The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

  “Of course not. Take all the time you need.”

  “Mommy is whipped?” Diana asks as I hand Peter the feather duster. “Who whipped her?”

  “‘Whipped’ means Mommy is very tired,” Peter patiently explains.

  I leave my husband to instruct our daughter in the finer points of English idioms and head for the stairs. Diana is so cute when she takes things at face value. Peter and I have learned not to tell her it’s time to hit the sack, or that she should keep her eye on the ball, or that we’re going to run to the store, or that it’s raining cats and dogs. Poor Diana was so disappointed after that last one when she ran to the window expecting to see actual kittens and puppies falling from the sky, she threw a book through the glass. That part wasn’t so cute.

  My bed is calling to me—another saying I will never speak in front of my literal-minded daughter—but I stop first at the room we set up as a nursery to look in on the baby. The baby is sleeping peacefully, as I knew she would be. Our second daughter is an absolute joy, perfect in every way: sweet rosy cheeks, tiny bow of a mouth, a tuft of baby-fine hair sticking straight up on the top of her head, and with the cutest scattering of tiny red freckles across her cheeks; quiet, calm, happy. I can’t resist stroking one cheek with my finger. Her eyes remain closed, but the corners of her mouth turn up in a sleepy smile.

  Not for the first time, I marvel at her even temperament. If I had done something like this with Diana, she’d have woken up screaming. This baby is the exact opposite of our first daughter in every way, as if the Universe realized it messed up big-time and was trying to make amends. When Diana was this age, her screams were so loud, our ears would ring. When this baby is hungry or needs her diaper changed or is just feeling lonely and wants to be picked up, she squeaks. I used to nurse Diana to sleep in my rocking chair, then dislodge her oh-so-carefully from my breast, carry her gently to her crib, lay her down as softly as humanly possible on the genuine sheepskin that was supposed to promote sleeping, and slowly, ever so slowly slide my hands out from beneath her while holding my breath and praying that she would stay asleep—only to have her wake up screaming the second my hands broke contact. This baby I could literally drop into her crib after nursing her to sleep and she’d snuggle happily into her blankets. (Not that I would, but I could.) I used to think that Diana’s difficulties were my fault because of my inexperience, and that I was a bad mother. It’s nice to know the problem wasn’t me.

  I leave my sweet baby to her sweeter dreams and draw the window shades in the master bedroom, then kick off my shoes and collapse on top of the bed. My to-do list swims in my head: sweep up the sawdust and woodchips Peter left by the hearth, hang the front door wreath, wash the mountain of dishes that have been accumulating on the kitchen counter for days, go to the post office and pick up the box of antique ornaments I ordered to replace the ones that Diana broke and cross my fingers that they are similar enough that Peter’s grandparents won’t notice. But gradually, my thoughts become less organized. I am washing dishes at the big farmhouse sink while Diana dries. Diana is using the sheepskin she slept on as a baby as a towel. The sheepskin turns into an actual sheep that jumps out of her hands and baas as Diana giggles and feeds it bite-sized pieces of leftover chocolate cake.

  I wake to the sound of Diana’s laughter coming from the baby’s room. I sit up groggily and swing my feet over the side of the bed and scrub my hands over my face. The wind-up alarm clock on the nightstand says I was asleep for half an hour, but if anything, I am more tired now than when I lay down.

  Diana giggles again. Of course, if she’s playing with the baby, this means that the baby is also awake, which means she will need to be changed and fed whether she complains about being wet and hungry or not. I slip my feet into my shoes and start for the door.

  “Jenny!” Charlotte exclaims when I step into the hallway. “Peter said you were asleep. I wasn’t going to wake you—I was just going to sneak a peek at the baby.”

  “Char! Oh, wow—it’s so good to see you! You look great. It’s been way too long.”

