Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  we must have been like four or five. or six? i’m not good with ages and stuff like we could talk and walk so how old is that

  we were walking out to the grove and it would have been after church because we were wearing those dresses mom always used to put us in (and still does i mean look in the mirror) and she was ahead of me because she always goes first even though technically i’m older

  she loves that grove and i get it i do because it’s not the house and that counts for something and mom never goes there anymore which counts for a whole lot more but i remember just feeling

  i don’t know

  she climbed this tree that’s the important part she climbed the tree and i went up after her and i remember asking her to come back down because we were walking and talking but we weren’t grown

  but that didn’t matter to her and i don’t remember a lot about the in between just grabbing hold of the branches and trying to follow her and the look on her face when she pushed me down

  that’s how i broke my arm

  mom always said it was an accident on the farm which is technically true i guess but i’m looking at my sister and she’s looking at me and i can see that expression on her face like “get out of here, get out of this place that’s mine” and she’s not making it now but that’s because she’s in her bed reading valley of the dolls and i’m in mine “reading my bible and writing my thoughts about jesus because i have so many thoughts about jesus yes i do”

  mom must know that’s how it happened she must know but i’m not supposed to and i don’t think mini is either but i wonder if she remembers and i shouldn’t ask her

  i won’t ask her

  do NOT ask her

  she’ll get that same look because maybe we grew out of going to the apricot grove to hide from mom (i wish we hadn’t) but we didn’t grow out of mini wanting to rip my eyelashes out every now and then so just don’t ask her

  if she remembers let her keep it to herself

  I look up from the page. Stare into the dark, across Katherine’s bed, into my own eyes in her dusty mirror. Mini—Gram said it was something she used to call my mom. So that’s her. That’s Josephine. And she hurt her own sister.

  She was young when it happened, if Katherine is remembering right. And I’m sure it was an accident. After all, Katherine doesn’t seem afraid of her. Instead she seems bright, and quick, and all these things I can almost see in my mother, if they weren’t hidden in the places not meant for me.

  The next entry, if I can call it that, is on the opposite page, running vertically down the margins. And all it says is:

  good morning mini snored so loud that i have been awake since five thirty and i am going to put salt in her cereal to take my revenge and if i die i die

  Sisters. Just normal sisters.

  But I keep turning pages. I keep looking. Because there’s a piece of Mom in Katherine’s entries that I recognize. Was she always like that? Always defensive, always keeping people away from the things she thinks are hers? Katherine can tell me.

  I have to turn all the way to the New Testament to find Katherine’s handwriting again, this time in pencil and harder to read, dipping in and out around a passage about charity.

  we took the x-rays today and mine were fine but they talked about mini’s for a long time because i guess they were weird (which oh great one more thing to add to the “those nielsen girls sure are strange” script everybody in town seems to follow) (it would probably help if mom weren’t still keeping us inside practically all the time and dressing us like paper dolls from another planet)

  dr howland sketched a copy of hers for her to keep because he couldn’t exactly give her the whole thing off the light board but she couldn’t even look at it

  she threw it away so i grabbed it out of the trash and stuck it in here because i think she’ll want it one day and i wish i could tell her it’s fine that it doesn’t make a difference between us but she won’t listen

  she made me sleep in the guest room for the night and it’s not fair because this isn’t my fault so why is she punishing me

  when i tried to talk to her she just kept saying “now we’re not the same now we’re not the same” and i know what she means i know why that hurts because she’s mini and i don’t know how i’d recognize myself if i hadn’t learned to recognize her first but still

  maybe it’s not such a bad thing maybe it’s fine you know maybe this means that we can be whatever we want and still love each other but i just don’t know how to tell her that

  is it like this with brothers

  we don’t have a brother the closest thing we had was richard but he went to college ages ago (probably when mini broke my arm actually) and he never seemed like this

  mom would tell me the bible has all the right advice although she’s been saying that less lately but when we were like ten and eleven that was the answer to everything

  “what does scripture say” like she didn’t think she could teach us how to be good people only this book could

  i don’t think either of us is really a good person but maybe there’s time for that

  or there would be if mini would just TALK to me i hate when she’s like this i hate when she disappears i miss her i miss her i’m pathetic

  A pit opens in my stomach. I recognize too much of myself there, in that last line. Katherine, begging my mom to open herself even the smallest bit, and missing her, and hating it. She was always like this. I guess I shouldn’t take it personally, then.

  Tucked between this page and the next is another piece of paper. That must be the sketch Katherine mentioned, the one of the X-ray. I unfold it, find it still crisp and white, preserved. The drawing is carefully done. A rib cage. Bones shaded and spindly. And an arrow, pointing to the heart where it’s tucked inside, on the left.

  Wait. I’ve seen my own X-rays, at the doctor’s the year I got pneumonia. They didn’t look like this. The heart is on the left of the paper. That would put it on the right of her body, opposite where it’s meant to be.

  I blink, surprised. Mom’s heart, mirrored. I had no idea. She never told me. And I guess she didn’t have to, but still. It seems important. Like something I should’ve known.

