Once Two Sisters

by Sarah Warburton

  Then Cristina unplugs the laptop, picks it up, and carries it over to me.

  She holds it up to the gate, and I see Beckett on the screen, bound in a chair, shirtless and shaking, while Phil tapes wires and electrodes all over his body. I can’t blink, can’t breathe as I watch. Then the screen goes dark.

  Cristina says, “You and I both know you can’t get out of here, but you could run around and throw things, waste my time and yours. And you’ll just end up on the floor again.” Her brown eyes lock on mine, but there’s not so much as a flicker in her expression.

  In her steady gaze, I see myself shuddering after a blast from the cattle prod, my arm in Zeus’s mouth, my throat under Cristina’s boot. We both remember. I don’t say anything, but she knows I understand.

  “I’m going to unlock this gate, and you’ll walk across the room and sit down in that chair.” She jerks her head at the folding chair where Beckett sat to have his blood drawn. The chair he sat in before they took him away. Not me. I step back, my lips pressed tightly together. Not me.

  “You’re going to walk calmly across the room and sit down,” she repeats, “and let me draw some blood and get some readings.”

  She can say the words, but she can’t force me to accept them, and I tally up the moving pieces. First, Zeus still sitting at attention, but second, Phil’s out of the picture. If Cristina wants my blood, she’s going to have to shed some of her own to get it.

  But I look again at the computer screen, no longer dark. Beckett is the final piece—alone, still bound to the chair, with the black cloth hood over his slightly bowed head. His chest rises and falls normally under the electrodes. He looks so thin, all alone on the screen, but he’s alive, not in pain. Not yet. There’s an implicit threat, a reason Cristina is holding this up to show me. Beckett’s well-being depends on my compliance.

  Even though my body’s wound so tight that it’s painful to move, I shuffle to the gate.

  Cristina nods, like this is exactly what she expected. She sets the laptop back on the desk and unlocks the padlocks from top to bottom. The key glitters in her hand. With a tug, there’s a gap between the two sections of the fence, and I walk through from one trap into another. My flesh crawls as I pass her.

  There’s no ambient noise in this room, so far below the surface of the earth, and each step reverberates against the high ceiling.

  I sit in the chair, and she sets the laptop on the desk next to the medical equipment. On the screen, Beckett’s shrouded head lifts, turns right and left as though he’s trying to see. He tugs at his hands and shakes the chair, a heavy wooden one. I can’t see his surroundings, just the concrete floor beneath him and cinder-block wall behind him.

  Without this visual aid, I would attack Cristina, choke her. My hands flex and I can almost feel her throat collapse.

  “You understand who that is?” Cristina asks.

  “Beckett,” I whisper.

  She looks pleased, like I’m smarter than she expected. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” she says, taking my wrist in her cold hand.

  Instinctively, I flinch and pull away.

  With a single finger, Cristina jabs the computer touch pad, and Beckett’s entire body convulses. There’s no sound, but I can see the hollow of his mouth sucking in the hood as he screams. Every muscle of mine contracts in sympathy, and I can’t help crying out.

  Cristina taps again, and Beckett’s body slumps.

  “I’m going to take your pulse, your blood pressure, your temperature, and then do a blood draw.” She doesn’t tell me to cooperate.

  She doesn’t have to.

  * * *

  Only minutes pass before Cristina takes the last tube off the needle and unties the rubber cord from my bicep. My inner elbow hurts from the needle being jabbed into my tensed arm. A drop of blood swells at the injection site. I press my thumb against it and bend my elbow. Cristina isn’t going to give me a Band-Aid and a lollipop. I’m staring at her with so much hatred my eyes sting, but she’s too busy arranging the little tubes of blood into their holder to notice.

  “Why me?” I spit out. “Why not a stranger? Why not Zoe?”

  She turns to me. “You were easier.”

  “Easier to find? Easier to catch?” Zoe was in Texas; maybe she was just too far away. I wish she were here and I were safe. But I think of the child I know she has, and I’m ashamed.

