“You’re making me nervous.”
She rolls her eyes but eventually she sits down. She’s looking better today. Less agitated. These last few months she hasn’t been sleeping right. Danny tells me she keeps checking the locks on the windows and bedding down on the floor of Scout’s room. She dreams of Andrew appearing at the window, that sunken place in his head like a crater full of shadow. Mostly those dreams have stopped, she tells me.
Mostly.
“You know the nurse told me it was a miracle you made it.”Cathy rests her chin in her hand, her head tilted. “She said someone was looking out for you.”
“Yes, there was. It was you.”
She brushes her upper lip with her tongue thoughtfully. In the moment which passes between us, I hear the sound of the church bells. A robin, heralding the spring.
“I’m not sure about that, Hazel. Isawher. Isawher, just before I pulled you out. She looked like a burning tree reaching all the way to the ceiling. The smell was awful, like singed hair.”
I nod. I remember. The smoke had been so acrid that I’d ruptured my windpipe coughing. My clothes smoldering, my eyelashes burned away. It was only Cathy dragging me outside that had saved me. My body had hissed as I fell forward into the snow. Steam surging upward toward a night sky that had seemed impossibly vast.
“Your other sister stood right in front of you and blocked the flames. Tell me, why do you think that was?”
Cathy’s voice is gentle, as if she’s teasing something from me. Trying to, at least. She sounds like one of the therapists at Belle Vue, I think. I almost laugh, but I can’t deny I’ve been thinking about this myself, especially on the nights I can’t sleep, lying in the dark with one eye open and staring at the closet door in case there is a thud from inside. Or a voice.
“I think—” I hesitate, eyes flicking out toward the pines. “I think my other sister knew that if I died, so would she, because I was the host. It didn’t matter which body she jumped into, I was herincubator, right? It wasn’t a selfless act, Cathy. She was just trying to ensure her survival.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Cathy reaches her arm across the table. Her own skin had been burned, rescuing me. Hands to elbows, like she’d put them inside afurnace. A witch’s oven. Superficial, they’d called it, as if there was anything superficial about the pain she’s been in. In places, her skin is dark pink, blotchy.It’ll heal, she tells me.Don’t worry.She’s more sanguine about it than I am.
“Did I tell you Danny has a girlfriend?”
“Oh?” I sit up a little straighter in my chair. “How do you feel about that?”
“Good. Glad. It’s strange. He doesn’t normally talk much about her, but last night he came into my room and sat on my bed. Rosie—that’s her, the girlfriend—had the same thing you did when she was younger. A tera-tumor.”
“Teratoma.”Terror-tome-ah.A sound like running feet. “Is he freaked out about it?”
She shrugs. “Nah. I raised him better than that. He just had some questions. It’s been nice, in a way. Since everything that happened, me and Danny have got much closer. I feel like giving him a fucking medal for making that video. If he hadn’t—”
My turn to reach over the table. I thread my fingers through hers. “Don’t. Backward, not forward, right?”
“Sure.” Cathy pushes her chair away from the table. She’s on edge, I can see that. “I worry about Scout, though. Sometimes he seems to have forgotten it all completely, and then I’ll catch him looking at me like I’m a stranger. I don’t know. Maybe I’m going mad. Iamgoing to get a drink. A proper one, with a high alcohol content. You want anything?”
“Go easy. You’re on those painkillers, remember?”
“One won’t hurt.”
We both laugh at that, because it’s never just one with Cathy. She’s all-or-nothing, and that’s what I love most about her. How fiercely she feels everything. She pauses as she walks past me.
“What was it he said to you again? At the end?”
I shift uncomfortably. I don’t like talking about Andrew, or that final night on Bray Farm. For my sister, this openness is a form of therapy. I’d rather bury it, down amid the dirt and the rot. Let it break apart and feed itself back into the earth.
Still, she is looking at me expectantly, so I put on a smile. “‘You can always knock it down and rebuild. It’ll look a little different—’”
“‘—but it will still give you shelter,’” Cathy finishes. She smiles, and it lights up her whole face. “Who’d have thought such a broken man could say something so beautiful?”
I nod. Sometimes I hope it was over quickly for him. On bad nights, I don’t. On those nights, when I wake up feeling as if I am drowning in hair, thrashing and sweating and gasping for breath, I hope he suffered all the way to the end.
“Oh! Here she is. She’s coming!” Cathy is almost breathless with excitement. I don’t turn around. “She looks so different! You okay, Hazel? You need anything?”
“For the millionth time, I’m fine.”