“You have a sister?”
I opened this can of worms. With a sigh, I try and close it again.
“I did. She died a long time ago.”
I try and walk past Nora, but she grabs my arm and stares up at me, her blue eyes so so serious, and so f**king perceptive.
“How did she die?” she asks quietly, never taking her eyes off of me.
I swallow.
“She drowned. Out in the lake.”
“Oh my God,” Nora breathes. “Did you see it happen? Is that why you don’t like to swim?”
I look away, out at the water, at the sky, at the beach.
As I do, I can’t help but remember that night.
“I was sleeping when it happened,” I tell her woodenly. “My sister used to sleepwalk. They put a lock on her bedroom door on the outside, to lock her in so she couldn’t hurt herself on the stairs. But that night, my father forgot to lock it when he tucked her in before he went to the bar.”
Nora stares at me in horror.
“I don’t know what to say,” she finally says. “That’s awful. Why does he want you to ring the bell?”
I shake my head and I hate to say the words. But I say them anyway, because they’re the truth.
“Because sometimes, people can’t blame themselves even when they know they’re to blame. They just have to focus their anger on someone else, just to make it bearable.”
Nora stares at me in confusion. “I don’t understand. He blamed you? How in the world could it have been your fault?”
I swallow again, and again, trying to get the lump out of my throat. The f**king lump that forms whenever I think of Allison.
“My father was under the assumption that I should’ve heard her come out of her room in the middle of the night because my room was right across the hall. He thought that I had heard her and just chose not to follow her. See, back then, when I was little, I was scared of swimming in the lake. I wasn’t scared of anything else… I wasn’t scared of snakes or spiders or heights. But I was scared of the lake. I don’t know why.”
I stop speaking and stare out the window. In my head, it’s that night. And it’s black and terrible.
“He thought I was lying about not hearing her get up. He thought I was just too much of a chicken shit to follow her into the lake to save her.”
I never knew that speaking the hateful words out loud would be so painful, so much like a scalpel to my throat.
Nora shakes her head slowly, in blatant disbelief. “No. There’s no way he actually believed that. Surely not…”
I shrug, trying to appear nonchalant, like it doesn’t still hurt after so many years. “He did. And he convinced my mother of it, too. They both hated me after that.”
“How old was your sister?” Nora whispers.
“Four,” I answer.
“And you?”
“I was six.”
She stares back at me, her blue eyes unyielding. “You were six years old. Even if you had heard her, and I’m sure that you didn’t, how could you have saved her? You were too little.”
I meet her gaze without flinching. “Nora, I guarantee you. If I’d heard her get out of bed and walk outside, I would’ve saved her.”
Nora smiles a sad smile. “I have no doubt that you would’ve.”
We stand there for the longest time, and the air is heavy around us with the weight of our conversation.
“I can’t believe I just told you all of that,” I admit finally. “I’ve never told anyone before.”
She glances up at me, her eyes soft.
“Not even Gabe?”
I shake my head. “No. Gabe and Jacey were only here in the summers. They never saw my sister, so they don’t even know she existed. They saw the bruises my father gave me when I was a kid, but they never knew why.”
“Didn’t anyone ever try and take you away from your parents?” Nora asks softly, her eyes assessing me, raking me over, searching out my secrets.
I shake my head. “I never told anyone. Gabe knew, to some extent, but I made him swear not to tell. I guess kids are just always loyal to their parents, no matter what. But he and Jacey did their best to help me. They kept me down at their grandparents pretty much all summer, every summer.”
But the winters were endless.
“Why does he want you to ring the bell?” Nora asks, her voice filled with dread.
I stare out the window. “Because that used to be his thing. He thought I purposely didn’t save my sister because I was scared to swim. So he’d come home from the bar and drag me out to the beach, where he’d try and make me swim out and ring the bell. It infuriated him when I wouldn’t. He’d beat me senseless and I still wouldn’t do it.”
Nora sucks in her breath as she stares at me in sympathy.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I tell her firmly. “Because what he doesn’t know is that I stopped being afraid of the water by the time I was ten. But I kept refusing out of principle…and stubbornness. I decided that he could beat me, but he couldn’t make me pay for something I didn’t do. It was my own way of standing up to him.”
Nora’s lips spread in a slow smile. “So that’s why you can swim, but you don’t.”
I nod, curtly, one time.
“And now he’s trying to bully you into swimming,” she realizes. “One last time.”
I nod again.
But Nora’s confused again. “I don’t get it though,” she says. “You said your mom has hated you ever since. Why would your father think that using her as leverage would work?”
I look away from her. “Because one of the things he used to tell me was that I was weak. That I was too loyal, that I should be colder. Like him.”
Nora stares at me, horrified. “He faulted you for being a good human being?”
I shrug. “I guess. He saw kindness as a weakness. And he always called me weak. I guess he wants me to either show, once and for all, that I am weak, or show that I can be a cold-hearted bastard like him.”
Without another word, Nora throws herself into my arms with enough force to knock me backward. We tumble into the chair behind us and she lands on my lap.