“Like what?” Cordelia asked her. “Concerned?”
“Look, it’s done,” Eustace grumbled. “There’s no going back and there’s no changing it. I’m sorry your feelings are hurt, but it’s out now. You know. So maybe you’ll understand why I’m not so ready to leave this place, and why I can’t help you.”
Cordelia felt like she’d been knocked in the head, the truth registering in sickening waves. It wasn’t that her sister didn’t want to give her the money, it was that she couldn’t. She didn’t have it to give.
“It’s not exactly cheap paying for surgery and drugs and monthly hospital visits,” Eustace told her.
Cordelia placed a hand over her mouth. “Didn’t you have insurance?”
“I’m a business owner—orwas.An entrepreneur in the cannabis industry. So no, I didn’t exactly have a benefits package to keep me afloat. Even if I did, the co-pays are enough to sink anyone poorer than Warren Buffett.”
“Oh, Eustace,” she whispered. “Tell me you didn’t?”
Eustace dropped on the end of the bed. “What choice did I have? I sold off everything I could just to keep my treatment going. There’s no use crying about it. I’m alive. That’s what matters.”
“Of course,” Cordelia agreed. “Of course. It’s just… all your hard work.”
“I know,” Eustace said quietly. “Let’s not dwell on it. I’m still adjusting to my new reality.”
Cordelia nodded.
“But I need some time,” she said now, meeting her sister’s eyes. “A place to lay low. Torest.I’m so exhausted, Cordy. This opportunity came up at precisely the moment I needed it most.”
“I’m not sureopportunityis the right word for what this is,” Cordelia told her, taking in Morna’s dismal room.
Eustace furrowed her brow. “Then what is it? I was just starting to make my peace with what happened to Mom when I wasdiagnosed. And now we come here and find the same mark on our aunt’s wall. And that photograph. Are we even going to talk about that?”
“I’d hoped I’d imagined it,” Cordelia admitted.
Eustace reached into the pocket of her robe on the foot of the bed and pulled it out. “Think again,” she said, wiggling it in Cordelia’s face.
“Don’t wave that thing around.” Cordelia ripped it from her fingers, laid it in her lap. She looked down at its eerie imagery with dismay.
“It’s not staged,” Eustace told her. “Photoshop wasn’t a thing back in 1959.”
Cordelia pursed her lips. “It’s disturbing.”
“It’s proof,” Eustace corrected.
“Of what?”
Her sister took her hands in her own. “Of everything. Mom. You. Me. The tattoo. Don’t you see? There’s somethingdifferentabout our family. Mom knew it but would never talk about it. It’s why she left. It’s why we’re here. And it’s at the bottom of what happened to her.”
The scope of the moment ballooned around Cordelia, convex and reflective, slippery as mercury. “Actually, I’m here for the money,” she joked.
It was true, of course, but her sister’s logic wasn’t lost on her, especially after whatever had just happened in the hall, her body still floppy as string from it, the absence of a headache more notable for once than the presence of one.
“Wouldn’t it feel good to finally put some of the goddamned pieces together?” Eustace asked her. “Don’t you want to know?”
“If we’re witches?” Cordelia passed the photograph back to her sister.
The blood-dripped word she’d seen in the mirror hovered between them. She hadn’t told Eustace about that. Now, she didn’tfeel sure she’d really seen it at all. But she wasn’t about to go back and check. Her head gave an unsolicited throb at the memory. With effort, she kept any expression of pain from her face. She was beginning to wonder if doing what she always had—repressing the difficult things: the scary, inexplicable, unnatural things—wasn’t precisely what had led her here, to this point in her mother’s shadow, a few headaches away from her own “brain aneurysm.” But it was all she knew.
Maybe her sister was right. Maybe the answers she needed— to put an end to the headaches, understand things seen that shouldn’t have been, lay their mother’s memory to rest once and for all—were already here waiting for them. Maybe with Eustace’s help, she could dig herself out of the hole she was in, get her life and her health back on track. She took in her sister’s diminished appearance. Eustace already knew her secret shame about the debts, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her about the headaches, to send her already compromised sister over the edge with worry. Those she would have to get to the bottom of on her own. Once she learned how to eliminate, or at least manage, them, then she would tell her sister thewholetruth.
She’d been raised to believe some secrets were best left buried, but that had gotten her here—at a dead end in her marriage, career, and finances with her life and health on the line. Like it or not, Bone Hill was the only way forward. Forbothof them.
“What else do I have to lose?” she told her sister, rising, steadier than she was before.
