I’ve come here so many times I know Thomas’s house just as well as my own. Benedict only agreed to talk about it once. He said his brother was just eighteen when he said he wanted to live on his own, in a house all his own, so he could live by his own rules. He wanted to settle in the original Mayer house, a run-down shack set back a bit from the lake. It was a one-room log cabin like in those picture books about the American frontier—a real childhood dream, I suppose. The roof was caved in, probably from so much snow, but the walls were still standing.
His father wasn’t happy, because it was a dangerous spot, too close to the crevasses cutting through the rocks east of the lake. It wasn’t for nothing that his forebears had chosen to build their second house in a safer location. But Magnus did respect his son’s decision and helped him to build an add-on so he could have an actual bedroom.
His parents were sure he wanted to start a family. I realized it wasn’t to have kids that he’d moved there, but I never said as much to Benedict.
Daddy taught me many years ago never to be the bearer of bad news, you could get your head cut off that way. Sometimes you don’t even need to say a word. I can still see the look on Mommy’s face when she came home, with the police cars in the street, the officers coming and going and the one talking to me very nicely with a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes as she saw my head, as she saw Daddy sitting on the couch, sobbing, and her eyes when she looked through the French door and saw they’d set a body on the stretcher, such a small body in a big bag with a zipper that had been yanked shut so fast we could almost hear it inside. Zipped all the way up because she didn’t need to breathe anymore. Right then, I thought Mommy wouldn’t ever breathe again, that all the blood was gone from her body. The one thing every parent’s most scared of had happened to her. She let out a long, wild scream and that scream is still the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.
I stayed for the autopsy results, for the police visits, for all the friends, neighbors, acquaintances, for the funeral, but also for the long stretches without anyone, when the grief was so heavy that my parents couldn’t even be together in the same room anymore. I stayed when Daddy couldn’t bear her look anymore, when the two of us were alone, and when she was saying every day that it was my fault, that I should have been watching my sister, that I’d broken my promise. I stayed when she started taking more Valium, Xanax, alcohol to wash them down, and then, when that wasn’t enough anymore, morphine she’d stolen from the clinic, until they realized how much medicine was missing and fired her, saying that they could understand her pain and they sympathized, they really did, but that they couldn’t look the other way.
Look the other way. Not see. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’d love to do that. But I stayed for everything, the fall from grace, the downfall, down to the moment I had to say goodbye to the woman I knew, as I’d known her, because I didn’t recognize what was there anymore. In her more lucid moments, she said that she wanted me to go, just seeing me was too much. I wasn’t a good girl, someone had gotten things mixed up, made a mistake by leaving me alive and not Cassandra.
I left, because that was what she wanted. I was eighteen. I dropped out, I didn’t have a dollar to my name. I sold what I still had of my girlhood—my jewelry, even the golden necklace I’d gotten for my fifteenth birthday—and I bought a bus ticket to the middle of nowhere. I had my mind made up to erase every trace of Elizabeth Morgensen, the girl who didn’t save her sister, and I became Bess, just Bess. And maybe even that’s still too much.