Punishment with Kisses

by Diane Anderson-Minshall

  “Yes, Father insisted I visit so I decided to make a weekend of it. How are you?” I asked politely.

  “As good as can be expected I guess,” Tabitha said cryptically. “I have something for you.” Tabitha ran to the library and came back with a small framed text. As I read I realized it was a weathered copy of George Eliot’s poem “Two Lovers” with a scrawl across the bottom.

  “Wow, Tabitha, I…”

  “You know this was your sister’s favorite poem.” I didn’t know my sister read poetry at all. I thought I was the only literature buff in the family. I assumed Ash was all TV and tabloids, never venturing beyond twentieth-century pop culture. I should have known, reading her journals, how literary she was. I felt sad at the umpteenth reminder that I didn’t bother to know my sister at all.

  “I had a scout looking for an autographed copy of the poem over a year ago. You know it’s really rare, and well, he called me last week and asked if I still wanted it, and I thought that maybe you would enjoy it as much as Ashley would have.”

  I smiled not just at the gift but at Tabitha’s habit of calling my sister by her birth name instead of her nickname. Suddenly, it was endearing more than annoying. The one positive thing I’d discovered after my sister’s death was how lovely a person Tabitha was. I could never see her as my mother, but now, in the wake of all this misery, I could see her for the woman she was. This was probably what Ash saw, too.

  “I love it, Tabitha. Thank you.” It was ironic how, in the wake of my sister’s death, I no longer hated her hand-me-downs. Or Tabitha.

  After some small talk, I ventured off to my room, adorned as it always was, and pulled out one of Ash’s journals for a quick read before the family dinner. Reading about sex in Father’s home now felt beyond perverse.

  *

  March 21

  I try to explain it to Cynthia tonight, the meaning of punishment with kisses, and she doesn’t get it, how I first said it to Father after he spanked me so hard my butt blistered and Mother sent me to stay at Grandma’s house for a week, but by the time I came back Mom was already dead, the cancer so swift and sudden it took her from us almost overnight.

  That night of the spanking, oh how I wished for an alternative, something more loving than the belt. I finally got it. I didn’t know then that kisses could be punishment, so it’s all the more ironic now that I see they can be. But simple, stupid Cynthia didn’t get it either, and I don’t have all the time in the world to explain life to her. She’s with me constantly, always trying to touch me, to hold me, to own me. I tell her again and again, I don’t want her like that. I just want a friend, but she whimpers and whines so much I relent and I spread my legs and let her have a piece of me, the piece I’ve shared so often and so easily it seems unfair to not let Cynthia have it too. After all, I do so want a friend, someone to confide in. But before I even finish, I stare at her big silly grin and her wide eyes, and I wonder why on earth I let her do that again.

  The worst part is when she comes up to kiss me, smelling like musk and pussy and desire and I’m reminded that a moment ago I was making a shopping list while pretending to come just so the poor sod would be happy. If she were my friend, she wouldn’t need me that way. She’d help me be happy without diving into my cunt every time she came over. As it is, we do this over and over again, and I always hate her afterward. I get annoyed and I make her leave and she storms off until the next time, when we repeat the cycle all over again. I’m just afraid now that Cynthia will upset all of my plans with The One. I’ll do almost anything to get The One back, including leave all of Daddy-O’s money behind. Cynthia is probably the only one who knows, so if it all goes awry, I’ll have doe-eyed Cynthia to blame. Poor sod.

  I’d always known that Cynthia and Ash were close, and I’d obviously caught them having sex together, but now I was seeing just how close the two of them were. I needed to talk with Cynthia. She probably knew Ash better than anyone. Certainly better than me.

  Tracking Cynthia down wasn’t hard. She still lived in the same house in Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood that was listed in Ash’s address book, and when I called she was eager to see me. Which, given the circumstances, I could sort of understand. After all, she’d been Ash’s best friend and we’d hardly spoken since the funeral. She was probably looking for closure. Maybe she wanted an update on the case. Still, even taking that into account, Cynthia seemed oddly eager to reconnect. I wondered what kind of ulterior motive she might have up her sleeve.

