Ruby comes into the room. Pretty Ruby. Cora stares at the red of her sister’s lips, frozen in the circle of a silent scream, unable to escape.
Ruby turns to run, but Cora follows, running too. They haven’t played this game in a long time, but Cora was always better at it.
Ruby looks back, her eyes wide with incomprehension at the monster that chases her. She stops. A mistake. And she opens her mouth to scream, but Cora swings again. And again. The scream dies in her sister’s throat.
The baby cries. And the violin plays on.
She takes the steps slowly, dripping as she goes.
She opens the door to the schoolroom, where the tutor plays. Blood falls to the floor at her feet, but he doesn’t turn around. His eyes are closed. Grace flows from the instrument to him and back again.
Cora tilts her head and watches. Listens. The baby cries again, but the sound is lost here, beneath the sound of the violin.
She can make the music stop. But there are terrible things waiting, and when the music stops, they’ll come for her. The blood on her hands. The spark leaving her brother’s eyes. They’ll come, and without the music, there will be nothing to fill the air but her screams.
She turns and leaves him there, lost in his song, lost in a place better than this.
Cora goes down the stairs. She opens the library door. Her father’s chair is turned away.
“Can’t a man have some peace in his home, Helena. Is it too much to ask?”
On quiet feet, Cora walks to his chair. She’s tired now. So tired. She’s never been so tired. She’ll rest soon. And then forever.
But when he turns, she swings again.
Cora’s standing in the entryway when Deirdre comes, the violin washing over her. The baby is quiet now. Like she knows there’s no one home.
No one but Deirdre. And poor, silly Kitty. Perhaps she should kill Kitty too.
But she’s so tired.
She tries to raise her arm, but her strength is gone. The little ax drops from her hand and thumps on the floor.
She stares at it. Deirdre picks it up.
The baby cries again.
And the violin plays.
The darkness comes.
And Cora Cooke is no more.
47
TESSA
Tessa runs her hands through her hair and drops into one of the uncomfortable chairs in the hospital waiting room.
The police have come and gone, including Detective Morello. She was cool and professional, despite the circumstances.
Tessa might have spared her some pity. It was a hell of a story to sort through, but she’s just so damn tired.
Margot walks into the room, which is deserted except for Tessa, and drops down beside her.
“They told you Ben’s surgery went well?” she asks.
The sisters have barely had a chance to talk since Tessa arrived. The police were waiting, and the fallout from Valerie’s final video has already begun. It spelled out, in no uncertain terms, the facts about Oliver Barlow and Chief Lloyd Winters. Despite any injunctions, the press ran with the story. It was too explosive to sit on.
Tessa has turned off her phone to stop it buzzing in her pocket.
“Yeah,” Tessa says. “Full recovery, barring complications?”
Margot nods and leans her head back against the wall. “Yeah.”
“You’re not truly going to divorce him, are you?” Tessa asks quietly.
Margot sighs, but she doesn’t open her eyes. “I should. I really should.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“What if I do? Do you understand how big a betrayal it was for him to meet you in the city?” She picks up her head to meet Tessa’s eyes.
“It was never romantic, Margot. That ended when I left home. You have to know that.”
Margot’s head falls back against the wall again. “I do know that. It was worse.” She sighs, but when she speaks again, her words are quiet and heavy with everything they’ve left unsaid.
“When you called that one time, I held my phone in my hand and stared at your number. I couldn’t believe it. Honestly. I couldn’t believe it was real. It had been so long. I threw the phone down and marched out of the room. My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. I sat in the bathroom with the door locked and I cried.”
Tessa stares.
“Ben knocked on the door, begged me to call you back but . . . I couldn’t. I don’t know why. I wasn’t ready, I guess. You know what I said to him?”
Tessa shakes her head.
“I told him, if it was really important, you’d call back. I said it like it didn’t matter to me any more than what color cart I got at the grocery store. He didn’t say a word. He slammed out of the house instead. By the time he came back I’d pulled myself together as best I could. If he was going to be mad, then I could be mad too.”
Margot studies the ceiling over their heads.
“It was our first real fight. When he packed a bag and said he was going to stay with a friend for a while, I didn’t know if he’d come back.”
Tessa knew how Ben spent the following days. He helped her through the admissions process at the best psychiatric hospital in the state.
“When he did come home, he acted like everything was fine. He let me believe everything was fine. Not once, in all the years since, did he think to mention that my sister, my twin sister, alone in New York, had suffered a breakdown, and when she did, it was me she reached out to. Not once.”
Tessa lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She opens her mouth and struggles to find the right words to explain.
“I asked him not to,” Tessa says. “I begged him.”
“I know that now. It all came out after . . . after Mom died,” Margot says. “But Tessa, no matter what you asked him, he’s married to me. He should have told me.”
She’s right. And Tessa has no idea what to say.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but the words are too small, nothing compared to the pain she caused.
Margot squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. “All this time, all these years. I was waiting, Tessa. I was waiting for you to need me. And when you didn’t call a second time, I shoved away all the hope the sight of your call ignited. It was a fluke. A weak moment, nothing more. If you needed me, really needed me, you would have called again. You never did. And when I realized you didn’t because you got what you needed from Ben, it was . . . difficult to swallow.”