  And it’s familiar somehow. I think back, scrape through every memory I can, and there—an opposite heart. Position inverted. I saw that at the morgue, written on the report for the girl’s body. Her heart is switched, just like Mom’s.

  A shiver shakes through me. Of course everything knots together. I knew that. But this makes it impossible to ignore. Makes the possibilities I’d written off rear their heads. Maybe the inversion is genetic, is a marker that the girl really was Mom’s. That I’m not.

  Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe there will always be something about this family I’m not meant to understand.

  I fold the sketch and slot it back where I found it. In a minute I’ll go back to my room. Wash my hands, go down to dinner and try to forget everything that happened today. And when I go to sleep I’ll cross my fingers and hope I don’t dream about Mom’s voice mail message, about her saying sorry over and over again as she pushes her sister out of an apricot tree.

  EIGHTEEN

  I wake up still in my clothes from yesterday, Katherine’s Bible on the nightstand, the photo I found in Mom’s propped up behind it. One of them dead, the other haunted.

  I roll onto my back, stare at the ceiling. Gram said Katherine died before I was born. Before she could have a daughter who’s my age now. So where does that leave the girl in the field? Not a cousin, and apparently not a sister. Nothing Gram will talk about. Nobody’s again, nobody’s but mine.

  This is only my second morning waking at Fairhaven, but it feels like years since I got to Phalene. The fire, the girl, Katherine. I thought it would be easier without Mom, thought I’d find the answers I want. But all I’ve found are bits of the wreckage she left and more questions.

  I will not spend another day here in the dark. I will
not let Gram lie to me again.

  I change and head downstairs. She’s already in the kitchen when I get there, standing at the stove, shucking corn and watching a pot of water as she brings it to boil. Fairhaven stretches out on either side of this room. Dark corners and locked doors, and I remember yesterday morning how I thought the house could show me something Gram didn’t want me to see. I was wrong. This is the only part with any truth hiding inside. The only part that matters—the rickety table and Gram at the counter, a tiny smile just for me.

  “You feeling better?” she asks. “You were quiet at dinner. last night.”

  I was. Wolfed everything down and went back upstairs as soon as I could, because I couldn’t stand it, sitting there with her like everything was fine. I can’t stand it now, either. She’s keeping things from me, just like Mom. A lifetime of people deciding for me what I need to know. That stops now.

  “What were they like?” Gram’s proved she won’t give me anything about the girl from the fire, so I start with the twins. Katherine told me some of it in those entries. But I need to hear it from Gram.

  “The girls?” she says, looking up from the corn. I examine her for some relief, for something that suggests she’s happy to be telling me the truth. There’s nothing. Nothing I can recognize, anyway. “They were inseparable. I suppose most twins are.”

  That’s not what I’m here for. Not some rosy picture of two girls in matching dresses, laughing and holding hands. There’s no way that’s how it really was.

  “But they must have fought,” I say. I don’t bring up the Bible, the broken arm. Maybe Gram’s already read everything in there, but as long as I never find out for sure, I can keep it just for me.

  “Of course they did.” Gram picks up another ear of corn from the pile and begins to shuck it. I grimace, remembering the texture of it from the field, the way some of the ears split and spiraled around each other. “Some days they were Mini this and Mini that, and some days Katherine wouldn’t stop stealing your mother’s clothes.”

  Mini. Again. “Is that what Katherine called Mom?”

  Gram drops the corn into the pot, and she doesn’t even wince as some of the boiling water spatters onto her skin. “They shared it. They shared everything, most of the time.”

  But nobody shared a thing with me, did they? Not about this. So I try something else.

  “How did the fire start, anyway?” I ask, sitting down at the table.

  Gram raises an eyebrow. “Which one?”

  “The apricot grove. You know, the ‘accident,’ ” I add sarcastically.

  “There is no need to take that tone.” She pokes at the water with a wooden spoon, frowning. “Who knows why that sort of thing happens?”

  “It’s just a little weird,” I say. “Two fires on the same farm.”

  “Well, the world is wide and full of happenstance,” Gram says. I don’t bother calling that the bullshit it so clearly is. I’m not getting anything here.

  She pulls an ear out of the water by her fingertips and sets it on a plate, sprinkling salt over it. “Eat.”

  “For breakfast?” It comes out sharp, my frustration taking hold of me. She finds a way out of everything. Every single thing.

  “We all make do with what we have.” She lays it on the table in front of me and waits, like she’s expecting to watch me until I finish. I ignore the plate and get up instead, going to the fridge. Gram gives a small exasperated sigh, and I hold back a smile. Maybe I can’t get the truth out of her, but I know I can piss her off.

  The fridge is alarmingly bare except for two sticks of butter, a plastic bag of wilting green beans and rows and rows of bottled water. None of this will do the trick. I want something I’m not supposed to have. I want to show Gram how much her rules mean to me. I shut the fridge and swing open the freezer.

  “Margot,” Gram says, “please leave that closed. It’s not for you.”

  But I’m not listening. The freezer is stuffed full of apricots. Not an inch of space left for anything else. Some of them packed in plastic bags, some of them still fresh enough that when I reach out to touch them, they give under my fingertip. I want to ask about them, but the whole thing is weird enough that I don’t even know what the question would be.

