Eleven Minutes

By Margie Lukas

I opened my eyes to the soft glow of the morning sun filtering in around the canvas shade.  But even that dim light felt fierce and I turned my face from the window.  When had I last slept well, or without my eighty-five year old twin sister beside me in the bed where both our parents had died and where Letty and I would also likely die?  And now it was our birthday, the day Letty loved, but the day when everything I tried to forget was annually revisited on me.

Though I felt more suffocated everyday by Letty's needs and constant presence, I had no choice but to endure with her.  We'd lived a long life together and at the other end of it, in our childhood, she'd looked out for me.  Still, I longed for both an emotional and physical space where I had the time to ponder the life I'd not lived, grade my failed results, and come to terms with myself. 

I turned in our bed again and faced my twin, studying her in the half-light.  Her rounded scalp, visible through her thin hair, looked like an overturned saucer floating in soapsuds.  Her lips were dry and white, ice, but her skin shone blue, thin as cellophane and loose, draping above her ears in small scallops.  Her nose and cheekbones made me think of the hard-edged and miniature balsa-wood dinosaur skeletons that I'd had my second grade class glue together in the '40's and '50's.   My twin, I thought, and a chill found me despite the summer morning and my blankets.    

The longcase clock chimed eight times from the main room.  Customarily, we slept until nine or even nine-thirty.  The nightmare of our birthday had awoken me, but Letty's eyes struggled and opened too, as though my scrutiny had been a hand tapping her shoulder.  She looked at the ceiling with a glazed stare.  I knew her mind grew more and more framed by routine, and at times, I envied that growing quiet.  My own thoughts insisted on leaping backwards, forcing me to traverse over corkscrews of the past I wanted never to remember.

Letty summoned herself from some distant place and turned and after a hesitation, remembered me.  “Happy birthday, little sister.”

I pushed back the blankets on my side of the bed and sat up slowly in the hope of keeping the room from spinning.  “You aren’t going to start that, are you?”  But I didn’t mind being reminded she was my older sister.  Eleven minutes older, and if the world meant to give us equal time, it owed me those eleven minutes.

“You were always prettier,” she said.

I closed my eyes and fought back irritation.  "You won't start that again."

"But I am older.”

Though I'd only just awakened, I already felt tired, and as I turned slightly to give her a sideways glance, my back ached.  “Why don’t you stay in bed and rest while I start our oatmeal.” 

Alarm raised the pitch of her voice.  “We’ll make breakfast together.  The same as we do everyday.”

Yes, the way we do every day.  I looked away.

We sat at our small table in the kitchen.  Our sugar bowl with its hand-painted roses and a plain white creamer I'd filled with milk sat in the center on a crocheted doily.  I tried to keep my eyes on these utensils and not watch Letty dripping her Earl Grey Tea and even her oatmeal.  Or the way she wiped at the cereal, smearing the sticky substance farther down the soft and worn bodice of what had been Mother's nightgown.   Letty had thoroughly soiled the nightshirt and I knew if I was to avoid looking at the stains for the entire next week, I'd have to take the robe later, after Letty had changed into her day clothes, and see to its washing.        

When she put down her spoon and raised her cup, I tipped my spoon into my oatmeal, trying to read her next move and keep myself out of synchronicity with her.  Her arms were eighty-five years thin and the skin had scored itself into dark creases that ran from her wrists up to the short sleeves of her gown.  The pleating resumed again at her neckline.  I tugged on the long sleeves of my robe.

 “What time are they coming?” she asked.

I knew she meant our nieces because we rarely had visitors, and she’d asked me the same question dozens of times the day before.   I wasn't sure if her memory had deteriorated to the point of forgetting every few hours, or if by constantly rechecking the facts of something she did know, she assured herself she wasn't losing her mind.       

“Two o’clock.”

“How long since we’ve seen them?”

I placed my spoon beside my bowl.  "You know they come every year.  They were here last year.  Don't you remember Dorothy talking about her cancer?"

“Well, they were old then.”

"They're fifteen and seventeen years younger than we are."

