Maybe it was the regret, or the aftershock of eating maggot-filled chocolate. Maybe it was that this was the most messed up Christmas anyway. Whatever the reason, Claire said the words.
“I didn’t get in.”
Speaking them out loud was a dagger stab to the throat. The blade pierced through skin, and the blood ran down, hot on Claire’s neck.
“Wait, what?” Murphy sat up on the couch.
“I didn’t get in,” Claire said, louder, feeling strangely euphoric. At last she was announcing it for everyone to hear: She wasn’t the Exceller she’d tried to be. “They rejected me. Yale. They said no.”
Eileen was staring at Claire, face slack. “What the hell?”
“Yeah.” Claire shrugged. “What the hell.”
“What about other colleges?” asked Eileen. “U of O, or OSU? You applied to those too, right?”
Claire didn’t speak.
“Shit,” said Eileen.
Claire dipped her chin into the throw pillow. “Go ahead and tell me what an asshole I’ve been, and how Harper Everly is a joke, and that’s what I get for trying so hard.”
Eileen remained quiet. Claire felt pressure on her arm—the lightest graze of three fingers. It was Murphy, leaning off the couch.
“Sorry, Claire,” she said, and nothing else.
Eileen’s jaw had tightened and her eyes shone, rabid, in the firelight.
“Fuck them,” she said. “Elitist pricks. You’re the goddamn smartest, put-together asshole I know. If they can’t see that, they’re idiots. So, fuck ’em.”
Claire blinked. Her blood was pouring out slower, euphoria gone. Despite her night of hard sleeping, she felt exhausted. And maybe she was delirious, because she was almost certain Eileen was being nice to her.
Like the Eileen from five years ago, who’d listened when Claire had told her she was gay. Not in so many words, because Claire was thirteen then and figuring things out, but Eileen had understood what she was trying to express.
She’d said, “That’s cool, Claire. It’s more than cool.” And she’d added, “Don’t take shit from anyone.”
Claire had forgotten that. Not that Eileen knew her secret—you couldn’t ever forget who you’d told—but that she’d accepted it easily, and well. She’d been … a good sister.
The way she was being now.
Claire wasn’t ready for that. For any of this.
“I need to be alone,” she said, realizing as she stood how true the words were. “I … just … need to be alone.”
She stumbled out of the tangle of blankets, heading for the grand staircase.
“But Claire!” Murphy called after her. “It’s dark and cold up there!”
Claire ignored Murphy. That was easy to do; she’d formed the habit.
She’d formed all the wrong habits, hadn’t she?
She took the stairs quickly, wiping tears as she went, and reeled into the hallway at the top of the landing, throwing herself into the first room she saw. She slammed the door and sank to the ground, and then, for the very first time, Claire cried about the bad news.
The rejection.
The shattered future.
The forever loss of Ainsley and Excelling and what could have been.
TWENTY-ONE Murphy
Operation Memory Making was at a standstill.
And things had been going so well.
Last night amid all the “remember whens,” Murphy’s heart had filled with hope. She, Claire, and Eileen had shared a moment. They’d talked, really talked to each other, reminiscing on the past by firelight. It had practically been a scene from Little Women. Yes, Eileen had been sort of distant, but this was progress. A step in the right direction.
And now?
After Claire had run upstairs, Eileen and Murphy stayed quiet. What was there to say after that announcement?
Claire hadn’t gotten into college.
Bam. The big, awful truth had gone off like an explosion. Murphy wasn’t sure how to make a memory out of that.
So she lay on the couch, absorbing her sister’s news, while Eileen finished off the rest of the Pringles. When she was through, Eileen stood, crossed the parlor to the wall of boxes, took the open one she’d fallen asleep with, and began to go through its contents.
What was she searching for? Murphy wondered. The only thing those boxes were good for, from what Murphy could see, were proving that Uncle Patrick had been a big-time hoarder.
Murphy army-crawled to the side of the couch, peering over its edge.
