Chapter 4
Chapter Four
T he small upstairs hallway led to two bedrooms and a bathroom.
She used to share a bedroom with her twin, but when their aunt died, Lena took her bedroom.
Ruby didn’t feel right sleeping in Aunt Millie’s room, but Lena had argued that it was a bit ridiculous for adult sisters to still be sharing a room.
She had a point. It wasn’t exactly conducive to?…
visitors. Not that either sister had many. Especially not lately.
Light seeped out from beneath Lena’s door. Still up. Still having trouble sleeping. “Lena?” Ruby pushed the door open and found her sister staring out the window toward the woods. Had she seen Ruby running? Had she seen anything else?
“Lena.” Ruby squeezed her sister’s shoulder, but Lena didn’t budge. “Lena!” Ruby shook her sister, her voice rising. “Not again,” Ruby muttered as she turned Lena in her chair, forcing her to look away from the window. “Lena, can you hear me?”
Lena turned toward the sound of Ruby’s voice, but her pale eyes were blank and unblinking, like she wasn’t seeing Ruby’s face in front of her own.
Ruby swallowed the panic in her throat. “Lena, it’s me, Ruby.
Can you hear me?” She had to cut off the sob rising to the surface.
Crying would get her nowhere; panicking would get her nowhere. It never had in the past.
Memories of her aunt sitting in her old rocker with the same blank expression on her face crowded into Ruby’s mind, but she pushed them away. Her aunt was gone, and Ruby had no one to ask about her strange habits, about what was happening to Lena.
Finally, Lena’s unseeing gaze settled on Ruby. Her dark hair hung around her pale face and, even though they were the same age, she looked so young and helpless right now. Ruby shook her fiercely. “Snap out of it, goddamn it!”
Lena cocked her head, as if hearing something no one else could.
Ruby froze, her fingers digging into her sister’s flesh. “Lena, please.” Her voice was nothing more than a choked whisper.
Lena blinked. “Ruby?”
Ruby collapsed into her lap with a sob. “You’re back,” she repeated until Lena tugged her upright again, worry etched into her features.
“What happened this time?” she asked as Ruby plopped down onto the floor at her feet.
“The usual. It was like you couldn’t see or hear me, but like maybe you could see or hear?…
something else…” Ruby sighed, running her hands through her long hair.
She knew it sounded crazy. It sounded crazy every time over the past year that they’d explained it to a doctor or a specialist or a therapist. And they’d been to many.
She had the medical bills to prove it. If it wasn’t for Aunt Millie leaving them the house and the small trust fund from their parents, they’d be out on the street by now.
They’d had every possible test done and everything had come up normal.
Her sister, according to the medical community, was perfectly healthy.
Lena frowned. She didn’t remember anything. She never did.
She was getting worse. These episodes were coming on more and more frequently, and Ruby didn’t know what to do about it. Her aunt had never mentioned her episodes after they happened, and Ruby had convinced herself her aunt was just old and tired.
But Lena was young and vibrant. Or at least she used to be.
Lena pressed her fingers against her temples and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to stop it.” She shook her head, dropping her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry, Ruby.”
“Don’t be.” Ruby patted her sister’s knee through her fuzzy pink bathrobe.
“You don’t need to apologize. It’s not your fault.
We’ll figure it out.” It was the same every time.
The same apologies, the same promise to figure it out.
But Ruby still didn’t have any answers. “Come on, I brought you some food from the bar.”
She grabbed Lena’s hand and tugged her up. Her fingers were cold and clammy, and Ruby held them tight, warming them the best she could.
Downstairs, under the soft yellow light of the kitchen, Ruby studied her sister as they ate their reheated lasagna in silence. They sat at the kitchen table, just big enough for the three of them, when there were three of them. Now Millie’s chair sat empty.
Lena picked at the food on her plate, a furrow of worry between her brows.
In the wake of their parents’ deaths, Lena had grown soft where Ruby had developed hard edges.
When they’d moved here more than twenty years ago, Lena had managed to win their classmates over.
She was well liked and well behaved. Where Ruby was seen as morose and sullen, Lena was bright and kind.
Invitations to sleepovers and birthday parties were never in short supply for her sister, while Ruby stayed home with their octogenarian aunt and watched reruns of The Twilight Zone .
It didn’t matter. Ruby loved her aunt and her sister. She completely understood why everyone loved Lena, because she did too. But her sister was falling apart, and no one had stuck around to help.
The fact that Lena had become town gossip at the bar only drove the point home for Ruby. No one was coming to help them. It was up to her to fix whatever was wrong with her twin.
How the hell she was going to do that, she had no idea.
Ruby scraped the edges of the pan, getting every last bit of crispy cheese.
Lena gave her a tired smile. “I’m sorry you’ve been working double shifts.”
Ruby waved her fork as though she could brush away their problems. “It’s fine, really. I don’t mind.”
Shreya was right about Lena quitting her job at the local preschool. But she hadn’t been speaking in tongues . That little tidbit got added later as the story wound its way through town.
But it was true that Lena’s mind had drifted away during story time.
Ruby maintained that the incident only proved what an amazing teacher Lena was.
Not a single child moved from their seat as they waited patiently for Lena to start the story again.
Unfortunately, her assistant teacher had returned from bathroom duty and found her unresponsive on the brightly colored alphabet carpet, Little Red Riding Hood in her lap.
Ruby reached across the table and took her sister’s hand again. “It’s going to be okay, Lena. I promise.”
Her sister sighed and shook her head.
“It will,” Ruby insisted. “Now go get some sleep.”
Lena’s pale blue eyes met hers. The girls were nearly identical in every way. Same dark hair, same fair skin, but where Ruby’s eyes were a dark brown, Lena’s were so light they sometimes looked translucent. Their parents used to say it was the only way to tell them apart when they were babies.
Lena looked as though she might say more, but instead, pulled her bathrobe tighter around her and shuffled back up the stairs to her bedroom. Shuffled, when she used to hike all the highest Maine peaks, when she used to be the center of every party.
Ruby listened to her footsteps overhead, the sound of her door clicking shut, the creaking of her old mattress as Lena sank into it.
And only then did she let her thoughts slip back to the woods.