Page 8 of Hellebore

Isabel nods, agreeing, but purses her lips – the spitting image of our mother for the smallest moment. “I’m perfectly capable of finding my way. My sister and I grew up in these trees.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean anything by that. I would just hate to see something happen to a beautiful young woman such as yourself,” he says, smile twisting into something predatory and disconcerting.

“Thank you Cole. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out of any men who may wish to cause me harm,” she says, pushing past him.

He stands for a moment, his smile faltering before he continues along the path, adjusting the bow across his shoulder as he steps through the scrubby weeds.

“What was that about?” I ask, rushing back to Isa’s side.

“What an asshole,” she seethes, clutching the fabric of her dress as she draws heaving breaths.

“Are you okay?”

There’s something I’ve missed. A piece of the puzzle I can’t fit into place.

She shakes her body, her shoulders and fingertips, dispelling the anger as she draws a grounding breath.

“I– I just have to finish this,” she whispers, gripping the cookie tin to her chest and stepping forward again.

There’s something fierce about her now, the way she steadies her eyes ahead, knuckles whitening beneath her grip. The way she forges ahead without concern of keeping within my line of sight. As though I fell asleep one evening, and awoke to a whole new person. An adult version of the small sister I once knew.

The passing of her childhood into womanhood, gone in the blink of an eye.

No longer is the young Isabel standing ahead of me. Instead, now, she is grown. And she is fire.

T

here are fragments of time slipping away. Moments where it feels as though my mind has left my body and I’ve disappeared into an abyss of nothing.

Isa is crying again. Now home, looking through photo albums from our childhood. I sit beside her on the worn couch as she turns the pages, halting occasionally as she studies various still images of our family.

“Isa, are you okay?” I whisper, longing to brush the tears from her lashes.

She groans, shaking her head as she flips another stiff page, plastic crinkling beneath her fingers.

“I’m sorry Isa,” I say quietly, head downcast as my own tears begin. “I’m so sorry you must go through all this loss. I know how much you loved Francesca. It’s awful what happened. I hope the police can find who did it.”

Though, there’s a thread of knowing that tugs beneath my ribs. As though my body is urging me to remember, as though I already know.

I can’t recall the last time I saw her, the last six months still a puzzle I’m struggling to piece together. The edges won’t fit, each memory not slotting into the last. Part of me worries something inside me broke the day Francesca vanished. That when she left, leaving me alone, the part that she filled became a void of nothing that has begun to eat away at the rest of me.

Isabel sniffles a wet, chesty sob beside me again, exhaling slowly as she turns another page. Her eyes are puffy and bloodshot, cheeks mottled with red. She traces our faces behind the plastic film, a fresh tear slipping down her cheek.

I haven’t any idea how long we’ve been here. I don’t recall even visiting Francesca’s parents to deliver the cookies. Yet here I am, my sister once again sorrowful beside me, Christmas music filtering in from the kitchen where mother hums quietly as she bakes.

The plastic catches receding sunlight for a moment, sparking the memory of when that photograph occurred. She and I stand arm in arm, mother and father either side of us, in matching overalls between the tall sunflowers that grow in the property across the creek. Smiles break across our youthful faces; dirt smeared on our foreheads as we pull each other into a tight embrace.

“Remember the bees?” I ask, recalling Isabel being stung on her lip, her mouth swelling so rapidly she could barely speak to tell us what happened.

I rushed home, skipping over river stones, slipping through weeds in my haste to collect supplies to help. Tallow balm and ice cubes to reduce the sting and swelling. Father applied it as she sat on a mossy rock at the creek’s edge, his hands uncharacteristically gentle and caring. It took days for her lip to go back to normal, days of her sulking, days of me giggling at the absurdity of it. Eventually, she found the humour in it. But for a while, it was as though the world had come to an end.

“Fucking bees,” she laughs through a sob, tears trickling down her fair cheek as she caresses fathers face behind the plastic film.

The mournfulness of her is so consuming, it feels as though I may hardly know her at all. There is something to her that I don’t understand; that I can’t see through my fogged mind and the chill of my breath. As though darkness has begun to invade all the spaces that once held joy. A fog of anguish that reaches from her eyes to her fingertips, wrapping the small joyful child I once knew in a cloak of sadness she can’t seem to break free of.

Losing father took a toll on us all, the absence of him something that caused a rupture in the foundation of our lives. He was gone faster than time should allow – walking out the door, to collapse on the pebbled driveway before he reached the car. Dead before he hit the ground. God called him quickly, urgently. And what was once a home ruled by male presence, suddenly became something else entirely. While still rigid in its expectations,

in its structure, there was a newfound gentleness to it.