Sisters of Misery (3 page)

THE WHEEL-TIME

O
ver the next few weeks, Rebecca and Cordelia settled into life in Hawthorne. Abigail kept a sullen distance, but Tess practically floated around the house, happy to have her house brimming with life once again.

Despite Maddie’s attempts at conversation, Cordelia remained aloof, making it clear she didn’t want any new friends. In sharp contrast, Rebecca was open and warm. It was hard not to love her—with her musical voice and infectious optimism, she seemed to make everything a little bit brighter. She threw herself into work right away, making plans to open a New Age flower shop and setting the town all abuzz.

“Aren’t you excited about the store?” Maddie asked her cousin one hot, muggy morning as they sat across from each other at the breakfast table. Tess was humming as she prepared eggs, toast, and coffee for them.

Cordelia gave her a withering look and buried her head in the
New York Times
, obviously more interested in what was going on in the rest of the world than anything happening in Hawthorne.

“Of course she’s excited,” Rebecca said brightly as she whisked through the room, planting a kiss on all of their cheeks, grabbing a slice of toast and part of Cordelia’s paper. “She just doesn’t know it yet. It’s just the beginning, girls, just the beginning.” She rifled through the stack of mail on the table. Cordelia and Maddie looked at each other, and they both fought back smiles, rolling their eyes. At least they could both agree on Rebecca’s eccentricity.

“Oh my God! It’s here!!” Rebecca yelled. She held a piece of yellow paper aloft like it was an award, shaking it so hard that the beaded bracelets that crowded her lithe arm rattled like a maraca. “It’s official!”

The paperwork and lease for the store had arrived. It was really happening. Despite Abigail’s insistence that this would only be a temporary stopover for her sister, that she never stayed in one place for too long, this new development proved otherwise. Rebecca embraced each one of them, whooping with delight. “Look out Hawthorne, the LeClaire girls are here to stay!” she called out with a hearty laugh.

Everyone stopped talking abruptly when a loud crash sounded from the next room. Maddie ran into the living room to find her mother furiously cleaning up shards of broken glass from a crystal bowl that had fallen from the mantle. Maddie wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate action on Abigail’s part or an accident from the shock that the inevitable was happening, something that Abigail didn’t want to accept: Rebecca and Cordelia weren’t going anywhere.

Later that week, Maddie swung through the heavy leaded-glass door of the store, aptly named Rebecca’s Closet, and was met enthusiastically by Rebecca, who was blaring Fleet-wood Mac’s “Rhiannon” from an old tape deck. They had already done an overwhelming amount of work on the store. The floors and woodwork gleamed. Every inch was scrubbed. The walls were freshly painted white with the tiniest hint of lavender, giving it an airy feel.

“Well, aren’t you a doll for helping us!” she exclaimed, gathering her niece tightly into her arms for a hug. Maddie was overwhelmed by her scent—an exotic, musky mixture of thick perfume and floral oils. It was the sweet smell that flowers exude right before they die. It was a welcome change for Maddie, who was accustomed only to the faint whiff of Chanel No. 5 perfume that her mother had dotted behind her ears and wrists every day for as long as she could remember.

Maddie shrugged. “It’s no problem, Aunt Rebecca.”

“No, don’t call me that. Too formal. Just Rebecca,” she said, brushing her long, red hair away from her wide, luminous face. Maddie suddenly understood why people mistook Rebecca and Cordelia for sisters. Rebecca’s youthful, vivacious spirit made her seem much younger than Abigail, despite the fact that Rebecca was the older sister. Her beauty was startling and almost unreal. She was movie star beautiful. Maddie had never known anyone in real life who had such ethereal looks. And even without a stitch of makeup, she had a radiant glow. It made Maddie feel special, yet slightly uncomfortable, to be in her presence. “I’m surprised that my sister is even letting you help us.”

“She suggested it actually,” Maddie offered weakly, blushing at the awkwardness of their living situation.

“Hmmm…” Rebecca considered that for a moment; something appeared to be nagging at her. “That’s surprising.”

Rebecca settled back down onto the worn plank floors, tucking her hair behind her ears as she unpacked a crate. She unwrapped a series of glass bottles, apothecary jars, and vases and then nodded in the direction of the back room.

