Murphy sat on the parlor sofa, hands formed into fists, and counted her protruding knuckles one by one.
One, two, three.
These were real.
Four, five, six.
Flesh and blood.
Seven, eight, nine.
Smaller, maybe, than other knuckles, but visible to her.
Ten.
Yes, these were real, she’d confirmed.
So why was Murphy a ghost to her sisters?
Was she such a good magician-in-training that she’d managed to pull off an invisibility trick, without even trying?
Murphy, shut up.
Murph, for the love of God, not now.
Their words looped inside her ears, the final in a long line of dismissals. In Emmet no one asked how the day had gone, or how school had been. No one asked Murphy’s favorites, or dislikes, or whether life was easy or hard. It hadn’t always been that way, though.
She treasured the old days of Cayenne Castle, the makeshift blanket fort, and her role as Prince Pepper. There were gut laughs then, and singing, and made-up stories. She’d been part of a shimmering kingdom.
Then the Dark Ages had come—slammed doors, eye rolls at her jokes. Murphy hadn’t understood why. Is that what it meant to grow up? One moment her sisters hadn’t been that different from her. Then they got to high school, and Claire started saying, “You’re too little to get it,” and Eileen stopped saying things, period.
They no longer shared a castle.
They no longer shared anything.
The others had simply forgotten Murphy existed. They’d left her to fade, fade, and one day disappear.
The way she’d left Siegfried to starve, starve, and die.
That was the trouble: Murphy was guilty too. She was more restless than ever, and, picking up the Tupperware coffin resting on her knees, she rose and crossed to the parlor sideboard. There she found The Three Musketeers. Sniffling, she opened the cover, flipping through its pages, wondering why it couldn’t be like this with her sisters: One for all, and all for one.
As she flipped, a scrap of paper loosened and fell out, fluttering to her feet. Frowning, Murphy set the book aside and picked up the scrap. It was an ad for carpet cleaning, shorn in half.
“Huh?” Murphy said.
Then, turning the scrap over, she found the true clipping: an obituary.
For John Enright.
Dad.
Murphy stared through bleary eyes at the text, frowning.
“What,” she said, because what she was reading didn’t make sense.
Was she delirious? Maybe. From the crying and lack of sleep. Or maybe this house was messing with her head. She set down the paper, rubbing away tears and lifting her eyes to the window.
Wind had kicked up over the ocean, leaning into the house, making slow work of warping its floorboards and loosening its nails. This murderous place was decaying with Murphy inside. Decay—she could smell it, there was no doubt. A horrendous stench was leaking from Siegfried’s coffin, akin to a pizza gone rancid.
“I’m sorry, Siegfried,” she said through tears. “I’m going to make it right.”
Because, at last, Murphy knew what to do.
The sun had gone down hours ago, and neither of her sisters had checked on her. From her place on the couch, huddled in blankets, pretending to be asleep, Murphy had watched Eileen slam open the front door and tear through the parlor, heading up the grand staircase.
She hadn’t seen Claire at all.
There was a part of Murphy—a wormy, wriggling part—that wanted to be smug. If her sisters chose to shout her down and exclude her, they deserved to be miserably mad at each other, too. Another part of Murphy—the better, bigger part—was only sad.
Because she remembered Cayenne Castle.
Even though those royal days were distant, she’d seen sparks of the sisters they’d been before, when they’d huddled by the fire, remembering the beach trip. Now that the storm was over, her sisters had instantly scattered, and they’d left her behind. Murphy, the spare tire. The baggage. The invisible one.
The way it had been in Emmet. Same story, different house.
The house on Laramie was silent. The parlor fire offered fewer crackles, clinging to the remaining splinters of wood, dying out. Murphy made work of counting her knuckles again, reminding herself she was real, no matter how easily her sisters passed her by.
Operation Memory Making had failed. But in the growing darkness Murphy made a new plan.
She’d known what to do since the moment she’d seen the sea from the Caravan’s back seat. She’d allowed herself to be distracted by a beachside mansion and whispers of murder. She’d failed Siegfried this long, but the failing ended tonight.
Murphy rose from the couch, crossing to the parlor’s double doors. She tucked Siegfried’s coffin into her puffer coat and, with one steeling breath, stepped outside into the wind. Her coat hood was pushed back almost instantly, forcing Murphy to tighten the toggles. After the false start she set out again across the wraparound porch, clomping down its steps into the front yard and then making her way down the steep, slick road, toward sea level. Down she went, and down farther still. With care, she stepped over a gaping pothole, reaching the base of the road. She followed the street to the beach, walking past a worn wooden fence until her feet were sinking into loose, damp sand.
The sky was pockmarked by clouds, which occasionally parted to reveal a half moon. The ocean spread before Murphy—an eternal vastness, hemmed in by a pushing and pulling tide. The wind pressed into her, dowsing her face in salty cold. In the distance, a dog barked in vicious tenor snips.
“Welp,” Murphy said. “Ominous as heck.”
She didn’t know who she was talking to—Siegfried, maybe, or herself. She only knew she needed to talk, to keep her heart beating and her feet moving. If she could make this funny, she’d be all right.
Murphy forged through sand, sinking ankle-deep with each step. Uggs definitely weren’t meant to be worn on the beach, but Murphy was through with excuses for why it wasn’t time to pay Siegfried his due.
At last she came to the water’s edge. The tide reached for her, hungry, and water stained the tips of her sheepskin boots. She removed Siegfried’s coffin from her coat, holding it reverently in both hands. She didn’t peek into the Tupperware for one last good-bye. The smell would be too bad and, anyway, that wasn’t Siegfried in there, just shell and decomposing goop.
Her breath plumed out, and she eulogized: “This is it, my dude. The final resting place. You were a good turtle and never hurt anyone. Rest easy in the knowledge that you were the perfect pet. It’s not your fault you had a sucky owner.”
Murphy let guilt pour over her, like frigid water. She let herself feel it, deep down in her pores. She felt it for a full minute—breathing in, breathing out.
Then, it was time.
“Don’t mess it up, Murph,” she whispered, and with all her strength, she swung the plastic coffin back, then released it in a powerful arc, hurling Siegfried A. Roy into the sea.
Maybe he would wash up on the shore; Murphy wasn’t clear, exactly, on how the physics worked. And sure, she knew Siegfried was a freshwater pet, not a sea turtle. In this moment, though, she felt she was doing him justice, returning him to the water, a place he belonged. For once, in his death, she was doing something right, and the weight of his shell and decaying body, wrapped in a candy cane napkin, was no longer suffocating her.
Murphy’s feet were cold and her bare hands colder as she surveyed Siegfried’s watery grave.
She wondered what time it was. If it was past midnight.
A Christmas burial. What a nice and terrible thing.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry you were invisible, and I forgot.”
There was nothing else to say.
The world was quiet and dark, and Murphy’s thoughts were loud—so loud, she felt her head might explode. Her legs felt too weak to stand. She sat right there on the sand, legs crisscrossed, breathing in deep, the cold stinging her lungs. Shutting her eyes, she laid back in the sand and listened to the drudging crash of waves.
She pressed her fingers into the sand, one at a time:
One, two, three.
Four, five, six.
Seven, eight, nine …