“Okay. No bad thoughts.”

“Good. You don’t do too much today. Have a good lunch. Listen to music. Read and think of me, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I was hoping he didn’t hear the panic in my voice. He seemed not to, but then again, he never saw or heard what he didn’t want to see or hear.

After he left, I sat on the bed and contemplated my fate. What was left to do? I could try to get that door open again. Of course, if I didn’t and he saw chipped wood when he returned, he’d know that I had tried, and that could bring the worst. But being forced to have his baby was the worst anyway. Perhaps it was time to choose between death and what would come day after day now.

Last year, there had been a suicide in our school. A boy named Hampton Hill had shot himself with his father’s pistol in his father and mother’s bedroom. He had been under a lot of abuse from other boys in his class because he seemed ambivalent about his sexuality. Things had become worse when one boy accused him of making sexual advances. Some parents had apparently complained that their sons were uncomfortable with him in the locker room before and after gym class. We had heard that his own father was belittling him for not being in an after-school sport and for not having friends, especially girlfriends. Haylee had said that was why he used his father’s gun and killed himself in his parents’ bedroom. He’d wanted to get revenge.

“Some revenge,” I had told her. “He’s dead.”

She’d laughed. She always laughed at a lot of things I didn’t think had an iota of humor in them.

I wondered if she was going to laugh now.

I picked up the bread knife and stared at it for a few moments. I could try to kill him. I had thought about it a few times, but killing someone, even someone like him, seemed more difficult than killing yourself. And what if I failed? He might not kill me; he might torture me for weeks and weeks until I died, just as I had almost done before. No, suicide was a better choice now.

Where would I want to die?

I looked about the dismal basement apartment to consider my choices. Do it in the bathroom, maybe over the sink with the water running? Sit at the dinner table with my arm extended? Maybe on his newly laid carpet? No, I thought, it would probably be best to lie down on the bed and close my eyes. I pulled back the blanket and fluffed the pillow, thinking that I might as well be comfortable.

What do people who are about to commit suicide think about just before they do it? I wondered. If they were angry at someone or something, they’d probably concentrate on that. If they were depressed, they’d probably see it as the doorway to a place where there was no depression. If they thought so little of themselves, as Hampton probably had, they’d see no reason to continue being who they were. Maybe they thought they’d become someone else, someone better, in another life or somehow brought back in another body. Maybe Haylee had been right about Hampton after all, and that applied to most suicides. They just wanted someone to feel terrible, to get some sort of revenge on people or a world that had treated them so badly.

Should I think about Haylee? Should I fill my heart with hate and curse her as I slowly let the life drip out of me? Who would blame me? She certainly would do that if our roles were reversed. And yet there was the Kaylee in me remembering the good times we had together, our duets of laughter and squeals of delight, the two of us holding hands and walking together, falling asleep in each other’s arms when we were little, crying when one of us was in pain, maybe because we feared the same pain was about to happen to whoever didn’t have it yet but still crying just as hard as whoever was suffering. Sometimes we surely did that to please Mother, to assure her that we did more than sympathize with each other; we empathized.

And what about those times when we got the things we both wanted, the dresses, the shoes, the toys? We gave each other conspiratorial looks of satisfaction. Either she or I had convinced Daddy or Mother to buy us whatever we longed to have. We learned how to play on our “twindom,” as Haylee liked to call it. “We’ll do some twindom today,” she might say, and then we would plot and plan, perfecting the way we would mimic each other when we wanted something.

Once we were truly sisters, I thought. Should my last thoughts be about her then or be ugly, hateful thoughts about her now?

Most people didn’t choose how they should die or where they should die. No matter how firm they were in their acceptance of what was inevitable for everyone, they refused to believe it would happen or happen too soon. Something would save them; someone would save them. And when death did come calling, did they surrender, or did they fight until there was no more strength, no more breath, and no more hope? Suicide was the last thing they would ever consider.

“I’m not going to die,” Haylee had once told me. “I’ll make myself so ugly and mean that God won’t want me back.”

Well, maybe you have succeeded in doing just that, oh sister of mine, I thought.

Thanks to her, I didn’t have to find a reason to die today. I had only two choices, and I wouldn’t accept the second choice. I would not bring a child I could never want or love into this world. I would not be so wounded that I would have no hope of any other life or happiness. No one had found me. No one seemed to be trying, and with all my courage and determination, I had to accept that I could not escape.

I brought the knife to my left wrist. I would slice deeply and then drop my arm over the side of the bed so I wouldn’t have to watch myself bleed. I would just feel weaker and weaker and maybe get sleepier and sleepier. It would be easy, almost as if it wasn’t really happening, once I was past the initial sting of the knife.

Shouldn’t I be thinking a little about Mother or Daddy? Was I afraid that if I did, I wouldn’t cut myself? Despite everything, I didn’t want to imagine the pain and sorrow they would experience. Of course, I was confident that Anthony probably would bury me somewhere on his land, where no one would ever find me. To them, I would still be alive. They could keep convincing themselves of that and hold off the funereal thoughts.

This was so much better for everyone.

No more good-byes, no more regrets. I would finally escape.

I pressed the knife to my wrist and closed my eyes, but just before I started to slice my skin, I felt something and saw that Mr. Moccasin had leaped onto the bed. This time, he had a just-killed mouse in his mouth and was sitting there with it as though he wanted me to praise him for his hunting skills. He dropped the mouse at his feet and then turned and leaped off the bed.

Normally, I would have screamed or gotten sick to my stomach, but as if the cat had heard every one of my thoughts, he came up with a possible way for me to stay alive and be untouched, at least for a while longer.

I sat up and poked the mouse with the front of the knife. Where I poked it, a tiny pool of blood appeared. I could never guess where I got the nerve to do it, but I reached out and picked up the dead rodent, squeezing it like an orange. Then I dipped the tips of my fingers into the blood and began smearing it on my nightgown, between my legs. After that, I put the dead creature under the bed, washed off the knife, and put it back. Then I waited.

The moment Anthony stepped into the basement apartment, I started to cry. He stood there confused until I pointed to the bloodstain.

“My period has come,” I said. “We have to wait.”

His mouth dropped open with surprise.

“You have to get me something.”

Tags: V.C. Andrews The Mirror Sisters Suspense
Source: readsnovelonline.net