Sisters

by Daisy Johnson

When one of us speaks we both feel the words moving on our tongues. When one of us eats we both feel the food slipping down our gullets. It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.

Mum said, getting into the car, Let’s make it before night. And then nothing else for a long time. We imagine what she might say: This is your fault, or, We would never have had to leave if you hadn’t done what you did. And what she means, of course, is if we hadn’t been born. If we hadn’t been born at all.

thought we were both born in Oxford. So did I. But only you were. I was born in this house. It had, I realize, meant something that we had been born in the same place. Ten months apart, the same hospital, the same bed perhaps, one chasing the other out. September and then—soon enough we might as well have come together—me.

September put her face very close to my ear and said, She looks like a goddess. We loved her then, willingly, unendingly, in a way that I think we do not often do. Mostly she is just there. Mostly she is just a mother to us and she is in rooms the way chairs and tables are.

I just need some time, Mum says. I feel the words breaking through the quiet. I feel them against my arms and face. She puts the dishcloth down and turns toward us. I will always love you, she says. And if you need me you come get me. But I need some time. OK? We nod and then she is gone.

I feel dizzy and have to sit down. There are whole sentences in my head but when I try and say them the words choke themselves and my head jerks and not a single sound comes out. September puts her hot hand on my forehead and I close my eyes and when I open them she has moved away, although the feeling of her hand lingers, too warm, against my skin.

It burned, September says, and I know she means the moment when we dared each other, barely breathing, and moved the box away, stared upward. A whole day with the imprint of that bolt at the corners of our eyes and me thinking that it was the only time we would see something so exactly the same. Wishing it could always be that way.

I don’t know how it made me feel. Often, at school or at the kitchen table with Mum, I felt as if I moved a little outside my body, could not quite touch or see anything entirely. It was only when September was around that color returned and I could experience pain or smell the lunch cooking in the school kitchens. She tethered me. Not to the world but to her.

He’s an idiot, September said and wouldn’t speak on the subject. But I liked him. That was it. I liked him. I felt it in my muscles and my skin. I lost words around him. I liked the way he looked and spoke, the shape and sound of him.

She pressed her fingers to my temple, rubbing at the taut skin. I leaned my head against her trousers, which smelled of graphite and black coffee. She had us with a man she had been afraid of, although she would not tell us why. There were months when she spoke little, only wanted to often be holding us, ordered takeaways, had baths that lasted all afternoon. There were months when she told us she was living in a sadness the color of rust and leather.

There was nothing to say. I would not admit that September would fight them if she had to and that I would be glad when she did. I wondered, in that moment, what it was like to be a mother to children who did not need you.

I didn’t like the blank eyes of the page turned on me, the attention narrowed into a thin dart, the way people commented when they saw us in bookshops or at Mum’s events. When I was five I wept and wept until Mum said she wouldn’t draw me for a year, and then the images had been only of September, scaling trees or swimming in the school pool to find a key that had dropped to the bottom and would open a locked box. Except a year later Mum was drawing me again and I’d felt—though silently this time—the same way.

A sexy picture, the message said. It took me a long time to get it right. I was so nervous that I kept dropping the phone or forgetting to smile. In most of them I looked frightened, as if kidnapped and forced to take the image by someone just out of sight of the camera. In all I looked haunted, barely there, ghostly the way I always felt in Mum’s picture books. I kept thinking about September speaking the book aloud using my voice, a voice so convincing that I didn’t even need to read my own parts. I thought: I need to go upstairs, get September, ask her to take it. But I didn’t. The texts belonged to me and no one else.

We’d made a pact. Back in Oxford. Hand in hand in front of the mirror to double-check with our reflections that the promise would hold true. We would weather whatever was going to come. September stood next to me but, still, it felt as if my hand closed around nothing. I squeezed and squeezed. July, she said, do you promise? I would promise her anything. July, she said, listen to me. We’d never broken a promise to each other before.

Yes. I think then, as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars—and that she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world. I remember the promise we made years ago, how we wrote it down so we wouldn’t forget, how we linked hands and held them over the paper and squeezed and squeezed.

She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most. She housed those beautiful daughters, didn’t she, and she has housed depression all through her life like a smaller, weightier child, and she housed excitement and love and despair and in the Settle House she houses an unsettling worry that she finds difficult to shake, an exhaustion that smothers the days out of her.

Peter had gone off with his binoculars and the two women would sit at the greening tables outside the cottages and sometimes Ursa would tell her the way it had been when they were children, the moments of small violence that had dominated their relationship. Although when he was back she would rush around after him, make him food, bring him presents, fight for his approval in a way that, worryingly, Sheela saw herself beginning to do too. He was like a black hole and nothing caught in his gravitational pull could survive for long.

