The Good Sister Read online

  THE GOOD SISTER

  A NOVELETTE

  KYLA STONE

  CONTENTS

  Untitled

  The Good Sister

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Preview: Who We Are Instead

  Preview: Beneath The Skin

  About the Author

  THE GOOD SISTER

  A NOVELETTE

  By Kyla Stone

  Copyright © 2017 by Kyla Stone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  1

  There are flies in the bathroom again. Five of them buzz frantically in circles above the window, black bodies bumping against the glass and spinning away. The kitten watches them from her perch on the back of the toilet, her gray tail twitching, pupils sharpened to pinpricks.

  Emilyn wonders where they come from. There must be cracks in the caulking around the windows, fissures between the doors and their frames. She’s discovered them all over the apartment, alighting on dirty dishes, swirling in a glass of water left on the end table, crawling across the blue screen of the television. But the bathroom is where they congregate in growing numbers. Yesterday, she killed four.

  She splashes cold water on her face, uses the hand towel Shane left on the floor again, and folds it neatly over the rack on the wall next to the sink. Shane says the flies come because of the weather. Frost tips the grass most mornings now. The flies are seeking warmth and light. There are no cracks, he claims. The flies come through the open door, the same way we do.

  “Shadow,” Emilyn says, clucking to the kitten. The kitten half leaps, half falls off the back of the toilet, lands lightly on her paws, and follows Emilyn into the bedroom. The room is furnished with cheap, glossy IKEA furniture, a low-slung bed, two square end tables, and a screen print of a rainforest hung above the dresser. On Shane’s side, a few crumpled boxers half-kicked under the bed, three glasses of water on the nightstand next to a jumble of chargers and cords. Emilyn smooths the wrinkled bedspread, adjusts the pillows, and heads to the closet.

  She undresses carefully, hanging up the long black skirt and saffron-colored blouse she wore to Northshore Chemical bank in Brokewater Creek, Michigan, where she works as a teller. She sits on the bed to tug off her nylons while Shadow nibbles the silky toes with interest. Emilyn pulls on a pair of comfortable slacks and the moss green T-shirt she got at Mackinac Island last summer. Her fingers quiver ever so slightly. She can’t get the flies out of her mind. They remind her of filth, of blight and decay. They are a contamination. She’ll have to find a way to get rid of them.

  Shane left his work boots and filthy jeans on the floor in front of the bed. She picks up the jeans, places them in the hamper behind the bedroom door, then grabs the boots by their laces with one hand and scoops up Shadow with the other. A fly corkscrews in front of her all the way down the hall and into the living room.

  Shane slouches on the couch, dressed only in blue plaid boxers, his legs and chest pale and nearly hairless. She puts his boots on the floor mat beside the front door. Her chest feels tight. She takes several deep breaths to clear her head.

  “You okay, babe?” Shane asks, not taking his gaze off the television.

  Shadow squirms in her hand until Emilyn releases her. She springs into Shane’s lap and begins attacking the hand he’s using to channel surf with the remote.

  “The flies are multiplying,” Emilyn says. She doesn’t mention the boots, or the hand towel.

  Shane wrestles the cat away from the remote with his free hand, flipping her onto her back with hands roughened from years of manual labor. “Uh huh.”

  “It’s gross.”

  “They’ll die soon enough. See how they fly at half-mast? They don’t find any food since you keep this place so clean. They’ll slowly starve to death.” He swats at one buzzing around his ear. Another grips the wall just above the TV. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “The ones in the bathroom are still flying around the ceiling.”

  Shadow wraps her paws around Shane’s wrist and forearm, and he lifts her slowly into the air. Upside down, she bites at his thumb. “There must be food in there.”

  “There isn’t. We don’t eat in the bathroom. Be careful with her.”

  “She’s fine,” he says, crabbing his fingers around the kitten’s soft, rounded belly. “Why are you still standing up? You look tired. Come sit down. We’ll grab some take out in a few minutes, after the show. You feel like Thai again?”

  She remains standing, digging her bare toes into the worn carpeting. They’ve been together six months. He came sauntering into the bank to deposit a few grand from building a buddy’s garden shed and asked her out on the spot. She wasn’t used to the attention. Wasn’t used to being singled out. She wasn’t the type of girl guys usually flirted with. Her instinct was to say no thanks, she couldn’t possibly. But his hands were on the counter, still gripping that envelope of cash. His fingernails had grime under them, his palms calloused. For a second, she thought about what her mother would say, her daughter dating some blue-collar grunge. “Yes,” she said, having to repeat herself when hardly any sound came out the first time.

  “You look like death warmed over, babe,” he says. “Come over here.”

  She wants to. She truly does. Shane offers a warmth, a comfort she longs for. He’s simple, easy, kind. Except for lately, when it seems like their tiny apartment, cozy when they first moved in, has shrunk. It’s harder to breath, like there’s less oxygen to share. “I think I’m going to visit my parents.”

  “Again?” Disappointment laces his voice. His dark hair sticks out below his blue Lion’s cap. Beneath the shadow of the brim, his brows come together like thick black caterpillars.

