The asparagus has a sour bite that clashes with the soggy texture, but I swallow it down. This and worse will be our future over the winter months if we have nothing fresh coming by boat. Pickled vegetables and preserved fish. I take a bite of the bread roll and nearly chip a tooth. I dip the edge of the roll in the small butter puddle beside the fish skin.
She’s punishing you.Chamomile leans across the kitchen counter thatseparates her from our small table.For nothing. You didn’t ask to be here.
I ignore her. The roll is tolerable once soaked through.
She wants you here for the rest of her life,Chamomile continues. I’ve never seen her so agitated. Her red dress shines in the firelight, the folds swimming with the flames’ movement like ribbons. Like snakes.Do you want to waste your life, the nothing sister of a dangerous lighthouse keeper?
Elle closes her eyes to enjoy the fish, drawing circles in the sauce with a forkful. I meet Chamomile’s stare and shake my head.
Elle is selfish. Not you.
“We should reconsider the winter plan,” I blurt out. My words stumble over one another like crabs in a bucket. “I can disguise myself. We’re safer together.”
It’s also harder to keep secrets as big as our parents’ death if I accompany her.
Elle takes her time chewing her last bite of fish. Her gaze stays steady while her temples bulge in time to each mouthful.Owl’s eyes,my mother called them. I used to sneak into Elle’s room and try on her long, dark dresses. Too large for me with our six-year difference. I’d look in her mirror, a pale ghost of my sister, keeping my eyes open until they watered.
“No,” she says, so final. No room for discussion. “Here is safe. Winter will pause any investigation. Better not to chance it.”
Investigation? Into what? Why inconvenience us so much for one man’s notice? Everything with Elle is strategy, not sense.
“And the wages? They’re still waiting at the society.”
Elle looks up at me. “I’ll take care of it.”
Her eyes are cold, set in a way they never used to be. There’s a piece in Elle that’s been missing since our escape. A part of her she hides from me.
I can’t untangle the missing from the new head-on, but I also can’t ignore it. Her care is a fence meant to protect me, but the pickets aregrowing higher every day.
You might as well be dead here.Chamomile’s words echo, a chorus of discord.She’s killed your future. Any chance at happiness.
Her goading sparks the grief into something darker.
“Perhaps I’ll go alone.” My voice shakes. “You love your solitude, your life away from the world. Should that not include me anymore?”
A viper’s strike of regret turns my blood cold. I can’t catch the words out of her ears.
Elle stands in a rush, throwing down her fork and bumping the table. “How dare you,” she seethes. “This is foryou. Not me.”
“Yes, I’m sure you enjoy nothing in the process,” I spit back, standing myself. The energy between us crackles once again. “This life suits you, not me. I didn’t ask you to bring me to a suffocating spit of land away from everything! Everyone! We missed our own parents’ funeral!”
“And our own!” she snaps back. “By Thomas’s hand or the gas. Where else would you have gone to escape him? Gallivanting around town, buying bonnets and flowers like a schoolgirl?”
I want to tear her hair out. Scream in her face. Hurt her so she knows what it’s like to be without control. And I know she feels the same.
“There’s something in you, Mary Eleanor. Something vile.” Each word is a spit of venom. “You kept me in the dark. Gave me empty hope. Don’t lie.”
It feels good to say aloud. I lost myself to melancholy. I forgot how the churning waters of self-righteousness can bring life back into me.
Elle’s eyes bulge. She curls her fingers inward. A portrait of restraint.
“All of this,” she says, each word a brick in the wall she’s always building and tearing down between us, “I’ve done for you.”
No matter how carefully Elle has hidden us from the world, she can’t hide herself. She’s not miserable on this island. She doesn’t miss home, or dancing, or good food and better gossip. Only one of us is sufferingwhile the other plays make-believe keeper.
If our parents are dead, why stay here? I could return, couldn’t I?
Thomas haunted our world, but it was our parents who kept him there. They’d use him as a threat to keep Elle in line.Mr. Seymour would not approve of that, they’d say at the mildest inconvenience.Elle, my dearest, you will not act thus when Mr. Seymour arrives.
