her mouth.
When she woke, she still tasted it. The bright tang of blood.
She’d bitten her tongue.
Wincing, she rose and stumbled to the mirror to examine the wound, tears springing to her eyes when she ran a finger over the raw flesh. She grabbed a washcloth from the closet in her bathroom and held it there, waiting for the bleeding to stop as she examined her face in the mirror.
She’d lost weight. Her cheeks gaunt in the way she once wished for. The supermodel look every woman in Hawthorne Springs starved for. She turned away from the mirror in disgust. She hated it. It made her look like a corpse. Like the Dark Sisters.
Finally, the bleeding slowed, and she tossed the washcloth into the hamper and glanced at the clock on her bedside table.
Six fifteen. Enough time to get ready for church.
Primped and polished and ready for her father to preach all about how Retreat had saved his wayward daughter.
Just in time for Purity Ball, too! Praise the Lord!
She turned, ready to plop herself in front of her vanity, the makeup brushes scattered before her, a mockery of her attempts at beauty, when she heard her father’s voice. And then her mother’s, raised to a volume Camilla had only heard a few times in her life.
She crept toward her door and opened it the tiniest bit.
Just enough to see the length of the hallway, the door at the end thrown open.
Her mother stood in the doorway, the black silk dressing gown she so loved gaping open to reveal her sunken chest, the ribs visible beneath the skin and flexing as she panted, eyes wild as she pushed against Henry.
“We’ve talked about this, Ada.” His voice was stern, the voice he used when there was no room for argument, no room for anything but strict obedience. But Ada did not meekly nod and retreat back into the depths of her sickroom. She balled her fists at her sides, the cords at her neck straining.
Camilla forced herself to stay hidden even though she wanted to rush down the hallway and throw her arms around her mother. Sometimes learning what you wanted to know meant staying quiet.
“I’m fine. I can cover it with makeup. It’s my duty to be there. With you,” she said.
“No, you’ll stay here and get some rest. Dr. Morgan said—”
“I don’t care what Dr. Morgan said!” Her mother slammed her hands against the doorframe.
Camilla tried to open the door just a bit further, an attempt to see her mother more fully, to see if those telltale sores ringed her mouth, but she’d stepped backward, the still-darkened room wrapping her in shadow.
“You have to understand, Ada. Camilla’s just come home from Retreat, and I’ve barely managed to pass that off as a momentary lapse of faith.
The struggle we all go through but can correct with the right guidance.
But if the congregation were to see you in your …
condition, they’d take it as a sign from the Lord. As a punishment for sin.”
Ada’s voice sharpened. “Sin?”
“Ada—”
“No. Tell me, Henry. I want you to tell me all the ways I’ve disappointed you as a wife. All the ways I’ve managed to sin.”
Camilla swallowed against the knot in her throat as she let what her father said settle over her. Condition. Punishment for sin.
She moved as if in a dream. Her hand pushing the door fully open before she stepped into the hallway, her gaze locked on her mother. Her impossibly beautiful mother whose mouth was a seeping mess of sores.
“Mom? Are you sick?”
In the same moment her mother took a stumbling step forward, her father pushed her back, his right hand clamping on her wrist as her mother cried out in pain.
“You’re hurting her.” Tears fell over Camilla’s cheeks, her vision going blurry as she hurried toward them.
She didn’t know what she would do when she got there.
Didn’t know what she could do. He was so much bigger than her.
It didn’t matter that he was her father.
She wanted to hurt him. To slap him or bite his arm until the skin tore. Anything to get him to stop.
Her father turned to her even as he backed her mother farther into the bedroom. “Get ready for church and wait for me downstairs, Camilla.”
“You lied to me. You said it was a cold.” She pushed forward, ready to shove him aside, to beat him with her fists until she was inside that room with her mother.
“Camilla.” Her mother’s voice wavered, but she spoke clearly. With authority. “Listen to your father. We don’t know if it’s contagious.”
Camilla forced herself to stop and to settle back into her body.
Furiously, she swiped at the tears on her cheeks and nodded.
She would do what was asked of her. Not out of devotion to her father but because her mother had asked.
She would do this, for now, under the pretense of obedience.
She needed her father to think she was the good, reformed girl he expected.
To give her, if not the trust, then the time and space to be able to talk with her mother in private.
But Brianna was sick. Her mother was sick.
There was no more time. She needed to know what her mother knew about the Dark Sisters.
They were connected somehow. They had to be.
She needed to understand their connection to this illness, to the women of Hawthorne Springs, so she could try to stop it. To save them.
She dropped her head. “Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am,” she said and turned back to her room. She could have screamed even as the door closed silently behind her.
Two hours later, Camilla sat alone in the backseat, her fingers curled against her thighs as she kept her gaze trained straight ahead.
Her father had gone ahead. He had not come out of the bedroom at all before a driver had come to collect her, saying that Pastor Burson would meet her at the church.
He’d never intended to have a conversation with her.
To admit he’d lied and try to apologize with some lame excuse like he hadn’t wanted to worry her.
Especially with her only just back from Retreat, still so fresh on her renewed path and liable to stumble over the slightest provocation.
She could practically hear his voice in her head.
He was handling it. He had the best doctors.
The best staff. The best team. And God was on their side.
She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go and sit through an hour and a half of service, her father smiling down at them from the pulpit while he pretended everything was just fine, his hands on the puppet strings as he dangled Camilla’s time at Retreat over them like some sort of perfect story of redemption.
Her acting was good, but she wasn’t that good.