The Wicked Sister

by Karen Dionne

  “Do you hunt?” I ask.

  “Some,” he answers. “Deer mostly, though I’ve gone out with my buddies a couple of times for bear. But we didn’t get anything,” he adds quickly, remembering where he is and who he’s with.

  “Come on. I’ll show you the rest of the house.” I lead him back through the great room and stop at the bottom of the stairs. If anything deserves to be featured in his article, the stairs are it. Twelve feet wide at their base, the main staircase splits halfway up at a landing that’s big enough for a pair of armchairs with a table and a lamp between them. The stair railings and stiles are made of intricately woven branches; the treads are birch logs split in half with the bark still on them, their ends painted in fantastically detailed fairy-tale scenes: Hansel and Gretel breaking off a piece of the witch’s gingerbread roof; Red Riding Hood skipping blithely down a woodland path while the wolf lurks in the trees; Rapunzel in her high tower waiting for her prince; Rumpelstiltskin pointing his finger accusingly at the princess who weeps at her spinning wheel next to a mountain of straw. Twenty-eight steps, fifty-six scenes in all, well-known tales and obscure, each so intricately detailed I used to spend hours studying them and still find something new. It’s no wonder Architectural Digest put them on their cover.

  I lead him up the stairs and pause at the top so he can take photos of the great room from above, then head down the bedroom hallway. Two faint squares spilling from two open doors are the only light. Judging by the paint-spattered jeans draped over the back of an antique pressed-wood rocking chair, Diana has taken over our parents’ master bedroom with its view of the lake. Charlotte appears to be using the same room she did when I was a child. The rest of the bedroom doors are closed. There’s no reason to heat rooms you’re not using.

  I open the door to the bedroom that has the sleeping porch because I used to wish that this room was mine. I drop my duffel on the bed, then unzip the bag and sit White Bear in the place of honor in the middle. Trevor follows with my suitcase.

  “Was this your room when you were a kid?”

  “No, mine was at the top of the kitchen stairs. It and the room across from it used to belong to the servants back when the lodge had a full-time staff. When I was little, I liked to sneak downstairs before anyone was awake, pretending that I was Cinderella and it was my job to stir up the fire while my lazy stepsister slept. But that was as far as my fairy-tale improv could go, since I had two loving parents, and I couldn’t very well assign the role of wicked stepmother to my favorite aunt.”

  “Cute. So, you loved fairy tales when you were little?”

  “I did. My sister used to read them to me all the time, though some of the stories were pretty gruesome. Looking back, I’m surprised my parents were okay with it.”

  “I know what you mean. Cannibalism, murder, poisonings, chopping off feet and hands and heads. But the stories are so satisfying, aren’t they? Everything is black and white, good and evil. And there’s always the reversal at the end, where the good guys get to live happily ever after.”

  “You’re into fairy tales?” I don’t know why I’m surprised. I guess because fairy tales were such an intimate part of my childhood, I never really thought they could be equally important to someone else.

  “I just signed up for a class on the influence of fairy tales on modern literature. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are the examples we’re going to be studying, but there are so many more that draw on classic fairy-tale elements, like Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Have you read it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Not even seen the movie?”

  I shake my head again.

  “Oh, man, are you in for a treat. We’re going to have to figure out a way for you to watch it. Meanwhile, I’d like to get a picture of you in your old room if you don’t mind. Assuming it’s unchanged.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  I lead him to the end of the hall and open the door to my childhood bedroom and step back in time. The room is exactly as I remember it: the crazy quilt my grandmother made, so named because no two fabric squares repeated, and if you tried to find a match, allegedly, it would drive you crazy, the room-sized braided rug also made by her, the toys and books on the low shelves my father built beneath the windows, the artwork created by yours truly on the walls. Details I’d forgotten: the pencil marks on the doorjamb that marked my growing height; the twin knotholes in the pine paneling next to the closet that I used to think were monster’s eyes until my father painted them into rabbits. The room is a time capsule, frozen at the exact moment that my life fell apart. I stand in the middle and turn a slow circle. Everywhere I look, I see my parents: the whimsical bear sculptures my father whittled for me, the early reader nature books my mother gave me, a crayon drawing of my happy little family made by me.

  “Good, good,” Trevor murmurs as he circles me with his camera as though I were a fashion model. “I like that pensive look.”

  “Where do you want me to stand?”

  “Just do whatever feels natural. Pretend I’m not here.”

  I take him at his word and go over to the window seat. I used to sit on this cushion for hours watching the pair of ravens who built their nest in a nearby pine. It pleases me to see that the nest is still here. The nest is huge: five feet across and two feet high, with a nest cup inside made from smaller twigs and branches and lined with mud and grasses. When I was little, I used to wish we had a ladder tall enough that I could climb inside and sit. I remember wondering if I did, if the birds would feed me. I wonder if this nest belongs to the raven who greeted me. Ravens live for up to seventeen years in the wild, and mate for life, so it’s possible.

  As if in answer, a raven swoops down with a large stick in his beak and perches on the side of the nest. Moments later his mate settles beside him.