  “Hi, kiddo.” Cynthia met me at the door. “Oh, I’m sorry. I mean Megan. What are you now? Twenty-five?”

  She didn’t give me a chance to answer.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure kiddo is no longer appropriate. It’s just that—old habits die hard. It’s good to see you,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length, and looking me up and down. “You look fantastic!”

  I wondered if Cynthia was just saying that because she recognized the clothes I was wearing as Ash’s.

  “Did you do something different with your hair?”

  I blushed, happy she noticed, but a little nervous that Cynthia might confuse my getting my hair done by Ash’s stylist as an effort to look more like my dead sister. That was hardly the case. I mean, he obviously did great work, and I had every right to pamper myself once in a while.

  And my appearance couldn’t have changed more in the last eighteen months than Cynthia’s had. Far from the feminine artifice I recalled, Cynthia was now clean and fresh faced, not a hint of makeup on her. Either this was her I’m-not-going-to-see-anyone-so-why-dress-up casual wear or Cynthia had butched it up a bit too, wearing Carharts and Chuck Taylor sneakers. From the soil ground into her pants, smeared on her face, and sprinkled in her hair, it was clear Cynthia had just been out rolling around in the dirt. Or possibly toiling in the garden I could see out back.

  Never in a million years would I have pegged Cynthia as the kind of woman willing to do her own dirty work and household maintenance. Maybe it was the help’s day off. I couldn’t have misjudged her that completely, could I?

  “Well, you look great, Megan. Please come in. My girlfriend and I were out gardening, so excuse the mess.”

  After a few requisite pleasantries, I just blurted it out. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to Ash, and since you were her best friend…and lover, I thought you might be able to tell me something I didn’t know.”

  Cynthia looked more perplexed than resolute. “I’m not sure I have anything that could help you. I already told the police everything relevant. I mean, they interviewed me three times.”

  I heard her words and the inference behind them. Cynthia didn’t know Ash had left me her diaries. She probably thought there was so much I didn’t know about Ash that she didn’t know where to begin. That’s why she hedged her responses. “You never know,” I said, repeating lines I’d drifted to sleep to. “Even the smallest thing could help.” TV detectives and criminologists always seemed to say that, as though random, irrelevant information was the most likely to solve a case. She washed her hands after going to the bathroom? Oh my God, I know who killed her!

  Cynthia shook her head and shrugged. “Sorry.”

  Why had she wanted to see me if she was just going to blow me off? She knew Ash better than almost anyone. Did she think there was nothing, not a single bit of information that could be useful? I tried a different tactic. “What did you tell the police?”

  “Just that I knew she had dated a bunch of people but no one serious. She was, um, sort of detached with her lovers. But like I told them, I couldn’t imagine any one of them going so far as killing her.” Cynthia paused.

  “Cynthia, you and I have never had a serious conversation, so why don’t you start off by telling me about how you and Ash got together?”

  “Okay.” Cynthia acquiesced, and the story began to spill out of her, first in single words and then in a rush of sentences and paragraphs, recalling their first mont
hs as friends in high school, bonding in the backseat over boys, and later, bonding even tighter with the boys out of the picture. Their relationship quickly crossed the boundary between friend and lovers. “She was my first,” Cynthia admitted.

  “First sex? First love?” I wanted clarification.

  Cynthia chuckled at the naiveté of her youth. “Both really.”

  “You both took boys to prom. It wasn’t mutual?”

  “That I don’t know.” Cynthia shook her head and was silent for a moment, musing. “But yeah, we dated boys throughout college, always keeping our own relationship under wraps. It killed me to see her date those guys. I never knew if she was fucking someone else or not, and she always kept me in the dark. Still, I had a pretty good guess. And high school was excruciating because of it. But I didn’t dare tell anyone for fear my parents would find out, we’d be separated, and I’d get shipped off to boarding school.”

