The Strings That Hold Us Together

by Kendra Mase

  “Kit.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I had a spell.” Emilie threw a dismissive wave toward the other side of the tiny room.

  “You have cancer, Emilie.”

  Not blinking, Emilie shrugged, letting out a long breath. She’d had cancer for a long time.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Katherine.”

  She never used her real name.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? You could have told me. I could have helped you and not been running around like some—some—”

  “Twenty-year-old?”

  “That is not the point. I’m not a child.” She hated that she even had to say such a thing.

  “I know, I know. But that’s the point, sweetie, and I didn’t want to tell you.”

  She couldn’t trust her. Was that it? Looking off to the other side of the room where the beige wallpaper began to peel away from the corner, just like in the living room back in the house, Katherine inhaled, but no air came back out. The only thing that formed was a burning sensation behind her eyes.

  “No, Kit. Look at me,” Emilie said. She reached up until just the tips of her too long fake nails grazed the edge of her cheek. “I didn’t want to tell you because I was selfish, okay? I knew what was happening for a long time now. That is why I have been having my friend stop in so often to help and take me to appointments—”

  “I could have helped you.”

  “You did, Kit. You did more for that shop and the people I know in the city than I have been able to do in years. The shop is thriving, you know, being up with my ledgers every night.”

  Katherine looked back down at her hands to let out a light laugh.

  “I love this city. I knew you would too if you gave it a chance. I knew I was sick long before you even showed up on my doorstep. You have lost so many people already, I wasn’t ready to tell you that you were going to lose another.”

  “Em.”

  A tear slipped, not from Katherine, but Emilie.

  “Woo.” She brushed it away. Gone as if it was never there. It occurred to Katherine that she had rarely seen her aunt without makeup on. Pinks and purples and even green lipstick never ceased to surprise her. Now, Emilie looked very plain, very pale. “No crying. No need for it except to clear some pimples. There is so much left I should have… so many things I need to tell you.”

  “It is alright, Emilie. Don’t worry about anything. I will figure out everything else. I’ll find somewhere to go.”

  Emilie began to shake her head.

  Katherine shook her own head as she thought about the options she had. She thought about Avril, who she hadn’t seen in weeks, and she thought about Jack left waiting outside the door. “Us Passins always somehow find somewhere to run off to.”

  “No, Kit, that is not what I meant. I’m leaving you the shop.”

  What? She must have heard her wrong.

  “I am leaving you everything,” Emilie said.

  “Em.”

  “No. Now you be quiet and listen to me. You used to be so silent all the time. It almost scared me, and now look at you.” She gestured meekly toward Katherine, standing, one garter tack broken and her hair completely skewed to the right. “You are so alive.”

  Katherine might have been crying now. She might have been crying for some time.

  “Emilie, I can’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You can’t give this to me. It isn’t mine. Don’t you have someone else or…”

  “You?” Emilie smiled weakly, clasping her hand on top of Katherine’s. Now, when she looked down, she still had to look at her.

  “I can’t take over the shop. I can’t take over everything.”

  “Of course you can. It’s time. It is your turn.”

  Another tear collapsed with Kit’s body hunched over their hands.

  “You’ve been practically running the shop since you got here. Why do you think I have been giving you so much to do? Why do you think I made you stay up until three a.m. until you got those pieces sewn together so perfectly you couldn’t tell which were mine and which were yours? You have talent, Kit. If you can’t trust your aunt, trust your mentor, trust me.”

  Trust her. Trust. Emilie must have seen the wavering in Katherine’s eyes, but wearily guided her to lie in bed beside her.

  “Kit, don’t you worry. The world isn’t done with me yet. It has you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  When Katherine stepped out of Emilie’s room, she found Jack sitting against the wall in an uneven waiting room chair. It rocked to one side when he sprung to his feet. He was still wearing his work boots from the barn. They stomped with each step until he met her across the laminate tile.

  “How is she?”

  How was she? Katherine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She released it out of her mouth just like she knew to. To let the pain fade. Only this time, it grew.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to.” Jack’s voice filled with something that almost sounded like regret surrounding the rest of his sincerity. But Katherine could hear none of it. “I wanted to tell you about Emilie, I really did, but I made a promise, Kit. I’m a horrible liar, but I made a promise.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” She was owed an explanation. She was owed something. Anything really, other than the nothing that was coming out of Jack’s mouth.

  “I couldn’t. She begged me not to and ever since I came to the city, Emilie has been there for me when I was fucked up or needed cash, so when she asked for a favor—You know that I couldn’t.” He said it all like it was so simple.

  “You wouldn’t. All of this was a lie.”

  “An oversight.”

  “Was watching me crumble some sort of goal for you? Because here I am! Take it in.” Tears streaked down Katherine’s face as quickly as she shoved them away. How pitiful she looked. How perfect for the exact same person Avril, who she also thought was the only friend she’d ever made, warned her not to trust.

  The people in Ashton were sleek and dangerous.

  For a minute there, Katherine thought she was a little dangerous too. But she wasn’t. She was soft and naïve.