  “Do you remember me?” I whisper as quietly as I can.

  The female cocks her head and turns one shiny eye toward me and puffs up her feathers.

  We remember.

  I can’t begin to say how happy this makes me—not only that this is the same pair I loved when I was a child, but that I can now understand their speech and they can understand mine. I used to try to teach this pair to talk. “Nevermore,” I’d say over and over again because my dad said it would be a good trick if my ravens could learn to say this, though they never did. I wonder what my father would think if he knew we were having an actual conversation.

  The male drops his stick where I can see it as though he’s brought me a gift.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  All will become known, he says again.

  I purse my lips. I still have no idea what this means. What will become known, and how, and when?

  Then it hits me. Ravens live up to seventeen years. If this pair are the same birds who nested here when I was a child, this means that they were alive the day my parents died. The raven is saying that I don’t have to struggle to regain my memories. They will tell me what they saw. What they know. Obviously, the testimony of a pair of ravens is never going to hold up in a court of law, but if they can point me in the right direction, I can present any new evidence I find myself.

  I nod to show that I understand. “Later,” I whisper.

  “What’s that?” Trevor asks.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking about how late it’s getting.”

  “I guess it is. I’m almost finished. Just keep looking out the window. But don’t smile.”

  I hadn’t realized that I was. But how can I not? I’ve never told anyone that I can understand the languages of insects and animals. To be honest, I don’t fully understand the whys and hows of my ability myself. I was eleven the first time a spider spoke to me. This was shortly after I came out of my catatonia. You can talk if you want to, the spider who lived in a corner of my hospital dorm room told me, and while my therapists had been t
rying for days to get me to speak, for some reason, the spider’s simple logic made sense. I picked up my book of fairy tales and read aloud the story called “The White Snake,” by the Brothers Grimm, because I knew that this was a story about another person who could understand the languages of all living creatures after he took a bite of his master’s special dish. My voice sounded strange to my ears, rough and scratchy from disuse, but the spider was right; I could talk. I wondered if perhaps I too had eaten a piece of white snake, and this was why I could understand the spider. Possibly one of the cooks put a piece in my soup or stew. At the time, it seemed as good an explanation as any.

  Fifteen years on, the best explanation I can come up with is that I’m like those people who have a special affinity for a particular animal—dogs, say, or horses—and are able to communicate with them on such an instinctive level, to anyone else it seems like magic. The difference between me and them being that I don’t have to guess at what the various species are thinking or feeling; I really can understand what insects and animals say. Also, my ability seems to run across all species. Naturally, I don’t listen in on every conversation, but only when I choose to; otherwise, the collective cacophony of hundreds of insects and birds and animals all yakking away at the same time would be too much to bear.

  All I know is that I’ve been talking to insects and animals for almost as long as I can remember. And I’m not crazy.

  ELEVEN

  THEN

  Jenny

  Diana’s therapist’s office is on the second floor of an old wooden building on a side street in downtown Marquette. Most of the buildings are far more substantial. The Marquette County Courthouse is the most famous, a beaux arts and neoclassical red sandstone structure in which Otto Preminger’s movie Anatomy of a Murder was filmed in the same courtroom as the original murder was tried. Marquette is the largest city in the Upper Peninsula, which sounds impressive until you realize that Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is such a big, empty place, its entire population could fit inside a city the size of Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

  Still, the city has everything we need: shopping, a movie theater, restaurants, concerts, a bowling alley, a craft brewery, along with the Peter White Public Library, the research library at Northern Michigan University, and a bookstore on Dr. Merritt’s building’s first floor. Every month, I pick up the books I ordered the last time I was in town and place an order for more. Most of the books I purchase are work-related, but occasionally the owner talks me into picking up a novel. It’s not that I’m against reading fiction; it’s just that there are already so many books at the lodge, many of them classics, some of them no doubt rare and valuable first editions, I’d need a hundred lifetimes to get through them all.

  Normally, driving to Marquette and spending the day in the city is a welcome treat. But there’s nothing normal about today. Today, all I can think about is that accursed pillow. I can still see Diana leaning over the side of the crib and pressing the pillow against her sister’s face, the baby’s little arms and legs kicking and flailing as she fought to stay alive. But it wasn’t only the pillow and what Diana was doing with it that chills me. It was her expression. Serene. As if she knew exactly what she was doing and understood what might happen and didn’t care.

  I check my watch. Peter, Charlotte, and I have been waiting for Dr. Merritt to finish with Diana for close to an hour. When the door to his inner office opens at last, Diana darts out from behind him and runs into the waiting room and plunks down next to Charlotte on the sofa. She grabs a book off the coffee table without looking at it and thrusts it into Charlotte’s hands.

  “Read me a story!”