  After high school the duo went to the same college, but instead of coming out together, Cynthia stayed closeted, still pining for my sister, while Ash bedded half the cheerleading squad and gained a reputation as a one-woman recruiting dynamo for the gay-straight alliance.

  “Ash loved to turn women, and she was good at it too—always beat her quota and took home the best prizes,” Cynthia joked, trying to deny her true feelings about Ash’s philandering, but you could see them in the frown lines around her eyes. It was the first time I noticed how much older than Ash Cynthia had seemed. Had loving my sister prematurely aged this woman?

  “And where were you with all this?” I prodded. Then I wondered why. Why was I making her relive these painful memories? Did I really think they would help find Ash’s killer, or did I have some ulterior motive? Did I think Cynthia deserved to be punished? Hadn’t she been through enough?

  “Waiting mostly,” Cynthia said. “And doing whatever Ash wanted me to do.”

  This apparently involved Cynthia having a lot of sex, just not always with Ash. Cynthia said she loved Ash but that my sister used her as bait for other sexual conquests—with women and men, though Cynthia preferred the former—and rewarded Cynthia with the occasional hump to keep her in line.

  “Ash was a very damaged human being,” Cynthia whispered conspiratorially. “I realized long ago that she was completely ignorant of the pain she caused other people. It was like she had been hurt so bad that she no longer felt emotional pain and she forgot that other people weren’t numb like her. Maybe she did push someone too far one day and she got what she deserved.”

  I was mortified that anyone would say something like that out loud. Cynthia must have seen my stunned face, because she sat back and corrected herself. “Oh, that sounded horrible. I don’t think she deserved to die, I just mean, she sure pissed off a lot of people.”

  I tried volleying a few more questions at Cynthia but didn’t get anywhere and was starting to believe that my sister wasn’t too far off the mark when she’d implied Cynthia wasn’t very bright. Clearly, she was hiding something, she was a world-class liar, or she was rather dumb. What could she stand to gain by not telling me all that she knew? Or was it that she was afraid of the truth?

  I felt like she was holding back, the way Shane did whenever the subject of my sister came up. It was making me angry. “Look, Cynthia, I know more about Ash’s secret life than you might think. I’ve seen the DVDs, I’ve read the journal, and I know where the bodies are buried, okay? So why don’t we drop the charades?”

  “You’ve seen it?” Cynthia looked around nervously. My God, who did she think was watching us now? She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Her sex diary?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, I’ve read her diaries. I found them when I cleaned her apartment.”

  “No.” Cynthia shook her head insistently. “Not those. She has another one. A secret one that nobody knew about but me. It was small.” She illustrated its dimensions with her hands. “Ash carried it with her everywhere. She liked to record gossip, you know, about other people that nobody else knew? I don’t think she was blackmailing anyone, or anything like that, she just liked to have information other people didn’t. She told me one time it gave her this sense of power, being privy to other people’s secrets.”

  What was the point of Cynthia describing the alleged book when she could just be telling me where it was?

  “Where did she keep it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Cynthia shook her head again. I wondered if she would tell me if she had it. “Ash kept it somewhere under lock and key, but not at the apartment. That’s all I know,” she added, lying again.

  If I ever wanted the truth, I’d have to come up with another way to entice it from Cynthia. Or Shane. Were they keeping her secrets, or their own?

  I was beginning to feel like I missed so much of my sister’s life I was unraveling more than just the mystery of her death. But what was I looking for now? And if I found that journal, would it hold the clue to who killed Ash? Or just open up another Pandora’s box?