  “They need me.”

  He sighs, puts the cat down, and swats her away when she tries to attack him again. “That’s the third time this week. You know how much gas money that is?”

  Her parents live almost forty-five minutes away, in St. Joe, Michigan. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll take it out of my paycheck.”

  He turns his face toward the TV. Blue light flickers over his features: high slanted forehead, strong jaw, slightly hooked nose, brooding dark eye fringed with long, girlish lashes. “That’s not even what I’m saying.”

  “Look, I—”

  “I could go with you.”

  “Shane.”

  “I know, I know. Maybe next time.” His voice has an edge to it, some emotion she can’t quite discern. “You ever gonna tell them?”

  She and Shane have been living together for two months, and she still hasn’t told her parents. They don’t even know she has a boyfriend. She cannot seem to explain adequately enough to him that there are . . . complications. “I will soon,” she says, hoping to placate him. “You know right now is a bad time. Daddy is devastated about Ava. I couldn’t hurt him, too. Not now.”

  Shane crosses his arms over his chest. Shadows move across his face, the flicker of the television. “How the hell are you hurting him? It’s always about them. About him.”

  Shadow bounds over to Emilyn and rubs against her ankles, yowling softly. She wants to step forward, to comfort him, to reassure him, but she doesn’t move. She can’t. Something she can’t describe or define holds her back. Though the house is chilly, sweat beads beneath her armpits, along the inside of her knees. “You
don’t understand.”

  “That’s right. I don’t get it.” There’s a change in the air, like static electricity. “How does a grown woman refuse to tell her father she has a boyfriend? Why are you always at their beck and call?”

  Here it is, the battle they always circle back to. She can’t do this right now. She doesn’t have the energy to try to explain the unexplainable, to get him to see that this is her duty, her responsibility. She doesn’t have a choice. She can’t take much more of this, at least not now. She can’t face his questions, can’t answer what she has no answer for. Her nerve endings feel exposed. Her skin is too thin, her heart pumping too close to the surface of things. “Daddy’s upset about Ave. She is—”

  “She’s toxic, is what she is. When is your crazy family gonna see the light? Just cut that fish right off the line.”

  Emilyn flinches. She’s said the same thing herself in so many words, numerous times, but it’s different coming from Shane. “It isn’t that easy.”

  “No? How hard is it really, to tell your father you have a boyfriend? It’s only four words.”

  “That’s not fair, and you know it. It’s not a good time. The evidentiary hearing is Thursday.”

  “It’s never a good time.”

  She sucks in her breath. “He needs me.”

  “Fine,” he says flatly.

  She resists the urge to hurl his “fine” back at him. No appropriate words come to her. How could she possibly make him understand? The distance between is suddenly unsurpassable, as thick and formidable as a brick wall. She opens the front closet door and pulls out her beige suede jacket.

  “I’ll be home late.” When he doesn’t answer, her heart squeezes in her chest. Part of her wants to go to him, to take off that grimy Lions cap and run her hands through his smooth dark hair, to feel him next to her, the steady strength of his heartbeat. Instead, she slips silently from the apartment, closing the door to the sounds of the cat’s whines and the top five replays from Sunday’s football games.

  2

  It’s already almost dark by the time Emilyn drives her battered ’03 Civic out of the Hillside Retreat apartment complex’s parking garage. To the west, a mass of clouds scud swiftly across the setting sun, trailing behind them the skirts of an approaching storm. The air swirls and lifts, thick with expectation. She watches the passing trees, the bristling pines and the lonely arms of oaks slowly losing their leaves.

  The road stretches before her, slick and shiny in the gleam of the headlights. In this part of southwest Michigan, the land is flattened, uneventful. Like her life, up until now. Up until Ava decided to ruin their parents’ lives, and by proximity, Emilyn’s. She should be considering this newest not-quite-fight with Shane, but instead, almost against her will, her mind turns toward her little sister.

  From the moment of Ava’s birth, she’s been at odds with the world, wrestling in the womb for thirty-six hours, and even when she finally relinquished that fight, she arrived with the umbilical cord coiled around her neck. Emilyn was five.

  As a child, Ava was tumultuous, ferocious, almost feral. She was always invading people’s personal space, demanding hugs or candy or various favors. She had difficulty controlling her emotions. Even at six and seven, she’d explode into fierce rages where she’d throw herself to the floor, lashing at anyone who tried to stop her, shrieking, scratching, and biting. Emilyn has a scar on her forearm, a faint silvered half-moon, the marks of human teeth.

  Her parents took Ava to a shrink, put her on medication. Once she started school, her anger retreated. For awhile, her parents thought she was fixed. But Emilyn was watching. It was still present, only now it was restrained, wary. Waiting. She watched the darkness inside her sister manifest itself in sly, surreptitious ways.