“Margie . . .” Tessa slips into the nickname she hasn’t used since they were four. “That’s not . . .”
“Fair?” Margot asks with a short laugh. “No, I guess it’s not. But that’s how I felt. How I still feel.”
Tessa takes a deep, deep breath. Wonders how to explain eighteen years of anxiety and their cause.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She braces herself and plunges forward. “Margot, I’ve needed you every day since I left. Every day. Without you, I don’t function. It takes pills and therapists and mantras to get me through the day.”
Tessa stares at the ceiling, counts the square tiles. “You . . . you’re my compass. My true north. You always have been. Without you”—Tessa shrugs—“I’m perpetually lost.”
She closes her eyes, lets the words float in the air between them.
“Then why, Tess?” Margot asks softly. “Why didn’t you call again?”
“Because I was ashamed!” Tessa cries, turning to face her sister. “It was selfish, and needy, and pathetic. I wasn’t the one who fought through physical therapy, day after day, just to walk again. I wasn’t the one who had to lie in bed, in pain, after seven surgeries in two years. I wasn’t the one who was supposed to need help, Margot. I had no right to ask you for anything. Not after what I did.”
“What you did?” Margot sits up and stares at Tessa, and the anger she’s become accustomed to is back in her sister’s expression. “Tessa, what exactly do you think happened on that cliff?” she asks slowl
y.
Tessa tenses, fighting off the memories by instinct. But it never works. Even if she can keep them away during the day, they own her dreams. “I don’t want to do this.”
“I think we need to,” Margot says. “I think we have to.”
Tessa shakes her head, but she’s been running for so long. She runs and she runs, but it’s still there. It’s always there.
“I talked you into coming,” Tessa whispers. “You didn’t want to. You never wanted to. You were terrified of heights.”
She can’t look at her sister. She closes her eyes instead and remembers the stars winking overhead and the splash of the water far below them. The sense of possibility that thrummed in her veins. Of the future opening in front of them, unfurling like the petals of a flower.
“But God, I loved that place. It made me feel . . . invincible. Like I could conquer the world.”
Tessa goes back, willingly, for the first time in many years. For the first time maybe ever. And the night that changed all their lives washes over her again.
The three of them lounge on a blanket, far from the cliff’s edge. Margot seems okay, as long as she stays clear of the drop-off. Tessa’s skin is cool from the night wind, her bathing suit damp from her first dive into the lake.
She’d hurried to remove her shorts and T-shirt, then run for the cliff’s edge as soon as they reached the top, just like when they were kids. Ben followed, his arms swirling in the air as he jumped. It was tradition, that first headlong kamikaze dive. Tessa first, with Ben by her side. They made the second trek up the trail where Margot waited, holding out towels with a bemused expression.
Their smiles are a little too wide, their laughter a little too loud.
Summer is ending.
She and Margot leave for NYU in a few weeks.
Tessa reaches over Ben, who’s stretched out on the blanket next to her, and takes a bottle of water from the little cooler. It drips cold droplets on his stomach, but he doesn’t open his eyes. Tessa offers the bottle to her sister.
Margot sits up and takes the drink, but there’s a far-off look in her eyes. She leans forward, rests her chin on her knees, and stares into the moonlit night.
She hasn’t said much since they got to the cliff, and Tessa wants her sister to smile. It’s a celebration. An ending, yes, but a beginning too.
“New York’s going to be great, Margot,” Tessa whispers, but Margot doesn’t smile.
Ben’s staying in Pennsylvania. He registered for classes at community college but promised to transfer to NYU in a year or two.
Tessa doesn’t mention that, though, because even when he said the words, she could hear the seed of doubt. His mom is alone now, and Tessa knows how hard it will be for him to leave her.
Margot opens her mouth to speak, but she closes it again. Then she takes a deep drink from the water bottle.
“What’s your biggest fear, Tess?” Margot asks her.
Being alone.
“Snakes,” she says. “You know that.”
“Mine is heights.”
“I’m sorry,” Tessa says. “I shouldn’t have made you come.” She only wanted one night, one last night to celebrate the days and nights that have come before. But she should have chosen someplace else. She was being selfish.
“You didn’t,” Margot whispers.
Then she stands. Tessa raises her eyes, opens her mouth to tell Margot they can go. That she’s sorry, it was a bad idea, but Margot’s muscles are clenched, and Tessa realizes too late what she’s going to do.
Margot’s legs push forward from the ground, and she takes off at a run. Straight toward the edge of the cliff.
Without thought, without understanding the repercussions of what she’s doing, without anything in her mind except to stop her sister, Tessa launches herself toward Margot, her hands flying in front of her, grasping, clutching.
For a moment, she has her, the skin and muscles and bone of Margot’s ankle caught in Tessa’s grip. But her momentum is too great, and Margot slips from Tessa’s fingers toward the thing she fears the most.
Margot stumbles as she pulls away, unprepared for Tessa’s grasping hands, and then she’s gone. Over the side of the cliff. Falling. Falling to the hard plane of water that will break her.
