Chapter 5 - The Unspoken Sister
The house was suffocating after they left. Tim had fled into the garage again, terrified of the wreckage he had facilitated. I sat in the kitchen, drinking cold tap water, listening to the silence ringing in my ears.
Then the side door clicked.
I expected Tim, but it was Ray. He had returned alone. He stood on the mat, his shoulders hunched inside his windbreaker, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets.
"She's sitting in the car with the hazard lights on," Ray said quietly. "She thinks I came back in to use the bathroom."
"Ray, I can't do this tonight," I whispered.
"I know," he said. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs—the one Tim usually sat in—and sat down heavily. "You need to know the truth about Karen, Elise. If you don't know, Linda will keep using her like a bludgeon until she breaks you."
I set my glass down. "Tim said she died in a car accident in 1987."
"She did," Ray said. "Out on Route 66, near Rolla. Driving eighty miles an hour in the middle of a thunderstorm."
He paused, staring at the salt shaker between us.
"Karen wasn't a saint," Ray said softly. "She wasn't an angel in a yellow hat. She was twenty-two years old, and she was running away from Linda."
The kitchen refrigerator hummed its endless note.
"Linda was nine years older," Ray continued. "Their mother died when Linda was sixteen. Linda took over that house like a warden. She picked Karen's clothes, Karen's friends, Karen's boyfriends. When Karen got a scholarship to an art school in Chicago, Linda hid the acceptance letter in her cedar chest until the registration deadline passed. She told Karen they'd rejected her."
A cold sensation prickled across my scalp. "How do you know that?"
"I found the letter three years after we were married, buried under some linen," Ray said, his voice flat, deadened by decades of carrying what he could not fix. "When Karen finally found out—when she realized what Linda had done—they had a screaming match that broke every dish in the kitchen. Karen packed three boxes in her Honda and swore on her life that Linda would never lay eyes on her again. She drove off into that storm blind with rage. An hour later, she crossed the center line into an eighteen-wheeler."
Ray looked up at me. His eyes were small, watery, and ruined by years of looking away from the truth.
"Linda didn't sew those blankets out of love, Elise," he whispered. "She sewed them out of guilt. She thinks if she can get a baby named Karen into this house, under her roof, she can raise her the right way this time. She thinks she can get her sister back and fix the ending."
I pressed both hands to my stomach. My daughters moved, stretching against the walls of their temporary home, innocent of the forty-year-old ghost waiting to claim them as compensation for a dead girl's stolen life.
"And Tim?" I asked, though my throat felt like it was full of ash.
"Tim doesn't know," Ray said. "Tim was four years old when Karen died. Linda told him his aunt went to sleep and went to heaven because she was too good for this earth. She fed him that lie with his morning cereal. He’s been eating it his whole life."
Ray stood up, his joints protesting with dull pops. He patted the edge of the laminate table twice, an old man's awkward farewell.
"Don't give her an inch, Elise," he said from the door. "If you give her an inch of those girls, she'll spend the rest of her life trying to finish what she started with Karen. Protect your babies. Even from my boy."
May you like
He slipped out into the darkness. A moment later, I heard the ignition of his sedan turn over, followed by the dull crunch of gravel as they drove away.
***