  At home, things went missing. Credit card bills. Twenty dollars from her mother’s purse. The charm bracelet their father bought Emilyn on her tenth birthday. At school, Ava’s little friends suddenly became clumsy, tripping in the hall, falling off the swings on the playground. Ava always nearby, a bystander, a witness, her blue eyes wide with innocence and virtue.

  One day when Emilyn was in sixth grade, Ava stayed home from school, sick with a fever. Emilyn took the bus home, grabbed a string cheese from the fridge, and went to her room to work on her history project. She didn’t play with Barbie dolls anymore, but she’d started sewing little outfits for them with her mother’s Singer. For her Native American history project, she’d painstakingly created authentic Indian clothing for each of her twelve dolls. She’d even woven tiny feathers into the dolls’ hair. It was the best project in the entire class.

  Seven-year-old Ava was already in Emilyn’s room. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, a pair of scissors in her hands, scraps of cloth and tendrils of blond hair scattered around her.

  “Look! I’m helping you!” she said in a sweet, little-girl voice. But Emilyn caught the wicked smile that flashed across her face, then quickly disappeared. In its place, the wide-eyed, innocent gaze that convinced their mother that the destroyed outfits, the chopped off dolls’ hair were Ava’s misguided attempt at “connecting.”

  “She needs your love and attention,” her mother had said, huffing as she bent over, snatching the shredded fabric into her fists. “Be nicer. Try playing with her more.”

  “But she—”

  “It was an accident.”

  “No, it wasn’t! She did it on purpose! It’s always on purpose. Like when she—” “Enough of that.” Her mother’s face closed like a fist. “Don’t go sobbing over spilt milk. What’s done is done. I don’t want to hear another word of this, you hear?”

  It felt like choking on a fishhook. She could barely swallow the rage swelling in her throat. Even now, the memory snags hot and angry in her chest. Like being nice had anything to do with it. Like anything was ever an accident when it came to Ava.

  Emilyn pulls into her parents’ driveway. The first droplets of rain splat against the windshield. Her parents live in a large white house less than fifty yards from Lake Michigan. From the kitchen, she can sit and watch the waves glinting between the sand dunes and clumps of beach grass.

  She gets out of the car and stands in the driveway for a moment. The air smells singed, like ozone. Behind the house, Lake Michigan stretches out past the dark horizon line. Lights from the houses along the beach wink like tiny stars. The moon is out, glimmering on the waves.

  Her thoughts return to her sister, almost unbidden. Ava crowds into her mind like the impending storm clouds.

  Ava is only seventeen, and she’s run away three times. She’s been caught shoplifting, drinking, driving while intoxicated. She does drugs, though Emilyn doesn’t know which ones. She wears mini-skirts and belly-baring tank tops, decorating her body with tiny tattoos of rabbits and coiled cobras.

  Last summer, she chopped off her own hair, dying it white-blonde and spiking it like a boy’s. Still, even with her weird clothes and shredded hair, Ava is beautiful in a way Emilyn will never be. Emilyn gets her plain looks from the women on her father’s side—the bland ash-blonde hair, the perpetually prim mouth, the unfortunate ski-slope nose.

  Emilyn doesn’t remember many happy moments between them. By the time the serious issues took hold, she was old enough to shut herself in her room or go out with friends whenever she could. But there were the “special nights,” as Ava used to call them. When she was little, up until she was six or seven, Ava used to climb into Emilyn’s bed late at night, even on school nights, and whisper things—little stories, songs, snippets of her day— into her ear until the words drifted into a soft hum, lulling them both to sleep. Sometimes she would stroke Ava’s back or rub her tense little shoulders.

  They never fought during those times. It was a secret space, a no-man’s land outside the boundaries their daily battles. But this was before their fierce dislike for each other sprang up from the ground like a poisonous flower. Before the history project. Two nights after the “unfortunate acci
dent” as her mother called it, Emilyn heard the creak of her door opening.

  “Emmy?” Ava whispered.

  Resentment and rage knotted in Emilyn’s belly. She stared up at the ceiling until her eyes burned. She felt her sister’s presence in the doorway, standing silent, her small hands at her sides. She knew what her sister wanted. The one thing Emilyn had the power to take away. “Leave me alone.”

  “Emmy,” Ava tried again, her voice rising, an edge of fear in it. “Don’t leave me alone.”

  “I said get lost. And don’t ever come in here again.”

  And she didn’t. Emilyn felt pangs of regret, but the towering relief was stronger. Maybe it was better that way.

  Emilyn blinks rainwater out of her eyes and pushes the memories away. She will never understand her sister. Thinking about it only brings more pain. She heads toward the house, two stories of newly painted white siding and cornflower blue shutters with a wide wraparound veranda and double glass doors. It seems enormous, like a white ghost rising up out of the night.

  She didn’t grow up here. Her parents bought the house with the funds bequeathed by her great-aunt Ruth, who franchised a successful clothing boutique in Kalamazoo but died of lung cancer before she could enjoy her wealth, a spinster at age forty-eight.

  There’s money set aside for college, but Emilyn deferred pursuing a degree. She needs to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The future is so wide open, the weight of it is crushing.