“It’s not asthma, it’s a panic attack. It’s in her head,” Mom says. She stands straight and still and tall, her hair in a perfect honey-colored bob. The light of the chandelier reflects off the shiny black of her shoes. Daphne slides slowly down the wall, trying and trying and trying to breathe.
“She needs her inhaler,” Emma says desperately. “It helps.”
“It’s a placebo, and I am done coddling her,” Mom says. Daphne squeezes her eyes shut. She needs air she needs air and there’s none, none, none. She needs to breathe. She needs to be normal—peculiar child—and if she can’t be normal, she needs to be unnoticed, and right now she is neither.
Heels click on hardwood. She senses her mother crouching before her, and opens her eyes.
“Control yourself,” her mother hisses. Her hand raises, and for an instant Daphne thinks she is going to slap her, but she only grabs Daphne’s chin, her fingernails digging in. “You’re too old for this.”
With that she drops Daphne’s face, stands, and walks away. Emma looks between them, her expression a wreck of uncertainty.
Daphne puts her head down and tries, again, to breathe.
7
EMMA
Now
Emma and Nathan lurched from one task to another in the house. They found a broom and some old rags and started to attack the dust and grime. Nathan made a go at cleaning off the spray paint. It quickly became apparent that it was a losing battle, but he kept scrubbing away, trying one cleaning product after another. As if by erasing the words he could erase what they meant.
Or maybe he was just avoiding her.
She wiped the dust off the lid of the grand piano in the great room. She lifted the fallboard and ran her fingers lightly over the keys.
“Do you play?” Nathan asked. She startled at his approach, turning.
“Not well. And I’m sure it’s horrifically out of tune,” she said. She’d sat at this bench for so many hours, mangling one song after another. Sometimes because her fingers never seemed to move correctly, tangling and tripping over the simplest scales. Sometimes for the vicious pleasure of seeing her mother’s face twist in anger. “Juliette was the prodigy.”
She reached to shut the fallboard. It slipped free of her fingers and fell with a resounding crack, and she jumped back, hand against her throat and heart thudding wildly. Her fingers ached, a sudden pulse of pain that vanished just as quickly. She rubbed them against the thigh of her jeans. Nathan was watching her with an uncertain look. He was nothing but uncertain looks.
“I need to go into town,” she said, speaking the words even before she’d consciously made the decision. “I’ll go by the hardware store. I can pick up cleaning supplies that aren’t over a decade old and something to deal with the graffiti.” They needed to look into renting a dumpster, too. Nathan’s black bag hoard was getting out of hand.
“I’ll go with you,” Nathan said immediately.
“Cool. Good,” she said, though the point had been not just to get away from the house, but also from him and his nervous energy. Like I’m the only one with secrets, she thought.
They took a few minutes to unhitch the trailer from the car, leaving it in the drive in front of the still-locked gates. She checked her email again. Still no response from Gabriel about the key.
At the hardware store, Nathan split off immediately to go look for bolt cutters, to get through the chain on the gate. Emma wandered, staring at aisles of doorknobs and hinges, sinks and countertops, lamps and painting supplies. There was so much to do at the house, so much to repair, and neither of them had a handy bone in their bodies. They should just sell it. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to make the suggestion to her sisters yet. Not after the utter nonresponse she’d gotten when she’d told them about moving in.
All she had wanted back then was to have them with her. She didn’t know what had happened and it hadn’t mattered—the only thing she had cared about was keeping them safe. Keeping them together.
But Juliette had left the day after the funeral and hadn’t ever come back. Emma and Daphne had been split up. Then Emma aged out of foster care.
She’d had money from her parents—lots of it. That was, after all, one of the reasons the cops—and later the DA—had thought she killed them. The money was in trust until she turned eighteen, and on her birthday she donated all of it, choosing a charity almost at random. She’d thought that maybe that would finally convince everyone, but it hadn’t made a difference. It just became evidence of a guilty conscience.