thighs. “Self-love?”
My drugged sister giggled. “Asking me if I got off?”
“Did you?”
“You can feel it. The skin bursting open, like overripe fruit. Then the blood releasing. Feels good. But then, you should know that.”
“I don’t feel pain, remember?”
“But it’s not pain, little sis. Oh no, it’s anything but.”
“According to our father.”
“You’re jealous. You don’t remember him.”
“You were four. I don’t believe you remember him.”
“But I do. I do and you don’t, which is why you hate me. Because Daddy loved me best.”
My sister sighed, her glazed eyes far away. Probably seeing the tiny house where we’d once lived. Not having my sister’s memory, I knew it mostly from the crime scene photos. My parents’ bedroom, where the sole piece of furniture had been a dirty mattress placed directly upon the oak wood floor. The piles of dirty clothes, soiled linens, discarded food wrappings, that formed the perimeter of the space. Then a lone car seat, stuck in the corner, or at night, in the bedroom closet. The car seat where, according to the detectives’ reports, I had lived.
While Shana had slept with our parents on that bloodstained mattress.
“I loved you,” Shana stated now, her voice still dreamy. “Such a pretty baby. Mom would let me hold you. You’d smile at me, waving your pudgy little fists. I cut your wrist, very carefully, so you would know how much I loved you. Mom screamed, but you still smiled and I knew you understood.” Her voice turned mournful. “You shouldn’t have left me, Adeline. First Daddy, then you, and then it all went to shit.”
After our foster mother had discovered Shana slicing up my forearm with sewing shears, my six-year-old sister had been sent to a locked-down mental institute where she was placed on antipsychotic meds, while spending most of her days physically restrained to a bed. The regimen worked so well she only managed to attempt to kill a fellow patient five years later. Given that clear level of success, they declared her magically stable on her fourteenth birthday and turned her loose on an unsuspecting foster family. In my expert opinion, that she finally succeeded in killing someone was less a matter of if, than when.
“What do you think of,” I asked her now, “when you remember Daddy?”
“Love.”
“What do you hear?”
“Screams.”
“What do you smell?”
“Blood.”
“What do you feel?”
“Pain.”
“And that’s love?”
“Yes!”
“So when we were kids and you cut me, you just wanted me to know how much you loved me?”
“No. I wanted you to feel how much I loved you.”
“By cutting your baby sister.”
“Yes!”
“And if you had a knife right now?”
“Blood is love,” she intoned. “I know you know, Adeline. I know that in your heart of hearts, even you understand.”
Then she smiled, so slyly it sent a shiver through me. As if she knew exactly what I’d been doing six hours ago, a beast, driven by her nature, even as all her nurturing warned her to behave otherwise.
“What if I told you that food is love?” I said now, keeping my tone steady, my mind focused. “That instead of cutting someone, you should offer them bread?”
Shana frowned, touching her temples with her right hand. For the first time, she appeared confused, even disoriented. “Daddy never offered food.”
“What about Mom?”
“Mom?”
“Did Mom offer food?”
“Mom is not love,” she informed me, her tone abruptly brittle.
“Mom is not love.” We’d danced around this before, without ever making progress. Now, having this rare moment in time, I decided to press the matter. “Why not? Why can’t Mom be love?”
Shana stubbornly pressed her lips together, refusing to answer.
“Harry loved her, married her. In turn, she loved him, took care of his house, raised children with him.”
“He did not love her!”
“He loved you?”
“Yes. Blood is love. He loved me. Not her.”
I leaned forward and stated quietly, “He hurt her. Every day, according to the detectives’ reports. If pain is love, then our father loved our mother very much.”
Shana growled back at me: “Don’t be stupid! Anyone can beat someone. That’s not love. Blood is love. You know this! Cutting requires thoughtfulness, even tenderness. To delicately slice through layer after layer of skin. To intentionally avoid the iliac or the femoral or the popliteal. To slice only the great saphenous vein and nothing else . . .” She gestured to her bandaged legs. “Blood is love. It involves great care. You know this, Adeline. You know this!”
I stared my sister in the eye. “It wasn’t your fault, Shana. What our father did, what happened in that house, it wasn’t