Chapter 13

13

My head lolledforward, searching for sleep, then snapped back at the last moment, the movement dragging a gasp from my lungs and a furious flutter from my eyelids. I shifted in my chair and tried to sit up straighter in the bleach cold of the hospital waiting room.

“Would you stop doing that?” Tyler said, his own face smushed into his palm, his elbow balanced precariously on the arm of his plastic chair. “You sound like someone is stabbing you every thirty seconds and it is very annoying.”

“Sorry,” I said, then began the slow slump back into almost unconsciousness. Loll, snap, gasp, flutter. Tyler groaned as I shook my head and sat up straight again. Vivi, who possessed the talent of being able to sleep anywhere, in any position, was fast asleep, her head back and mouth wide open. Cate flicked through a magazine and sipped a cup of tea, her teeth clenched tight.

I caught sight of my reflection in a vending machine. There were dark grooves beneath my eyes, a smudge of dried blood on my cheek. I licked my thumb and wiped the red away.

Outside, three floors below, I could hear the distant click of cameras, the murmur of the growing crowd who’d come to see the missing supermodel, who—for the second time in her life—had been spat back from the abyss. I stood and stretched, then went to the window and parted the blinds to glance out at the swelling mass of fans and well-wishers. They noticed me immediately and turned their phones and cameras my way. A restless field of stars blinking in the dusk.

It had been a confusing, scary afternoon. Getting Grey to the closest hospital had been . . . a challenge. We’d removed the police tape over her apartment door and carried her down the stairwell to the street below. Vivi tried to call an ambulance, but Grey—bleeding, gaunt, and barely able to stand—had pushed us off, thrown Vivi’s phone into the road, and screamed at us to listen, listen. When we’d hailed a cab to get her to the hospital ourselves, Grey had gone wild. There was still a fizzy sting of pain where she’d scratched my cheek, my neck, my arms as I helped Vivi and Tyler hold her down in the back of the taxi. “We have to run, we have to run, we have to run,” she’d chanted, kicking and bucking against us as we struggled to force her into the emergency room. We were all covered in scratches and bite marks and blood by the time doctors and nurses and security came rushing over to help restrain her.

The police had come, called by someone, and we’d each given short statements as nurses swabbed our wounds and gave us ice packs for our bruises. Yes, we’d really found her in her burned-out apartment. No, we didn’t know how she’d gotten there, or how long she’d been there for.

Then we waited. Waited for news of what the hell had happened to her, waited to hear if she was okay. Waited, along with the rest of the world, to find out the answer to the mystery. Where had she been? For the first time, I understood why people were obsessed with us, why there were Reddit boards with hundreds of comments trying to unravel the answer.

I let the blinds slip closed and went back to the vending machine. I was halfway through my sixth packet of chips when a doctor finally appeared, a young South Asian woman in glasses and a green checked shirt.

I stood quickly. “Is she okay?” I asked. “Can we see her?”

“Mrs. Hollow,” the doctor said to my mother. “My name is Dr. Silva. Perhaps we could speak privately?”

“I don’t think so, Doogie Howser,” Vivi said. “We want to know what’s going on.”

Cate nodded. “It’s fine.”

Dr. Silva looked hesitant but spoke anyway. “Your daughter is stable,” she said. I couldn’t help but notice the way my mother’s lips pursed on the word daughter. “We’ve sedated her to help her rest. Whatever happened to her, it’s over now. She’s safe.”

Safe. Grey was safe. Somewhere, in a room tucked off a corridor around the corner, my sister’s heart was beating.

The bones went out of my legs, like some tether inside me had been cut. I sank down into the chair behind me and looked at my hands, at the broken pinkie I shared with Grey. It had taken months to heal, a bruised, fat sausage where a finger had once been. Even now, when I ran my thumb over it, the joints beneath were bulbous, bent out of shape.

Grey was alive. Grey was back.

