Chapter 11
We laugh at the divided sheet cake, our giggles devolving into delighted cackles. At nine years old, neither my twin nor I can decide on one cake flavor, and Mom finally threw up her hands and said she’d figure something out.
“This side is red velvet?” I gasp happily, sticking my finger into the cream cheese icing.
My mom squawks indignantly, but while she’s focused on not letting me ruin the frosting, my sister, Elaina, scoops up some strawberry frosting from her side of the cake.
She’s just more subtle about it than I am.
Something in me knows this is a dream. I don’t feel like a child as my parents sing us happy birthday. As I look at Elaina and grin with our pinkies held together under the table, she’s…different. Older, I realize. Twenty-six instead of nine years old.
Though she never made it past twelve.
But I look at her in the dream and see a reflection of myself, the same way I did when we were kids. Light grey eyes dance back at me, and her long black hair is swept up into a bun with braids framing it, the way Mom used to do for her.
Elaina was always the patient one. The one who didn’t mind Mom tugging and braiding her hair into something amateur yet perfect.
“Happy birthday, Nell,” she whispers to me, using the nickname that she’d christened me with so long ago.
“Happy birthday, Lainey,” I reply in kind, leaning close.
But when I go to blow out the candles alongside her, the chair under me falls away, and the floor goes with it. I’m falling, hands outstretched, reaching for the family still celebrating my birthday. The last happy birthday we ever had together.
“Come back,” I whisper, floating in blackness so absolute that I can’t see anything. “Please come back. I can’t do this without you. I don’t want to do this without you.”
Suddenly my surroundings are illuminated, and I blink a few times to stare out the barred window of Horizon Psychiatric Institution.
But this isn’t right.
Most of it is. Golden Girls playing on the only TV in the room, where so many patients are clustered around to laugh and titter at the show. Two men play checkers, though neither of them really knows what’s going on.
I sit alone at the heavy table, knowing from experience that it’s bolted to the floor. None of the blue scrub-wearing orderlies pay much attention to me. I’ve never really acted out or tried to throw things like so many people here.
Especially George.
My eyes narrow at one of the men playing checkers. He’s responsible for so many lockdowns and ruined afternoons that most of us think he should be moved somewhere else. Somewhere for the more serious cases.
The milk carton in front of me reminds me of the ones we had in elementary school, as I twist it in my fingers while rain pounds against the glass.
That’s the part that isn’t right, I realize.
It didn’t rain on my seventeenth birthday.
It was obnoxiously sunny, and the sun had heated the rec room to an uncomfortable level as it burned through the glass.
Thunder sounds, and I look up as I hear footsteps getting closer.
Glory-Ann, one of the oldest nurses here, gives me a wide, kind smile. “A little birdie told me it’s your birthday,” she tells me, leaning down with a paper plate in her hands. There’s a cupcake on it, slathered in homemade frosting and a candle poking out from the top.
“Make a wish,” she instructs kindly. “It’s strawberry.”
Though my heart twists in my chest, I mechanically move to do what she says.
Strawberry was Elaina’s favorite.
I hate strawberry.
But once she removes the candle and stands there, beaming, I carefully unwrap the cupcake, biting into it and letting my teeth sink into the spongy cake. “It shouldn’t be raining,” I mumble around a mouthful that I can’t really taste. “It doesn’t rain today.”
“It rains every day,” Glory Ann replies automatically. “You love the rain.”
“I hate strawberry, though.”
“Elaina loved strawberry.”
Glory Ann had never known that, and by now, enough of me has caught on to the fact that this is a dream to recognize the other parts that aren’t quite right.
There’s no door from here to the hallway.
I don’t see any cameras on the walls, and I can’t quite focus on the surrounding faces.
It’s as if there’s a blurry filter over them.
“Elaina is gone.” I pick up the cupcake and bite into it again, the dessert tasteless on my tongue.
There’s nothing for a few moments. Just the rain and the cupcake in my mouth.
But my brain can’t move past the rain pounding on the window.
I get up, my bare feet silent on the wooden floor, until I’m standing against it, nose pressed to the glass, though I can barely see through the rain and the bars that stop anyone from doing anything stupid.
