by Carrie Laben
Even after they left, long after midnight, Mom didn’t say anything to Abby. She didn’t say anything about it in the days that followed, nothing specific or incriminating, just long wine-fueled rants about how Martha had always been weak and ungrateful between ever-increasing dozes. She was getting weaker and Abby—more stared at than ever and learning how to use that better every day—was getting stronger and they could both feel the balance of power tipping. Mom even made noises about keeping Abby out of school, as though that would be a favor, and the guidance counselor called the house and suggested the same thing. Abby was able to bat both of them down.
If she’d thought she knew what attention felt like before that had been nothing. Every emotion in the world was in the stares that she got now—fear so deep it felt like nausea, genuinely murderous hatred, but also fascination and in more than a few eyes a weird sort of respect. She was part of something they had to care about. No one could ignore her now.
Then, slowly, the yellow tape around the maple tattered and rattled in the wind. People stopped driving by just to yell vulgarities at the house, and the attention at school stopped being quite so lightning-hot. Abby waited to feel weaker again but she didn’t. She’d leveled up somehow, in some way she didn’t fully understand. She’d become an adult, maybe. Now all she had to do was go unfuck her sister’s mistakes and things could be better than they’d ever been. She and Martha could do anything they wanted now. They could be happy.
When she finally pushed Mom into sobering up long enough to drive her to visit Martha, she had her plan all ready.
“I can fix it,” she said, not in a whisper—that would be suspicious, and she was already pushing the guards to ignore them—but quietly enough. “All I have to do is be in the room when the jury goes out to deliberate, and it’ll be fine. I’ll just nudge each of them a little bit. Doubt’s not that hard, right?” She was projecting more bravado than she felt, since she couldn’t be in the room with them during deliberations—she’d tried to think of a way but even if she pushed everyone at court, some lawyer would realize what she’d done later. But she wanted to cheer Martha up, and herself too; the sight of her twin drowning in a too-big orange shirt was depressing.
Instead, Martha looked disgusted. “No. There won’t be a trial. I’m going to plead guilty, you won’t even get to testify.” She said it fast, like she was afraid the defiance in her voice would just fall out and leave her with nothing. “I know that probably breaks your heart. No one will be looking at you.”
“What?”
“Abby, I’m not stupid. What do you think I planned to have happen when I called the cops and confessed? Why would I do that and then plead innocent?”
“You confessed?” Abby inhaled deeply. “What did you plan? Why the hell would you do that?”
Martha looked over Abby’s shoulder for a moment to where Mom was waiting, and then back into her sister’s eyes. “I figured I’d be safer in here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A mosquito landed on her arm as she changed into dry clothes and as she squashed it she realized that the door was still open. That was no good with the hawk, a forest full of hawks, still out there. She needed to focus. She took a picture of the mosquito bite, captioned it “Tiny vampires everywhere!”
Wait, now it was night again. The moon was smaller, eaten away by a sliver. Goddamn Martha and her sulking. She needed more time, not less. And Martha should want more time, not less.
She blinked. It was light, the light of morning.
She blinked. The sun was slanted the other way.
Goddammit, Martha. There was no way she could be doing this by accident, in a sulk. And here Abby was feeling sorry for her.
Abby stuck her phone out the window and took a photo of whatever trees were in her way, filtered it blue and purple to make it eye-catching. No wonder the surges of power were falling off. If days were getting folded away and she wasn’t posting…
She lifted herself to her feet—she felt so dizzy, fragile, she was sure she wasn’t dead yet but she wasn’t sure how she could be so sure—and went to confront her sister.
“You will not,” Mom said. “I forbid it.” She was doing a good job of trying to imitate the person she once was, the person who could forbid things. She was sober and upright and dressed in actual clothes, not sweats or pajamas. Abby could barely remember the last time this had been true—maybe at Martha’s sentencing.
None of it was going to do her any good, though. Abby wondered what Mom saw, was it the kindergartner with the birthday party invitation? The kid who had, though neither of them ever did admit it out loud to each other, burned down the barn to save her sister and set the process in motion that rid them all of Grandfather for good? The teenager who could walk through the mall and come out of every store with an armload of goodies if she chose, smiling at checkout clerks and security guards as she passed them? Or did she just see her natural prey?
“I can and I will. I already filled out the paperwork.”
“With what money?” The answer was obvious—with Mom’s money, Grandfather’s money that should have been Martha’s and the income from the cabin in Minnesota. Abby had put herself to the task of imitating Mom’s handwriting well enough to sign checks, and it had come easily enough—which was fortunate, since the bills hardly would have gotten paid otherwise. And what worked for checks worked for credit card applications as well when they arrived in the mail.
“I got a scholarship.”
“To NYU? With your grades?”
“On account of my sparkling personality.” All of this was, technically, true. The scholarship was only a partial and she’d pushed hard for it, but it was real.
“And if you leave, who’s going to look out for your sister?”