  My agitation seems to amuse Cristina. “All of it. And we needed to make sure no one came looking for you, not too quickly.”

  “What do you mean?” The pain from my elbow flares. Has she made it look like Beckett and I ran away together? Maybe Glenn will hate me like Zoe does.

  But she just smiles and shakes her head, denying me any answers.

  “They’ll find you.” My husband, the police, maybe even my parents.

  Cristina sets the tray of tubes off to one side. “No, they won’t. They’re not even looking. They want an easy answer. Most people are stupid, Ava, just like you.”

  “What do they think happened to me?”

  “They think Zoe and Glenn did this, or that you took off on your own. Either way, nobody cares.”

  I know she’s just goading me, but hot rage propels me to my feet.

  She turns, her eyes wide, and my hand flies through the air to strike her cheek. Quicker than a thought, Zeus is on me, knocking me down. I crash into the chair as we fall, the table shakes, and Cristina is right over us, reaching across to the laptop. She’s going to hurt Beckett again, and I shout, “No! I’m sorry!”

  Zeus has one of my arms in his mouth, and she reaches down and yanks on the other. “Aus, Zeus, aus!”

  She hauls me to my feet and shoves me through the gate. I’m panting with fury and regret. There’s a smudge of blood on her cheek from my hand. Under the table lies one of my shoes, kicked off in the struggle, and I stumble out of the other as Cristina fastens the gate, slamming each lock with more force than necessary.

  “Just like your mother. Emotional. Stupid.” Then she wheels around and strides through the same door where Phil took Beckett, slamming it behind her.

  For a moment the relief of her absence is overwhelming and I sink to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees. The strain of holding still has burned out every nerve ending. Tears of humiliation have already dried on my cheeks. I don’t understand her words, can’t make the connection between my mother, cold and clinical like Cristina, and the word emotional.

  All I understand is the rising tide of sorrow building within me, pressing against my rib cage. I clamp my mouth shut, but I’m shivering like a child with the force of my longing. I want my mommy, but not my actual mother. A mother warm and comforting and supportive. I want arms around me, stronger than Beckett’s. I want Glenn, but not to see me like this, weak and broken. I want someone who has to love me, someone fierce and funny. Someone tougher than Cristina. I never expected this, but I want Zoe.

  My body is too tired to shake, my brain too fried to think. I close my eyes, wishing I could just pass out. I need peace, rest, oblivion, but none of that comes.

  All I get against my closed eyelids is a sudden overwhelming memory.

  Zoe as I saw her last—a madwoman with wild eyes and bared teeth, an avenging angel in a halo of shattered glass, illuminated by my living room light.

  At that time I hadn’t seen her in over a year, but I had known where she was, who she was with.

  I’d sent Glenn away and thought I meant it. I wasn’t ready for a forever love, not after Beckett. I thought I wanted solitude, an emotional fortress around which a thousand years of thorns could grow. But when I learned Glenn was with Zoe, I couldn’t help myself; I sent him that message in the dedication of my book, believing that with the power of my words I could conjure him home again. And I did.

  He dropped everything and returned, just because I asked. Not in a million years would Beckett have come back like that. Glenn reminded me that he’d never wanted anyone else, he never would have left if I had
n’t made him. And that Zoe was as close as he could get to me. She was the false princess, the enchantress in disguise, my pale shadow.

  So I forgave him. And then I turned all that anger on my sister. She had no excuse for choosing Glenn over anyone else in the world, no reason to pick him except to hurt me.

  Now he was back in my house, my kitchen, washing my dishes. I could hear the faucet running, knew he was up to his elbows in soapy water. He might not have heard the window break. Even though the first rock Zoe threw had caught my head, even though I could feel the hot dampness of blood on my forehead, I felt exhilarated.

  This was between my sister and me.

  Violence was the choice you made when you were defeated, so I didn’t need Glenn to come to my rescue.

