Chapter 50
Bastian
The window is our only exit, and it’s a two-story climb to the overgrown garden below. I desperately want to scale the drainpipe and race down the street and try to get Billy some help.
But I can’t leave my sister like this.
She’s sitting on our bedroom floor, covered in food and blood, her eyes staring at nothing. The puncture wounds on her arm and thigh are bleeding sluggishly. The cuts on her face look horrific, but at least they’ve coagulated.
Now she’ll have physical scars to match the countless emotional ones Evelyn gave her.
“Come on.” I keep my voice gentle. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even blink.
I sigh and go to fill the tub with warm water, adding the lavender bath milk Billy rescued from Evelyn’s bathroom trash.
I’m guessing our mother didn’t like the smell, but it quickly became Billy’s favorite.
She keeps it for special occasions—like the first rain of the season, or if she spots a double rainbow.
The bath milk turns the water white, and I wrinkle my nose at the smell.
It doesn’t mix well with the mildew inside the bathroom.
I fetch the bar of antibacterial soap from the basin and set it on the rim of the tub.
When I come back for her, she hasn’t moved.
“I’m going to pick you up now,” I tell her. “Okay?”
There was a chapter in one of Evelyn’s books about crisis response, and how the voice matters as much as the action. Calm and steady. Like you’re talking someone back from a ledge. I practiced it on Sybil once, when she had a nightmare so bad she didn’t know where she was.
It worked then. I sincerely hope it works now.
She’s heavier than she was when she was nine…but not much.
Stripping her out of Evelyn’s gray dress is like undressing a mannequin. She’s just as docile, not lifting a finger to help me. I hesitate at her underwear when I realize she’s wearing some kind of feminine hygiene product, then pull it off anyway, keeping my eyes averted.
She doesn’t resist when I lift her over the side of the tub, or when I ease her down into a sit, but the moment I let go of her, she slides bonelessly under the milky water.
“Billy!” I grab her armpits and haul her up, staring at her in disbelief. “Little bit of help here, please?”
“Sorry,” she mumbles.
But I don’t trust she can hold herself up if she tried, so I keep her pressed against the back of the tub with a hand on her sternum as I clumsily wash her face with the other.
The cut on her lip is angry and red, but not as deep as I thought it would be. And when I splash water over the gouges in her cheek, they hardly bleed at all.
I grimace as I work the mashed potatoes and gravy out of her hair. I pull out a big clump and hold it out for her to see.
“Want some?” I joke weakly. “Or should I bring you some more glass?”
Nothing.
“Billy?”
She blinks slowly, but her eyes remain unfocused, her lids heavy.
I stop trying to make conversation, focusing on cleaning her up as quickly as possible. We’ve been through a lot of weird shit in our lives, but bathing my sister in the tub after a nightmare Thanksgiving food fight takes the cake.
The sooner the moon rises on this day, the better.
“I dream about it all the time,” she says out of nowhere a few minutes later.
I’d been rubbing at one of the fork wounds on her arm, washing it out with the bar of antibacterial soap. Her voice is so unexpected, I drop the soap in the scummy lavender-and-gravy bathwater.
“Jeez,” I breathe. “What are you on about now?” I spot more gravy on her hair and reach over to wash it out.
“The birthday party. You remember?”
I pause, my hands still tangled in her hair.
“That was a long time ago, Billy.”
“I know.” She smiles, then winces, her face going slack again. “I keep dreaming about it.”
“That’s…nice,” I offer.
I wouldn’t share the things I dream about with my sister. They’re incredibly violent or incredibly sexual. Usually both. Not exactly a sign of a healthy mind, according to the psychology papers and journals littered around Evelyn’s study.
“I dream I’m Lily.”
“Lily?” I murmur, rubbing potatoes out of her hair.
“The birthday girl. I’m her, but her name’s Lily. I’m turning thirteen.”
“You’re already thirteen,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.
“Mom made me a blue cake with butterflies on it because that’s what I wanted. She asked what I wanted, and then she made me a chocolate cake with blue icing and fondant butterflies.”
“Our mom?” I scoff.
“Hazel,” Billy says. “Our mom’s name is Hazel. She’s so beautiful, Bash. Pretty, and kind, and the best baker in town. Everyone is always raving about her double chocolate chip cookies.”
My throat tightens.
“Billy—”
“Our daddy’s there too.”
We have different fathers, but I don’t correct her. I don’t think it would make a difference right now, anyway.
“Oh, yeah?”
“He was working very hard, but he came anyway because it’s my birthday,” she continues dreamily. “Oh, and Sally and Sarah are there.”
“Sally and Sarah?”
