The Sullivan Sisters

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  “You’re ruining it,” she whispered, focusing on the ground so she could swallow the tears. “I was going to put on a show, and you’ve messed up everything.”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” Claire said, scrolling on her phone.

  Eileen threw her combat boots over the side of the La-Z-Boy. “What show, Murph?”

  It felt silly to say now: I’ve been preparing magic. It was the worst thing to say when she was being accused of immaturity. The deck of cards in Murphy’s back jeans pocket felt hot, burning into her leg.

  “Never mind,” she mumbled. “It’s already ruined.”

  Something flickered in Eileen’s eyes—a place where, recently, Murphy hadn’t seen light.

  “Hey,” she said, softer than before. “Sorry for what I said. I know you’re not gonna break anything.”

  The tears Murphy had suppressed came back with a vengeance, pouring down her cheeks.

  “It’s … not that,” she croaked out. “It’s everything.”

  She couldn’t say more. She could only cry, like the little kid Claire and Eileen thought she was.

  Well, if that’s what they thought, then fine. She’d prove their point. Murphy yanked down the nearest blanket she’d clothespinned. She ripped out a sheet she’d tucked into the couch’s back cushions.

  Then she ran, escaping to her room, slamming the door behind her and locking it shut.

  Come back, Murph, she waited for them to call. Or, Don’t be like that, as they pounded on her door.

  No one even knocked.

  The longer Murphy cried in her room, the better she understood: Her sisters weren’t coming after her. They didn’t care enough.

  The castle had crumbled, never to be rebuilt.

  DECEMBER TWENTY-THIRD

  NINETEEN Eileen

  Claire, for the love of God, let me,” said Eileen.

  Because, as it turned out, her seventeen-year-old sister couldn’t light a match.

  “I know how to do it,” Claire insisted.

  “You keep freaking out. You have to make sure it’s lit before throwing it in. The box is worn down, it’ll take a few strikes. You’re not stopping to make sure.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Eileen’s best guess, in the wake of the lights going out, was that the electricity company had finally caught on to the fact that their customer at 2270 Laramie was deceased. That, or the storm was to blame. Either way they were screwed. Eileen could already feel the winter cold seeping through the old windows, overtaking the artificial heat that had formerly filled the house. They were in for a frigid, dark night. The sisters had decided, though, that it was better to stay inside, with blankets and a fireplace, then risk going out in the deluge. They’d stick it out one night, said Claire, and tomorrow they’d get out of town. Storms had to stop eventually.

  “Stop dicking around and let me do it,” Eileen said, making a grab for the box of matches Claire had scavenged from a kitchen drawer.

  Claire avoided Eileen’s grasp, twisting her arm to shield the box behind her back. “I can light a fire.”

  “Then stop being a wuss and do it already. Put your back into it.”

  “Put your back up your ass.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Eileen wasn’t offended, just impressed Claire had cussed. It had only taken half a day for her prim and proper ways to break down. What would her lord and savior Harper Everly have to say about that?

  Then something more unexpected happened. Claire struck a match and this time waited for the flame to spark. Without flinching, she crouched toward the firewood and the crumpled newspaper the girls had placed in the hearth, and threw the match the short distance left between her and the kindling. The flame caught the paper alight, and the fire started to grow.

  Claire stood, tossed the matches to Eileen, and said, “I’m not a wuss.”

  The box hit Eileen soundly in the chest. She’d forgotten this side of Claire: the stubbornness and resolve. When they’d been little, how many times had Eileen shamed Claire into being brave? Like the time she’d convinced her to get on the Area 51 spinning ride at the county fair, or how she’d given Claire endless grief about being too scared to shave her legs until she’d finally done it, knee cuts and all. In retrospect, maybe Eileen could have been gentler in her methods, but Claire was better for them. Of course, the way Claire behaved, you’d think Harper Everly had taught her to walk and talk.

  Murphy joined Eileen and Claire in a trip upstairs to gather blankets and pillows from the bedrooms. She refused, though, to go into the bedroom with the porcelain doll, and no one approached the bat-infested turret. Eventually they returned to the parlor with enough bedding to make a decent campfire arrangement.