  We embrace, then stand back and look each other over, then laugh and sink into each other’s arms again. Charlotte smells of fresh air and snow and cold. The long blonde hair I remember has been buzzed short on the sides and streaked with pink on top. The lip stud is also new. She’s wearing a cream-colored natural wool Highlands-style cable sweater with an Inca-look peasant skirt paired with hiking boots and thick woolen socks and huge dangling found-object earrings I have no doubt she made herself.

  “I like your look,” I say when we pull apart again. I reach up and touch one of the earrings, which sets it jangling.

  “Thanks. Wish I could say the same for yours.”

  “Hey, no fair. I just woke up. Wait till you see me after we dress for dinner tonight. The servants have a wonderful meal prepared.”

  Charlotte laughs and we embrace again. It’s hard to keep my hands off her. When we were younger, we were never close. My sister was always the creative one, the wild child, while I was as responsible and mature as you’d expect of the older sibling. Now that we are adults, I like to think that my sensibleness has tempered her lack of self-control and that some of her exuberance has rubbed off on me. Her wild side still gets her into trouble; Charlotte’s just off a bad breakup with an abusive misogynist she had no business hooking up with in the first place. She also recently gave up her receptionist job at an insurance agency to make a living selling her jewelry, a plan I am one-hundred-percent certain is going to fail, though I would never tell her. At any rate, the fact that she’s not working means she’s able to come and visit, so there is that. I’m hoping to talk her into staying on indefinitely. While I would never admit it to Peter, after more than a year with only the three of us rattling around this big, empty house, I’m lonely. I have no idea if wilderness life will suit my bohemian sister, but we certainly have the room.

  “Come see the baby,” I say when Diana laughs again.

  I lead Charlotte into the nursery. For a fraction of a second, I think that Diana is tickling the baby. Then I see the pillow she’s holding over the baby’s face.

  “Diana! What are you doing?”

  I rush across the room and grab her arm and push her away and snatch the baby out of her crib. The baby is limp, her lips and skin tinged blue. I collapse into the rocking chair and pound the baby’s back and pinch her cheeks until her coloring returns to pink. She draws a deep shuddering breath, then looks up at me and reaches for a strand of my hair and coos.

  Charlotte drops to her knees beside me. Her shocked expression no doubt mirrors my own.

  “My God. That was awful! Is the baby all right? Why did Diana do that?”

  “Diana is—unpredictable,” I manage. I look at my daughter standing next to the baby’s crib with the pillow still in her hands, watching us as calmly and unconcernedly as if she hadn’t just witnessed me bring her sister back to life, and shudder. If Diana had held the pillow over the baby’s face a few seconds longer . . . if Charlotte and I had lingered a bit more in the hallway . . . “I don’t know why she did that. Sibling rivalry, I guess.”

  “That wasn’t sibling rivalry. Sibling rivalry is when you used to pinch my arm or pull my hair. Diana was trying to kill her.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she didn’t mean to. I doubt she even understands what could have happened.”

  It can’t be as bad as it looked. Maybe Diana was only going to put the pillow under the baby’s head, and I came in at precisely the wrong moment and misunderstood what she was doing.

  I hand the baby to Charlotte and pull Diana onto my lap.

  “Diana, honey, why did you put the pillow over your sister’s face? Don’t you know you could have hurt her? She could have stopped breathing.”

  She nods. “I know. I like it when she stops breathing. Her face changes colors.”

  “Her— You’ve done this before?
”

  She nods again. “Lots of times. Am I in trouble?”

  Fear, revulsion, and horror sweep over me. I honestly thought that Diana would get better in time; that if we showered her with love and affection, her hard edges would soften. But what she did wasn’t a mistake—this was a deliberate attempt to see how close she could come to killing her sister. The marks on the baby’s face that I thought were freckles aren’t freckles at all—they’re burst micro-vessels from a chronic lack of oxygen. Diana has done this before, not once but many times. In my darkest moments I used to wonder if we should send her away, but how can we? She’s our child. We’re her parents. We love her.

  Now I wonder if whatever is wrong with my daughter is something that all the love in the world can’t fix. I can’t bear to think of her locked away in an institution, but what else can we do?