The corners of Letty's dry lips cupped white bubbles of spit and oatmeal.  “Our brother has been dead a long time.  Hasn’t he? ” 

It was hard to think of Henry's daughters, our nieces.  But thinking of Henry made my stomach fall away in a hail of conflicting emotions.  I pushed my bowl back over the plastic tablecloth and refused to answer Letty.  I knew any discussion of Henry would quickly wind around to a discussion about his death.  It had been labeled an accident by the police department, and no matter what Letty wanted to believe, I wanted to believe the official report.  I'd quit trying to convince her.   

“I’m glad we only have two nieces,” she said.  “I don’t like company.  I suppose they’ll ask us again for pictures of Henry.”   She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly clear and fierce.  “I’ll say we haven’t any.” 

My dread began to move across the bottom of my stomach, and as I sat down my cup, tea splashed onto my saucer.  I tried to keep my voice calm.  “He was their father, and we’re so old, what does it matter now?”

She scowled at me.  “I won’t give them one of our pictures.”

 "Of course not, dear.  The pictures we have are ruined."  I refused to let an argument start between us.  Life had taught me fighting always brings disaster.

“I’ve always loved you,” she said. 

“Yes, of course."

“No one else has.”  She looked down again and wiped at the wet smears on her bodice, pushing the food deeper into the gown's fibers, then lifted her eyes and looked at me with fear.  “You’re not going to leave me, are you?”

"No."  And when she still looked doubtful, I added, "why Letty, where would I go?”

Her eyes remained dark, but relief touched her thin, chapped lips.  “That’s right, this is the only home you got.” 

We struggled into our cream-colored gauzy dresses with their sateen linings: the last Easter dresses we'd purchased.  The big war had just ended and even for Letty and me the world looked bright and hopeful with troops of men returning home, married women leaving factories to decorate nurseries, and every woman feeling it was her patriotic duty to spend money for the economy and look resplendent for the soldiers who'd sacrificed so much for the women back in the states.   

Letty sat on the small chair in front of the dressing table mirror and I began to brush her hair.  She kept her hands still, one hand flaccid over the other in her lap made wide by her lax knees.  I kept my eyes off my own reflection, but looking down on her small, round shoulders as I worked told me how I looked.  We were old women.

 I finished brushing, twisted her thin hair into a knot, and stopped, holding it in my hand.  "Have our lives made a difference, Letty?"

She scowled.  "You're being foolish.  We've a roof over our heads and with your teacher's pension and what Father left us, we have enough to live."

"But don't you ever wish it had all been different?"

"Use the Mother-of-Pearl combs."

"We might have had children."

"I was always content.  Henry had children.  They didn't make him happy.  Why must people keep having children?"

Our eyes met in the filmy mirror.  "Why Letty, people are all we have."

"I don't like it.  What good is it to keep having children?  Not too tight, now.  You always get my combs too tight."

The combs slid through her hair and along her scalp, hardly meeting any resistance.  "There's so much we didn't do."

Letty frowned into the mirror.  "Perhaps I've lived more than you."

I felt my breath catch.  "But you haven't.   We've spent our lives together, right here in this house.  Our whole lives."

She pursed her lips.  "But I took care of you."

I couldn't bring myself to answer and Letty stood.  "It's always the same," she said.  "Every birthday you act as though you'll leave."

"You're my sister.  I'm not leaving you."

I took my turn sitting in front of the mirror and Letty forgot herself, brushing and brushing my ghostly hair like a child playing in fog.  I had no choice but to stare at our reflections and then into my own eyes.  There, I saw not even a lingering trace of all the dreams I'd once carried: only empty hollows where the visions had been.  I felt an all too familiar unsteadiness come over me.  I placed my hands on the dressing table for stability.   

“It’s our birthday,” Letty said, her voice lilted and breathy, her words and their sound a dray that carried me back eighty years.

