“So she wanted to reminisce.” A funny sour feeling grew inside my chest: jealousy. I’d never really had to share my mother with anyone else. “Did she say anything about birds?” I asked.
Emily didn’t seem to hear, her gaze blank.
“What about Fiona?”
This got a flicker of a reaction. “Oh. She said Fiona was strange.”
Details floated to the surface of my brain. Fiona before she’d turned into a memorial photo. Her greasy penny-colored hair curling on the pillow next to me, how small she was. I’d been four when Fiona was born in April of 1975. My youngest sort-of sister. “Strange how?”
Emily ran a finger up and down her neck, reflective, her eyes drifting shut. “She could move things. Here and there. Wherever she wanted. Fingers everywhere.” She lifted a hand and made lazy, delicate sweeps in the air.
Something crawled down my spine, even as I felt my curiosity click into a clean buzz at the back of my head.
Emily’s eyelashes fluttered; her breathing was thick and even. Her eyeballs rolled beneath the paper-thin lids. “Emily.” I was louder now. “Emily?”
Her lips parted, a shiny thread of drool webbed between her teeth. She whispered something too low to catch, and I leaned in closer, and then she screamed. Her eyes opened too wide, those pinprick pupils pointed right up at the ceiling, and I looked up too, my heartbeat wild from the hard crack of adrenaline, my ears ringing. Nothing: just the yawn of the rafters. Nothing. I looked back at Emily. She was reaching for me, her hands at my throat, my shoulders, scrabbling. Her grip was too tight. Her fingernails, long, unclipped, pinched my skin.
“You’re bleeding. Josephine, you’re bleeding. They hurt you.”
“No,” I said. “No, no, no, I’m fine, it’s a dream—” Wanda must’ve heard the scream: she must be coming. “Please. It’s okay.”
I backed away. Emily was half crawling out of bed now, knocking over the glasses, which rolled wildly, rattling. One shattered and Emily’s foot came down on the scoop of broken glass, the edge sliding right into her heel. She didn’t even stop—her footprints were stamped in red. “They hurt you,” she said. “They hurt you. You’re going to die—”
I looked down at myself, ran my hands over my body. My palms came away clean.
Emily wrapped her hands around my throat now, squeezing, squeezing. I reached up to pull her hands away and couldn’t find any purchase, couldn’t pry her fingers off. My breath was stuck somewhere in my breastbone and I thought, very distinctly and with a surprising calm: What if I die right now? Right behind that: I’ll never get to see my mother again.
I looked into Emily’s eyes. Greenish, stippled with a murky gold, darkening near the iris. Those dark pits of her pupils. How often did I look into someone else’s eyes this closely or this intently? As I made eye contact with Emily, her pupils dilated, slightly but abruptly, a welling blackness. Dizziness swept over me, and I wondered if I was losing consciousness. Her pupils were the only thing I could see.
“Let go of me,” I managed, a raw-edged whisper. “Let go now.”
Emily’s eyelid twitched slightly. She kept looking at me, unblinking, and then—then—a fucking miracle. She let go, and it felt like something many-fingered unraveling from around my throat, letting me breathe again. She swayed there, her arms at her side, like she didn’t know what to do with herself.
I took a painful breath, coughing. The air rushed back, wild and sweet.
“Oh, Josephine, you’re lost,” Emily said. The attic shrank until it enclosed the two of us, holding us there. “She’s lost too. Nobody can find her and you’re scared, you’re nothing without her.” I couldn’t speak. “But it’s all right,” Emily went on, and smiled. “It really is. He’ll help you find your mother. He’ll take you to her. He will.”
“Who?” I asked, a hoarse whisper.
“Him,” she said. “The one who looks out for you.”
6
“She’s sleeping now,” Wanda said, returning from the attic, giving me a limp smile.
I was waiting downstairs. Emily had left a long pink scrape circling my throat like a necklace. The sweat had dried on my skin and I was chilly, pacing to keep warm.
“Emily scared you good, huh? You should count yourself lucky she talked at all.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Sick didn’t explain what I’d seen in that attic. Sick was a simple term standing in for something bigger, the way I felt whenever someone described me as fatherless.