“What do you want?” she said.
“What’s it like?” Lily asked. She sounded cheerful, unconcerned. “I admit I’m curious about prison. It’s probably not so bad. Is it full of dykes?”
“Turn yourself in and find out,” Beth said.
Lily laughed. “Are you scared in there? You always were such a coward, Beth.”
Once, before so many people had died, those words coming from Lily would have been hurtful. But Beth wasn’t six years old anymore. She didn’t feel stung. She only felt icy calm, and the certainty that Lily was underestimating her.
Lily’s weakness—maybe her only one—was that she thought she was smarter than everyone. Especially Beth.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” Beth said. As if they were having a normal conversation. Because in Lily’s world, everything was just fine.
“Do tell,” Lily said.
“I’ve been remembering the night our mother died.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Which one of us killed her, do you think?” Beth asked her half sister. “You, or me?”
More silence.
They had never talked about this. There had never been time. After that day when Lily came home, she had stayed at the Greer mansion on and off for two years. She’d show up when she needed money, stay until she and Mariana had a fight, and then she’d take off again. Over and over. When Lily was gone, Mariana would be sick with worry. When Lily came home, Mariana always welcomed her back.
Beth watched all of it, helpless. Mariana never wanted to hear the truth about Lily: that she was a user, a manipulator. That she didn’t love Mariana the way Beth did. That in the stretches when she was away, out of sight, Beth was certain that people were dying. She could never prove it, could never find Lily when she truly wanted to be lost. But Beth knew her half sister, and she knew that when Lily was in one of her cold, angry moods, someone somewhere was going to die.
“She’s just lonely,” Mariana would say in Lily’s defense, over and over. “All those foster homes. She’s starved for a mother’s love.”
I’m starved for a mother’s love, Beth wanted to shout, her inner six-year-old still in pain. But it would have made no difference; Mariana wouldn’t hear it. She had only now edged into the territory in which she could admit, even obliquely, that she was Lily’s mother. She was too fragile for anything more.
Beth stayed silent to keep her mother safe. But when Lily was home, she always hurt her mother, cutting her with words, punching her with accusations: Look at you. What’s wrong with you? You don’t care about me. You never cared. That’s why you sent me away every year.
One night, Lily and Mariana screamed at each other, Mariana with tears streaming down her face. You failed me, Lily shouted while Beth stood in the living room doorway, unable to stop either of them. You never loved me. I hate you. Everything that’s happened to me is your fault.
And Mariana: I didn’t know what else to do. I loved you so much, Lily. I loved you more than anything. I didn’t know what else to do.
It ended, as it always did, with Lily leaving, slamming the door behind her. Mariana, already half-drunk, drank more. But Mariana was on those pills: What were they? Uppers? Downers? Where had she gotten them? She was always so secretive, especially with Beth.
Maybe Beth could have stopped her mother from drinking so much and taking pills. Maybe she should have. But she looked at Mariana’s bleary eyes and her tearstained face, and the words rang in her head: I loved you more than anything. And Beth went to bed.
When she heard her mother leave her bedroom in the middle of the night, mumbling to herself as she walked down the corridor to the stairs, Beth got up and followed her. She watched as Mariana, clutched in some paranoid delusion that only she could see, went out the front door and got into her car. Beth listened to the car drive away, and she did nothing.