“It’s your birthday,” our mother said and set the newly frosted cake on the dining room table.   Letty and I stood one on each side of her and beamed at the creation.  It was our fifth birthday and Mother had spent hours on the cake and its decorations while Letty and I knelt on kitchen chairs beside her, transfixed by how she kneaded the pastry bag in her hand and forced squiggles of frosting out the metal tip and brought to life pink flower buds which grew like magic and spread out from their centers into real roses.   The finished product had not only the blooms of pink roses, but high waves of white frosting.   

As the three of us stood admiring the cake, Father entered the room with our brother, Henry, and the green Kodak camera.  The camera was at the height of modernity, using roll film and having a lens that extended when the box opened, but folding up like an accordion to be put away.  No one but Father had permission to touch the machine. 

Mother sighed.  Father had positioned Henry in front of the mahogany longcase clock that had been in the family since the Civil War when Father's grandfather, a Union officer, stole it from a plantation house.  "I never had a slave to work my land," the elder relative had said, "I deserve this clock."

"You look stiff," Father barked at Henry.  "Don't hold the dang frame so high.  Stand straight, you're standing like a girl." 

Letty and I watched, mesmerized by the camera and the process.  The Kodak invention flashed twice before Mother spoke.  "Take their pictures, Leon," she motioned toward us, "it's their birthday."

Father glanced at her, then at Letty and I, and turned back to Henry. 

“For heaven’s sake," Mother tried again, "it’s their birthday.”

“I’ll take pictures of whoever the hell I want.”   

My heart began to race, and dampness began to grow in the center of my palms.  My parent's fights often began with no more than a comment or a cross look.  "Don't fight, Mommy," I said.  I knew fighting meant something horrible would happen.

Henry stood stiff as a soldier waiting to be dismissed.  He'd gotten the strap the night before, and Father liked to take his picture the day after. 

Mother’s eyes began to glisten.  She looked at Letty and I at her sides and pressed her lips together in determination.  "You know what that cake needs? Fresh lemonade."  She went to the closet and brought out her hat.  I'd never known her to have any another hat, but I didn't consider the blue felt with the ribbon and tall feather, old.  I loved seeing the indigo-dyed feather wave in the air as she walked, and I was mesmerized by the long thin pin she fearlessly stuck through the felt and used to fasten the hat onto her head.  "Do you girls want to walk with me?  We'll see if the grocer has lemons."

Father watched her.  "They don't need lemonade."

I grabbed Mother's hand.  I wanted her to say “Yes, dear” and look down and even forget it was our birthday.  "I don't like lemonade," I insisted.   

Father's neck grew red splotches.  "You spoil them and I won't have it."

Mother must also have seen the wide, red snake crawling up from his collar and breaking over one cheek.  She turned away from him and tossed the blue hat onto the table.  “I’ll start your dinner.”

Even I heard the sass in her voice. 

Father followed her into the kitchen.

I stayed behind with Letty and Henry and stared at the feather on Mother's hat and saw how the blue quivered beside the white frosting with its red roses.     

Letty stepped closer and put her arms around me.  “Don’t cry, Sarah,” she whispered.   “We don’t care.”  

Henry shuffled from his place in front of the clock and dropped into a chair.  He was thirteen, eight years older than Sarah and I, and he'd combed his hair and put on a clean shirt.  His life hung in a balance between the camera and the strap.  Any achievement made Father bring out the camera, just as the smallest amount of under-achievement, or any hint of infraction against one of Father's rules brought out the strap.  Letty and I were never been whipped; luckily we were girls and didn't merit Father's attention.   His focus was on "raising his son up to be a man."

Father's voice, a booming sound that struck down even my gaze a room away, roared from the kitchen.  

Henry darted from the chair, threw his framed award onto the flowered carpet, and ran toward the front door.  “I hate her.  She's just jealous because Papa doesn't take your picture.”  He stopped and turned back to where Letty and I stood still huddled together.  “It’s your fault.  If you’d never been born, they wouldn’t fight.” 

"You heard me," Father's voice bellowed from the other direction. 

Henry disappeared out the door.