  It would’ve been a cute setup in an alternate universe. Not in this dimension, though. Claire griped about the littlest things, like getting stuck with the scratchy blanket and the lumpy pillow. The only good thing she’d had to say all afternoon was when she’d emerged from the downstairs bathroom and announced that the plumbing, at least, was working.

  Now that the three of them were gathered around the fire, Eileen looked to the windows, trying to figure out the time of day. There was no trace of sun in the storm, but the rain-ridden outside had turned from a sickly white to a deepening gray. It was nearing sunset—four o’clock, Eileen guessed.

  “Hey,” she said to Claire. “What time is it?”

  Claire gave her a bizarre look, like Eileen had asked her to offer forth her firstborn.

  “What?” Eileen said.

  Claire pointed to the curtainless windows. “It’s getting dark. What more do you need to know?”

  This wasn’t the first time Eileen had wanted to call her sister a bitch. She had before, but saying it again would be a waste of breath. Instead, she headed to the kitchen to check the oven clock, only to remember that, of course, the electricity was out. There were no analog clocks that Eileen could see, either. For such an outdated house, Patrick Enright sure had kept his clocks in step with the digital age. As Eileen soon discovered, upon further kitchen inspection, he’d also kept his pantry stocked. She gave its contents a once-over and grabbed what looked best: an unopened box of Pop-Tarts. When she returned to the parlor, Murphy was at the piano and Claire was sitting on a stack of pillows by the fire, that bizarre look still smeared across her face.

  “I broke my phone,” she said, once Eileen was close.

  “What? How?”

  “I threw it across the room.”

  Eileen processed this fact. Then she said, “Good for you.”

  Because honestly, whatever the reason Claire had for throwing a phone, that was a sign she was partly human and not entirely a YouTube influencer–bot.

  Over at the piano Murphy was playing the bass chords of “Heart and Soul” on loop.

  “Mozart caliber,” Eileen told her dryly.

  “Thanks,” Murphy replied, without looking up.

  Weird kid, as always, but there was something in the simple song that gave Eileen’s heart a twist. Something so very Murphy about it—bouncy, and in a major key. Eileen hadn’t noticed that about Murphy until now: how, even when she was whining, she always sounded positive.

  Eileen took a seat by the fire, tearing open the box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts. Wordlessly, she offered one to Claire. Wordlessly, Claire pushed the pastry away. Right. Gluten. Jesus. If Claire wanted to voluntarily starve, so be it. Eileen ate in silence as Murphy ran over the same chords, again and again. As she did, Eileen noticed Claire’s hands, folded across her knees. Polish had chipped off her right thumb, forming a jagged triangle of bare nail.

  The Pop-Tart was good. Sweet and carby, and not the least bit stale.

  “Remember when Mom took us to the coast?” Claire suddenly said.

  Murphy looked up from the piano. “I remember.”

  Eileen did too. She hadn’t thought about that day since … the day it had happened, she guessed. It had to have been at least three years
ago. Leslie Sullivan had pulled her daughters out of school that day, piled them in the Subaru, and told them she was taking them to a surprise. That long drive northward, Eileen and Claire had sat in the back seat, laughing over a copy of Star magazine. That was back when the two of them would walk to Fred Meyer and spend change on sour gummy worms and tabloids.

  The nostalgia hit Eileen punishingly. It ricocheted in her ribcage, and she felt for a moment that she might spit out her food. They’d been close, she and Claire. What the hell had happened? How had it happened? It had been like a breakup, only afterward they kept sharing the same house, same blood.

  Murphy kicked Eileen out of her thoughts by saying, “What was Mom on that day?”

  “No clue,” said Claire, staring into the fire. “I kept trying to figure it out.”

  Eileen had too. From the moment her mom had ordered them into the car, to the moment they’d arrived on the shore and walked along the sand under the late summer sun, to the moment they’d stopped at Arby’s on the way home and Mom had said they could order whatever they wanted—shakes and extra curly fries, anything. Mom had never given an explanation, and she’d never done anything else like that again. The next day she’d gone back to working twelve-hour Walgreens shifts. As though their coastal trip had never happened, but rather been a mass-hallucination, shared only by the Sullivan sisters.