  “No.” Jack’s face looked crushed. He reached out only for her to take a step back, nearly falling into the cream-colored wall. “That’s not what I meant. You know what I meant.”

  “Then why the hell don’t you say it now?”

  To that, he had no answer. He only stared at her, cracks in both their facades.

  “Say it.” She gave him another chance but knew that he wouldn’t take it before he even did, mouth opening and closing like a gaping fish. “Right, you can’t. Because didn’t you know?”

  “Didn’t I know what?”

  “Did you not know that the only reason you are even talking to me right now is because Emilie paid you to watch over her immature little niece like a work whoring spy? That first day when we met. It was all a lie whether or not Avril was roped into it.” Katherine pounded on her hand, smacking it against her leg with every word. “I am pretty positive that you did know. Actually, I am one-hundred-percent positive.”

  Jack’s anger began to dissipate, but she could see it there, still right in the corner of his twitching lips.

  “You don’t actually want me.”

  “I want you. How many times do you want me to say it? Because like I told you before, Kit, I’ll say it a million more if I have to. I want you. You’re mine.”

  “You didn’t even want to be my friend.”

  His teeth gritted as he looked down toward his feet. “I do now. I have for a long time. When Emilie asked me—At the beginning—You aren’t even the same person who you were in my head then, Kit. You weren’t just some stupid twenty-year-old like I was, trying to find themselves in life. You are life.”

  Katherine could barely hear him anymore over the roar of it all. Emilie was leaving her. He was going to
leave her.

  He was never hers to begin with.

  “You need to go.”

  “Don’t do this, Kit,” Jack pleaded, his voice struggling to remain steady. “Not now.”

  “I am alone out here with my aunt and I leave for a few days and it is all gone. And you did this to me. I have no one anymore. No one. Not even Avril talks to me anymore.”

  “You know she isn’t talking to anyone right now.”

  He never wanted Katherine; she knew it. He was going to leave her the moment his chivalry to a dead woman was up and crawl back into anyone else’s sequin-filled lap that never needed any help to be more than whatever Katherine was. Less.

  “You need to go. Now.”

  “Katherine.” Jack reached out to gently grip her wrist, but she yanked it behind her before he could. He looked after that hand as if it had slapped him instead.

  “No. Listen to me. You need to go now so I can go back in there and watch the only measure of family I have left die hooked up to tubes in an empty hospital room.”

  “I am your family; don’t you see that? You said it! Me and Avril and everyone. We are your family. Let me be here.”

  They were nothing.

  “What a fucked-up family we’d be.”

  “That’s what I have been trying to tell you.”

  Was he joking? Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Leave.”

  “God, Kit. I want to be here for you. I want to be here—with you. I’m trying to make up for my mistakes. I’m trying to keep my promises.”

  By betraying her—taunting her with her stupid dreams and wishes on stars that made no difference in the end. She shook her head over and over again.

  “Look at me,” Jack pleaded, reaching out for her arm.

  She shoved him away. “Go.”

  “Just let me explain.”

  “I don’t want you to explain,” Katherine screamed. “Leave, like you do everyone else!”

  The nurse’s station behind them hushed at her rising voice. Katherine didn’t know if she’d ever been so loud, and she didn’t even care.

  Neither, it seemed, did Jack.

  “You say that you don’t want people to leave you? Whenever there is one question of someone’s loyalty or how they goddamn feel about you, you are the one who runs away. Do you not see that? You are the problem here right now!”

  “W-what?”

  Face red with held-in anger or fear or whatever it was that coursed the bright red blood throughout his body, he gestured to the space between them, a whole other being in the tiny hallway filled with bustling bodies and the beeping of blood pressure machines going up and up and up.

  “You! You push everyone away.”

  Katherine was frozen as the words floated in the air between them. She pushed them all away. She knew it wasn’t true. That all of this, that Emilie’s death even was not her fault, that her parents leaving on their own accord without her was not her fault, but deep down somewhere it all seemed to click.

  Yes, her. Her fault all along.

  Slowly, she nodded. “Have a n-nice rest of your night, Jack.”

  His hands hung on either side, almost stunned by the single gesture of the words. “Kit. I—”

  Turning around, Katherine barely even noticed the resident doctor holding the clipboard in his hands tightly. His wide glasses tilted to the side. “Miss Passin?”

  Peeking back over her shoulder, Jack still stood there, his eyes wide toward the doctor. Once, Katherine would’ve told him to come with her. To hold her hand while she held Emilie’s and watched her leave the world in a bed lonely without the quilts made of all the states she visited and scattered with ribbons and strawberry pincushions. Now, Katherine dipped her head and followed the doctor back down the hallway, feeling Jack’s eyes follow her even as he did not.

  Outside the hospital, the wind whipped with the beginnings of the first snowstorm as Katherine wandered along the sidewalk back and forth, back and forth, until she was walking straight again. She walked like she used to back home when she needed to get out of the one-story home miles away that smelled like dust bunnies and dried bottles of her mother’s favorite perfume her father couldn’t convince himself to get rid of. Alone again.