The room in Oxford where they lived for a while, mostly in the bed, the smell of breast milk and old cups of herbal tea, the picture books she read to September, July tucked in the crook of her arm. She’d never had so many hands on her, feeling like her skin could wear away like thin material. Her love for them was like carrying shopping bags up a hill and at times she became convinced they wanted the very foundations of her, wanted to break the bricks of her body apart and climb back in.

She could not have guessed the way they would be. Out in the garden in the white dresses they had begged her to buy from a charity shop, their muddy knees, their faces close together. They always seemed to be telling some great secret, some truth only they could know. The look in their eyes when she came across them, the sudden silence that fell and that she could not quite break into. The sound of her banal chatting as she tried to befriend them. Her own children.

September was the ringleader but July was the one who suffered.

They were so young. At ten and eleven they seemed barely older than six, the curls of their childlike language, the ribbons they insisted she plait into their hair. As teenagers it had been even more noticeable, how different they were from the other children at school; clever but stunted, naive, happily young. Often she wondered if they held each other inside childhood, arms around one another, clinging on.

They had dressed as the sisters from The Shining, powdered their faces with flour, curled their hair. They would never look the same—July was too like Sheela and September too like her father for that—but there was something about the way they moved that was disconcerting, like unfinished doppelgängers, turning their heads at the same time.

September could make her sister do anything. Had always been able to. The way September was with July sometimes reminded her of how Peter had been with her: his withholding of love for tactical advantage, the control concealed within silky folds of care. It wasn’t the same, she thought over and over; September was not like that man. Except sometimes she wondered.

She considered again and again moving them to different schools, enforcing some sort of system of rules, finding a therapist who could see them separately, but she could never quite do it. Their bold happiness when they were close, the protection they wound around each other like wool. She hadn’t had siblings and she wished, watching them, that she had.

She had worried that things would go further, would spill over, that September’s anger would get the better of her. And that was what had happened, wasn’t it? Everything had built and built and built and then spilled over. The phone ringing through the dying-day house, tripping down the last step to get to it, the slight hesitation when she picked up, and then the indrawn breath.

An awful Friday—she had to look up the day on her calendar—when nothing went right. She broke a mug in the kitchen and despair filled all the hollows and caves inside her. She could remember what it meant to be relieved and annoyed and pissed off and excited and tired from a long good day, but right now she only felt dread. D-R-E-A-D. The word spelling out behind her eyes.

In the bedroom they worked out how to get to each other and what to do about being so drunk. Maybe he hadn’t been with anyone for a long time either. She could feel how much she wanted it even through the distance of the sadness. There was a song in her head that kept going round and round, certain words making explosive sounds in her thoughts, almost unbearable.

Mum sits up in the bed. I freeze. She rubs her eyes with her fists; her hair is matted. I slide toward the door. September? she says. I am nearly out. If she turned her head, she would see me. I almost go to her. If she said my name, I would go to her. She is still half-asleep, dreaming, perhaps. I put my hand on the doorknob and turn it.

In Mum’s books September has always been the fierce one. When we were ten I was kidnapped by a minotaur and September rescued me from the maze. When I was twelve I fell into a water tank and September had to work out how to get me out before the water rose to the top. When I was fourteen I read the wrong instructions in an ancient book and September had to stop the end of the world from happening. But I was always in the pictures, even if somewhere off to the side.

I can feel the pull of September, calling me back to her. The boom of unspilled blood battling through me, the door of the house like relief in front of me, the sudden silence as I move inside.

I look at her face and she looks back, unblinking. I can see the beginning of an argument coming, the line of stubbornness that says she won’t back down, that I will have to. I’ve never been good at lying, but that is not something you could say about September. When we were children she would make me promise not to tell but I would always give it away. Did you take the coins from the side? Mum would say. Did you set fire to this toilet roll? Did you bury the end of the washing line? No, I’d say, but my neck would go hot-blotchy and I’d start stuttering. One of the teachers took me aside once and said, Does September make you do things you don’t want to do? And I said no no no no but underneath the no there was a maybe that I think about only at times like this.

I stare at myself, waiting for something to happen, and then, slowly, it does. I look more like September than I ever have before. The shape of my face is the shape of her face; my eyes are lightened and narrowed, the look in them so like the look that is often in hers. She gazes out of my coating, like a thief caught breaking into a building. In the mirror I can see that the mark on my arm has spread, stretching now nearly down to the wrist and up to the crease in the elbow. September wears me like a coat.