“Why don’t you go help Cordelia in the back while I get some work done out here? That way you two can start getting better acquainted,” she suggested. Maddie nodded glumly and headed toward the stock room.

“I have a feeling you two will get along famously,” Rebecca offered in parting. Maddie tried to manage a weak smile for Rebecca’s sake before continuing into the back room. While she could understand why Rebecca was encouraging a friendship between them, it just wasn’t coming very easily, at least not from Maddie’s perspective.

Making her way past all of the boxes stacked precariously in the back room, Maddie heard a muffled sound coming from behind a crate. Cordelia was crouched on the floor with her legs curled underneath her, holding a frame on her lap. Her hair, long and red as a stage curtain, shielded her face as tears dropped onto the glass of the frame. She rocked back and forth, crying softly.

“Are you okay?” Maddie whispered hesitantly.

Cordelia jumped slightly, her body stiffening, and wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her peasant blouse. She stood up, dusted herself off. Her lashes were beaded with tears, but her blank stare lacked emotion.

“Fine,” she said, shifting her gaze away from Maddie, unwilling to make even the slightest eye contact.

“Who’s that?” Maddie asked, motioning to the frame.

“My dad. He’s dead,” she said quickly, definitively.

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are
you
sorry? You didn’t even know him or anything,” she said and quickly turned away and busied herself with unpacking a box.

“Is that why you moved back to Hawthorne?” Maddie asked to make conversation.

Cordelia looked at her dead-on, reluctant to let her guard down.

“My mom couldn’t live in that house after he died. Plus, we couldn’t even afford to stay there. All the money went into treatments.”

“Treatments?” Maddie asked. “How did he, um…pass away?”

“The Big C.”

“Cancer?”

Cordelia continued unpacking the box in front of her as if the question was rhetorical.

“So that’s why you’re here?”

“Bingo.”

A long silence stretched between them. Cordelia was obviously not going to elaborate. Maddie had been dismissed. But she wasn’t going to let Cordelia off that easily. If they had to live together, at least they would be friends. She settled onto the floor next to her cousin and started unpacking another box.

“I lost my dad to the Big M-S,” Maddie offered.

Cordelia waited for a moment and then looked at her quizzically.

“Multiple Sclerosis?”

“No, Mindy Sherman, the cocktail waitress he ran off with,” Maddie deadpanned.

A smile slowly spread across Cordelia’s face. She nodded at a box, and they both went to work unpacking. They weren’t exactly
best
friends by the end of that particular day, but it was definitely a start.

Later that evening, after Rebecca had passed out from sheer exhaustion from all of the work they had done on the shop and Abigail retired to her room for her nightly reading, Maddie heard a soft knock on her door. Cordelia was standing there in a long, white nightgown.

“Tess wants to talk to us,” she said hesitantly. Despite their bonding earlier that day, Cordelia didn’t seem like she was one hundred percent sold on their new friendship. The two had barely spoken at dinnertime, and Cordelia had promptly buried herself in a book the minute she was excused from the table. It was as if the hours of telling stories and laughter in the store that afternoon never happened. She was, as Tess was fond of saying, a tough nut to crack.

Maddie hopped off the bed and silently followed Cordelia. Her grandmother’s room overlooked the ocean, and Tess often spent her evenings gazing wistfully out to sea. Maddie imagined that was how Tess had looked on the night so many years ago that she discovered her husband, Jack Martin, was lost at sea.

Tess beamed at her granddaughters and patted the bed, motioning for them to join her. Maddie allowed herself to be enveloped in the cozy darkness of the room, relishing the comfort of the old mattress piled high with quilts. She listened to the sounds of the summer night blow in through the open window. Kids were heading down to the beach. Maddie couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their voices bounced and echoed through the room. Every now and then, a girl would yelp and then start laughing—carefree, yet haunting in the darkness.

“You know that you girls are special, don’t you?” Tess asked once the girls were settled. Cordelia and Maddie looked at each other, trying not to giggle at Tess’s serious tone as their grandmother continued. “The women in our family possess a gift, a sort of extrasensory perception that allows us to know things that cannot be explained.” Maddie smirked, used to Tess’s stories about “special powers and gifts,” but Cordelia leaned forward, fascinated.

