“One more thing,” Gran said. “I don’t want Iris leaving the house. Not yet. She can go out in the yard, explore the woods with you kids, but nowhere else. Not into town yet. And do not take her over to the Inn.”
“How come?”
“I think it would be too much for her right now. Let’s focus on giving her a safe environment here at home.”
“Okay.”
“And, Vi, it’s a secret that she’s here. No one else can know, for now. Not even Mr. MacDermot.”
Vi frowned. Why keep Iris a secret? But Gran’s face didn’t look like it’d hold answers. Not tonight. So Vi only nodded, said, “Okay.”
A sister.
A secret sister.
When Gran left, Vi turned, looked at her nightstand. At the luminous face of the clock, which slipped from 10:13 to 10:14. The ceramic owl lamp with the glowing eyes, turned off now but still watching her. Beside it was a photo of her parents. Eric had the same one in his room, next to his bed. Gran had another photo in her own bedroom of herself and her husband, both young, standing together, Gran’s belly bulging. Vi loved looking at that picture, knowing her father was in there, waiting to come out, grow up, one day meet a girl named Carolyn, get married, and have Vi and Eric.
Vi gazed at the photo now, lit up orange-red by the digital clock. She looked at her mother, dark-haired and smiling; at her father, handsome as a movie star, his long surgeon’s fingers resting on her mother’s shoulders. She searched their faces, as she did each night, for some trace of recognition, of memory.
She knew the stories by heart, the ones Gran told: how her mother named her Violet because when they first brought her home from the hospital her eyes were such a deep, rich blue, they looked almost purple.
She thought of the accident that had killed them. The accident that she and Eric had somehow survived.
Her father had been driving that night. They were coming down from the mountains, where they spent each summer in a cabin on a lake with water so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, even in the deepest part. You could count the fish beneath you as you swam. Vi had tried and tried to remember that lake, those fish. She’d prayed over and over to the God of Memory, and sometimes she was sure she did remember floating in the water in a little blue life jacket while her mother drifted beside her and shimmering fish swam below.
When she tried to remember the accident, it got all mixed up in her mind. Images of the lake and the fish twisted together with the screeching of tires. The crashing of metal and glass blended with the lapping of waves and her mother’s soft laughter, the feel of the life jacket （or was it the seatbelt?） tight around her, keeping her safe.
When she asked Eric what he remembered about the accident, he always turned from her, tucked himself away like a turtle going into its shell, and said, “Nothing.” He didn’t like to talk about their lives before.
She reached down under the covers now, pulled up her pajama top, ran a finger over her own scars.
And she thought of Iris, of that black line of stitches on her chest.
“Sister,” she said, the word full of recognition and longing. “My sister.”
Lizzy
August 19, 2019
AFTER A TEN-HOUR drive from Louisiana, I unlocked my front door and stepped through into the entryway. It smelled like home: coffee and wood and books.
I’d bought the house—a little run-down cabin just outside of Asheville, North Carolina—ten years ago and had it totally renovated. I was fond of the sparse look of untreated wood, and the walls were paneled with locally milled tongue and groove. The floors were made of reclaimed floorboards from an old tobacco barn. It was a small house—just over a thousand square feet—but it had all I needed and suited me perfectly. There were a lot of windows that overlooked downtown Asheville to the east and the Tennessee mountains to the west. In fifteen minutes I could be downtown, but up here, tucked away on the ridge and surrounded by trees, I felt worlds away.