  Yet how can I sacrifice one daughter to save the other? Maybe there’s a new drug that will help her keep her dark urges under control, or a behavior modification program we haven’t yet tried. Maybe it really is sibling rivalry, but an extreme form. Maybe Peter and I need to triple the amount of attention we give her to compensate for the attention we give the baby. For nine years, she was an only child. Naturally, she sees her new sibling as a threat. Diana’s therapist’s office is closed for the holidays, but I’ll make an emergency appointment as soon as I can get through to them.

  Until then I promise that I will do everything in my power to make sure that my daughters are never left unsupervised when they are together.

  TEN

  NOW

  Rachel

  So, this is where things stand:

  I’m standing on the front porch of my childhood home with my duffel over my shoulder and my hand on the doorknob. Trevor is behind me with my suitcase. The door is open. Inside it’s dark and quiet. There’s no sign of life; no smoke coming from the chimneys, no cars in the driveway, no activity from Charlotte’s and Diana’s studios in the barn. It figures that after priming myself for a showdown during the entire three-hour drive, I’ve managed to come back at a time when no one is home. As half-owner of the lodge I have every right to show up unannounced and uninvited and to go inside if this is what I choose to do. Yet I can’t bring myself to step over the threshold. I thought I would be able to walk boldly across the place where my parents died. I was wrong.

  A raven calls: Cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok, cr-r-ruck tok.

  I search the trees. The raven is perched on the topmost spike of a tall white pine. The spike is bent from its weight. Ravens are massive birds, much bigger than crows: two feet long and with a four-foot wingspan, with a black beak, black eyes, and glossy black feathers.

  I shiver. That the first forest creature to greet me upon my return is a raven has to be a sign. All over the world, ravens are viewed as harbingers of death. Some cultures believe that ravens are the souls of wicked priests; others that ravens are the incarnation of damned souls or even Satan himself. Some say that when a raven croaks at night it’s because the raven is really the wandering soul of some poor person who was murdered who didn’t get a proper burial. Native Americans worshipped ravens as the creator of the Earth, moon, sun, and stars, but they also viewed them as tricksters and cheats, though I’ve never had a problem with them.

  The raven looks down at me. I look up at it. All will become known, it says after it is certain that it has my full attention.

  “What?” I whisper as quietly as I can because Trevor is standing right behind me and if he knew that I was talking to a bird, he’d stuff me into his Jeep and drive me straight back to the hospital. “What will become known? Is it about me? Is it about my parents?”

  All will become known, the raven says again. It opens its wings wide and flaps away.

  I feel like picking up a stone and chucking it after it. I hate when animals use enigmatic sayings to pretend to wisdom. That this raven spoke to me is not unusual; birds often serve as messengers from a higher realm in fairy tales and legends, assisting heroes and heroines by offering them wise advice. Unfortunately, I can’t tell if this raven’s message is a warning or a promise.

  “Rachel? You don’t have to do this, you know. There must be another door that we can use.” Trevor knows as well as I do what happened on the other side of this one.

  “I’m fine.”

  And as if speaking the words out loud has broken the spell, suddenly, I am. I take a deep breath, walk quickly across the place where my parents died, and stop at the entrance to the great room to give my eyes time to adjust. The room is so big, and the windows so tree-shaded and narrow, coming in from outside on a sunny day is like being struck blind.

  “Can we turn on some lights?” Trevor asks.

  “No, sorry. I mean, yes, we do have electricity, but we only run the generator twice a day, morning and evening. We won’t be able to turn on the lights until my sister and aunt come home.”

  “Ah, gotcha. That’s okay.” He takes out his cell phone and uses the flashlight feature to light the room. “Holy crap. This looks like the set of a horror movie.”