“Looking for buried treasure?” she asked Eileen.
“Something like that,” Eileen replied.
“What makes you think it’s in those boxes?”
“A hunch.” Eileen sifted through papers, looking them over and setting them aside, one by one.
“They’re just bills and stuff.”
“No one’s asking you to look through them.”
“But why are you looking?”
Eileen huffed, throwing down a stack of newspapers. “Because all it takes is a letter, okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Okay.”
Clearly, Eileen didn’t want to talk to her. What else was new? Murphy couldn’t help wondering, though—all what took was a letter? A letter about what?
From her pocket, Murphy pulled out the rope trick. Over, under, tug through and out.
As her fingers fell into the practiced routine, she raised her eyes to the windows. Rain beat against them, sluicing down the glass, forming a stormy curtain between the house and the world outside.
You wouldn’t even know a world was out there, Murphy thought. And then, Maybe it’s not. We could be in a vacuum. A void. A nowhere place.
The thought sent a chill through Murphy. She wondered, if you were cooped inside a house long enough, could it drive you insane? To murder? Is that what had happened to Uncle Mark? Was that why Uncle Patrick had turned hermit?
Maybe this house possessed magic.
Not the good kind, though.
Not the kind meant for a stage.
Tragic magic.
The kind that snuck up on you, from behind, and slithered a noose around your neck before whispering, Ta-da.
The rope went limp in Murphy’s hands. She felt a little like hurling. Maybe that was because of the maggots.
And maggots made her think of death.
Murphy’s gaze flicked to the piano, Siegfried’s temporary funeral home. It wasn’t right, keeping him trapped in there. She looked again to the rain-sheeted windows, imagining what she couldn’t see: the ocean, bluffs, and sand. She bet it was pretty here, on a summer’s day. A turtle’s paradise.
Siegfried hadn’t deserved a smelly cage or a broken heating lamp. He’d deserved Rockport on the Fourth of July.
Sometimes you didn’t get what you deserved, though. Take Claire, for example, and college. If she couldn’t get into college, who the heck could?
Murphy was gladder than ever that her entertainment career wouldn’t require a diploma. When she turned eighteen, she’d be off to Vegas, and that was that. No applications for her, no tests, and no AP classes. She would attend the school of hard knocks, the way all performers did.
“Uh, Leenie?” Murphy craned her neck over the couch.
Eileen sifted through papers. She didn’t reply.
“Leenie.”
“For the love of God, Murph.”
“Should we check on Claire?”
“No. She wants to be alone.”
“Because it’s got to be cold upstairs. And she was crying really hard.”
“She’ll get over it. Leave her alone.”
Murphy huffed. She was over it. Over being overlooked.
She pocketed the rope and got to her feet, shuffling toward the door that led from the parlor to the front rooms.
She waited for Eileen to say, “Where do you think you’re going?”
She didn’t even glance up.
“Whatever,” Murphy muttered. “Find your mystery le
tter.”
The foyer was big and high-ceilinged, same as the parlor. The front door was red. Blood red, Murphy thought. Out of nowhere, the voice of Cathy at the diner reminded her, Bashed in like a cantaloupe.
Murphy’s mouth felt maggoty again. She fled into a sitting room.
Even though there was no fireplace here, the room felt cozier than the parlor. Maybe it was the pink floral wallpaper, or the fact that there were three couches, all comfy looking.
“Why didn’t we sleep on these last night?” she wondered aloud.
They clearly hadn’t been thinking. In fact, everything they’d done since arriving at the house had been haphazard. Like the sisters had been knocked off a trajectory in Emmet and were careening into deep, dark space.
Murphy ran her tongue along her teeth. Maggots. In the chocolate. She’d been eating baby flies.
“Ugh.” She sank onto the nearest couch, resting her head in one hand.
For a long moment she remained that way.