And really, I can’t promise I wouldn’t be one of those people doing something incredibly dumb.
From the second floor, I can just see the parking lot. Where cars should line the spots marked in faded yellow lines, there’s nothing but asphalt.
Well, asphalt and her.
She stares at me as if I’m looking in a mirror. And the rain doesn’t touch Elaina as she stands in it, like she’s not really there at all.
She’s not. I know that, since by the time I was seventeen, Elaina had already been dead for five years. But she’s standing there looking up at me with the face we’ve shared since we were born and the same long, black hair.
I raise a hand and press it to the glass, fingers splayed and palm flat against it. “I miss you,” I whisper to my twin. And somehow, through the rain, I see her smile kindly.
“You could always see me again.” I shouldn’t be able to hear her, but I can. Like she’s standing right beside me. Elaina reaches her hand up and up, as if she can surmount the two-story distance and reach through the bars.
But thunder shakes the windowpane, louder and louder, until—
My eyes snap open, and in the darkness of my apartment, I sit up straight. A storm rages outside, as another peal of thunder shakes the nearby window.
It hadn’t stormed that day, I remind myself. For some reason it matters to my currently scattered brain that I get all the details right in my head. It didn’t storm, and Elaina was obviously long dead by that point.
God, I think to myself as I get to my feet and press my face to the cold glass of the window. I always have the weirdest dreams on my birthday. My only saving grace this year is that no one here knows what day it is.
The storm outside persists as I get dressed in the dark, knowing I could sleep for a few more hours if I want to.
But some part of me is afraid of those dreams. Because I know they’ll eventually twist into something else.
Something with fewer smiles, less laughter, and more of my mother after my father left.
It’s hard not to think about those birthdays. As always, I shove the thoughts away as soon as they appear, though a few memories manage to slip through.
First, the strawberry cake. Never something I wanted, but always Elaina’s favorite. Which is all Mom cared about once she was gone. Everything Elaina was missing.
And how unfair it was that I was the one who got to have it instead.
“You better stop it,” I sigh to myself, pulling on the second hoodie of the year.
Not that I’m counting the amount of perfectly crisp days or anything.
“Or you’re going to summon one of them.” Thankfully, my brain has never brought my mom back to life for me.
Maybe some deep, primal part of me knows that would be a step too far.
That I’d never recover from the sight of her face, whether it ends up being from before or after—
“Not doing this today,” I murmur. “Absolutely not doing this, nope. Today is going to suck enough without doing more to make it worse.” Jerking on a pair of leggings, I don’t even bother to do more than roughly brush my hair before pulling it into something resembling a bun on top of my head.
The black strands fall and twist, never wanting to stay still or orderly.
But I’m not in the mood to make it perfect. Just passable.
After snagging my phone, I glance around the small apartment like I always do, to make sure everything is in its place. When nothing sticks out as wrong, I let out a breath, just like always, before leaving and locking the door to my apartment behind me.
My steps are quiet on the wooden stairs leading down to Coffee Crest, though it took me months to stop thumping down them and shaking the bannister. Not that I’m willing to take all the blame for that. Part of it is the stairs, and just how old and shaky the damn bannister is.
I’m surprised to find Hestia isn’t behind the counter, though Justin gives me a quick, friendly grin when he sees me. “Oh, hey! Good morning, Nell,” the teenager greets. While I’m not usually a fan of children, teenagers least of all, he really is a nice kid.
“Hey Justin. Where’s Hestia?” I walk to the front and place my order quickly, though he’s made my coffee enough times that he barely needs me to do more than say ‘large’ and ‘iced’ before he’s already moving around like a hurricane.
While Justin doesn’t have Hestia’s casual and knowledgeable grace or experience behind the counter, he is fast and earnest.
He flashes me a quick grin and, in less time than believable, he’s handing me my coffee.
“I don’t know. She just told me she had to go out for some stuff.
Asked if I could take an extra shift this morning.
I really don’t mind as long as I don’t have to be here alone for lunch.
” A shudder goes through him at that, though I’m pretty sure it’s more theatrics than serious.