Agnes
Vera and Ana, just two years apart, are very different. I watch them in the rearview mirror, my eyes darting away from the
road to the two slender girls in my back seat. One dark, one fairer as they sit still, each looking out her respective window.
Vera, the elder, has big eyes, weirdly black, and thick lashes, eyebrows angry slashes, mouth wide and full, high cheekbones.
Her auburn hair, glossy and thick, is tightly braided to a single rope that slides over her shoulder like a snake. To someone
else, those still features might communicate calm. But her aura is wild—grief, anger, fear. She holds her sister’s hand.
Ana is silently crying, tears streaming from icy blue eyes. Her hair is so black it’s almost purple. Heart-shaped and pale,
her face is a mask of sadness. Downturned pink lips, inky eyebrows knitted. Her energy however is as cold as a blade. She’s
the one to watch. That’s what my sister, the girls’ mother, Sadie, said. Vera has a golden center. Ana’s is steel through
and through. Sadie loves them both, fiercely.
“Not much longer,” I say, catching Vera’s eyes in the mirror as she offers a tight nod. There’s something there that gives
me a little jolt, like a mini electric shock to the solar plexus.
I wonder if Sadie was right about the girls. She often made mistakes about people. Take, for example, the girls’ father. She was clueless about him, though I saw right through him from the first. I knew he’d be her undoing. But what woman ever listened to reason when she was in love?
The road winds on, the sun sets. I flip on my headlights. And finally, I turn onto the drive that leads to the house, come
to a stop. Then I climb out to unlock and swing open the gate, return to the car to drive us through.
“Why is there a gate?” asks Ana, her voice soft.
“To keep people who don’t belong here out,” I say.
She seems to consider this but doesn’t respond.
“We don’t want this,” says Vera, those fierce dark eyes on me. “We don’t want to live with you. We don’t even know you.”
“I understand,” I tell her, gripping the wheel. “You’re a child, but you do have a choice. Come live with me here, or you
and your sister will go into state care, the foster system. I think I can promise you that won’t be better.”
Ana throws Vera a frightened look, tugs at her arm urgently, shaking her head. Vera will make the decisions for them, and
Ana will do what she says. This much is clear.
“I want to go home,” says Ana, voice wobbly.
“This is home for now,” I say as gently as I can. Ana reminds me so much of Sadie. I hope she’s stronger, wiser. I am not
the mothering type, lacking patience and that essential tenderness. But maybe I have something to teach both of them, if they’ll
learn.
I wait, the engine rumbling. In the trees, the mournful call of a barred owl. Above, a dusky sky starting to glitter with
stars.
“What’s it going to be, girls?”
I turn to look at them. Vera wraps her arms around her middle. Her red coat is too small, exposing delicate wrists. Another
nod.
I drive.
“Where are we?” asks Vera as the big house rises into view. “What is this place?”
“This is your birthright, the place where your mom and I grew up.”
Something in Ana’s eyes glitters. And strangely I’m reminded of a baby rattlesnake.
How its bite is rumored to be more deadly than that of a mature rattler because it can’t control the amount of venom it releases.
Adult rattlesnakes supposedly know to leave some venom in reserve. Young snakes unload it all.
“Whoa,” Ana says.
The house is actually kind of a wreck. The porch needs shoring up, the roof repair. The whole thing could badly use a coat
of paint. But it’s huge, and its decrepitude is masked by the crepuscular gloom. I admit there’s a grandness to it in the
shadows.
I help them get their tiny suitcases from the trunk. They have so little, and I try not to feel sorry for them because pity
is disempowering, and I want better than that for them. They’re right that we don’t know each other well, but they’re my blood.
Inside, I ask them to follow me upstairs. “I’ll show you girls around properly tomorrow,” I say as we climb the creaking steps.
“But for tonight let’s just try to get some rest.”
I hear them whispering as they climb the stairs, past the row of portraits and photographs. Their family—aunts, their grandmother,
Sadie and me as children. In time, I’ll teach them all about the family Sadie was so eager to leave behind.
At the end of the hallway, I swing open the door to the bedroom that I shared with their mother when we were girls. The room
is cozy with two twin beds made with fluffy pink comforters and soft pillows, matching dressers, thick overstuffed chairs
by the window. There’s a working fireplace, and a tall bookshelf packed with the novels that Sadie and I devoured as young
people. Vera enters and offers an imperious nod, as if she finds the space just barely acceptable. I know for a fact it’s
about a hundred times nicer than their room in the hovel they called home.
She moves inside and claims the far bed, putting her suitcase down by the dresser. She stares at a picture of Sadie and me;
we stand hand in hand in the garden, which I’ll show them one day.
“Is it haunted?” asks Ana, still lingering at the door. “It looks haunted.”
“Don’t be stupid,” snaps Vera. But she doesn’t fool me; fear pulls the features of her face taut as she gazes out the door, down the long dark hallway.
“It’s not haunted by anything but memories,” I answer truthfully.
What I don’t say is that memory can be the most relentless haunting of all.