Then something caught her eye, glimmering from beneath the opposite couch. Murphy got up, approaching the shiny object for closer inspection. It wasn’t beneath the couch, exactly, but attached to its velvet upholstery, under the centermost cushion. Murphy crouched, tugging at the pull. That’s what it was: a metal pull. Nothing happened when she yanked forward, so instead she yanked up. The couch groaned, and Murphy froze, startled. Then she understood. Releasing the pull, she threw off the couch cushions, revealing a hinged plank of wood. This couch was, in fact, a chest.
Murphy’s hands trembled with excitement as she took hold of the pull again and lifted. Inside she found …
Blankets. Quilts. Sheet sets. They were folded neatly, stacked upon each other. She’d found a linen chest.
Murphy felt a prick of disappointment. Then a memory hit her. A memory, and then an idea.
“Holy crap,” she breathed. “Merry Christmas.”
She raised up the first of the quilts, crocheted in deep magenta and gold. She held it to her face, breathing in the scent of Decembers past.
This house and its murders and maggots weren’t getting her down tonight.
Operation Memory Making was back on.
TWENTY-TWO Eileen
There was nothing in the boxes.
Eileen had reached the last of them and come up empty.
Nothing.
No life-altering document.
No answer to her question.
Nothing earth-shattering disguised as innocuous junk. This really was innocuous junk.
And what was she looking for, anyway? A letter from Mark Enright, laying it on the line, confessing everything in explicit detail?
I am guilty of parricide.
I did have an affair with Leslie Clark, who later married my brother in a severely twisted way.
I am the father of Eileen.
I am a psychopath, and she’s got all my traits—ask anyone who’s seen her art.
Nothing like that, though.
Bills, newspaper clippings, expired coupons, tax forms, and partially filled-out Nielsen rating surveys.
No answers.
“Goddamn you, Mark,” Eileen growled, pushing away the final box and sprawling on the ground, sapped of will.
What the hell was she doing? Following a vague hunch that there was a reason Uncle Patrick had left her this house, and a reason why William J. Knutsen had told her there were “documents”?
She’d grown so reckless, she hadn’t even cared about sifting through contents in front of Murphy, telling her sister precisely what she was looking for. She’d felt she was so close, and she had to make up for the time she’d lost when she’d fallen asleep last night. The storm had been a gift. This was her chance. She had to seize it.
Only there was nothing to be seized.
Her heart beat slower, each thump a sad defeat—ch-change, ch-change, until the word had faded altogether.
Nothing had changed.
Now Eileen was stuck in this house on Christmas Eve with no electricity, rained and sleeted into captivity. All along, the storm hadn’t been a blessing, but a curse.
God, she needed a drink.
She didn’t have one, though. She didn’t even have Dubble Bubble left.
She’d drained the last of her Jack Daniel’s the night before, during her search, and for a few hours she’d been numb. Removed.
A headache was forming, angrily pulsing under her temples in erratic red bursts. Eileen knew the cycle. She’d been in it for a long time.
Sometimes, Eileen tried to remember what it had been like to enjoy life. She had once, and then one day she hadn’t. There wasn’t a definable breaking point—not even the night of her junior art exhibit, or the day she’d found the infamous letters. The loss of liking life had happened gradually. A fade from Technicolor to gray scale, pixel by pixel, over months, until the color was gone completely.
She’d looked around and found no friends. She’d checked her calendar, and the arts program deadlines had passed—which was just as well, because she hadn’t drawn or painted anything worth a damn since the exhibit.
She still had the drinks, though, and those could be easily bribed out of Asher. For a while she’d lived her life in black and white, no feeling. A drink. A shift at Safeway. A drink. A shift. A drink. The drinking replaced art, friends, even TV.
She’d made money in the meantime. She’d used it to buy a van, and she’d equipped that van’s glove compartment with additional drinks. It had been a nice routine, until it wasn’t anymore. Until it got harder to wake up, pointless to draw on eyeliner, draining to work another shift of scanning and bagging and taking coupons. Until the drinking itself got dull.