Letty and I remained eye-level with the cake.  “Don’t listen to them," she said.  "Come on, we’re leaving, too.”  She ran across the room to where our dolls lay in their beds on the window seat, grabbed them up, came back to shove mine into my hand, and pulled my arm.  Leaving Mother felt wrong, and yet I believed Henry who was so much older, and in my mind I'd heard him say that if Letty and I were gone, our parents would stop fighting.  We'd certainly been to blame for this fight because it had been a picture of us that Mother wanted.

As we started to run, our shoes making soft, pounding sounds on the carpet, I looked down at Henry’s award and saw the glass had shattered, throwing broken, jagged lines across his face. 

Letty and I raced until we reached the end of the block and then panted and struggled to catch our breaths.  We weren’t allowed to turn the corner; we'd gone as far as our escape permitted, and we stood there where cars and bicyclists went by, most of whom waved and smiled.  Being twins made us neighborhood celebrities and people spoke to us, or to Mother and Father, as though twins in a family meant we'd achieved the American Dream.  Letty and I knew never to object or suggest something else.   We sat down on the curb so close to one another we touched from our white anklets to the ruffles on the shoulders of our dresses, and not until the sun began to grow our shadows did I begin to worry we were staying too long. 

“No,” Letty said.  “We have to wait until she calls us.”  

Doctor Robert's automobile, a black box on thin, spoke wheels, sputtered around the corner.  In 1915 his car might have looked like most of the cars on the road, now ten years later, the auto was easily recognizable, and the sight and sound of the machine sent shivers down my body.  Doctor Robert had visited our house before when Mother fell or hurt herself in some way.  And when he did, he always repeated to us that we were the only living set of twins he'd ever delivered.  We thought him a demigod.  This time, he nearly passed us before the gravel under his tires began to slide and he stopped.  His head came out and he called back to us.  “You girls stay right there and play with your baby dolls until I come and get you.  All right?”

We both nodded with exaggerated, frightened movements, and I felt Letty's arm slowly rise and come around my shoulder again.  “It’ll be all right," she said.  "Doctor Robert is going now.”  

I didn’t look at her face when the ambulance with its loud bell went by because I knew she was crying too, and she wouldn't want me to see. 

“Sarah!" she shouted.  "Are you listening to me?  I need a comb.” 

My old hand shook as it reached out and lifted a tortoise shell comb from the row on the yellowing dresser scarf.

“No, give me the pearl.  I want to match on our birthday.”

I felt as though half of me still sat on that childhood curb.  I wanted to mask the heartache my memories gave me and struggled to find something to say.  “Shouldn’t that be birthdays?”

 “No, it’s just birthday.”

By the time Letty noticed our nieces’ car pull into our narrow drive, I had set the table in the dinning room with four rose china cups, saucers, and Mother’s Battenburg lace napkins.  "Hurry," Letty called and together we went to the window to watch them, but kept back, hiding in the dusk of the room.  Letty slipped her arm into mine.  “Dorothy looks so frail, like she ought to be using a walker, and Alice has become such a large woman.  Why do you suppose that is?”

I didn’t taste either the birthday cake they'd brought with them or the tea I’d made.  I kept thinking about our mother, the horrible "fall" she'd taken and how it had left her body black and blue and her back permanently injured so that she spent the rest of her life in a wheel chair and how Father had continued to take pictures of Henry, as though not doing so would be to admit his guilt.   

Like me, Dorothy scarcely touched her cake.  She saw me watching her.  “I'm having to do another round of chemo,” she said.  “I’m not feeling well.”   

“Then you mustn’t stay long,” I told her.  “Though we appreciate having you stop by, you mustn't fatigue yourself.”  

Alice grabbed at my words like I’d asked them to leave and meant to show them to the door before she'd made her customary plea.  She leaned forward in her chair, her heavy bosom making me fear for my china cup.  “I don’t suppose you’ve found any pictures of our father?  I know you promised to look again.”  She glanced at Letty, then back at me.  “We’ve never found a one in my mother’s things.  There must have at least been a wedding picture."

"Your mother," Letty began, "was a young woman when Henry died and she remarried.  I'm sure there was a picture, but she likely threw it away."

No one answered that, and the stillness began to gather heavy as an impending storm.

