“I know,” I say, mirroring her movements. I could tell her the truth: that I am not her sister, and she is not mine. But the wildness in her gaze makes me think I shouldn’t, not like this. Instead, I reach forward quickly and grab for her arm, trying to snatch the knife away from her.
But she shrieks, jerking away from my touch, and when she tries to spin around, twisting out from beneath my grip, the knife in her hand swings forward and the blade slides delicately across my forearm. Warm blood beads instantly to the surface.
I release her arm and press my other hand to the wound—the cut is deep, a swift peeling open of flesh, like butter, easily separated—and the bright red soaks between my fingers, dripping onto the dirt at my feet.
Bee staggers backward, her mouth agape. She must know what she’s done because she touches the end of the blade then presses her fingers together, feeling the sticky blood.
The shock tears across her face. Eyes wide.
“It’s okay,” I mutter to her. “You didn’t mean to.”
She shakes her head, repetitive and quick, staring through the darkness of her unseeing eyes—her pupils resuming their blankness, their voided focus. This single violent act has unmoored her.
“Bee,” I say, reaching out for her with my good arm, and this time she doesn’t flinch away; her body has gone slack. But she keeps the knife held tightly at her side, refusing to give it up. “I have to tell you something,” I say. “I have to tell you the truth.”
THEO
We had thought a man was living in the decaying sunroom, a stranger sneaking in and out of the house at night, unseen.
But that stranger was me.
And I wasn’t there in secret.
Broken bursts of memory surface inside me: driving into these mountains, sleeping in the drafty sunroom while snow blew down from the sky. But when I discovered that Calla was Maggie St. James, I knew we had to leave. A storm thrashed against the walls of the farmhouse, and Levi was there, in the sunroom, telling me I couldn’t go. I remember the air leaving my lungs as we fought, the single-pane window shattering, and the glass slicing open the flesh above my left ear. I can still see the shock in Levi’s eyes—he hadn’t intended for it to go that far.
I touch it now, feeling the tender spot just above my ear that has nagged at me, ached late at night, but I couldn’t seem to recall the injury that caused it.
That same night, Calla stitched my skin back together at the kitchen table. Something had changed between us in the month I had spent in the sunroom, in the farmhouse—I was falling in love with her. I kissed her for the first time that night, and the following morning when I woke in her bed—the sun streaking through the curtains—I told her we had to leave once the snow thawed. And she agreed.
I must have known something was going to happen—maybe I felt my memories slipping away—so I hid the notebook pages inside the house, the last reminder of who I used to be before a kind of madness took hold. But the last page—the third one—I kept in my pocket for several days, unsure where to place it so it wouldn’t be found, except by me.
It’s one of the last memories I have of before.
Now the man I used to be begins coming back into focus like a tide rising and falling against the shore of my mind. I stand in the kitchen, holding the photo of Maggie, trying to see my wife in the distorted image, in the soft blue eye staring up at me, when the screen door bangs open.
Calla pushes inside, her face pale, one hand pressed to her forearm. “She didn’t mean to,” she says, blood dripping steadily to the floor. Behind her, moving like a frightened animal, is Bee, a knife held at her side.
I make Calla sit at the dining table, and I peel back her hand, revealing a deep cut, while Bee crosses to the stairs and her footsteps can be heard climbing up to the second floor, and then the sound of the bathroom door shutting.
“It was an accident,” Calla says, pinching her eyes closed.
The knife has gone through several layers of flesh, and I grab one of the kitchen towels, pressing it to the wound. “I’ll go get Faye,” I say. “You’ll need stitches.”
But Calla shakes her head. “No.”
And I understand: She wants this to stay between us. If Faye knows, then so will others within the community, and they will want to know what happened, why Bee cut her own sister. There will be questions and whispers, and right now, we can’t have either.
So I blot away the blood, then using strips of fabric, I begin to wrap Calla’s wound. “Why does she have a knife?” I ask, keeping my voice low so Bee won’t hear.