  Eyes wide, Zoe stumbled back, like she was losing her nerve. But instead of leaving, she raised a second stone. A cube of hand-squared Belgian granite, to be precise. I’d chosen them for their old-world look, not their lethal capabilities.

  She hefted the stone, so perfectly sized for a human hand, her eyes darting up to my forehead and then back to my face. If that first throw had hit me directly, I might already be bleeding out on the ground. And now I was facing her, stationary, an easy target.

  She might kill me. The thought made me bare my teeth. I might be willing to risk everything for this Pyrrhic victory, proving my own control, making her angry enough to lose hers.

  And I didn’t move. I didn’t say a word, just lifted my chin and silently dared her. This is your chance to be the author. What happens next, Zoe?

  But a police siren sounded in the distance, and she startled, the stone falling from her nerveless fingers.

  Then my sister turned and ran.

  Now new tears squeeze from my closed eyes and I wrap my arms more tightly around my knees. We wasted so much time telling stories about each other, but I’m starting to believe storyteller is just another word for liar.

  As time went by, my anger began to fade. Glenn is very straightforward. When I said it was over, he believed me. When I decided to forgive him, he was one hundred percent loyal. And the happier I was, the harder it was to stay angry at Zoe. When she “disappeared,” I found her. It was pathetically easy. And I learned she had a husband, a child. I wondered who this sister was, the one who was a wife and mother. Was she happy in her marriage like I was in mine? But after all that anger, after I’d deliberately persecuted her in fiction, there was no way to reach out. I had obliterated any chance we might have had at a relationship.

  I’d defeated Zoe. I made sure she knew I wasn’t afraid of her and I could take and keep anything—anyone—I wanted. I was just like Cristina, and even if Zoe knew I was in trouble, there’s no way on earth my sister would help me now. She’d think I deserve to be helpless and alone.

  Maybe I do.

  Once, once, once—a drumbeat of regret, our beginning turned to dust.

  CHAPTER

  25

  ZOE

  I CAN’T STAY ON this bus forever. We’ll reach a destination, everyone will get off, and I’ll be alone again. All the passengers bump and sway in unison, but as separate islands. The woman next to me is close enough that I can smell her perfume and the leather of her briefcase. She’s looking at her phone, oblivious to my presence.

  What will I do next? I’m good at leaving and at becoming someone new. I could disembark at the airport, get onto a bus or a train, end up in a strange city. Start all over again with a bed in a shelter and a crappy job. Look for a lonely person longing for a roommate or a daughter or a lover. I know how to do all that. Shedding Lizzie might be as easy as dropping my wallet in a trash can.

  Outside my window the buildings move farther away, replaced by more and more lanes of traffic. We’re on the highway, definitely headed to the airport. And I don’t want to leave. I want to get home—back to the place where I sang Emma to sleep and woke up in Andrew’s arms. My longing hurts like my heart is being squeezed. It hurts enough to make me gasp so that my seatmate turns her head to stare out the window, pointedly away from me. Asshole.

  That’s what I need to remember. This woman is just like everybody else. No one gives a shit about me. Strangers, the police, even my parents would believe I’m responsible for Ava’s disappearance. I’m the only one who knows the truth. If I want to clear my name and try to get Andrew and Emma back, it’s all on me.

  Ava. She would know what to do. She would make a list, examine the evidence, and get the answers. I’ve been angry at her for so long, but her skills are the ones I need right now. And maybe it’s just because I miss Andrew and Emma, but I actually miss my sister too. At least the idea of her.

  When I was in fourth grade, I had a report to do on Georgia and was feeling overwhelmed. I could read a page of a book, but I didn’t know which parts mattered. I wrote down the titles of all the books in the bright pile I had collected, but that didn’t make a report either. What mattered more, history or climate? The state bird or peaches or the Okefenokee Swamp? Ray Charles or Jimmy Carter or Gone With the Wind? I couldn’t include everything, so I sat there with nothing.

  My parents were in the other room, working. They were writing and talking and moving effortlessly among papers and books and the computer screen. I rose and stood in the doorway, watching them, waiting for them to notice me, but they didn’t. And if they had, I wouldn’t have known what to ask.

