Heather(20)

“What should we do?” Sabrina asks suddenly. The old assumption of your girlhood in play again, that you would spend the day together, every minute, a fact you’d taken for granted until she met the Coyote. For a moment, you tell yourself that everything will be okay. You try to keep your smile in check.

“We could play with Hannah and Iris?” Hannah and Iris are the dolls your mother gave you for your seventh birthdays, the few years when money wasn’t tight and your parents could buy you Christmas gifts. You mean the suggestion as a peace offering—it has been years since the two of you played with them, but you think it could feel good. A return to your old selves, to the way things were. Entire afternoons lost to the worlds you created, the dramas unfolding nearly wordlessly between you, because you were so often thinking the same thing.

Sabrina scoffs. “Annabelle, we’re not kids anymore.”

“I was joking,” you say, trying your best to keep the hurt out of your voice.

At Sabrina’s suggestion, the two of you decide to pick mushrooms in the woods behind your house.

Almost as soon as you bend to pick your first mushroom, Sabrina finds hers. She scans the edge of the woods ahead of you and she crouches down low. An unspoken competition blooms, making the air throb. Every few minutes you’ll straighten from picking one and find Sabrina watching you. Measuring something in you.

You find one mushroom, Sabrina finds two. You point out that one of hers looks like a Destroying Angel, which can cause your guts to turn themselves inside out, make your liver shut down, so poisonous that by the time the symptoms set in it’s too late. You’re dead. You warn her that she should probably dump her whole basket. Just to be safe.

“It is definitely not a Destroying Angel,” she says, a hand on her hip.

“Eat it, then.” You cross your arms, sure you have her, but then she opens her mouth and shoves the entire mushroom inside. She hasn’t even cleaned it, so crumbs of soil collect at the edge of her lips. You are stricken, your mind already racing through the what-ifs. You picture yourself carrying your sister’s limp body through the trees, to the road, flagging down a passing car. Sabrina only laughs, open-mouthed, at your shocked expression, the pulp of the mushroom spotting her tongue.

You resume your hunt and aim for blitheness, even though you are watching carefully, for beads of sweat to burst forth at her temples, for her skin to go yellow, for her eyes to glaze over.

“Well. That was stupid. Now you have one less than you did before.”

“It’s okay. I know places you don’t know. Mom showed me.”

You stiffen. Your mother has been gone for over two years. You came home from school to find two delicate heather flowers and two wooden animal figurines—a cat and a horse—in the gap in the brick wall of the old factory building, where the three of you would leave notes and trinkets for the others. A two-line message in her angular print on one of the rough scraps of paper she would make herself: I love you. Forgive me.

You and Sabrina pocketed the flowers and note, carried the carved animals inside, set them on the kitchen table, and when your father came home from work and asked where she was you gestured to them. He understood right away, walked over to your mother’s favorite footstool, covered in blue gingham cloth and trimmed with bric-a-brac, and raised it over his head, slammed it against the wall until it splintered. Afterward he seemed both satisfied and shamed by this display of rage. You placed your flower between two sheets of wax paper and piled your textbooks on top to press it flat so that you might always keep it, this last tender, living thing that held your mother’s touch.

Neither of you ever said it out loud, but you knew that in your heads you and Sabrina tussled over the note. That you of the I love you felt so small. Trying to make it cover both of you was like two people sharing a too-small umbrella in a thunderstorm.

Not long after your mother left your father took the night shift job down at the prison, his presence in your life reduced to little more than the heap of his boots by the door, the occasional stack of cash left under the brass letter opener that had been his great-grandfather’s. Sometimes you see his car at the tavern up the road. Sometimes, you make out his slumped form in the front seat.

The mention of your mother stings, a sharp, astringent pain. You understand that Sabrina has been saving this statement, hoarding this knowledge, waiting for the right time to deploy it. The pain of it, and your exclusion, hits like a fist in your guts.

“She did not. When?”

“You were at school and I was home sick.”

You inventory your memory for days in which you and Sabrina had been apart, back then. The list is short. But, you think you know. May, before your mother left, Sabrina woke feverish and flushed. It unsettled you all day, that something was happening to Sabrina that was not happening to you, and you could hardly pay attention in class.

You are still watching for signs that there is a poison coursing through her bloodstream when she turns abruptly on her heels and starts to walk back to the house.

“Let’s go out to the factory,” you call desperately at her retreating back. You ache for the afternoons you passed there as a trio, your mother with her fistfuls of wild plants that she turned into tinctures and salves. She hadn’t grown up here but was more at home in the woods than your father, could break the land down into something that could be tamed.

Ahead, Sabrina swings her basket. A glittering thread at her wrist catches the light, and that’s when you realize Sabrina is wearing your mother’s old bracelet, cool spheres of amber that turn a bronzy gold in the sun. The surge of anger that bolts through you is sudden and total. Next thing you know you are running, and when you catch up you shove her as hard as you can. Her basket tumbles, mushrooms scattering in the grass.