Relief flooded my body with such force that I gasped and laughed at the same time. With it came a surge of memories. The night my pet guinea pig died, Grey curled up in bed next to me, teaching me to meditate. Her body next to my body, her lips against my ear, her fingertips trailing down my nose as she taught me to breathe in for seven, hold for seven, breathe out for seven. The day that Vivi bit my arm so hard she broke the skin, so Grey bit her back as punishment. The night Grey pulled me onto the dance floor at a school dance and led me in an exaggerated tango, spinning me so fast I could feel gravity trying to wrest us apart, but our hold on each other was so strong I knew no force in the universe could separate us.

“What happened to her?” I asked as I wiped mist from my eyes.

Dr. Silva glanced at my mother. “As best we can tell, it seems as though your sister is in the grips of a particularly severe psychotic episode. During psychosis, the mind finds it extremely difficult to separate what is real and what is not. Hallucinations and delusions are common. It could explain why she’s been off the grid for a week.”

Vivi bristled. “You immediately assume she’s crazy?” she snapped. “We found her cowering and covered in blood. She could have been taken by someone, she could’ve—”

“Grey believes she was kidnapped and dragged through a door to another realm by a horned beast, where she was held captive,” the young doctor continued gently. “She believes she managed to escape, but that this creature—again, for emphasis, a fairy-tale creature—is coming for her. She also believes you—her sisters—are in mortal danger. She told us this herself.”

“I want to see her,” Vivi said as she pushed past her, but the doctor stopped my sister with a hand on her shoulder.

“You don’t. Not right now. We had to restrain her. You don’t want to see her like that, I promise you. Your sister is sick. Her mind and body are exhausted. Now, there is a police officer posted at her door for her protection, more police downstairs to keep the press at bay. Even if someone did wish her harm, they wouldn’t be able to get to her. Let her rest tonight. Talk to her tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Cate said as she pulled Vivi back. “We’ll let her sleep.”

“Wait,” I said. “Whose blood was she covered in?”

Dr. Silva turned back to look at me. “It was her own. There are cuts on her forearms, some so deep they needed stitching. Self-harm.”

“You’re both coming with me,” Cate said as she shrugged on her coat. “I don’t want you here tonight.”

“What?” I said, unmoving as she pulled my hand. “Your daughter is in the hospital and you’re going to leave?”

“Grey’s here. She’s safe. There’s nothing you can do for her overnight.”

“What if she wakes up all alone?” Vivi asked.

“She’s heavily sedated and will be kept that way until morning. You’re not going to miss anything by coming home.” Cate looked so tired. Her frown lines cut grooves through her forehead and gathered to a pinch above her nose. She was still dressed in the scrubs she’d worn to her last shift. She clasped my hands in her own and pulled me close. “Please. Please come with me. Don’t stay here.”

I glanced down at her bare neck and ran the pad of my thumb over her collarbone. I remembered the delicate necklace of bruising left on her throat the week after Grey left. I remembered how our next-door neighbor had come by during this time with mail that had been incorrectly delivered to his house and how, when Cate answered the door, he had let his eyes linger on the hickey-like thumbprint by my mother’s collarbone for too long, the slash of a smirk on his face, like he could judge the type of woman she was from this one small thing.

“Steer clear of him,” Cate had said when she closed the door, her skin flush with goose bumps.

It was the first time I had thought of my mother as a sexual creature. I was thirteen at the time and just coming to understand the power and treachery that came with breasts and hips and body hair. Men had begun catcalling me as I walked home from school in the afternoons—but that was my burden to bear. Seeing it done to my mother was something else.

It had made me angry, the look he’d given her. It had filled my stomach with blood and bile. The neighbor slipped in the bathtub that night, split his skull on the faucet, and spent the next week liquefying. His was the body I’d smelled, before the dead man in Grey’s apartment. I wondered, for a long time after he died, if my hatred of him had cursed him to death.

Part of me was horrified at the thought. Part of me hoped it was true.

“I’m not leaving her,” I said. “I can’t.”

Cate shook her head and left without saying another word, too exhausted to fight.

“That is some bullshit, right?” Vivi said. “There is some weird crap going on, but Grey is not crazy. We saw those dudes in her apartment. We saw a dead guy fall out of her ceiling. We saw her step through a doorway from somewhere else and end up in her burned-out kitchen.”

