“Isabelle, honey, let me explain.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I like to think of our memories like a mirror: reflecting images back to us, something familiar, but at the same time, backward. Distorted. Not quite as they are. But it’s impossible to look our past straight in the eye, to see things with perfect clarity, so we have to rely on the memories.
We have to hope they aren’t somehow warped or broken, bending reality to fit the way we wish things were.
“I was sick,” my mother says to me now, stepping forward in the dark. Her arms are outstretched, and I crawl back, afraid to let her get too close, my palm pushing into the shattered glass on the floor. “Isabelle, honey. I was very, very sick.”
The memories of my mother have always been dreamlike and hazy: her in those gossamer white robes, with curls like a lion’s mane and that trancelike gaze. It’s like I wanted to see her in the most flattering light, her sharp edges buffed out and airbrushed to perfection: an angel or a goddess or something not entirely human. Not entirely real.
“What do you mean, sick?”
I’m trying to ignore the stinging cut in my hand; the trickle of blood I feel dripping down my wrist.
“It started when we lost Ellie.”
“Ellie?” I ask, unable to mask my confusion. “Margaret’s doll?”
I think of all the times she was there with us, porcelain eyes watching over everything. Virtually every memory from those final months has her in it: Margaret singing to her in the kitchen or nestling her between us in bed that last night, my mother’s hands on our cheeks.
“My girls,” she had said. “My two beautiful girls.”
And then Margaret: “You forgot Ellie.”
Suddenly, like the cock of a shotgun demanding attention, I feel the pieces starting to slip into place.
I think of the strangeness of my mother’s laugh every time Margaret mentioned that name; her sad little smiles and the way she would clear her throat and walk away before she retreated to her bedroom and shut the door behind her, leaving us alone for hours on end. The distant look in her eyes when she gazed out the window, like she was staring at something the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Oh my God,” I say, finally remembering. Really remembering. Like that splinter, buried in deep, the pain comes shooting back again, almost bringing me to my knees.
I think of the gentle slope of her stomach beneath that flimsy white robe, still slightly swollen, like a balloon deflating slowly. Losing its shape.
“Yes, well. Of course we can’t forget about Ellie.”
But we did. We forgot about her—or at least, I forgot about her. Eloise, Ellie, my second sister. The one who died before she could even take her first breath.
I remember it all now, not fragmented like a dream or a nightmare, but in sudden, startling clarity: my mother’s screams as they echoed down the hall, and Margaret coming into my bedroom, her little eyes peeking through my cracked door the way she always did when she was afraid. Scampering into my bed and the two of us huddled beneath the covers together, flashlights shining, telling each other stories to try to drown out the noise—and then the deafening silence that followed, almost like the house had stopped breathing, too.
I remember working up the courage to creep out of my room, finally, my eyes landing on my father as he paced outside their bedroom, brown bottle in hand. I could see my mother in bed, covered in blood. Sheets staining red as she held something limp and lifeless in her arms and the sudden sound of her fragile voice traveling down the hall.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”
I see her in the kitchen, weeks later, fingers twisting through Margaret’s hair as she bounced that doll against her hip.
“Have you named her yet?”
And then Margaret’s answer, followed by the sudden stillness of my mother’s hand, like her veins had frozen to ice; her face, sad and pale, like she had seen a ghost.
“Ellie,” she had said, that proud smile tugging at her lips. “Like Eloise.”
“Eloise,” I say now, the name suddenly so familiar. I had even seen her nursery once. The door was perpetually closed the way Margaret’s was, too, eventually, like it was easier to just walk right past it and pretend she never even existed. But I had seen it—we had seen it—Margaret and I, during one of those long, summer days when we wandered around the house unsupervised. We had peeked inside, looked at her crib. Trailed our fingers along that little white rocking chair sitting motionless in the corner and read her name—Eloise—embroidered onto everything.