THE SUN ERUPTED through the window. Fritzi stroked the hair from my face and wiped my mouth with a cold, wet dishtowel. She sat behind me with my hair clutched in one hand as I threw up into the green beach pail. We had been like this all morning, on and off in spells, my knees buckling intermittently under the rush of nausea.
It had been my idea, the drinking. I found my father in his study, his head on his desk with a diaphanous sheen of sweat, and my mother in the den listening to a fizzling lullaby of radio static. The bottles in the cabinet had sung to me then, in a narrowed frequency like a dog whistle.
“Have you just been letting these rot?” Fritzi held up my limp arm and eyed its yellowing scabs. “These look infected, Bonnie.”
I lifted my head from the pail for the first time in roughly an hour. With fresher air in my nostrils, the acidic stench under my chin smacked me hard. “I’ll rinse them out tonight,” I said, groaning. I wanted to tell her to watch that early morning mood of hers, but I heard my own thought in Connie’s voice, and Fritzi would have, too.
“My foot, you will. We’ll wash them now.” She started to rise and I grabbed her arm.
“Please . . .” I lay my cheek against the pail’s hard plastic rim. “Please don’t leave.”
Fritzi rubbed her eyes. “Can you handle water yet?”
I started coughing again in dry, burning heaves. She sat back down, evidently deciding not to fill me up with more liquid. I sat up a little, holding the pail’s rim, and glanced at her leaning over my shoulder. Her hair was a dark, sticky matte. She smelled sweaty and citric, but beneath it was the unalterable and deeply comforting fragrance of her skin.
Was this how Daddy felt each morning? He had been drinking steadily since Connie disappeared. I could almost understand never wanting to drink again; my forehead was on fire, and my thoughts were connecting only loosely, drooping and breaking like strings of saliva. But during the drinking, it had offered an almost magical respite from the guilt that filled every hour, every minute. For weeks I had slept in broken fits, time slotted by the shifting hours on the clock until viscid daylight milked in through the blinds with a skidding sense of continuation — like the days never ended, only merged, piling up on one another.
But last night I had been out of my mind, or body, like a conscious sleepwalker, shooting up from bed in confused conviction that the backdoor in the kitchen needed, with direst urgency, to remain unlocked. It was so straightforward it stunned me — how clear, how simple and obvious, that all we needed to do to find Connie was let her back in the way she had left. As if the door being locked was the culprit. I kept rolling off the mattress and stumbling down the hall and through the house to make sure that nobody had, for whatever reason, gone and locked it up again.
It did not occur to me that keeping the door unlocked, after what had been learned in the orange grove, was just about the most dangerous thing I could do.
Fritzi and I had arrived home from River Road the previous day with a sense of purpose. We had mapped out what to do, how exactly we would stalk Dorian Fields, the posts from which to watch him, to document his Monday, his Tuesday, his every waking moment, but the bone tremors and the adrenaline drain and a gaping spinning sleeplessness took over, and Fritzi was clamping a bottle to her mouth, handing it to me, purple spittle running down her chin, and all that I remember beyond that was a sour fruity taste and a seductive burn in my throat.
I pushed away the green pail and climbed onto Fritzi’s bed, where she now lay with her long arms wrapped around herself and her face rolled into the pillow. She began to cry and I sat there staring without any sense in my head. Fritzi got snappy, she got drunk — she did not cry.
“What did they do to her?” Her voice was hoarse and she had to collect herself to breathe it smooth again. “They might have been doing it for years and we didn’t help her.”
I leaned back against the headboard. My heart sagged at how Fritzi was blaming herself, when she was not the one at fault. The night before, I almost told her how I had failed our sister, but the shame was too huge, I could not do it. “Maybe she didn’t want us to know,” I said.
“How could she not want us to know?” Fritzi rolled onto her back and looked up at me. “I’d have fixed it for her, I’d have taken care of it.”
“She might have been ashamed,” I said. “It took me a long time to tell you about that boy who grabbed up my skirt.”
