Fiancée, she thinks,not wife. That’s what he told me.
But the man doesn’t correct her. He scratches at his jaw thoughtfully. “She really needs it today. What do you think the half-life is on these?”
“I’ll need to look that up for you.”
She starts tapping on the keyboard. Suzie knows what Leprazine is, but she’s only dispensed it a handful of times—it’s a medication she thinks of as being heavy-duty, and she certainly wouldn’t be able to prescribe it over the counter to a complete stranger without a prescription. She doesn’t want the man to know this, though. Not yet. There’s somethingoffabout his request, about theway his eyes shift restlessly in their sockets. She felt it the second he came in.
“It depends what dosage she’s on.” Suzie glances over the top of the screen. “I don’t suppose you have that information?”
He shakes his head. He’s moved closer now. His eyes are the tawny brown of sucked toffee. “I suppose what I really want to know is, how long?”
“How long?” Suzie frowns.
“Until… you know. She loses it again. How long till the drugs are out of her system?”
“About ten days, if she’s on an average dose. Tell you what would really help, if I could speak to her and ask some questions. Can you give me her number?”
Suzie holds her gaze on him. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, not exactly. A flinch maybe, a dart of the eyes. Even some color building in his cheeks, like the lie is burning him from the inside out. That’s what would happen in the movies she likes to watch. But there is nothing. His expression remains stubbornly neutral.
He shrugs. “I’ll tellyouwhat”—he smiles—“why don’t I go out to the car and ask her? I’m parked just round the corner.”
She’s surprised. Maybe it’s all a whole heap of nothing after all. A coincidence that snowballed. It’s how she’s been feeling since she woke up this morning, she realizes. Upset and ill at ease, jumping to conclusions. She’ll feel better once she has a cup of coffee and can wash her hands. A good scrub with some of that carbolic soap they keep by the sinks in the dispensary.
The belltingsas the man opens the door and leaves, and Suzie thinks of the day Hazel had come in, how keyed up she’d looked, like she couldn’t stand to be in her own skin. Suzieknowsthat look.She’s seen it in Hazel before; eyes turning to pitch, her restless, agitated smile.We’re house-sitting for our parents, she’d said.
We. Our.
Such small words, Suzie thinks.Funny how they’ve got stuck in my head like splinters.
22
My other sister hadn’t appeared to me as a monster. Monsters never do. Look at Andrew, standing there in his stained overalls, or the man who had lived in the house on Beeker Street and kept a tub of ice cream that he wanted to share out back in his freezer. Look at Joseph Bray, who’d lived right here in this crumbling old farmhouse and told his young children he had something wonderful in the barn to show them, all the while holding an axe behind his back. Monsters wear the face of conviviality, keeping their sharp teeth hidden until it is too late.
The first time my other sister told me to do something bad was the day I took the scissors to my sister’s hair. Cathy had been asleep at the time, lying on her side with her beautiful blond hair forming a halo around her head. The scissors had been big and unwieldy in my small hands as I’d lowered them and begun to hack at it. It had fallen away from her like drifts of sunlit straw, and when her eyes had flared open in horror, it had made me smile so hard my face ached.
“Don’t give her a hard time, Cathy,” our mother had muttered as Cathy wailed at her broken reflection in the mirror. Half her hair was missing on the left side, snipped right up to the top of her ear. “You know your sister has been through a lot.”
I wasn’t afraid of my other sister when I was little. Her appearance was as described by the doctor who’d talked to my parents over my small, bowed head as if I wasn’t there at all.Upon investigation, we discovered a mass of skin and bone and hair, no teeth.Those words had sunk into my brain—an organ I thought of at the time as a large wad of chewed Wonderland gum, gelatinous and gluey—and spun her into a corporeal form. At first, she was just a voice, floating through the air like a melody. She was nice. She made me laugh. I liked when she would sing the funny little five-line songs she calledlim-er-ricks, and even though she was mean about Cathy, that was funny too, in a way. She told me that Cathy was as nasty as a scalded cat, so it was okay to think bad thoughts about her.
My other sister hada lotof bad thoughts about Cathy, and when she did she whispered them to me. Like the time she told me where to cut the wires on Cathy’s bike so that when she went flying down Shooter’s Hill on her candy-colored Raleigh, she would just keep right on going over the grass bank and into the river. I’d been reluctant about that one, but then my other sister had told me thatsometimes people have to be taught lessons, and sometimes those lessons hurt, and I’d understood.
Cathy hadn’t gone over the bank and into the river—she’d crashed into a parked car at the bottom of the road after picking up a good head of speed on the journey down, her screams trailing her like long ribbons. She’d needed nine stitches on her head and four in her chin, and all the way home from the hospital, Dadhad gone on and on about the importance of wearing a bike helmet, but Cathy had just stared at me like she was trying to work out a puzzle.
Then, the night the snow came, I heard a thump in my bedroom closet. Cathy had moved out of my room by then, because she said she wanted her own space, so I had the bedroom all to myself. I looked up from my book and over at the closet. It was creeping up to lights-out o’clock, but I reckoned I still had a good five minutes of reading time. I wondered if our cat had got stuck in there. Mum said he was very old, and that meant he sometimes got lost and confused.
“Gandalf?”
I lowered the book.Thump. Thump.Like something was trying to get out.
“Stupid cat,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. Gandalf was beautiful, and Mum said he was worth Big Bucks, so we all treated him like royalty. There was one more thud as I swung my legs out of the bed and crossed to the closet door, but then it all went quiet. Somehow, that was worse.
I reached for the handle, and the light flickered. It happened sometimes, in bad weather. The wind had been singing through the pines outside in a way that followed me down into murky, restless dreams.
Little pig, little pig, let me come in.
I opened the door, and she was there. My other sister, a black tangled mass. The smell of her wet and old, like she had crawled out of the sea. She showed me her eye, runny and yellow as a soft-boiled egg, and the black slit of her gummy mouth with no teeth in it. Iasked her to tell me all the things she heard when they had cut me open, and so she began the way she always does, by saying,
More suction. There. Do you see it?