“Did we, though, Middle Hollow?” Tyler said. “I certainly didn’t. For all I know, she could have been curled up in a cupboard the whole time.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vivi said. “I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“Do you think she’s ever coming back?” Tyler asked as Vivi stalked off. “Or is she skipping town to go and start a new family somewhere else?”

“I didn’t pin you for the daddy-issues type.”

A quick grin slipped across his lips. “No one who has a good relationship with their parents ever becomes a model. Even if they’re as ridiculously good-looking as me.”

“Did Grey ever talk to you about our parents?”

“Oh, dribs and drabs. Enough for me to know that she was afraid of your father and that she didn’t get along with your mother. Shocker.”

“It’s not that they don’t get along. It’s that Cate hates her.”

---

“You are not to speak to her,” my mother warned me the morning after she threw Grey out. “You are not to speak to her ever again.” I hated Cate a little bit for that. It seemed wholly unfair. The day before, we had been a (relatively) normal and happy family, and then all it took was a drunken whisper from Grey to tear it all apart. Now one of my sisters was gone and the other—though I didn’t know it yet—was already planning to go.

Vivi left in the middle of the night two weeks after Grey, without warning or fanfare. That was Vivi’s way. Grey was dramatic. Grey liked people to know when she entered and exited the room. Vivi was the opposite. She left with nothing but a backpack and her bass guitar, and left nothing behind to mark her departure except a note on the end of my bed. Sorry, kid, it read, but it’s just not the same if it’s not all three of us together. She caught a midnight Megabus to Paris, then spent the next three years making her way east, through the jazz clubs of France and the grungy nightclubs of Berlin and the absintheries of Prague and finally to the ruin bars of Budapest, collecting tattoos and piercings and languages and lovers along the way. It was rarely an easy, carefree life. We never talked about it, but I knew from Grey that Vivi had done things to get by. Pickpocketing tourists. Selling drugs. Working the odd shift at a strip club. At eighteen, when she moved into a converted warehouse overlooking the Danube with seven other musicians and artists, she had already lived and hurt more than most people do in a lifetime.

The first six months after Grey and Vivi left were the worst of my life. They were both mostly MIA, busy transforming themselves into the women they wanted to become. I heard from them only occasionally. A message here, a phone call there. It was like a piece of me had been cut away, two-thirds of my soul suddenly sloughed off.

It was also during those months that something changed in my mother. It was then that she started collecting newspaper clippings and police files from our case, started hiring private detectives to follow leads the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t or hadn’t. Before, it had been enough for her that we had come back. It didn’t matter where we’d gone or what had happened to us, so long as we were safe and whole and home. Then suddenly, overnight, she developed this burning desire to know. To know exactly. I would wake sometimes to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me with quizzical eyes as I slept, as though searching for the answer to a question she was too afraid to ask out loud.

Please,I messaged Grey around the six-month mark. I need to see you.

Grey came that very night like Romeo and threw little stones at my window until I opened it. It was past midnight. She beckoned me into the dark. I put a coat over my pajamas and climbed down the tree that grew close to the house. It was the first and only time I have snuck out. We went to a pub in Golders Green and ate salt-and-vinegar chips in a haze of other people’s smoke. It was like meeting in secret with a lover, except I was thirteen and my clandestine liaison was with my estranged older sister.

In the six months since I’d seen her, Grey had cut her white hair into a long bob that skimmed her shoulders. She wore a black turtleneck and cat eyeliner. She looked like an assassin from a spy movie. We talked about what she’d been doing, where she’d been living, the boys she’d been dating. She showed me pictures of herself on her phone, beautiful images that would soon run in magazines and appear on billboards. She was on the precipice of intense and immediate international fame, though neither of us knew it yet.

“Come and live with me,” she said at one point. “You don’t have to stay there anymore. You don’t owe her anything.”

It was a tempting offer. I wanted to go—and I wanted to stay. I was split between the two halves of my heart. “She’s my mother,” I said finally. Grey frowned like she wanted to dispute that but couldn’t. “I can’t leave her all alone. I’m all she has left.”

So I stayed, on the condition that I could see and talk to Grey whenever I wanted. Cate allowed it, begrudgingly.