Then one night, filled with more whiskey than she’d ever contained, Eileen had gotten real with herself: She was no artist, as she’d thought at fourteen. She was an illegitimate kid, with a murderer for a dad, two sisters who’d become strangers, and a mom as distant as the moon.
And it all seemed suddenly, suffocatingly heavy.
The heaviness pushed down hard—so hard that Eileen didn’t have the energy to feel sad. In that blank space she’d been free from feeling anything. And feeling nothing, she’d almost felt fine.
Why didn’t she feel fine anymore?
Patrick Enright, and the law offices of Knutsen and Crowley, and Murphy with her freckles, and Claire with her god-awful heartfelt confession—they’d upset the order of things, and the stabbing sensation beneath Eileen’s ribs wasn’t going away, no matter how hard she dug her teeth into sugary gum.
She really, really needed a drink.
There was none to be found in this house though, Eileen knew. She’d already surveyed every inch of it on what Murphy had called their reconnaissance mission, making careful note of hiding places for life-changing documents and whiskey bottles alike. No drop of liquor in the pantry, no worthy documents in any of these forty-seven boxes. She’d exhausted her options, on both counts.
From her shut-eyed sprawl, Eileen listened to the sounds of the winter storm. The squall had been going on for so long, it had become white noise—slatting rain, pressing wind, occasional bursts of sleet.
Eileen didn’t believe in omens, but she did believe in ebbs and flows. The tide of life drew back, surged forward. Time was as cyclical as her drinking routine. Once, three siblings had lived in this house. Three brothers, each with their own unique tale of woe. And here, three siblings lived again. Three Sullivan sisters, alone in their separate corners. Just as they’d been in Emmet.
A new sound reached Eileen’s pricked ears: creaking wood.
She opened her eyes to see Claire on the grand staircase. Her makeup was, for once, imperfect, exposing a reddened nose and dark-circled eyes. She’d been crying, of course. Moping around in one of those upstairs rooms.
A few days back, Eileen might have said something cutting: Feeling sorry for yourself, huh? Today, she didn’t have the energy. Or maybe she didn’t have the heart.
“Hey,
” Claire said, soft and flat.
She descended the remaining stairs, stopping feet from Eileen and, after seemingly thinking it through, sitting crisscross on the floor.
“Didn’t find what you were looking for in those boxes?” she asked Eileen.
“Nope.”
If only Claire knew the half of it. Eileen wondered, if she’d found the letters five, not two years ago—would she have shared them with Claire? Or had the letters been part of the problem, a reason why she’d pulled away?
“You, uh … cool?” Eileen asked.
What kind of question was that? No, Claire clearly wasn’t cool.
“I guess I’m in shock,” Claire said, idly tapping the soles of her glitter Keds. “I was sure, you know? I’d never been so sure of something in my life.”
“I mean,” said Eileen, “if we were placing bets on college admission, I’d put my money on you.”
Their eyes caught—blue on brown. Claire parted her lips, widened her eyes, looking almost … grateful? A way she hadn’t looked in a long time. Maybe not since the day Eileen had given her that old iPhone.
The knifing sensation sharpened at Eileen’s ribs.
“My counselor told me not to get my hopes up,” Claire said. “That it was a long shot. A ton of people get good test scores and GPAs, and I needed something that made me stand out. If I’m honest? I wrote about being gay in my admissions essays because of that. Like, you know, take pity on a gay girl growing up in a tiny town.”
Eileen’s eyes widened. “Jesus, Claire.”
“I feel gross about it now. Not about being honest, just—I opened myself up, you know? To strangers. I undressed for those admissions officers. Like I was, I don’t know, pimping myself out. And it wasn’t even worth it. Like, of course not. It’s Yale. As if they don’t have enough small-town gay kids.”
Claire produced a self-deprecating smile.
“Why the hell didn’t you apply to Oregon schools?” Eileen asked. “U of O is queer friendly as hell. You’re acting like it’s goddamn Westboro Baptist Church.”
The Sullivan Sisters Page 16