Violet

28

“Furthermore.” Aunt Clara waved a finger in the air. The light from the window hit the diamonds in her rings, making them sparkle like tiny rainbows. “I will monitor all your letters, and there will be no more unsupervised phone calls. I will make sure that the phones are all locked up.” She sounded very happy with herself, because she didn’t know I could open all the locks now. “It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is!” She looked at us both as we sat on the bed with the empty porridge bowl between us. “What do you think the people in town will think if you go around spreading stories like that?” Aunt Clara started pacing the floor, waving her arms in the air.

“It’s not stories,” Lily protested. “It’s the truth. You killed those people!”

“Yes, but what good do you think the sheriff can do in this unfortunate situation? How can them finding Timmy’s bones possibly improve anything? Should they—God forbid—lock me up, you two will most definitely go into foster care and will probably be separated. Is that what you want?” She gave Lily a nasty look, and I could feel my sister shifting on the bed. I wanted to take her hand to give it a squeeze, but Aunt Clara made me think of a dangerous snake right then, and I worried that if I moved she would bite me.

“But you’re a murderer.” Lily looked a little sick. “You should be punished,” she added matter-of-factly. Mama would have been proud about the way she kept her head.

“Oh, you precious girls with your rights and wrongs.” Aunt Clara continued pacing. She was limping a little, I noticed. “What do you even know about life? Maybe things aren’t all black and white, and maybe—just maybe—the departed deserved all that was coming to them.”

“Then why are they so angry with you?” I asked, not to make her angrier, but because I wanted to know. “If they deserved it, they wouldn’t be so angry, would they?”

Aunt Clara threw her head back and gave a short, barking laugh. “No one likes having their lives taken away,” she said when she was done. “That doesn’t mean that they didn’t deserve it.” She paused to look at us again. “To survive in this world, you have to sometimes do things that are unpleasant,” she said. “Especially people like you, who have neither a father nor a mother. Who do you think will look out for your happiness but yourselves?”

“Is that what you did?” I asked her, and finally took Lily’s hand in mine. “Did you look out for yourself?”

“Yes, Violet, I did—and I am proud that I did! It made my life better and the world no poorer…A woman must be able to take care of herself,” she said. “Your grandmother Iris taught me that.”

“But what about the law?” Lily asked from beside me, squeezing my hand hard. “There are rules—and what about the ones who died? Maybe they, too, wanted to make their lives better.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t understand it. “Why should your life be better and theirs be over?”

“That’s just how the world works, Lily. You kill or you’ll be killed. Just think about the mice. No one cries over a mouse in a trap, and are human lives truly worth that much more, or is that just something we have made up? We go to war all the time and slaughter one another, and no one even bats an eye! Why should this be any different?”

“It just is,” Lily said, looking unhappy. “It’s the law! And I am sorry for those who die in wars, too—”

“And the mice,” I added. “We are also sorry about the mice.”

“But if you don’t kill the mice, they will overrun your house, eat your bread and shit in your sugar, make your bedding smell like piss, and even gnaw through the cords and set your house on fire. Is that truly what you want?” Aunt Clara bent down and stared us both in the eye—first me, then Lily.

“What does that have to do with the ghosts?” Lily asked. I could feel her fingers relax a little when Aunt Clara finally looked away.

“Everything!” She straightened up. “You are just too young to see it yet.”

“But it was Cecilia’s house first.” I couldn’t help but say it. “I think that to her, maybe you were the mouse—”

“Oh, keep your righteousness to yourself!” Aunt Clara suddenly bellowed. She towered above us, as tall as a house, with her hands placed at her sides. The diamonds in her ears made rainbows, too. “Why should that useless old hag have everything when I had nothing at all? People who are born to money are vermin.”

“What will you do to us?” Lily asked in a small voice. She and I had been born to money, so did that make us vermin to Aunt Clara? Very probably so, and I did feel a little like a mouse just then, in front of a very bad snake.

“It’s not about what I will do to you, but what you will do for me.” Her green eyes had found me again. “You will undo what you did. You will get rid of all the ghosts! I don’t know how and I don’t care, but you brought them here and you will remove them!”

I didn’t say anything to that, because I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at the flashing diamonds on Aunt Clara’s fingers, swallowing hard all the while.

“When those pesky critters are gone, we can discuss the future,” Aunt Clara continued, sounding calm all of a sudden. “Until then, you are at the top of my shit list, and you can both consider that a warning!” With that, she strode out the door, slammed it closed, and locked it, too—although that wasn’t really a problem anymore.

As soon as we heard her heels on the stairs, Lily turned to me and whispered, “Don’t put the ghosts back, Violet! If you do, there’s less reason for her to keep us around.” She looked really scared; her eyes were very big.

I let go of her hand and put both of mine in my lap. I didn’t know how to say what I needed to, and it was hard to look at Lily just then.

“I have been thinking of putting Mr. Woods back,” I said at last, in a voice that was much quieter than I had meant. “He is making a lot of noise and isn’t very nice, and I know how much he scares you. But, Lily.” I felt like a mouse again when I looked up at her. “I don’t know how to do it.”

Lily’s eyes widened. “Don’t you just…feel it?”

“No. Before, they asked me and then I knew, so maybe if one of them asked me to put them back again, I’d know how to do that, too. But no one has asked yet, so I don’t know.”

“What about the raven?” Lily looked at the empty window where Irpa was before. “Doesn’t she know something to help you?”

I shook my head. “She doesn’t tell me things with words, just pictures, and when I asked her about it, she just showed me a sword. I don’t know what that means.”

“Then you must never let Aunt Clara know that you don’t know how to put them back.” Lily’s face was very white. “As long as she thinks you can do it, we’re safe.”

I swallowed hard and nodded, because I felt that she was right, and maybe I would figure it out, too, if only one of them asked.