The first and only time Grey reentered our house since leaving was to pack up her bedroom. We spent the next afternoon dumping all her bric-a-brac into boxes bound for storage until she had enough money for her own apartment. I wanted to linger over each piece of treasure, to slip lipsticks and candle stubs into my pockets to marvel at later, but she watched me with eagle eyes, and it all went where I had chosen not to follow.

“If Justine or her little Barbie sidekick give you any more trouble, let me know,” Grey said as she carried the last box out the front door. “I’ll take care of them.”

Before she left, Grey went upstairs to speak to Cate. I followed behind her quietly and listened at the door, hoping to hear them reconcile, but that was not what I heard. “If you hurt her,” Grey said to our mother softly, “if you so much as harm a single hair on her head, I will come back here and I will kill you.”

If Cate answered, I didn’t hear it. I went to the bathroom and vomited. I thought of Justine Khan and how I could never unleash my sister on her, no matter how mean she became, because Justine was just a girl and my sister was something more, something crueler, the thing in the dark. Grey left without saying goodbye. Somehow, whatever she had said to my mother the night she threw her out was even worse than the death threat.

Here is a terrible truth I had known for as long as I could remember: I was my mother’s favorite child. I was orderly and docile and quiet, and those traits made it easy for her to like me, to understand me. My sisters were difficult girls: too sexy, too angry, too hard to handle. They wanted too much. They were too willing to put their bodies and lives in the way of the world. In the months and years after Grey and Vivi evaporated from our day-to-day, life was better. I learned to live without my sisters as my constant companions. I became myself. The strangeness that haunted them decreased to a low simmer when they weren’t around.

Cate and I fell into an easy routine. We watched Doctor Who and drank herbal tea curled up on the couch. We donned Wellingtons and took long strolls in London’s marshes, foraging for knotweed to make jam and elderflower and nettle to make summer cordial. We took flowers to my father’s grave every other week. Without my sisters there to cause trouble, I settled into what was left of my little family with ease.

---

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Ugh, your mother does not hate Grey, Iris. So dramatic.”

I stared at the door through which she had left. “No, she does.” I knew it profoundly. I had known it since the night Grey left home. I knew it on the nights I curled up next to Cate on the couch. I knew it in the mornings when we ate our homemade jam. As surely as many children know they are loved, I knew that Cate despised my sister. “She manages to mask it most of the time, but there’s something . . . ugly underneath. I see it sometimes. Cate is afraid of her. I don’t know why.”

“You sound like you belong in the psych ward with your sister.”

“And I thought you were going home.”

“Yes, well. I look like utter garbage. I can’t let the paparazzi shoot me in this state.” A lie to mask the truth: He was worried about Grey too. “I always knew Grey was a bit . . . off. I liked it. It seemed, I don’t know, dangerous in a sexy way. I never thought she was completely nuts, though.”

“I don’t think she is.”

“Oh, please. You heard what the doctor said.”

“I’ve also seen things over the past week that I can’t explain. If it’s all in Grey’s head, why can Vivi and I see it too?”

“Folie à deux, Little Hollow. Or in this case, folie à trois.” Tyler tapped my temple. “Sometimes madness is catching.”

Vivi came back an hour later, once darkness had settled over the city, the knuckles of her right hand raw and bleeding from punching a photographer as he tried to manhandle her for a picture. The three of us went down to the hospital cafeteria together and ate prepackaged sandwiches and old oranges for dinner, then trudged back upstairs to wait and wait and wait. Vivi went to sleep again, her hand bandaged and iced by a nurse. Tyler stared dead-eyed at his phone screen, scrolling through tweets and Instagram posts about Grey’s disappearance and subsequent miraculous return. The story was blowing up on social media. There was already a fan-art meme trending online of Grey as a venerated saint rendered in watercolor, a banner behind her reading “In Hollow we trust.” Dozens of celebrities had reposted it, rejoicing at our sister’s return. I watched over Tyler’s shoulder for a while, and then, even with the plastic chair beneath me biting into my bones, I eventually slipped into a fraught and fitful sleep.