  It hadn’t been make-believe though, Eileen knew. She remembered the colors vividly: stark blue sky meeting gray sea in a perfect line. Jagged rocks had stood up from the water, cloaked in algae. The sand had reflected the sun, precious and bright.

  “I want you to take it in,” Mom had told them, smiling. “Sink your toes into the sand, enjoy it.”

  And they had. Claire had turned cartwheels, perfectly balanced rotations. Murphy had dug their names in the sand—“LEENIE + CLAIRE + MURPH”—and drawn a massive heart around the words. Eileen had walked close to the water, allowing the chilly waves to lap over her toes. She couldn’t remember the name of the beach, or the route they’d taken. She hadn’t known the why of the trip at all.

  It was clear to Eileen tonight, though, in a way it hadn’t been at fifteen: Maybe Mom had been saying sorry the only way she knew how. Maybe she’d been trying to make up for being a mom who never attended PTA meetings, who hadn’t counseled them on the best mascara to buy, or warned them about menstrual cramps.

  Yes, Mom provided accommodation, utilities, basic needs. She’d never been cruel to them. She hadn’t shouted or fought. She wasn’t bad, she simply wasn’t around.

  That day on the coast, though, Leslie Sullivan had been a normal mom. She’d spent time with her kids. She’d been there. It was the normalcy that had made it strange.

  Eileen had been to the coast plenty of times since then—for school trips, and back when she’d actually hung out with a friend group in her first two years of high school. The coast was simply a place to go, only an hour’s drive west. Why not see the Pacific? And why not eat some good seafood, while you were at it? There was nothing noteworthy about a trip out there. Only this trip stood out.

  Murphy dropped an elbow on the piano keys, producing a dissonant jumble of notes.

  “Maybe that was the start of Mom’s menopause,” she said. “Or, like, she was having a midlife crisis.”

  Eileen didn’t know where to begin with that.

  Claire said, softly, “Who knows what it was about.”

  Murphy hopped up from the piano and joined her sisters by the fireside. She grabbed a new packet of Pop-Tarts from the box, ripped it open, and bit into both pastries, double-layer style.

  Through a full mouth she said, “Uncle Pat had bad taste. Didn’t he know strawberry is the lowest of Pop-Tart flavors?”

  Uncle Pat. The familiarity made Eileen’s skin prickle. Had he known about her mom’s affair? Had she been sleeping with him, too? Was it a brother fetish? God only knew.

  But maybe Eileen would know too, if she finally got the chance to go through the boxes. Her gaze drifted to the wall, stacked high with them. Eileen couldn’t have dreamed this shit up. And for this to fall in her lap, right when she was feeling her shittiest, most directionless—it was almost enough to make her believe things happened for a reason.

  Almost.

  Not entirely.

  Of course not. That idea was bullshit.

  Claire lay out on the ground, stretching her arms above her head. The firelight danced on her face in patches of orange, and her eyes were intensely blue. So opposite of Eileen’s.

  “Remember what we did with the shakes?” Claire said.

  “Oh my God,” said Murphy. “FLAVORNADO.”

  Claire nodded, repeating the word as a reverent prayer: “Flavornado.”

  The memory hit Eileen in a sensory-packed punch. The three of them had conspired in the back seat of the Subaru while in the drive-through line at Arby’s. They’d each ordered a different flavor milkshake and asked for an extra-large soda cup. They’d pooled their shakes into the cup and mixed the flavors with a plastic spoon. Then, with the finesse of a practiced mixologist, Eileen had poured the concoction into their individual cups. So flavornado had been born. A perfect combination of vanilla, mocha, and mint. They’d only had flavornado that once, but clearly it had been enough to make a memory.

