“Laura-Ann misses her sister, so she’s going to come visit. You don’t mind sleeping on the sofa for a bit?”
All the while the neighbours and my teachers and the people at church all went on about how good my parents were to take care of them.
And all the while I agreed, yes, it was good to share. It’s good to share and be kind and be thoughtful.
But I also started pulling out my hair and biting the skin off my lips.
One day at school, I was in the same classroom as the older girl, Lucy. Her teacher was off sick, so we had to share a class. I pulled the chair out from under her as she went to sit down. From the head teacher’s office, I watched through the window as my father arrived. He checked on Lucy first out in the hallway. He got down on her level and wiped away her tears and gave her a hug. Then he silently signed me out at the secretary’s office and drove me home without a word. Lucy came over the next day for me to apologise. I think I did, though I don’t remember doing it. I remember imagining I’d left my body and was flying up into a grey sky over the cliffs, a yellow kite, brilliant and free.
I noticed now that the kite string was red. A spool of red string. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the thread I’d been using to make the knots. Even the plastic it was wound about was yellow. The same as the kite.
“Fuck’s sake,” I said to myself.
“Such language, Tammy.” My father tutted. “Don’t listen to her, girls. You’d never use language like that, would you?”
The Grayson girls shook their heads sweetly, like two fucking adorable cherubs. I bit my tongue.
“See how well they share?” my father said to me. “You really should have been better to them. You’ve no idea how hard it’s been for them.”
Okay, tongue-biting over.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Divorce is tough on kids. But here’s the thing”—that high whining buzz rang in my ears again—“they still had a fucking dad, Dad!”
All three of them looked up at me.
“Their father didn’t die. He didn’t leave them. Fuck, he didn’t even leave the town. He moved two streets over. I saw him pick them up from school. They saw him every weekend. Or the weekends when they weren’t at our house. You treated them like they were fucking orphans, when they had better shit than I did! But still, every birthday and Christmas and graduation you were there with flowers and photos. When they fucked up, you came running to dust them off. They’re in their thirties now and you still run after them like they can’t even wipe their own arses. And everyone thinks you’re a fucking saint.”
I shook as every photo of every smiling family dinner my father had attended with them came flying through the mental social media feed of my mind.
“When she”—I pointed at Laura-Ann, the smallest girl—“graduated from her nail course, you got her a car.”
“She needed it. For her new business,” my father said.
“When she”—I pointed at Lucy—“got pregnant you moved her into the house.”
“She needed support. For the baby.”
I sniffed and nodded. “Yeah, I get it. But when I graduated from uni, I just got a lecture on finding a job. And when I needed a place to stay, because the finding-a-job bit wasn’t going so great, I had nowhere to go because you’d moved a girl with her own goddamn family to worry about her into my old room.”
“They’d had a hard start in life. The divorce—”
“Then who was there for me when you got fucking divorced?”
The wind ripped through the space between us, a howl. I looked over my shoulder, but I already knew the hillside behind me would be empty. My mother was gone. She moved down south and remarried into a large family. I’d visited a few times, but I’d never quite found my footing amongst her new stepchildren, all of them so boisterous and busy. She never said anything, I’ll give her that, but it soon became clear that things were just easier for her if I didn’t visit. Though she did express surprise at how I failed to meld into her new family. After all, it had been like I’d had two stepsisters long before my parents ever split. I turned back to my father and the Graysons. The two girls stared at me innocently, hand in hand. On top of everything else I’d envied about them, through it all, they’d always had each other.
My father nodded and sighed.
“I suppose you’re old enough now to know the truth.”
CHAPTER 51
He stepped away from the girls. They looked up at him, confused. I braced myself.
This can’t tell me anything I don’t already know, I thought. It can’t tell me things I don’t know.
But somehow that didn’t bring me any comfort. There were so many things I already suspected, feared. What was left to invent?
My father walked over to me, then looked back over at the two girls.
