Page 12 of The Sisters of Crimson House

After the funeral, there was a bounty of food laid out on the dining room table, a fun house mirror version of the Spectacular but with southern wake-style potato salad and rolls and women Charley had never met before telling her how sorry they were for her loss. What did they know about her loss? No one said anything to Miranda, who was absent for the post-funeral activities and for the strange purgatory that limped on afterward.

Charley and Miranda did not speak, which was its own unique torture. Charley’s grief was an animal that seemed to scrabble around in her heart, her lungs, constantly searching for a way out. The only person who could possibly welcome this wild animal with understanding was a zombie who spent a large portion of the day staring out the window, occasionally scribbling in a journal or refusing food when she wasn’t asleep. That was likely because Miranda’s diet consisted largely of Valium and whatever pills Celeste carefully fed her at designated mealtimes. Whatever had worn her face like a sad, wailing banshee on Halloween night had not returned for another unwelcome appearance. Celeste had been the only one to address this with Charley directly, reassuring her that the strange keening that had broken through Miranda’s defenses that night—please, please, please—was the direct result of those aggressively pushy guests. Everyone knows how delicate she is after a performance, Celeste had added solemnly, unable to not twist the knife.

When Charley got close enough to be within striking distance, Miranda just looked through her, cloaked in her own miserable shroud. What had been left behind wasn’t much, but Charley figured she would take an empty shell that looked like her sister rather than be completely on her own.

They hadn’t returned to their Midtown home since the accident, and she wasn’t sure she ever would. She’d grown up under three miles from Crimson House, but perhaps she only had dreamed of the sweet two-story craftsman in the park that had housed a mother and a father and a sister who sang for ghosts.

Her uncle Robby, her father’s brother, had been at the funeral, his wife and their two kids standing graveside stiff and anxious, as if death were catching. They had fled to their car after the service, not even bothering to come to the house for the meal. She could only imagine the gossip her uncle’s family would gleefully take back home with them. Her father had married into that family, and it had killed him.

It would be the last she would ever hear from Robby and her cousins.

***

“We don’t get to just shut this off, Mom. Don’t talk to me like I’m a goddamn light switch.”

Shots fired from Celeste at Sadie. At least Charley thought. It was hard to hear with her ear pressed to the wall. Charley had invented every possible reason to lurk outside the swinging kitchen door that had been installed sometime in the seventies, forever making her feel like she was entering a bustling restaurant.

“I’m asking you to use common sense, Celeste,” said Sadie. She didn’t sound angry. She sounded exhausted. Like she was speaking from another planet.

“Common sense? How does that work when you’re asking us to do the impossible?!”

Charley had little warning to move before the door swung open, mid-shout. Celeste froze, her fury twisting her face into something unrecognizable. Charley stared back, equally startled to see her aunt anything but perpetually composed. Celeste was in black jeans and a gray cardigan, her hair coiled in a bun like a ballet teacher. Several errant strands of dark hair hung loose around her neck, another betrayal of her perfectly curated facade.

Impossible. The word hung between them like a warning. What was the impossible thing being asked?

“You need food?” Celeste asked, signaling that she was not engaging in any form of conversation that wasn’t surface level.

Charley nodded. Claiming she needed soup or a cup of tea was guaranteed to generate some excitement from the three women who would pause battle plans to feed the children. They couldn’t bring her parents back, but they could deliver on a promise of Sadie’s chocolate chess pie. Celeste stood aside, granting access to the kitchen.

Leo sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, nursing a cup of chamomile. The argument was over, but the remnants hovered over the kitchen like a dissipating storm. Sadie wordlessly spooned banana pudding into a bowl and placed it before Charley before making her own exit. It was just Charley and Leo, her great-grandma plastering on a smile and humming into her cup of tea.

Charley’s parents were gone. Impossibly. So was any semblance of normal life. What fresh hell were Sadie and Celeste fighting about now?

Despite the constant kitchen lurking and countless slices of pie and pudding over the ensuing days, Charley never overheard when she and Miranda were going home, what shape their lives were taking next. Platitudes were offered; direct questions were dismissed. Celeste said that when a plan had been formulated, Charley would be the first to know. She was not psychic, but she knew a lie when she heard one.

One afternoon—one morning? What was time when everyone you loved the most was dead?—she watched as Miranda skulked past her doorway, headed for the grand staircase. Charley held her breath and counted to sixty. Maybe Miranda was getting lunch. Going for a walk. Wherever she was, it wasn’t likely Charley would get this opportunity again.

She quietly opened her bedroom door and padded down the hallway. It wasn’t technically spying. Okay, it was spying, but since the rest of her family had built-in magical skills to use to their advantage, she was going to have to rely upon her own skill set to get any real information. Translation: She would steal whatever she could get her hands on.

Miranda’s guest room was just down the hall from hers, a junior suite dubbed the Emerald Room with a velvety green duvet that swallowed up a massive king-size bed. Miranda had left the journal sitting out on the bed, so it may as well have been an open invitation. Charley’s heart danced into her throat as she held the slim black book in her hands. What was she expecting to find here? A confession? Miranda’s detailed report on the last minutes of their parents’ lives? An explanation of how she had been mysteriously ejected from the car? Too many nights Charley had lain in bed, feet away from her sister, and wondered if she was a monster, a victim. How could she sort out the truth when the only witness to their parents’ death had taken a vow of silence?

As Charley cracked open the book, her hands began to shake, a primal scream of black ink and fury confronting her on each page. Dark eyes with bleeding tears spilling across a sea of white. Slashes and strokes like she’d stabbed the notebook in a rage. It was a graphic novel without the text. Pain bruising each page. But there was one image she found over and over again as she turned the pages with increasing speed: a tree, a hastily sketched trunk whose explosion of branches blotted out the sky. Its roots ran just as deep, slithering underneath the ground like large burrowing worms.

“You can have it.”

Charley jumped to find Miranda watching her from the doorway.

“You scared me,” Charley said, shutting the journal and wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. She stared at the floor as Miranda passed her and climbed onto the bed. Silence oozed thick between them until Charley managed softly, “I’m sorry.”

“I meant what I said. You can have it.” Miranda’s voice was flat as she lay back on the jade-green pillows. The color wasn’t doing her any favors; her skin already a sallow yellow from a devoted lack of sunlight.

“I don’t want it.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Why would you want me to have it?” It wasn’t exactly the conversation she’d hoped they could have, but it beat talking to any of the women in the kitchen who’d taken to staring at her with pity, like the orphan she was.

Miranda didn’t answer. Charley took advantage of the silence to climb into the bed next to her. At home, she’d rarely, if ever, slept over in her sister’s bed, Miranda complaining that she was a whirling dervish of elbows and kicks to the back. Charley was fine to sleep on her own. Her sister was strange in the day. In the dead of night, Miranda whispered her dreams, calling out to unseen visitors. It felt like she was narrating stories that Charley wasn’t sure were her own.