I open my mouth to shout at her and she draws in a big breath and any words I was about to say are sucked from me and into her.

The Settle House is load bearing. Here is what it bears: Mum’s endless sadness, September’s fitful wrath, my quiet failure to ever do quite what anyone needs me to do, the seasons, the death of small animals in the scrublands around it, every word that we say in love or anger to one another.

The days are threaded together with blood, sewn with the needle of red: the blood in the bathroom that day, the blood on the beach, the blood in the swimming pool.

I kept thinking I’d tell her that I didn’t want us to do it, that we were going to call it off. At lunch in the cafetena I imagined how authoritative my voice would be, how I would bring my fist down on the table for emphasis, how she would look annoyed and then accepting and how, afterward, our relationship would be ever so slightly changed, how she would listen to me and listen when I said I didn’t want to do something, how we would finally be equal.

Thinking of September. Firstborn, crackling lightning-haired child, his eyes, the inflection of his voice inside her soft mouth, his determination and avarice, as if he had not died but had somehow seeped into the skin of the child.

Her firstborn, running rampant, bloody-nosed child, July tugged behind like a kite. Sometimes to look at her the fear was so large she felt like it might lift her by her shoulders and carry her away. September was her father’s daughter. A darkening of worry at the threshold of their good life.

When Sheela’s mother died there had been bank accounts to close, a house in India to sell, books and kitchen implements to sort through. But daughters leave so little behind.

The pain was different from the way she’d felt when her mother died or with Peter. It had been possible then to compartmentalize, however ineptly, the grief, to whittle it down into smaller sections. Losing September was not like that. There was no moment when she did not remember what had happened and feel the pressure of that remembering up and down her arms, curled in her stomach, knotted in her hair, digging like nodules into her skin. She lay on the bed and waited for her to come back but she could not lie there forever. She had another daughter.

The house had seemed different that day. She’d never liked it much but she liked it then, the way she and it waited together for the small, new thing to come into the world, the way the walls contracted around her first, glorious cry.

Peter buried like a broken bottle inside her child. Her child who was capable of manipulation and cruelty and who sometimes treated her sister like she was a receptacle, carried around, picked up and then put back down, everything poured into her.

She took a spoonful of chili and tried to imagine what it would feel like to care about having a body again.

In the years when the girls were young she had wanted to write about what it was like to house things inside her, how it was possible to be both skin and flesh and also mortar and plaster. She pitied the Settle House and the house in Oxford then, understood better what it felt like to be filled up with noise and pain, understood why the walls sometimes seemed to crumple in on themselves. After she’d given birth she felt emptied out, like a beloved house closed up for the winter.

She has dreams of those early child-filled days. She sees warnings where there were none, thinks over and over: Why didn’t I stop it? Did it mean something that September always threw her food on the floor as a toddler? Did it mean something that she used to tug out Sheela’s hair when she was breastfeeding? Did it mean something that she did not cry on the first day of nursery like the other children, only walked, without looking back, into the school? Did it mean something that her father was a man whose hate so closely resembled his love?

The light in the house changes. My mind moves from one conclusion to another. I understand that September is dead and was never there at all. That the thoughts I had been certain were hers were mine all along. The events of the past few days clarify. My head feels full of hollows. I have never seen myself without her also there, her body pushing mine out of the frame. When I look from the corner of my eye I think I see something moving, not out in the room but somehow inside me, crawling beneath the surface. I will hold on. A decision that is not a decision lingers and then is made. I will keep her here.

All the good things September did. Loved me. Looked after me. Was me.

I think of all the things I can do now she is gone. Eat what I like, sleep, talk to Mum, go for walks, watch what I want, make friends with some of the people on the beach, make friends with anyone I like. It is freedom. ★ ★ ★ No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. ★ ★ ★ Yes.

If I died, would you? she says. It is not the first time she has asked such a thing. If I was kidnapped would you offer yourself in my place? If a double was here would you know it wasn’t me? If I lost a limb would you cut off one of yours? There is only ever, of course, one answer. Yes, I say. I know I would.

What is it? She holds her cheek to the side of my cheek in a way I remember doing but that hasn’t happened for a long time. I can see September in her, in the shape of her nose and mouth, in the way, even, that she blinks. I do not know how to tell her everything that I need to say. I do not know where the beginning is. It is buried back at that tennis court, in the debris from the collapsed shed, in the ambulance with the discarded syringes and stained sheets. I do not know how to tell her that I have been living with the ghost of September strung around my neck. She’s dead, I say.