Alice reached for a second piece of cake.  "You know he died before Dorothy was born, and why... I was only a toddler.  Neither of us has seen a picture of him.”

“It’s a silly thing, I suppose,” Dorothy said.  “It's just that when I die, I don’t want to ask which man is my father.  I want to recognize him.”

Letty glanced at me, and then looked back at Alice.  “We did look for pictures.  We can’t find any.”  

“Perhaps we can help you look,” Dorothy suggested.  “Do you have a trunk in the basement or attic?”

“We emptied the attic and the upstairs years ago,” Letty screeched, “and shut up the rooms.  Sarah's pension isn't enough to heat this whole house."

My sister's outburst silenced the room and after a moment all four of us began to fiddle with our forks and cups as a way to bring back sound.  I sipped at my lukewarm tea.  If I'd have felt steadier, I'd have warmed our cups, but I let the china pot sit under its quilted cozy.  I wondered if my nieces would want pictures of Henry, their father, if they knew the truth about his feelings towards them.

From my place at the table, I had a view of the street, and when I saw movement outside, I looked up without taking the time to wonder if Time had come for me again.  I looked across the lace and across the room and through the curtains and the window and out to the driveway where Henry sat in the saddle of his police mount.  Henry was married then and lived in a small house a couple of blocks away.  We'd never seen him in his police uniform or on his horse, a huge, long-legged black steed in a size large enough to startle even the most determined rioters or criminals.  Sitting taller and with the shiny badge on his chest and the heavy blue-steel gun riding on his hip, Henry looked formidable.  The horse's restless hoofs knocked and echoed on the cement, and Henry jerked on the reins every time the beast moved, pulling the bit in the animal's mouth and making the horse's eyes grow huge and white-rimmed.   Still, the horse seemed a part of Henry, a machine that was an extension of our brother, giving Henry giant proportions and an inhuman strength. 

Letty and I, standing only a few feet outside our front door, kept safely back, but I still feared that at any minute the animal, just under my brother's control, might charge and roll over us like a cable car.  

The sun reflected off the horse’s flanks like mining pans and I noticed that across the street our new neighbors had come from their house to stare.  Henry was now a man of the law.  As a family, we hadn't held our heads up since Mother's confinement to her  wheel chair, but now we were someone again. 

Mother sat inside, looking out the window from that wheelchair, her face barely visible through the curtain.  She never spoke when Father was in the room and she never left the house in the daylight.  Her skin had grown the color of the moon.    

Then Father's camera began to flash. 

Letty and I had still never had our picture taken, and now that we were sixteen, people told us we looked like our mother had when she'd married our father, and they asked more frequently how was she doing and said it has been so many years since they've seen her.

 The family's secrets had stopped up the windows and doors of our house and Letty and I knew to smile and say, "Mother is getting along very well.  Thank you, for asking."  But whispering together in our rooms at night, we knew that wasn't true and that the more we looked like mother, the less able Father was to even meet our gaze when we passed him in the house, serving him his meals and doing his laundry.   

"That stupid camera," Letty cursed under her breath, "let's leave."  She turned and stepped back inside the house.  

I didn't follow her; I was too mesmerized by the horse and the sunshine and the neighbors watching.  Now that Henry was grown and had a wife and a baby named Alice, we seldom saw him and it had been years since Henry had been small enough for Father to hold and use his strap on.  The picture-taking seemed appropriate for Henry looked grand, and what had Letty and I ever done worthy of a camera's flash?

Father finished and Henry pulled the reins, turning the horse's head toward the street and duty.  Father started back toward the house and had reached where I stood on the walk when Henry pulled on the reins again and brought the horse back to us, the hoofs striking the pavement with a hollow sound that rang out and made me feel alive. He came to within a couple of feet of where Father and I stood. 

I hadn't been this close to the horse the first time, but I wasn't afraid.  Father knew horses, he'd been raised with horses rather than automobiles, and he stood close enough for me to smell the cigarettes on his breath, close enough to reach up and grab the bridle if necessary.  And amazingly, he hadn't sent me off with a nod or a glance, but stood at my side as if the closeness were a thing he could tolerate.  The horse seemed changed, too.  It stared at me with its large, soft eyes and though my hands were clasp firmly behind my back, I imagined I could feel the shape of his long equine nose beneath them. 