  I burst out laughing. I’ve never heard anyone describe my home quite like this. Most of the scientists and former work colleagues of my parents who came to visit gushed over the lodge’s construction and décor. The Architectural Digest article my grandmother had framed and hung on our dining room wall calls our great room “an over-the-top extravaganza; the definitive example of lodge style gone amok,” which pretty much covers it. Sixty feet long by forty-five feet wide, with a twenty-four-foot-high vaulted ceiling and three massive cast-iron and deer-antler chandeliers and a fieldstone fireplace that’s so big, there are two benches inside where you can sit. Plank oak floors, leather furniture, Tiffany lamps, Navajo blankets, animal-hide rugs, and enough taxidermy to open a natural history museum, which in the half-light look every bit as menacing as Trevor’s remark implied: a beaver gnawing on a stick on one end of the fireplace mantel, a mink and a martin posed to look like they’re fighting on the other end, a pair of Canada geese on the wall above with their wings spread as if they are perpetually flying south, a wild turkey beside the fireplace displaying his tail feathers for a nonexistent female, and on and on. Native animals mix with exotics: a snarling gray wolf beneath a majestic Cape buffalo head, a black bear beside a leopard, a crocodile posed as if it’s trying to decide between a bighorn sheep and a white-tailed deer.

  “Aren’t some of these endangered?” Trevor asks as his light falls on a juvenile mountain gorilla that I happen to know has been on the critically endangered list for decades. My parents hated trophy hunting and made sure that Diana and I understood what the animals we grew up with represented.

  “If they are, I guess we have my ancestors to thank.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that—well, you told me how much you loved animals when you were a kid. How could you stand living surrounded by all of this?”

  I shrug. “You know how it is. Kids accept whatever they grow up with as normal.” I don’t tell him that every time I passed through this room I whispered an apology to its unwilling inhabitants for my ancestors’ collective bloodlust.

  Trevor switches his phone to camera mode and shoots a panorama despite the miserable lighting, then walks around the taxidermy taking close-ups. I’m not sure I like him poking his critical eye into every corner of my home knowing that his readers will one day see these pictures and pass judgment. On the other hand, I opened this can of worms when I invited him here, and I can’t very well put them back.

  “Come on. I’ll give you the grand tour.” The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can do what I came to do. I bring him first to the gun room. If Trevor is going to make a big deal about my ancestors’ trophy hunting, then I want him to see that the gun cases are empty, so he understands how much my parents disapproved.

  “Okay, now this is definitely impressive. What are we look
ing at? Maybe fifty, sixty rifles?”

  “Something like that,” I manage. I put out a hand against the doorjamb to steady myself. The sheer quantity of weaponry in this room knocks me back. I feel as though I’ve stepped into a past that I recognize but never knew. All of the weapons from my great-grandfather’s stories have been returned to their places, exactly as I remember from the pictures: a Winchester 1894, according to my great-grandfather the most-sold sporting rifle in American history; the classic Winchester Model 70, which every young hunter saved for; a Remington 770, one of the most accurate mass-produced rifles in American manufacturing and the rifle I see in my visions; and so many more.

  And there is another addition. In the middle of the room is a large glass display case filled with birds. I borrow Trevor’s phone to go in for a closer look and quickly identify most of them because these are all species that live on our property: sandhill cranes, great blue herons, peregrine falcons, short-eared owls, bald eagles, brown-headed cowbirds, pileated woodpeckers, American goldfinches, and common crows—a male and female of each, all expertly mounted and preserved. My sister always did like birds. Fortunately, there are no ravens.

  Trevor is standing in front of one of the cases with his hand pressed against the glass as if he wants to stroke the rifle behind it, a Pre-’64 Winchester Model 70 that is in such high demand among shooters and collectors my great-grandfather said it was worth five thousand dollars. I swear, he’s all but drooling. I can only imagine how Trevor would react if I were to show him the most expensive gun in my family’s collection, a Colt .45 revolver my great-grandfather said used to belong to Wyatt Earp. I’m about to point it out to him when I realize that the place where the revolver should be is empty. A Winchester Model 1873 Carbine saddle ring that was worth seventy thousand the last time it was appraised and a factory-engraved Winchester Model 42 shotgun worth about the same are also missing. I wonder if they’re on loan to a museum.