Abby actually had to choke back a laugh at this line of attack—look out for Martha? Even at the sentencing, Martha’s hard leave-me-alone stare had dissuaded Abby from trying to fix the judge’s mind on mercy. All she’d been able to do was shut him up half-finished from his long-planned speech on the depravity of today’s youth, and she hadn’t done that for Martha, but because he was annoying the shit out of her, Abby. She’d written letters to no reply, she wasn’t sure if they even made it through, and then she gave up. What she did for Martha was make sure her commissary account never went dry, and she could do that as easily from Manhattan as from Alden.
Mom hadn’t even done those few things, so anything she had to say about looking out for Martha could go and curdle the wind.
“You’re just going to leave me here all alone.” Mom’s few remaining work friends had abandoned her, naturally, after the case hit the papers and she lost her job. The only outside humans she talked to now were a few easily-influenced pharmacists in a handful of locations far apart from each other—one in Batavia, one in Attica, one in Depew. Every so often one would get fired and she’d have to drive all over and find a new one. It had gotten depressing to watch.
Abby had lost most of her friends too. Kristen’s parents had put her in rehab after they found her incoherent in the bathroom one night, and Carl blamed Abby for that, and Duane—well, Duane wasn’t a functional friend to begin with, and he’d graduated, barely, under a steady stream of taunts about being the father of dead babies. For some reason Luke hadn’t gotten any of those, but then again, no one but Abby knew why doing the regular kind of math didn’t solve this problem, and she wasn’t going to defend stupid Duane. After a year moping around at home he’d gone off to one of the sadder SUNY schools to start over. He’d called Abby once, just after midnight and so drunk she knew instantly that someone had put him up to the drinking and he’d only dialed their number from the instincts in his fingers. She hung up on him and he was finally gone.
None of that mattered, though, because people still stared at her and warmed her, whispered and fed her, sneered or struggled not to ask an awkward question and gave her strength—more than any friend ever could. And she had a plan now too, inspired
by the news coverage of Martha’s case. She was going to study journalism and be a TV anchor and people would never stop looking at her. She’d be damn near invincible. She might never die, she might achieve Grandfather’s dream for her own self and in a way he was too limited to imagine.
Thinking of it made her feel stronger even now, and she quickly detected the signs of Mom pushing at the edges now that she saw Abby was serious, looking to force her. “You will be alone,” Abby said evenly. “You didn’t exactly do anything to make me want to stay with you, and you put Martha where she is now. I don’t see how you can complain.”
Mom stood up at that, but when she raised her hand to slap Abby—who now stood well over her—Abby caught her mind and her wrist both. She squeezed, just a little. Mom sat down again with a sob.
“You stupid, spoiled little brat,” she said through clenched-back tears. “I hope that when you have children, they salt your grave.” And that was how Abby learned the last key to keeping her relatives dead. She looked it up later in the Orne to be sure, and there it was, if you knew what you were looking for.
In the moment, she simply filed the fact away and turned for the door. The car was already loaded and the tank was full; she’d known better than to tell Mom one minute earlier than that. It was the last time Abby saw her mother before she poured salt over her face, and then dirt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Martha was still sitting in the kitchen and it was not clear from her eyes or the swirl of her intentions just what was going on. Did she know Grandfather had been here? Did she realize that there were two minds pursuing her as hawks and not just one? She didn’t say a word as Abby pulled the summer sausage from the refrigerator and a crayon-yellow squeeze bottle of mustard to go with it. She was wearing that locket Grandmother left her. Abby thought, I should have recognized that before. After the moment on the cliff, the tying of the knot, I should have known. I wasn’t paying attention.
“Where’s the bread?” Abby asked when the silence got too annoying.
“Where it always is.”
And it was, in the same drawer that Mom used to file it in when they’d come out here.
Half a sandwich later Abby finally decided that confronting Martha probably meant actually having a confrontation, not just hoping she’d fold without pushing or talk. It felt obscene, but she was supposed to be the one who lived in a world where privacy was obsolete, right? Not being able to actually talk to her sister was just ridiculous, a hangover from the way Mom and Grandfather raised them, never able to tell anyone the truth about anything.
“You’re trying to kill me,” Martha said while Abby was thinking and her mouth was full.
There was only so fast a person could swallow, and Abby didn’t rush it, refused to choke and sputter like she was in some kind of sitcom. She chewed until she was done.
“I’m not. You’re the one who started it with the killing people, anyway.” Martha stared at her. She took another bite of the sandwich and chewed neither faster nor slower than she had before.
“You want to take over my body,” Martha said. Speaking was costing her, the way she had to force her will to focus on Abby. She found this conversation hard too. That comforted Abby in a weird way. “And your body is dying. I saw you were sick as soon as you picked me up. So if you’re in my body and I’m in yours, I’ll be the one who dies.”
“You’ll die anyway, without anyone to protect you from what’s out there.”
“I might not. I just want a chance. You’re not giving me a chance.”
“You think they’ll turn sentimental on you?”
