TWENTY-ONE

I didn’t ignore what Sarah Ciorelli told me about Cate and those girls. Not at all. After hearing about the weird things my sister had done, I’d stormed right home. I had to know if Sarah was telling the truth. Not just about the drugs and random acts of cultural appropriation. But about the way she made the girls listen to her. About her power.

I tore Cate’s room apart. She was bad at hiding things.

Or else she didn’t care if they were found.

In the bottom of her closet I found a tin of organic breath mints, rotted shut with organic mold, and a half-empty bottle of rum. Bacardi something. I unscrewed the top, smelled it, and made a face. Awful. In the back of her desk drawer she had a bag of weed and two pipes. One was metal, but the other was made of glass, all swirly with purples and blues, like a bruise that lingers. I found a second bag wedged in the drawer, too. But this one was filled with pills and a glossy piece of magazine paper folded tight with care like origami art. Inside was a yellowish-white powder.

I folded the paper right back up.

Next, I crept into her bathroom, a place I hated with its frightening contents like jumbo-sized tampons, hair removal strips, and drip-drying undergarments. Cate’s medicine cabinet was lined with orange prescription containers, the way mine used to be. But instead of Valium and Ativan, she had pills with names I didn’t recognize. Topamax. Seroquel. Something that was probably her birth control pills, only I couldn’t verify this because I hastily put it back after seeing the words menstrual cycle written on the label. The rest I tried jamming into my pockets, but my hands were all slick with sweat and one of the containers slipped from my grasp. It rolled across the floor and under the linen closet.

“Crap,” I muttered. I settled everything else on the floor and lay on my stomach to reach around for it. My shirt sort of pulled up so that my bare skin rubbed against the ceramic tiles, picking up dirt and stray hairs like a lint roller. Finally my fingers closed around the pills. And then something else—an envelope, a large one, was taped to the bottom of the hand-painted armoire.

I pulled them both out and sat up. The envelope was faded, lined with creases and water stains. Then my heart stopped.

It had the words Amy Nevin written on the front.

Our mother. My mother.

I fumbled with the brass clasp and shook the contents into my lap. There wasn’t much. Some papers and a single faded photograph.

I inspected the papers first. The first two were photocopies of birth certificates: Cate’s and mine. I’d never seen them. I smoothed them in my lap, running my fingers along my name, my stats:

James Ellis Nevin.

6 lbs., 3 oz.

19.5 inches.

Mother: Amy Catherine Nevin.

Father: Unknown.

Cate’s was similar, except she was bigger, more impressive:

Catherine Grace Nevin.

7 lbs., 6 oz.

20 inches.

I looked at the third photocopied document.

It was a copy of our mother’s death certificate:

Deceased: Amy Catherine Nevin.

Date of birth: 6/22/1978.

Date of death: 11/5/2002.

Cause of death: blood loss due to accidental discharge of a firearm.

I felt queasy. And hot. All at once. My mother had been murdered. That’s what I’d always been told, so what was “accidental discharge of a firearm” doing on her death certificate? I plucked up the tiny photograph that had been in the envelope. I held it before my eyes.

A moan escaped my lips. It was a photo of two children. A girl and a boy at a park. The girl looked maybe six or seven, with twin black braids that curled out like adders and a winning smile. She was leaping in the air when the picture was snapped, back arched, hands above her head. The boy standing to her left was lesser in every way—smaller, fairer, paler. He had a blue T-shirt on and no jacket and brown cords so short his calves showed. He was scowling and he looked miserable. Or pissed. Both, really.

I swallowed hard. Okay, I looked miserable and pissed. Because I knew who these children were before I even turned the photo over and saw the words handwritten on the back in the prettiest cursive I’d ever seen.

My owl and my pussycat—Catie and Jim, Thanksgiving 2001

Oh, oh, oh. I lost it then. I couldn’t help it. I put my head against my knees, curled up like a pill bug, and wept. For this sorrowful scrap of fate I’d been born into. For my mom whom I’d barely known, but who might’ve died in some horrible way I no longer understood.

But most of all, for my sister who was doing God knows what and heading down a similar path of self-destruction.