“Everything okay?” I asked as she ran her fingers through my hair. I caught the prickly chemical scent of hospital soap, overlaid with sweat and bad breath and other telltale hints of a fifteen-hour shift in the emergency room. Some people thought of their mothers when they smelled the perfume she wore when they were children, but for me, my mother would always be this: the cornstarch powder of latex gloves, the coppery tang of other people’s blood. “You left the front door open.”
“No, I didn’t. Did I? It was a long shift. I spent a long time with a guy who was convinced his family was controlling him with anal probes.”
“Does that count as a medical emergency?”
“I think I’d want some pretty rapid intervention if that was happening to me.”
“Fair point.” I sucked my bottom lip and exhaled through my nose. It was better to ask now, in person, than over text later. “Is it okay if I go out tonight? Vivi’s in town for a gig and Grey is flying in from Paris. I want to spend time with them.”
My mother said nothing, but her fingers slipped in my hair and tugged hard enough to make me gasp. She didn’t apologize.
“They’re my sisters,” I said quietly. Sometimes, asking to see them—but especially asking to see Grey—felt like asking for permission to take up shooting heroin as an extracurricular activity. “They aren’t going to let anything bad happen to me.”
Cate gave a short, complicated laugh and started braiding again.
The picture she’d been looking at was facedown on the blanket, like she hoped I wouldn’t notice it. I turned it over and studied it. It was of my mother and my father, Gabe, and the three of us girls when we were younger. Vivi wore a green tweed duffle coat. Grey was dressed in a Bordeaux faux-fur jacket. I was in a little red tartan coat with gold buttons. Around each of our necks hung matching gold heart pendants with our names pressed into the metal: IRIS, VIVI, GREY. Christmas presents from the grandparents we had been in Scotland to visit when the photo was taken.
The police had never found these items of clothing or jewelry, despite extensive searches for them.
“It’s from that day,” I said quietly. I hadn’t seen any photographs from that day before. I hadn’t even known there were any. “We all look so different.”
“You can . . .” Cate’s voice split, fell back down her throat. She let out a thin breath. “You can go to Vivi’s gig.”
“Thank you, thank you!”
“But I want you home before midnight.”
“Deal.”
“I should make us something to eat before you go to school, and you should definitely have a shower.” She finished my braids and kissed me on the crown of my head before she left.
When she was gone, I looked at the photograph again, at her face, at my father’s face, only a handful of hours before the worst thing that would ever happen to them happened. It had carved something out of my mother, shaved the apples from her cheeks and left her thinner and grayer than before. For much of my life, she had been a watercolor of a woman, sapped of vibrancy.
It had carved even more out of Gabe.
Yet it was the three of us girls who’d changed the most. I hardly recognized the dark-haired, blue-eyed children who stared back at me.
I’ve been told we were more secretive after it happened. That we didn’t speak to anyone but each other for months. That we refused to sleep in separate rooms, or even separate beds. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, our parents would wake to check on us and find us huddled together in our pajamas, our heads pressed together like witches bent over a cauldron, whispering.
Our eyes turned black. Our hair turned white. Our skin began to smell like milk and the earth after rain. We were always hungry, but never seemed to gain weight. We ate and ate and ate. We even chewed in our sleep, grinding down our baby teeth and sometimes biting our tongues and cheeks, so we woke with bloodstained lips.
Doctors diagnosed us with everything from PTSD to ADHD. We collected an alphabet of acronyms, but no treatment or therapy ever seemed to be able to reset us to how we’d been before it happened. We weren’t sick, it was decided: We were just strange.
People always found it hard to believe now that Grey and Vivi and I had come from our parents.
Everything about Gabe Hollow had been gentle, except for his hands, which were rough from his work as a carpenter and his weekend hobby of throwing mugs on a potter’s wheel. He’d worn cozy clothing from charity stores. His fingers were long and felt like sandpaper when he held your hand. He never watched sports or raised his voice. He caught spiders in plastic containers and carried them out to the garden. He talked to his kitchen herbs when he watered them.
Our mother was an equally soft woman. She drank everything—tea, juice, wine—only from the mugs my father had made for her. She owned three pairs of shoes and wore muddy Wellingtons as often as she could. After it rained, she picked up snails from the sidewalk and moved them to safety. She loved honey—honey on toast, honey on cheese, honey stirred into her hot drinks. She sewed her own summer dresses from patterns handed down to her by her grandmother.
Together, they’d worn waxed Barbour jackets and preferred walking in the English countryside to traveling overseas. They’d owned wooden hiking poles and hand reels for fishing in streams. They’d both loved to wrap themselves in wool blankets and read on rainy days. They both had light blue eyes, dark hair, and sweet, heart-shaped faces.
They were gentle people. Warm people.
Somehow, combined, they’d produced . . . us. We were each five eleven, a full ten inches taller than our tiny mother. We were each angular, elongated, sharp. We were each inconveniently beautiful, with high cheekbones and eyes like does. People told us as children, told our parents, how exquisite we were. The way they said it, it sounded like a warning—which, I supposed, it was.
We all knew the impact of our beauty and we all dealt with it in different ways.
Grey knew her power and brandished it forcefully, in a way I had seen few girls do. In a way I was afraid to mirror myself, because I had witnessed the repercussions of being beautiful, of being pretty, of being cute, of being sexy, and of attracting the wrong kind of attention, not only from boys and men but other girls, other women. Grey was an enchantress who looked like sex and smelled like a field of wildflowers, the human embodiment of late-summer evenings in the South of France. She accentuated her natural beauty wherever possible. She wore high heels and delicate lace bras and soft smoky eye makeup. She always knew the right amount of skin to show to achieve that cool-sexy look.
More than anything else, this is how I knew my eldest sister was different from me: She walked home alone at night, always beautiful, sometimes drunk, frequently in short skirts or low-cut tops. She walked through dark parks and down empty streets and along graffiti-smeared canals where itinerants clustered to drink and do drugs and sleep in piles. She did this without fear. She went to the places and wore the things that—if anything happened to her—would later prompt people to say she was asking for it.