That was the year David disappeared.
David was a groundskeeper. In the summer, there was a small crew of men who came to maintain the lawns and the gardens, but in the winter there was only David. He came at the end of every month and spent a few hours cutting out dead annuals, removing any snow and ice on the ground, and raking old leaves. He was supposed to come the day after Christmas, but he never showed. As days passed, it became clear that he was gone, and no one knew what had happened to him. Maybe he had suddenly left town. He was just a groundskeeper, though, so it was considered a minor mystery, shrugged off by Julian and Mariana and never spoken of again.
Lily went home on the twenty-eighth, and for once Beth was glad to see her go, glad to be free of the flat look in Lily’s eyes.
They didn’t find David until late April, his broken body on the rocks below the cliff. They couldn’t pinpoint how long he’d been there, but it had been months. It was declared a suicide, but Beth had an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Lily . . . But she had never seen Lily anywhere near David, never seen her look at him or talk to him. So, no, it wasn’t possible. What would be the reason? There wasn’t one.
Beth put her suspicions away and didn’t think about them anymore.
The next year, Lily’s bruises were gone and she was thinner, her cheekbones sharper, her hipbones as hard as diamonds. She was seventeen, a year from aging out of the foster system. “My new family barely pays any attention to me,” she said. “They let me do whatever I want.”
“What happened to your old family?” Beth asked.
“Bad things,” Lily said, and for the first time in months, Beth thought of David again.
“What bad things?” she asked as fear curled into the pit of her stomach.
Lily only shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. People do bad things to themselves. It’s their own fault. Let’s go do a cartwheel race on the lawn.”
They hadn’t done cartwheel races for a few years, and Beth didn’t really want to go near the edge of the drop right now, when she was thinking of David down there, his bones broken. But she went, and she cartwheeled close to the edge, the cold air and the excitement making her breath come short. After a while, she forgot about David again.
That night, the half sisters sat in Beth’s new room—she’d graduated a few years ago from her little-girl room to a teenager’s room down the hall, though the little-girl room was still intact—and listened to records on Beth’s record player. Lily sat cross-legged on Beth’s newer, bigger bed, her legs slim and flawless in her tight jeans, her breasts obvious beneath the fabric of her striped turtleneck, making the black and blue stripes bend into wonky shapes. “I’ve got something for you,” she said.
Beth looked up from the Neil Diamond record she was putting on the player—Lily said she had atrocious taste in music, but Beth disagreed—and saw that Lily was holding her hand out, and there was a small white pill in her palm.
“Take it,” she said.
Beth looked at it warily. She and Lily regularly stole from Julian and Mariana’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, and had for years, but Beth had no experience with pills. “What does it do?”
“It makes you high, silly,” Lily said. “Like really high. It’s better than anything else I’ve tried.”
Beth didn’t want to get high. She wanted to play records and get drunk when her parents weren’t guarding the liquor cabinet. Being high with Lily sounded like something that wasn’t terribly fun. “I don’t know.”
Lily’s gaze went darker, flatter. “Take it.”
Saying no to Lily was always a tricky proposition. You had to do it the right way. “It would probably destroy me,” Beth said. “Obliterate me completely. You know what a lightweight I am.”