“I almost forgot,” Henry said.  “Karen's pregnant again.” 

            Father nodded, though his expression remained unchanged.  

            “And this one,” Henry swore from atop the black horse, “had better not be another god damn girl.” 

I knew my brother stared at me, that his words were meant to wound my pride, but I was standing next to father, not Henry, and the horse looked into my eyes, speaking to me with the power of an enchantment      

Henry jerked the reins again and the bit in the horse's mouth, turning the gentle animal's head.  Henry urged it down the drive and into a trot.     

Letty met us at the door.  She let Father pass, and then tugged my sleeve so hard she might have torn my blouse.  “Why did you stay out there?  You should have come in with me.”  Her anger scalded my face.  I'd been thinking about the way Father had tolerated my standing by him, the new baby our sister-in-law was expecting, and the horse.  Letty saw my elation: how I’d been given something she hadn’t.  “You thought he’d take your picture, didn’t you!  Sarah, the pretty one!”  Her face looked haunted and frightened.  "You thought the beautiful Sarah would finally have her picture taken now that the ugly Letty was gone."

"Don't call me pretty."  I hated it when she did, trying to separate me from her and the family by pushing me off to some outward limb.  But I couldn’t explain how I’d felt looking into the lordly horse's eyes, how for the first time in my life I'd felt washed by the rain of mysticism. 

"Pretty Sarah."

I knew not to fight with Letty.  I only had to look at Mother to know fighting had horrible consequences, but I couldn't stop myself. 

"I'll make you pay," Letty said.

"Like you made Henry pay?"

Letty's face blanched, but for one cheek that flamed red.  "I said I would, and I will."

With Dorothy and Alice gone for another year, I began to carry the cups and saucers to the kitchen.  Letty's eyes sparkled with excitement while my back ached with the weight of my memories.   “I’d better wash these dishes,“ I told her. “Why don’t you rest a bit.”

“Nonsense," she answered.  "I’m not tired and you can wash the dishes later.”  She put her hand into mine and the soft, loose flesh over her slowly twisting, arthritic bones felt cold.  “Let’s go see Henry before we change out of our good dresses.  I want him to know we’ve had another birthday.”

“I 'm too tired to climb the stairs.”

“Don’t be silly.” She tugged.  “We always go on our birthday.  We never miss a year.” 

I looked into her eyes.  I didn't want to go again and yet nothing was worth the risks involved in fighting.  I followed her.  Going up the stairs, I clung to the railing for balance and used it to help leverage myself.  My dread made my climb slow.  Letty made frequent stops, turning and waiting for me, never letting me lag more than a few steps behind. 

“Sarah, lift your feet,” she said.  “What’s wrong with you?”  Then only a few steps farther up.  “Maybe we should plan for when you can no longer get upstairs.  We can make this room for you downstairs.”

I didn’t answer.  I couldn’t tell her that at that very moment I was planning ahead.  Planning for my eleven minutes.  I hoped I’d have them; surely God owed me eleven minutes alone.  If my wish were granted, I wanted Sarah to die at night.  I wanted to spend my eleven minutes alone outside and under the stars where I’d sat countless nights with Mother, having wheeled her chair out when Father and the neighbors slept.  There, with the wheels of her chair shining in the moonlight, she’d reached her arms up for the stars and never taking her eyes off the heavens, she’d felt so drawn up into the deep lights of the velvet sky, she'd cried out, “I’m standing, Sarah.  Look at me, I’m standing.”  And then later, when fatigue had softened the lines on her face and she was ready to be wheeled back inside and helped into bed, she'd say, "You'll live won't you Sarah?  You'll see all the places I've never seen."  