  Charlotte laughs and pulls Diana close. “Big dogs and little dogs. Black and white dogs,” she begins, somehow making the simple story sound engaging enough for a nine-year-old who reads at a tenth-grade level. My sister is so amazing. I never would have made it through the holidays without her. Char was an absolute lifesaver; plying Peter’s family with food and drink, cheerfully washing their dishes and doing their laundry, taking Diana sledding during the day and working jigsaw puzzles with her in the evenings while I walked around like a zombie, pretending that everything was fine and that this Christmas was no different from any other, not sleeping, barely eating, stealing an occasional glance at my husband and seeing my anguish reflected in his eyes. I swear, we could have won Academy Awards for our performances.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham?”

  I stand up and shift the baby on my hip. I feel as though I’m walking toward a guillotine. Because we’re here to discuss not only what Diana did to her sister and what we can do to keep it from happening again. When I finally got through to Dr. Merritt’s office after the holidays, the receptionist told me that Diana’s test results were back.

  I was against the idea of testing from the beginning. Whatever is wrong with my daughter isn’t something that can be weighed and measured. Diana’s previous therapist wanted to run tests as well, but I couldn’t see how putting a name to her condition was going to help us. The only reason I agreed this time was to placate Peter, who agreed with Dr. Merritt, who said that refusing the tests only puts off the inevitable. Now I’m sorry I did.

  “There’s no easy way to say this,” Dr. Merritt begins after he’s seated behind his desk and Peter and I are settled in the guest chairs opposite him. A single manila folder waits ominously on the desktop between us.

  Then don’t, I silently plead. Don’t do this to us. Don’t ruin our lives any more than they already have been.

  “Go ahead,” Peter says. He sounds calm, but I can tell he’s nervous because the muscle in his jaw is twitching like it always does when he’s upset.

  “As we discussed, I’ve used a combination of psychological examinations and family rating scales to evaluate Diana,” Dr. Merritt begins, “all designed to measure predatory conduct associated with adult psychopathy.”

  Psychopathy. I close my eyes against that terrible word. I knew this was coming. I’m not stupid. I’ve spent enough hours researching what might be wrong with my daughter to know that this was where we were going to end up. But hearing the word from Dr. Merritt’s professionally objective lips cuts to my very core. My daughter can’t be a psychopath. She just can’t.

  “I also asked one of my colleagues to verify the results, and her findings agree with mine,” he goes on. “Diana tests at two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-unemotional behavior. This puts her on the severe end of the spectrum.”

  “It all seems a bit—arbitrary,” Peter manages, and I’m grateful that he hasn’t lost the ability to speak, because I don’t think I could squeeze a response past the lump in my throat if my life depended on it. “I mean, I’m not questioning your judgment, Doctor. It just feels as though you’re relying more on opinion than on scientific method.”

  “I don’t disagree. Unfortunately, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children. And to be perfectly honest, many psychologists believe that psychopathy can’t be identified in young children at all. But a growing number, including me, believe that psychopathy is a distinct neurological condition and that the primary traits can be identified in children as young as five. The most significant factors we look for are what we call callous-unemotional traits, which distinguish fledgling psychopaths from children with ordinary conduct disorders who are also impulsive and who exhibit hostile or even violent behavior. To the best of our current understanding, the results are conclusive. Diana is a psychopath. I’m sorry.”

  I look at Peter. Peter looks at me. He gropes for my hand and squeezes my fingers so hard it hurts. Our daughter is a psychopath. Such an ugly word. So loaded with negative connotations. Such a cruel label to assign to a child.

  “You’re sure?” Peter asks.

  “Diana’s behaviors fit all the criteria.” Dr. Merritt ticks them off on his fingers. “C.U. children tend to be highly manipulative. They a
lso lie frequently—not just to avoid punishment, as all children do, but for any reason, or for none at all. Callous-unemotional children are also unrepentant. They don’t care if someone is mad at them, and they don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings. If they can get what they want without being cruel, they will. But at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever they must to achieve the result that they want. However, it’s important to understand that in real life, psychopaths are nothing like you’ve seen depicted on television and in movies. Diana isn’t some deviant heartless soul bent on doing evil. She just doesn’t understand the ramifications when she does hurt someone—nor does she care, as when she put a pillow over your baby’s face to observe the color change.”

  “So, what do we do? How do we fix this?” Peter asks.

  “Sadly, there is no cure. Diana was born this way, and there is nothing that you or I can do to change her. It’s also important to understand that her condition is not your fault, no more than if Diana had been born with any other non-heritable birth defect. However, I and my colleagues believe that confronting the problem early on may present an opportunity to help children like Diana change course, if only slightly. We believe that the capacity for empathy might still exist weakly in callous-unemotional children, and that it can be strengthened. This is where your baby can help.”

  I grip my daughter more tightly in my arms.

  “Naturally, I’m not suggesting that you do anything that would put your baby in danger. But as Diana sees the two of you showing affection toward her sister and loving the baby and responding to the baby’s needs, she can learn empathy from your example.”

  “Helping Diana is as simple as soothing the baby when she’s crying?” Peter asks.

  “Essentially yes. Believe me, I’m not minimizing the crisis that brought you here today. It’s essential that Diana and the baby never be left unsupervised when they are together. Still, I believe there’s hope. A sliver instead of a slice perhaps, but hope, nonetheless.”