No One Can Know(14)

“I don’t. I don’t care what he thinks. I hate him.”

“Don’t say that, Emmy,” he says. Daphne narrows her eyes. Emma doesn’t let anyone call her that. But Emma just huffs.

“It’s true. I hate them. Both of them. I wish they were dead.” Emma sounds like she’s ready to cry.

“Everybody hates their parents sometimes,” the man says. “You won’t be a kid forever. Once you’re eighteen, you can get out of the house. Go wherever the hell you want.”

“Mom would never let me. She wants to control my life forever,” Emma says bitterly. Her voice is ragged, and she bites her lip hard the way she always does when she’s trying not to cry. “She won’t let me go until one of us is dead.”

Fear wiggles its way through Daphne’s body. She doesn’t like the way Emma is talking. She doesn’t like that Emma is saying these things to a boy Daphne has never met or seen before, and she doesn’t like the way he reaches out, touching Emma’s shoulder gently.

The fear is formless and nameless. It’s like she can feel something rushing up behind her, but she can’t see it. Her chest seizes. Her breath wheezes in her throat. She can’t draw in enough air.

“Emma,” she tries to say, but it barely makes a noise. Panic scrabbles through her. She thrashes up the hill toward Emma, her breathing making a horrible whistle. Emma looks up, startled. Daphne says her name again, and Emma rushes toward her.

“Where’s your inhaler?” Emma says, sharp and authoritative. For an instant she sounds like their mother. Daphne shakes her head. “You forgot it?” Emma says, frustrated and anxious.

“What’s wrong?” the boy asks, worry drawing his brows together.

“She’s having an asthma attack. I have to get her home,” Emma says while Daphne struggles to breathe, the world closing in until all that is left is the sensation of not enough.

“I’ll drive you. Come on,” he says. Emma grabs Daphne’s arm, dragging her away. Now people are looking. People are seeing them following this boy, seeing Daphne keel into the back of his car while Emma rubs her back and murmurs words that Daphne doesn’t hear. Mom is going to hear about this. The thought makes the fear surge higher, and Daphne gasps and gasps.

He drives, looking at Daphne in the rearview mirror every minute or so. Emma keeps talking to her.

“I shouldn’t go in,” he says when he pulls up to the house, like he’s apologizing.

“I know. This is fine. Thanks, Gabriel,” Emma says. Daphne wants to thank him. She can tell that the worry in his eyes isn’t just for her. This is a risk, somehow, though she doesn’t entirely understand it.

Emma pulls Daphne along. Daphne’s feet drag. Every breath is a question mark. But they burst in through the front door and Emma leaves her leaned up against the doorway. She races inside shouting for their mother.

“What on earth is going on?” Irene Palmer says, stepping out from the dining room. Daphne tries frantically to draw a normal breath. Irene’s lips press together.

“Daphne needs her inhaler. Daph, is it upstairs?” Emma asks, afraid but focused. Daphne shrinks in on herself.

“She doesn’t need that thing. She needs to pull herself together,” their mother says, folding her arms so that her fingertips rest neatly on her elbows.

“She can’t breathe,” Emma says.

“It’s not asthma, it’s a panic attack. It’s in her head,” Mom says. She stands straight and still and tall, her hair in a perfect honey-colored bob. The light of the chandelier reflects off the shiny black of her shoes. Daphne slides slowly down the wall, trying and trying and trying to breathe.

“She needs her inhaler,” Emma says desperately. “It helps.”

“It’s a placebo, and I am done coddling her,” Mom says. Daphne squeezes her eyes shut. She needs air she needs air and there’s none, none, none. She needs to breathe. She needs to be normal—peculiar child—and if she can’t be normal, she needs to be unnoticed, and right now she is neither.

Heels click on hardwood. She senses her mother crouching before her, and opens her eyes.

“Control yourself,” her mother hisses. Her hand raises, and for an instant Daphne thinks she is going to slap her, but she only grabs Daphne’s chin, her fingernails digging in. “You’re too old for this.”

With that she drops Daphne’s face, stands, and walks away. Emma looks between them, her expression a wreck of uncertainty.

Daphne puts her head down and tries, again, to breathe.





7

EMMA




Now



Emma and Nathan lurched from one task to another in the house. They found a broom and some old rags and started to attack the dust and grime. Nathan made a go at cleaning off the spray paint. It quickly became apparent that it was a losing battle, but he kept scrubbing away, trying one cleaning product after another. As if by erasing the words he could erase what they meant.

Or maybe he was just avoiding her.

She wiped the dust off the lid of the grand piano in the great room. She lifted the fallboard and ran her fingers lightly over the keys.

“Do you play?” Nathan asked. She startled at his approach, turning.

“Not well. And I’m sure it’s horrifically out of tune,” she said. She’d sat at this bench for so many hours, mangling one song after another. Sometimes because her fingers never seemed to move correctly, tangling and tripping over the simplest scales. Sometimes for the vicious pleasure of seeing her mother’s face twist in anger. “Juliette was the prodigy.”