Letty continued to wait, growing more impatient with me and I continued to hesitate on each step, making our ascent doubly slow.  I knew why she insisted we make the climb every year; she wanted to be sure I didn't forget what she considered my debt to her.  But I didn’t need to be reminded of all that had happened by making this annual trek.  Mother's "fall," had pushed Letty and I into a borderland.  We hadn't physically lost our mother, but living from a wheelchair she was emotionally changed, in almost constant pain, and often drugged.  Of the many things she'd lost, one was the ability to climb the stairs and tuck us into our beds at night and come to us when we were sick or cried out.  Over the next couple of years, the floors upstairs covered themselves in dust, and when we opened or closed doors, matted balls of lint swirled at our feet like mice.  Our sheets turned dark and our dirty clothes grew in piles and lay scattered about until we needed them and brought armloads downstairs.  Half-eaten bowls of cereal and crusts of sandwiches turned green and then into powder.  But worse than the dirt was that I began to hear the house wail at night and I'd grown deathly afraid of a new dark thing my mind refused to label, and yet was never without, often forcing me to run from my bed in the middle of the night and across the hall to Letty's room.  She quickly grew accustomed to my joining her, and with never a word of objection, she moved over for me, making room in her bed though it, like mine, was only slightly wider than a cot.

The pattern repeated itself until the night she screamed and I woke in her bed and found myself alone.  I ran across the hall to my room where I heard her muffled scream again and saw her struggling with the darkness.  Had she gone to my bed because I’d taken up too much space in hers, or because I'd taken her blankets?  The dark thing was angry and whispered words I'd heard many times before.  “Stop it, Sarah.  You know I get mad when you cry.  You want me to like you, don’t you?”

Letty struggled and when she’d gotten free she ran and turned on the light.   I didn’t want to see the dark thing, didn’t want to see it was Henry.         

He held one hand over his cheek and when he took it away I saw Letty had done her best to rake his face with her fingernails.  His eyes burned with anger over the blood she'd drawn and his realization that he’d been caught by Letty.  But there was little he could do without Letty screaming again at such a pitch, and for so long, that surely Father would do the unthinkable for him and come upstairs.  But if he came, we all knew he'd bring the strap. 

 “Letty, go to bed,” Henry whispered.  His words hissed from between his teeth and he looked to where I was crying.  “I’ll take care of Sarah.”

Letty came to me, put her arm around me, and faced Henry again with a fury I'd never seen anywhere but in Father's eyes.  “No.”   

With Henry back in his own room and a chair wedged under the handle of Letty's door, she held onto me.  Now she knew.  I wanted to be Mother.  I wanted to sit in a wheel chair and never have to talk and never have to be seen and never have to leave the house. 

“Sarah,” Letty scolded.  “Have you forgotten how to climb stairs?”

I saw her waiting for me at the top and the fright on her face. 

“I’ve loved you my whole life,” she said suddenly. 

I didn’t answer. 

She waited until I was beside her before she opened the door to Henry’s room.  There, covering the walls, were all the familiar photos Father had taken of Henry through every stage of his life. 

I stood in the doorway and watched Letty walk around, lightly touching some of the pinheads sticking out from the eyes of every picture.  Her wispy body leaned forward like a soft candle and her chiffon dress hung on her, nearly sweeping the dusty floor in front and giving her the shapelessness of a ghost. 

She began to laugh.  “I made you pay, Henry, didn’t I?  You lived only three days after I made your shrine.”  She spread her arms wide, as though taking in the room. 

I couldn't bear any more of her foolish talk.  "His death wasn't our fault.  We were foolish, teenagers.  His death was just a horrible coincidence."  I turned and started back down the stairs.   

“Sarah,” I heard her scream.  “Sarah, where are you?”

Cold brushed over me as her voice came into the hall and she looked down at me from two steps above.  “Come back here!”

I knew not to fight, but my anger reared up over me.  “I don’t want to see that room again.”

“What do you mean?  I did that for you.”

My hands trembled on the stair rail and I didn't answer. 

“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” she screamed. 

I concentrated on keeping my footing.     

“You were always the pretty one,” Letty screeched.  “Even Henry chose you.”

Her words felt like the strike of a stick.  In my disbelief I tried to turn around, but dizziness caught me up, took my legs.