Maddie had heard this before, of course. Every time Tess spoke of the “family gift,” Abigail laughed it off, saying that it was one of Tess’s many eccentricities, the result of having too much time on her hands. Maddie wondered if the gene had been passed along to Cordelia and Rebecca, because it certainly hadn’t made its way through to Maddie or her mother.

“I discovered my gift when Rebecca was just a baby,” Tess began, allowing her gaze to drift back to the window. She explained how she dreamt about the color blue for weeks, her mind crowded with wide expanses of deep blue skies hovering over cool aquamarine waters. She dreamt of blueberries, fat and ripe, rolling across the dining room table, which was formally set with expensive china as delicate and blue as a robin’s egg. Cobalt blue water goblets were filled to the rim with grape juice, and the vases were cluttered with hydrangea, cornflowers, and sweet pea. “The images stayed with me long after the dreams dissipated, but I shrugged it off, not knowing what to do with the premonitions.”

“So what happened?” Cordelia asked.

Tess sat up a little straighter, her face flushed with excitement at having a new, rapt audience to tell her magical stories to. “It wasn’t until I awoke from a late summer afternoon nap and felt compelled to look in on my sleeping baby girl—your mother—that my dreams started to make sense,” Tess paused dramatically. “As soon as I walked into the nursery, all the blue images came rushing into my mind when I saw that your mother’s face was the color blue that had haunted my dreams.”

Cordelia gasped as she learned that the baby had become tangled in her bedclothes and blankets, and the lack of oxygen had caused a blue tinge to stain her cherubic face.

“What did you do?” Cordelia cried. Maddie was surprised at Cordelia’s emotional reaction—the tense energy coming from her cousin was palpable. Tess explained how she quickly hoisted the child from its confines, pressed her mouth against the baby’s tiny sliver of blue lips, and forced heavy bursts of lifesaving air into the lungs. After several tension-filled minutes, the baby began gasping and wheezing, her returning pink coloring flushing away the deathly blue.

“After that, I knew that my dreams would foretell an important event, but the symbols never gave me a warning,” she said ominously. “The symbols were there; the meaning was not. This is why it is so important to be aware of the signs that are always around you. If you look close enough, you can see the patterns of what’s to come. You can and you must use the signs to protect yourselves—and each other.”

Maddie was suddenly overcome with the feeling of being watched. She rubbed away the goose bumps that appeared on her arms.

Finally, Abigail threw open the door and glared at Tess.

“Is there a reason you’re keeping these girls up so late? You know that they have a lot of work ahead of them in the store tomorrow,” Abigail scolded. Tess ignored her daughter and simply clasped the girls’ hands tightly in her own. Abigail sighed and said as she shut the door, “Fine. Don’t blame me if they’re the walking dead tomorrow.”

“Your mother refuses to see her gift,” she said to Maddie. Next, she turned to Cordelia. “And your mother doesn’t know what to do with hers. I think she blames herself for not being able to stop your father’s death—just as I had no way of stopping your grandfather’s.” Maddie noticed Cordelia stiffen at the mention of her father, her mouth drawn into a grim line.

Tess continued, “It’s important not to share the knowledge of this gift with anyone but each other. You know what Hawthorne is like.” Tess said, turning to Maddie.

Maddie nodded solemnly, but she couldn’t help feeling left out. For all this talk of “gifts,” she didn’t seem to share this gift that everyone in her family possessed but her and her mother. Unlike her grandmother, Maddie never had visions or premonitions. She looked over at her cousin, whose eyes were brimming with tears.
What does she see?
Maddie wondered.

Tess and Cordelia stared at each other for a long time. It was like they were sharing a silent conversation. Then Tess started talking about the dreams she’d been having recently. They were mostly typical laid-back summertime dreams: swimming in the ocean, boating to the local islands, dancing around bonfires, sand, and stones—her attempt at easing the tension. Then Tess squeezed each of their hands and said, “All right, that’s enough of this for one night. You’d better get to bed before Abigail has a fit.”

The girls kissed their grandmother on the cheek and headed for the door. As Cordelia reached for the handle, Tess spoke again, her voice soft but firm. “You two need to stick together. No matter what.
No matter what
.”