  Chapter Eleven

  June 30

  It’s not bad enough that kiddo watches me through the blinds, spying on me like a jealous lover, but now I’m quite certain someone is following me at the oddest times and places. I don’t know if I’m crazy or if it’s true, but I feel like I should hire a private investigator to follow me around and find out if he’s the only shadow I have. Maybe an ex is stalking me. Or maybe The One has people following me. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real anymore. I go off to the parties and can be there at all hours, but when I leave I always feel another set of headlights behind me. I’ve hidden my real journal, the one that unlocks everything, so that nobody can find it without me wanting them to. I’ll never give it up either. It’s the key to my power, my control over the situation.

  I think the real problem is, I don’t know if I deserve to be safe or not. Surely if I cared about my future, I might take different actions with my life, might do something different with the information I’ve been given, with the power that I can master. But I don’t see a future for myself, not really, not the way I feel now. I have no one I can trust. Not even Megan, I know, because I see the way she looks at me, like I’m some treacherous tramp she wants to spit on in the street. I’m not the sister she once loved. I’m just a whore, the harlot of Lake Oswego.

  So if someone is stalking me, I just hope they don’t get in the way of the truth. I know I’ll end up in an early grave, but as long as the truth comes out, I’ll die a vindicated woman.

  *

  I stood in the kitchen with the smoke detector blaring, one of my tits hanging in the sink under a stream of cold water. I was making chicken for dinner and burned my boob on the oven. Hard to believe, I know, but somehow I decided it would be a smart thing to cook oven fried chicken and sweet potato fries in a low-cut shirt on a summer day. The house was steaming, my shirt popped open, and out plopped the boob and, well, there I was at the sink just as Shane raged through the front door, slamming it behind her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as gently as I could. Shane had been under a shit storm at work lately, and every day her mood was worse than the one before.

  “I got canned.”

  “What? Why?” Shane loved that lit journal, and she’d been working sixty hours a week to help keep the thing afloat. Why would they just fire her?

  Before she even registered the question, I knew the answer. The publicity around Shane’s possible involvement in Ash’s murder had been fierce, although no law enforcement agency had gone on record to link her to it. Her firing was just another link in the chain of events that was colluding to shove our relationship onto the wrong track. We were fine, but all this external pressure was too much.

  Between the media, our jobs, Father, the bloggers, and Cynthia, well, there didn’t seem to be a soul alive who thought Shane and I should stay together. I thought this pressure could explain why so many celebrities broke up in the face of constant media scrutiny.

  “W
hat are you going to do?” I asked quietly, hoping to coax Shane into talking.

  “What do you mean, what am I gonna do? What can I fucking do? I can’t take this, I really can’t, Megan.” Shane broke down crying then, a touching sign of her humanity I so rarely saw these days. Long gone was the girl who played connect the dots on my skin. Shane was a changed woman. Harder, bitter, indifferent.

  More like Ash. More like me. I had changed too. I was no longer the sweet, inexperienced girl I was when that summer began. I spent my days hiding who I was and my nights trying to reenact things my sister had done. I’d watched Ash’s sex DVDs obsessively, spending dozens of hours in front of the screen, always worried the next scene would co-star my current girlfriend making nice with my sister.

  Video quality being what it was, I could rarely tell faces, masked and covered as they were. Occasionally I recognized someone I knew. I swear the players included a classmate, a friend’s mother, a teacher, and the girl down the block who never said boo to me. I didn’t know what to make of the silent videos, each one with the sound intentionally recorded over with dark concertos. If there were secrets on those videos, I’d never decipher them, not orally at least. Well, aurally, that was.

  My mind wandered so much I forgot about my boob, the chicken, Shane’s pain. I put it all away and led her to bed, where she cried in my arms until we both fell asleep.

  The next morning, I broached a subject that had been nagging at me for weeks. “Ash had another journal. A secret one she hid somewhere.”

  I hoped it might draw Shane into conversation, but I was not expecting the outburst that followed.

  “Oh for fuck sake, Megan, your sister is dead and buried. Can you please fucking let it go?”

  “I can’t believe you could say that to me! This is my sister we’re talking about. I owe it to her to uncover everything I can about who she was and what she was going through, and maybe, if I’m lucky, figure out who killed her.”