And if it is … how do you stop it?
CHAPTER FIFTY
I left as soon as the sun came up, my car winding down the driveway with those stone statues in my rearview: the baby, the angel. The woman with the sickness. I wasn’t sure if I could face them in the daylight: My mother, for what she told me. My father, for what he did—or rather, what he didn’t do.
“I always thought it was me,” I had said, a numbness settling over me as the comprehension set in. I watched as my mother cocked her head, like she didn’t understand. “I always thought I was the one who led her out there. That maybe I was asleep, and she followed me. That she tried to wake me, and I … I did something—”
And then I realized: I never really said it. Not outright, anyway. I told them I had memories from that night that didn’t add up: the water on the carpet, the clean nightgown, the mud on my neck. I told them I wanted to know what happened—what really happened—and they had glanced at each other from across the living room, like they were afraid that their mask was slipping. That their secret was about to be revealed.
Their secret. Not mine.
“Honey, no,” my mother had said, shaking her head. Tears streaming. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I had no idea you thought that.”
“How could I not have thought that?” I yelled. “Margaret was always following me around. I was always waking up in strange places. I’ve spent my entire life thinking that.”
I glance to the side now, at the thick folder resting on my passenger seat. My mother had handed it to me after we descended the steps together in a wordless daze, promising its contents would help explain the rest. I can’t bring myself to open it, not yet, so instead, I keep driving, my body on autopilot. I don’t even know who’s responsible; I don’t even know who I should blame. It was my mother’s hands that shook Margaret from sleep, taking her in one arm and me in the other, eyes open but empty, as we wandered into the dark. It was her hands that beckoned her into the water, forefingers curling, promising her that it would be okay. That relief was coming. That we would be comfortable soon. Her hands that held her down, fought the thrashing, reached out to me next, once the movement had stopped.
That touched my neck, smearing those three fingers of mud, like she wanted to feel my heartbeat for the very last time, a gentle pounding that would soon slow to a stop.
It was her hands, but it wasn’t her. Not really. I know it wasn’t.
I wonder what it was like for him, my father, snaking his arm across the bed to find nothing but empty space where her body should have been. Bolting upright, blinking in the dark, instinctively knowing that something was wrong. I imagine him throwing on his robe and running into the kitchen, expecting to find her there: tampering with the stove, maybe, or stalking the halls the way she sometimes did when she couldn’t sleep. Checking outside and hoping to see her standing by the marsh again, barefoot, before coming back in and leaving dirty prints on the carpet. Making the floorboards pop as she roamed around, watching us sleep.
But when he got out there, he realized what had happened.
What he had let happen.
He saw the three of us beneath the glow of the spring tide moon: two of us, standing, and the third, the smallest, facedown in the water, still as a piece of driftwood floating with the current.
I turn into Beaufort National Cemetery now, just as the sunrise starts to bleed across the horizon, and pull into the empty lot. The air is dewy, a permanent floral aroma from all the arrangements laid on each grave. I wind my way through the headstones—even though I haven’t been here since the day we buried Margaret, I could never forget where she is—and finally, when I reach her, I kneel down on the turf, feeling the damp seep through the knees of my jeans.
I stare at her headstone, an immaculate white marble, her name, birthday, and death day etched into the surface.
Margaret Evelyn Rhett
May 4, 1993—July 17, 1999
Next to her, there’s another one, nearly identical.
Eloise Annabelle Rhett
April 27, 1999—April 27, 1999
Two pitifully short amounts of time.
I exhale, lean back on my feet, and squeeze back a tear. Everything makes sense now: Margaret questioning me about the footprints that day on the water, her head tilted to the side.
“Is it because of what happened?”
I had started sleepwalking right after we lost Ellie, the trauma of what was going on in our house triggering something inside me that I could never understand.
Margaret understood, though. Somehow, she knew.