Martha shook her head. “They’re family. They’re just like you.”
“And you. You’re no different.”
“You can’t be… you can’t be mad at me for that. You can’t be surprised at what I’ll do to survive.” Martha was the one who seemed to be having a hard time swallowing, even though Abby’s throat was the one that was dry with crappy Wonder bread and sodium-packed sausage.
She was about to say, “I’m only surprised that you think you’ll win,” and just let it be, finally, that they were blown apart into open war, like everyone in their family had to be when the truth was out. Then the hawks screamed outside the window. It will be those little bastards winning, she thought, and that made her angrier. They’d only got one brain between them and it was a bird brain. Wait. One brain between them. And they were not, were never, any better than her, for all that they had raw power.
“I’m only surprised that you don’t trust me,” she said. “I wasn’t going to put you into my body.”
“You weren’t going to let yourself die! You just said so!” She sounded offended, but her mind was turning to Abby a bit more hopefully now.
“Of course not, that would be stupid. But I don’t need your whole body, Martha. We can share.”
“That’s…”
“I mean of course Mom and Grandfather never even tried! Mom and Grandfather were selfish bastards!” Something they could agree on together, to get their minds in alignment without pushing. “But look at those two out there—” she nodded towards the window. “It’s both of them, even when it’s only one hawk.”
“You’re lying.” That was a fair thought, Abby couldn’t be mad at her for thinking that, even now she was finally not lying at all. And it wasn’t like Martha could see for herself.
Except she did. “No, think about it. Outside, in the rain just now. Or however long ago it really was. You saw that two separate birds attacked us. Two separate birds, two separate minds.”
“Mom was able to control two bodies at once.”
“Only when she needed two bodies doing the exact same thing. And only when they were really close together, practically touching. This is both of them, sharing a body, and if they can we can.”
Martha’s mind settled like a bird onto a nest, back to the place where Abby was her protector—the earliest place. She wanted to believe. She knew she couldn’t win, and it was cold comfort fighting to lose. But she was still scared, too. She breathed hard, as though all this had been a physical exertion. “But what if we don’t want to do the same things?”
“We’ll do what we’ve always done. Argue about it.” Abby grinned like a sister on a sitcom or in one of Martha’s book club books and didn’t point out that she’d do what she’d always done, and win.
“What if I want to… I don’t know, do something you’d never do? What if I want to eat waffles for breakfast, or get another dog, or move to Montana?”
“We’ll work it out.” Abby tried to think of what a nice person would say. “Compromise or something. I promise you’ll get some of the things you want, sometimes.”
“What if I want to have more kids? You can’t compromise on that.”
Abby started to say Are you crazy but of course she’d, they’d, have to unless she wanted to be just this screwed again in sixty years. Or worse, as screwed as Enoch and Briggs.
“We’ll figure something out, there’ll be plenty of time to make a plan.”
Martha wanted to believe her. And that was not the same as pushing to Martha to give Abby what she wanted, even if the tendrils of Martha’s mind wavered and clutched in the same way. But Martha kept looking away, she always did when she thought she might be pushed, as though that would protect her.
“You’re just telling me what I want to hear, and then you’ll be in my body and I’ll be stuck.”
“Listen.” Abby leaned in. She didn’t push even now, Martha was waiting for that and it would ruin everything, but she used every other trick she knew. “I’m your sister. I was always on your side. I would have saved you from all of it if I could. I burned down the goddamn barn for you.” Abby squeezed the sandwich for emphasis. Mustard on her hands, a thing some people might do as a sincere mistake. Martha was going to notice even in her peripheral vision. She didn’t really want the rest anyway.
Martha shook her head.
“Come on,” Abby said. She
stood up, licked her fingers. “Take a walk with me, huh?”
Martha followed.
Out the door into the golden light. Past where Grandfather stood to frighten the bear. Past where the bear was. The creek was high for summer, but it did just rain. Abby splashed through, not caring any more about wet socks and hems, just wanting to take the direct path.
“Why are you doing that?” Martha asked. “I don’t want to get muddy.”
“You can jump across.” Abby held out her hands. There was still a yellow smear on one. “Come on.”
“No, let’s just go the other way.”
Abby thought again about pushing, it would be so easy, but she wouldn’t. There was no magic in promises but there was a weird kind of magic in someone knowing they’d been broken or kept. They headed away west instead, along the creek, towards the little waterfall where they once saw the garter snakes mate. At some point Buddy started bounding after them, and now he’d caught up. Martha ruffled his ears.
A hawk circled above them but it didn’t stoop or cry out. It might have been just a hawk. There were plenty of hawks in the woods.
Martha had changed her mind about getting wet, it seemed. She walked the rocks half in the water, bent to trail her fingers in the stream as Buddy splashed and snapped at minnows. “Do you remember how we used to hunt crayfish here?”
Abby nodded. The crayfish would run away backwards. They didn’t hurt them. Just caught them and let them go. Tried not to get pinched. A way to kill time.