  She couldn’t help herself when she arrived at the tall apartment building.

  She didn’t remember how she got there or knew where it was, only that she snuck rather easily into the elevator before it closed, going up nine floors. She had never been inside this building before, yet somehow, as if Emilie’s intuition was already rubbing off on her, Katherine knew exactly where she was going.

  It was the only place she had left to go.

  Knocking once, twice, five times, the door finally whipped open, but only an inch.

  “Avril.”

  A whisper of red hair fell partially in front of her face.

  “Kit. What are you doing here?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go. Emilie was really sick and Jack—”

  “Go away.”

  Shocked, Katherine almost took a step back, farther into the hallway. Instead, something came over her as she shoved the big toe of her shoe in the doorway. It burned when the door tried to crush it. “What?”

  “Move.”

  “No. Avril, please. Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  “Then what is going on?”

  “Get out of here, Kit,” Avril snarled, kicking Katherine’s foot away before she peeked behind. “Go.”

  “No.” She had done everything that Avril had asked of her, and now it was her turn. It was her fucking turn. “Avril, please, I need you.”

  “And I need you to leave. If I wanted to talk to a skittish mouse with no idea how desperate she sounds, I would call you or go and talk to some random chick scraping up pennies in the subway.”

  The words felt like a bullet wedging itself farther and farther into her chest until she almost couldn’t breathe.

  “Avril.”

  “Leave me alone. Leave.”

  “But.”

  “I don’t want you here!”

  I don’t want you.

  “Okay,” Katherine murmured the word until she almost couldn’t hear the sounds choking out of her. “Alright.”

  Gritting her teeth together, the redness around Avril’s eyes seemed suddenly a lot more prominent than it did when she was yelling at her. “Please, Kit. Leave me. Go and run your dead Emilie’s shop and leave me here. Leave me alone.”

  The door slammed in her face, leaving her in the fancy carpeted hallway with no other noise to be heard. The only sound Katherine could hear was the ragged breathing as her chest heaved, trying to catch the next breath that was already supposed to be filling her lungs but wasn’t. She stumbled back into the wall behind her.

  Her heart felt as heavy as the breaths she took. Her hands as light as air, she ripped one of the three bejeweled pins off her garter and pitched it at the door before her. “Fuck you, Avril!”

  Katherine cried as she fell toward the swirling carpet. The next brooch found itself in her hand, glittering with red rubies. She could have sworn she threw it just as hard, but it only rolled off her palm and onto the floor. The third brooch caught and pulled under her skirt. The clip broke before it finally came loose, until it shone up at Katherine, the stark purple amethyst. It winked.

  Winked.

  Stupid brooch. She was supposed to keep them safe. She was supposed to be safe, but Katherine only fell to the floor along with them. “Fuck you.”

  After what felt like an hour but could have been only minutes, Katherine gathered up the still intact gold and jewels in her arms. She stumbled into the elevator and out the door to a taxi, not even caring that she barely had enough cash to pay once she arrived back at the shop. Keys shaking, she struggled to turn the lock.

  Avril knew.

  She knew that Emilie had died. She had probably known that Jack didn’t actually love her at all. They were playing her this en
tire time and she had believed them.

  Leave her alone.

  For once, it seemed fate had brought her right back around to the place and things she found herself very good at.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The funeral was quiet. Katherine had no one to call, and Emilie had told most of her friends she didn’t want an affair. Katherine wore the shoes Avril gave her, slightly scuffed now around the heel. She tied her curls back into a low bun with one of Emilie’s scarves. She wore the simple black dress with sleeves that ended just below her elbows, shoulders covered with Emilie’s fringed piano shawl.

  It was the same dress she wore for Jack’s parents’ anniversary party.

  The urn felt too light in her hands.

  An old friend of Emilie’s lifted Katherine’s glasses for her, only for her hankie to come away dry. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I just can’t believe he didn’t show up.”

  Her father was not a cruel man. He was not mean or uncaring. He was simply indifferent. Katherine didn’t realize how much so until now.

  Handing the urn to Emilie’s chosen confidant to get to place her in her final resting place in the ground, Katherine’s hands now felt even lighter. Felt the way they did when she never blew out her pretty pink birthday cake with yellow frosting flowers the day her mother left. Felt the way she did when the note her father left her slid off the table and she never bothered to pick it back up or throw it away. She felt nearly the same way as she did when she accidentally gave the cab driver a nickel instead of a quarter the other night after she left Avril’s apartment in the city, and he said nothing.

  She was hollow.

  Go home, get some sleep, those who came to the cemetery advised to her empty blinking eyes.

  Right. Sure. She would do that. Right away.

  But Katherine was not in the mood to be taking any orders, well-meaning or otherwise.

  She let the cabs pass her by on the walk home through a prophetic mist that turned into thin drops of rain beating down on her, slipping down around her temples. Katherine’s shoulders slumped and let the rest of her body melt with it with every step across the gritty pavement. Eyes down, she even slipped off her shoes halfway home, watching for glass hidden against the cracks.