“The twins, Bash!” she says, like only an idiot could forget Sally and Sarah. “My best friends since kindergarten? Duh.”
“Right. Them.”
Her voice drops lower. “Tommy’s there too.”
My hands have gone still in her hair.
I want her to stop talking so I can finish washing food out of her hair—food she should have been eating at a table, not scooping off the floor with glass like a starved animal.
Because that’s what our evil mother turned us into.
Animals starved of everything.
Food, comfort, love.
But I can’t tell Billy to be quiet, because there’s a light in her eyes I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
It’s hauntingly pure, devastatingly hopeful.
Like, if she dreams it enough times, this awful life will become the nightmare, and that birthday party will become her new reality.
Billy becomes Lily—a girl grateful for every rising sun, instead of wishing desperately for each day to end.
I clear my throat, scooping water up to rinse her hair. “Who’s this Tommy guy?” I croak.
“Tommy?” Billy sighs. “Only the cutest boy in school.”
Is she…blushing?
“Who else is there?” I force a swallow, glancing down to look for the soap. I spot it near her feet and sink a hand into the water to grab it.
“Last Valentine’s Day, he gave me a card with a heart on it and told me he wants to kiss me on the park bench by the lake. Isn’t that romantic, Bash?”
I find the soap, but it slips away as soon as I try to grab it, spearing through the water like a damn salmon.
“Sounds like Tommy’s a cheap date,” I tell her gruffly.
When I try to grab the soap again, I find Billy’s hand instead.
It’s as limp as the rest of her until she wraps her fingers around mine.
“I love him, Bash. I’m going to marry him and have his children. Twins, a boy and a girl. Blond, beautiful twins, and we’ll be so happy, Bash. All of us. You, and me, and our beautiful babies.”
I give her a squeeze, happy that she’s regaining some of her strength. At least I won’t have to haul her out of the bathtub by myself.
Then my mind catches up with her words.
“You mean Tommy. Tommy’s babies. His…twins or whatever.”
I can’t see the bar of soap, and Billy’s gone quiet, so I look up at her.
My heart stutters at the heart-wrenching despair in her eyes.
“No, Bastian,” she whispers. “Our babies.”
Billy pulls my hand deeper into the water until I’m touching her thigh.
I don’t know what she’s doing until she flattens my hand against her leg and drags it up and in.
“Hey, stop!”
Water sloshes against the side of the tub as I tug my fingers free. Billy’s hand falls down hard enough to splash water on my face.
“What the hell?” I spit out.
She huffs out a bemused laugh.
Suddenly she’s twice her age—so jaded, so broken, not even God can save her.
“It’s just a silly dream, Bash,” she says flatly. “All I’ll ever have are silly dreams.”
We stare at each other across the cooling bathwater, the truth I’ve been avoiding for months suddenly blatant.
My sister is gone.
Whatever was left of her after years of Evelyn’s torture has finally crumbled away, leaving behind this hollow thing that dreams of birthday parties and believes in a God who has never, ever answered her prayers.
“I can’t kill myself,” she says suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. “It’s a sin.”
Not this again.
“You can’t just decide to be Catholic one day and—“
“I can, and I did.” She says it simply, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “God loves me, Bash. Even if no one else does.”
“I love you, Billy. But not…not like that.”
“I know.” Her voice sounds hollow, her eyes suddenly empty.
“Billy—”
“It’s okay.” She reaches up to touch my face. “You did everything you could. You…you were my guardian angel. But even angels can’t fight God’s will.”
I hate hearing her speak about God. I get that she needs to believe there’s a higher power so that her miserable life will make sense on some cosmic level, but in my mind, it only proves there is no God.
“So God’s will is for you to suffer, even though you’ve never done anything wrong in your entire life?” I say bitterly. “Sounds like a great guy.”
“God’s will is for me to transcend.” Her voice hitches on the last word.
“Today was rough, okay, but enough of this transcending bullshit. It’s over already. We’re going to get into bed, and when we wake up tomorrow, it’ll all be in the past.”
I pat her arm, then squeeze it when that doesn’t get a reaction. “You wanna know what’s happening tomorrow? Cinnamon rolls, Billy.” I drop my voice conspiratorially low. “Cinnamon roll Fridays! Maybe they’ll even have another one of those apple fritters I got yesterday.”
Her eyes gleam, but it has nothing to do with pastries.
They’re too bright, almost feverish.
“You don’t get it, Bash. I’m like…” She sighs wearily, her bleeding mouth turning down at the corners. “I’m like that butterfly you caught. The one The Witch made me eat. You remember that?”
Remember? Hell, I’ll never forget. That shit’s branded in my brain.