  Gram takes hold of the freezer door and nudges me out of the way, shutting it firmly. “That’s enough of that,” she says.

  It’s the sputter of a car engine that keeps me from arguing. I recognize that sound. The whine, the choked growl. How many times have we scraped together enough money to get it fixed? How many times has it broken down again?

  That’s our car. That’s Mom. A laugh spills out of me, giddy and terrified all at once. I called her, and she actually came. I can’t believe it.

  I run out to the front porch in time to see our gray station wagon, battered and covered in dirt, turn in to the driveway and screech to a stop. After a moment, it lurches forward again, but only a few yards before Mom must hit the brake.

  I feel a reaching in my chest, and the acid of spite. Come on, I think. I’m right here. You have to come after me this time.

  For a long moment it’s just us, just her and me and the space between. All I can hear is the sound of my breathing, of my heartbeat. And then the careful footsteps behind me, the swing and slam of the screen door as Gram comes out of the house.

  “Who is that?” she asks me.

  I don’t look away from the car. Don’t look away for a second, because if I do she could disappear. If I do she could turn and run, just like she always does.

  “It’s Mom,” I say over my shoulder, and I can hear Gram’s sharp little breath.

  I can’t see Mom through the windshield, not with her this far away, but I just know she’s looking at me like I’m looking at her. I know she’s hating that I got her here. I made her do it. Finally, finally, I got myself in her line of sight.

  But there’s one more thing, one more thing standing between me and winning this fight. She has to get out of the car.

  Another moment, another beat of stillness.

  “Maybe you should go inside,” Gram says behind me. “I’ll talk to her.”

  No way. I’m not surrendering now. If I go inside, she wins. If I move first, she wins. She has to want me enough to do this herself.

  “Nobody but you and me,” I say under my breath. “Come on, Mom.”

  It’s stretching too long. The urge beating in my chest to just give up, to just go back to her, but I set my shoulders, bite my lip so hard I taste blood, and sit down on the porch, my movements exaggerated so she can see. I won’t do it. This one’s on my terms, not hers.

  That must be what does it. I can’t be sure, but it’s barely a minute later—the click as the door opens, sound carrying down the dusty flat of the driveway. The stretch of her legs, and the shape of her against the sun, so familiar it hurts.

  I have to grip the edge of the porch to keep myself from standing up. That is not enough. She has to come farther. I’m not asking for much here. I never am. Just one step, Mom. Just one step.

  She takes it. That’s all I need before I’m on my feet and heading for her. So quickly it’s embarrassing, but I missed her. She’s my mom, and I missed her.

  The distance between us is long and maybe she felt it like I did, maybe she wants us close again too, but by the time I’m a few feet away from her, any proof of that is gone from her face. Just Mom as she always is, a statue an inch from falling apart.

  The sight of it pinches my chest. Her familiar smell, like honey and salt. She looks like home, and I wonder what she sees when she looks at me. If I look like Fairhaven. If that makes her want me less.

  “Hi,” I say. And then: “You got a haircut.”

  “Dead ends,” Mom says. Not a hitch in her voice. Not a flicker, not a fight. Just like Gram. “Needed a trim.”

  I don’t think she means it to hurt me. So many times she does, and I know what that sounds like. And this time she doesn’t, but she hurts me just the sa
me. Because I remember it, I remember, good days and cold evenings, the fall snapping in quick, and Mom sitting me down in the bathroom, her scissors careful and cool against my neck as she snipped the split ends from my hair. Just like she taught me to do for her.

  Her weight shifting from foot to foot, her eyes darting over my shoulder, to the house, to Gram back on the porch. She couldn’t look more uncomfortable if she tried. I almost feel bad for her—the space in my chest is there, but the pity never fills it.

  “I looked for you,” she says at last. “In Calhoun.”

  Does she expect me to reward her for that? For doing the bare minimum?

  “Okay,” I say. “So?”

  Mom folds her arms across her chest, meets my eyes for half a second before looking away again. “So you shouldn’t have left.”

  “It was about time I did,” I say. A mistake, I think as she straightens, draws herself up tall. I should have stayed soft. But I’m here now. I might as well commit. “Was I supposed to just wait for you to start caring?”

  “That’s it?” Mom’s knuckles are white, her fists clenched. “That’s what you have to say for yourself?”

  I know what she wants. An apology for leaving, for not waiting, and all the groveling that goes with it—but like hell I’m gonna give that to her. She doesn’t deserve that from me.

  “I asked you about my family,” I say. We both know I mean so much more than that last fight, in front of the pay phone in broad daylight. “But you never told me. So I found someone who would.”

  “Well, you seem to have figured it out.” Mom looks up at Fairhaven, lets out a bitter laugh. “I thought when you called me maybe you were ready to apologize, but—”

  “For what?” I say. I can feel it starting to throttle me, that anger I can’t ever seem to shake in moments like this. It would be so much easier if I just let her win, but I’m the only person in the world fighting for me. If I don’t do it, nobody will. “I’m not sorry at all. I got what I needed.” Never mind that it doesn’t feel at all how I wanted it to.