Fritzi ran her wet nose up her arm.
“Could’ve been scared,” I said. “If people thought she was crazy, she’d be sent back to that hospital. You know Mama.”
“You don’t think Mama would’ve believed her?”
“I think Mama would have,” I said. “Can’t say what Connie thought.”
Fritzi struggled to her feet. She paced from one end of the room to the other, shifting through mild grey shadows and warm slants of light, wrestling her hands together. She stopped in the centre of the floor and pulled a cigarette from her housecoat pocket. After lighting it, she went suddenly still, and a frenetic gloom collected around her.
“Just spit it,” I finally said. “You’re hiding something. You’ve been hiding something for weeks.”
She stared at me for what felt a long time before handing me her cigarette. “Hold this,” she said, then brushed my hair over my shoulder, away from the flame. “Hold your arm out, like this. Don’t set yourself on fire.”
She whipped the curtains shut and the relief of darkness fell over the room.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just shut up and give me a second.” She walked to the narrow alley between her bed and my and Connie’s bunk, and crouched on the floor, her hideous housecoat billowing in the breezy dark. The faint light through the thick red curtains almost glowed, and Fritzi gave off an ultraviolet radiance, like a spectral smudge in the background of a photograph. She felt along the baseboard of the wall.
“Come here,” she said.
I slumped onto my knees. She had two fingers on either side of a chunk of baseboard, and was using her nails to jostle it free from the wall.
“I read Connie’s journal,” she said. “Not when she thought I did. After she disappeared.” Gradually, she slid out the small wooden plank to reveal a musty hole in the wall. “She didn’t take it with her.”
My nose pinched from the dank wood as I peered inside.
“I caught her stashing it one night,” Fritzi said. “I just thought she was writing love notes, something embarrassing.”
At the back of the shallow pit rested a cracked, burgundy travel journal with a broken clasp. I reached for it, but Fritzi grabbed it first and held it beyond my reach.
“You kept this from me,” I said. “You lied.”
“I’ve been hiding it for her.”
“Let me see it.”
“I thought she ran away because I read it. She’d never come back if everybody else did, too.” Fritzi lowered the journal to her chest, still holding it with both hands.
Small, tremulous waves licked inside my stomach.
“You goin’ to be sick?” Fritzi asked. When I shook my head that I was fine enough, she gave me the journal and sank beside me on the floor. “I don’t want you to read it.”
I nudged her hand off my shoulder and opened the cover. At first I did not know what I was looking at. Violent scratches of ink covered the pages, the pen scraped so hard at times that it tore through the paper. Further along the pages filled with words, mostly crossed out and made impossible to read. Then hundreds of red and white swirls, like peppermints. Dozens of tiny ones crammed into clusters and giant ones spiralling across the page.
I turned the pages so quickly that I nearly ripped them out. “What is this? I don’t understand. What was she doing this for?” A gurgly, coppery sting rose and receded up my neck. My stomach muscles clenched, and blood drained from my legs until they shook. An airy nausea filled my head and I set my hand on Fritzi’s knee to steady myself. “I don’t understand,” I kept saying. “I don’t understand, what’s this supposed to be?”
“Just keep looking,” Fritzi said.
Drawings began appearing in the scratches, one after another. A cowering girl in jagged charcoal, holding her head in her hands with hair made of snakes. Or frozen, drawn in blue, her small form shivering and her skin crawling with leeches, until a growing swell of darkness consumed her, reshaping her face into cracks like a shattered doll, and from the pages emerged a foul, fanged creature, with writhing features and a red-penned mane. I touched the inky lines of red hair. I moved to turn the page, but the sickness flew up into my mouth and poured sizzling hot onto the floor. I threw the journal out of the way just as my stomach muscles squeezed and emptied.
Fritzi’s voice was faint beyond the wind in my skull. “I’ve sat outside his house a dozen times, waiting to see her move around in the windows.” She ran her sleeve against my chin, and after a long, tightened silence, she said almost gently: “I’m going to open his throat, Bonnie, you’ll see.”