  That queasy feeling was inside Eileen again. She was thinking of three years ago, of the way things had been. Some of those things had stayed the same: Mom’s absence, the clogged bathroom sink, rainy winters and springs. Other things had changed, though, and for the worse: what they’d had as sisters, how they’d goofed off, joked, confided, kept their doors open. Eileen had shared a room with Claire, then. She’d given Murphy regular piggyback rides. She’d believed she was one of them—a Sullivan sister.

  Then, after the letters, she’d begun to think differently. She’d pulled away, barricading herself into the garage. Because Eileen knew a secret they didn’t, and that secret would change everything. Telling them, or confronting Mom … that made it too real. Saying the truth aloud was impossible, and if Eileen had mustered the guts to do it, she knew what would’ve happened: Claire and Murphy would’ve looked at her differently, treated her differently, known she was the daughter of a murderer.

  That’s what Eileen had decided.

  Only now? She watched the firelight dance on Murphy’s freckles and in the blue-gray flecks of Claire’s eyes. And she wondered if, maybe, she’d misjudged her sisters. Even if the worst was true, and she was Mark Enright’s kid, would Claire and Murphy turn their backs on her?

  Claire, who—for better or worse—had given Eileen gas money and not allowed her to drive drunk? Murphy, who’d had the guts to stow herself away and to call Eileen and Claire out on their bullshit?

  Maybe Claire was less of a bitch than Eileen had painted her to be. And maybe Murphy wasn’t so little or weak. Maybe they were kind and strong enough to hear the secret and be okay. They were her own goddamn sisters.

  But … what if sisterhood wasn’t enough?

  Eileen was growing numb, the way she had the first time, when she’d discovered the letters. She wondered if she would remain this way, frozen, no matter how close she scooted to the fire.

  She really needed a drink.

  She’d needed one hours ago, and the lingering taste of flour and sugar on her tongue made the craving worse. Digging into her jacket pocket, she found one precious Dubble Bubble left. She made quick work of unwrapping the gum and popped it into her mouth—her powdery pink salvation, for the time being. As she chewed, Murphy and Claire talked on, not fighting for once. None of them were fighting, so why did Eileen need a drink more than ever?

  The conversation had turned into a game of Remember When.

  Murphy started with, “Remember the tire swing?”

  Eileen did. She’d swung on it before Murphy was even born. Dad had pushed her. Then the tree branch had broken off one night in a summer windstorm.

  Claire said, “Remember the marionberry contest?
”

  The three of them had gone to the county fair and stood in a gray-sky drizzle, gawking as contestants pursued the most stereotypical Oregonian feat: shoving their mouths full of as many marionberries as they could, in front of a screaming crowd. When the sisters had returned home, Murphy had reenacted the event by standing on the kitchen counter and cramming twenty stacked pieces of Kraft singles into her mouth. She’d puked in the backyard a minute later, but they’d all found it hilarious. Eileen thought maybe that was the last time the three of them had laughed together.

  The last time until today.

  Claire and Murphy continued to reminisce, jumping on each other’s words like eager crickets. Eileen didn’t join in. She couldn’t anymore. She could only viciously chew her gum down to its stringy, sugarless core. It took the others minutes, maybe an hour, to notice. Murphy nudged Eileen’s foot and said, “Why’re you quiet?”

  Eileen had been staring at the wall of boxes. Waiting for her chance to look inside, without the fear of either sister looking over her shoulder.

  She shrugged and said, “Worn out, I guess.”

  “Leenie.” Murphy ducked her head, looking oddly shy. “What’s your favorite memory with Dad?”

  Eileen blinked, her throat growing rigid. The question should have been an easy one to answer—logistically, at least. Eileen had multiple memories of Dad. She should have been able to pick one she liked best.

  It wasn’t as simple as that, though.

  Back when they’d been close, Eileen and Claire had swapped memories of their father, and Eileen had found out that Claire had barely any; she didn’t even remember the funeral. Eileen had thought that was strange, that they could be a year apart, and yet Eileen got the lion’s share of memories. Was it something about the human brain, how its memory-making magically clicked on when you were four, but not three years old?

  For whatever reason, Eileen had been given the responsibility: She was the designated memory keeper of John Sullivan. How twisted was that? He was their biological dad, not hers, and she got the memories.