Tears are leaking from the corner of Tessa’s eyes, but she doesn’t notice. She’s lost beneath the heavy weight of guilt.
“It was my fault. If I hadn’t grabbed you, you wouldn’t have hit the water at the angle you did. I wanted to stop you, to keep you safe, and I almost killed you.”
She risks a glance at her sister, seated beside her in the crappy chairs. But Margot’s face isn’t angry. There’s no hatred or accusation. No blame.
One eyebrow is arched above the other, and her head is tilted slightly to one side. She’s watching Tessa with an expression that can only be described as disgust.
“You’re such an asshole.”
Tessa’s eyes widen. Margot’s words are a lit match, burning away the atmosphere in the room, heavy with the fumes of Tessa’s sorrow and regret. The only thing left behind is shock.
“Why is it always about you?” Margot demands. She stands up and stares at Tessa for a moment, then paces the small room. “I almost killed you, Margot. It’s all my fault. I talked you into going up there, Margot.”
She pauses, then turns back to Tessa, her eyes wide with mock suspense. “What if, for the sake of argument, we pretend for just a minute that you, Tessa Shepherd, are not the center of the whole goddamn universe? How does that sound?”
“I . . . uh . . .” But Tessa doesn’t know what to say.
Margot’s face softens, and her words are quieter when she speaks again. “Why don’t we imagine for a moment, a girl. A girl who never had to make hard decisions because she let her sister make them for her. Imagine she liked it that way. It was easy.”
“Did I do—”
“Shh,” Margot interrupts. Tessa clamps her mouth closed. She watches. She listens.
“Now, imagine this girl is faced with the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. But it’s going to affect more than just her.”
Tessa frowns, but she doesn’t interrupt again.
Margot sighs. “Do you remember when I got the part-time job at the bakery?”
Tessa nods. That last summer was filled with pastries and cake samples Margot was always bringing home from work. They joked about putting on the freshman fifteen before classes even started.
“Now imagine my surprise when I realized, two months into the job, that I was happy there, Tess. Really happy. The same kind of happy that the thought of making movies made you.”
Tessa’s mouth drops open. “I didn’t know that,” she says on a surprised exhale of breath.
“You didn’t know, because I didn’t want you to know,” Margot says. “We may be twins, but I can keep a secret when I want to. And I was keeping a big one. I didn’t want to go to New York.”
Tessa sits up straight. “But . . . but why didn’t you—”
“Just say so? Because, Tess.” Margot sits down next to her again. “I knew you didn’t want to go alone. Never even considered it. We did everything together, and NYU had the film program you wanted. It didn’t matter when we applied. I had no idea what I wanted. I thought I’d figure it out along the way, but the closer that day came, the clearer it was that I’d already figured it out. You belonged in New York, but I’d found my place already.”
Margot watches as her words sink in. She studies Tessa’s face while she absorbs the things she never knew.
“You didn’t make me go to the cliff that night, Tess. I made me go.”
“But . . . but why?”
“If I stayed in Linlea, that meant you were going to have to face your biggest fear, Tess. You were going to have to face the world on your own.”
The bald truth of that stares Tessa down. When Margot asked, she said snakes. She always said snakes. But her sister knew her better than she knew herself.<
br />
“I couldn’t ask you to do that without facing my own.”
Margot shrugs. “So please, for the love of God, would you stop with the all my fault crap? It’s tired and it’s old. You didn’t push me off that cliff, Tess. I made that decision on my own, and you grabbing at my foot isn’t the reason I landed the way I did. I hesitated at the last minute. Fear got the best of me, but it was too late. That hesitation is why I hit the water the way I did. It wasn’t you.”
The idea is so foreign that Tessa can barely wrap her mind around it. A world in which she hadn’t almost killed her sister? What would that even look like?
“And afterward . . . afterward was my fault, Tessa. Not yours.”
A memory slams into Tessa of Margot’s face, pale and strained, as the doctors tell her she might never walk again. They’ll just have to wait and see.
“No,” Tessa whispers.
But Margot shakes her head. “I can’t describe the anger, Tess. Anger from nowhere. From everywhere. Anger like I’d never imagined. It hurts to think of it now.”
Margot rubs both hands across her face, as if she can scrub the remnants of the emotion away.
“I was so mad. At Mom. At you. The doctors. At Dad for dying. At anyone and everyone, just so I didn’t have to face the truth. I had made a terrible mistake, and I couldn’t take it back. You and Mom. I’d ruined your lives. Mom was going to be stuck taking care of an invalid for the rest of her life, and you . . . you wouldn’t even consider NYU. You took it completely off the table.”
“I didn’t want to leave you!”
“I know that, but I couldn’t look at you, Tessa. I couldn’t look at you every day, with your sympathy and your stupid, stupid guilt and know I’d taken the only thing you ever wanted.”
“You never took anything from me,” Tessa says.
“I did! I did, and you refused to even acknowledge it. I made a mistake, and I had to deal with the consequences. Me. Not you. And you wouldn’t even give me that. It was always about how it was your fault, and if you’d only done this or done that differently. You, sacrificing your future to stay with your poor broken sister. But it was never about you, Tessa. It was about me. Me.”
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