  Then Ava came up behind me. “Is it your paper?”

  I nodded, too choked with my own stupidity to speak.

  “Come on.” She pulled on my shoulder. “Let me show you how to do it.”

  And she sat next to me, my smart seventh-grade sister, with a paper and pencil, and talked me through it. “First you write down your topic. Then you choose some subgroups. Then you write a few facts for each. Then you explain why they all matter. And then you’re done.”

  That was such a clear memory, a moment when Ava was the big sister and I was the little sister, a moment when she was my mentor and my guide.

  What broke the spell? I remember working with the yellow light of the lamp shining on my books, but not how I finished, or what the final report looked like, or even the grade I received. The moment was so rare that it is enclosed in amber in my memory.

  Now it’s been three years since I’ve seen Ava at all. I lost her, and I wonder if I have lost Andrew and Emma too.

  No. I have to believe I can get my family back. And this belief, this hope that we can fix everything broken and go back to the way things were, seems to open a window to Ava as well.

  I can figure this out. I have to. I open up my shoulder bag. I have a notebook and a pen, the scraps of paper I swiped from Ava’s house and a phone. Ava would make a list, a plan. The bus bumps again, hard, and I flip my bag shut before anything bounces out.

  Through the windshield I see the signs for long-term parking. We are approaching the airport.

  As the other passengers begin sliding across their seats, ready to go, the woman next to me takes a firm grip on her briefcase and actually locks eyes with me. Looks at me. Long enough to make me worried. Does she recognize me? I turn my back to her and busy myself with the strap of my bag until the bus comes to a stop in front of the terminal.

  As we all stand together, pressing to get off the bus, I realize the airport is the worst place for me to be. So much security. So many cameras. Even in the innocuous waiting area, so many televisions, all tuned to an endless loop of news.

  I need a quiet place to spread my papers and look at the big picture. I need to become Ava—methodical, intelligent, analytical.

  Instead I’m a panicked animal, trapped in a crowd of predators, looking for a direction to run.

  Thank God this shuttle brought me to Reagan National. If I were out at Dulles or BWI, I don’t know where I would have gone. But here I have access to a dozen easy ways to flee. Buses, Amtrak, taxis and Ubers. I choose the Metro. Fast and anonymous. The Blue Line takes me to Crystal City, and this time of day it’s n
ot crowded, except for the couple sitting across from me with a little girl about Emma’s age between them. A family. My heart gives a sideways lurch. No, I can’t think about that.

  Right now I need something simpler than Ava’s brain or an act of God.

  The internet.

  This little burner phone had a limited data plan, one I’ve already used up. But I’m desperate for information.

  From the Crystal City Metro station, it’s only a few minutes’ walk to the closest branch of the public library. Some libraries make you log in with your card and a password, so I’m gearing myself up to lurk around and steal someone else’s open computer. But apparently I’m on a long-overdue lucky streak, because I drop into a chair in front of a computer with my bag in my lap, hit the keyboard, and the internet is right there.

  Of course, that’s the end of my luck. And in only a few minutes it’s clear I have neither the skills nor the patience I need to dig for the right information and analyze it.

  What I have is a lot of random clues. Or possibly no clues at all. Just random things. The folded blueprint that shows an unidentified building with the word “Spiegler.” The notes from Ava’s mood board with words like “SERE,” which I now know stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. That sounds like my life. But I have no idea what it has to do with anything else.

  I don’t know how to identify a building’s shape or search using a blueprint. The numbers on it make no sense to me. Spiegler could be the surname of any of a hundred different people or something in a foreign language. There’s too much here.

  I get tired of scrolling through screen after screen. Fuck it. If I were braver, I would search for my own name and see what the news is reporting now. But I’m not going to do that. Partially because I don’t want to know and partially because I’m not sure how surveillance works online. Maybe searching on myself would trigger something and the cops would show up. It’s probably just my paranoia—I know it’s stupid—but it feels dangerous.