Looking into her was like being thrown into a cauldron of bubbling oil except it was guilt, self-hatred and anguish making me writhe and scream. I’d never read anything as painful and debilitating before. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t break away, sucked in by the crushing weight of her remorse.
She pulled away and I slumped back, dazed. Free of her tortuous emotions I felt insubstantial, as if my body were rising, the molecules separating and floating above the trees. I watched the children play while I fused myself back together and all the while Caroline twisted her daisies. Hatred and love. Anger, jealousy, vengeance and guilt.
Truth and lies.
Her daughter fell over and started crying, and both children ran up to the bench.
“It’s all right, sweetie,” Caroline crooned, giving her a tender kiss.
“Gosh, Elizabeth, you’re such a baby,” the boy said.
Elizabeth?
Caroline didn’t meet my incredulous stare. And then I got it. My throat tightened and I let out the breath I’d been holding. My sister still hated me. Not in the old way so much but in the way that some people come to hate those who they’ve harmed. Her sea was leagues deeper than mine, her chains heavier and her truths far uglier.
But she had a plan.
She was going to give this small, innocent Elizabeth the love she had never given me, protect her like she should have protected me. Cherish her and pretend that I had never existed. And maybe someday she’d find redemption.#p#分页标题#e#
Yeah well, good luck with that.
Caroline fit the daisy chain on Elizabeth’s golden head. “I bought Mum and Dad’s house from the council a few years ago. The spare key is at the Radomskys’. Anything of yours still there is going in the skip on Monday.”
They’d kept some of my things? It didn’t matter. I had no intention of returning to my parents’ house, so she could bin whatever she liked. I nodded and stood up.
Caroline didn’t look at me. “I hope I never see you again.”
I took a deep breath. “Ditto.”
And if my voice wasn’t entirely steady, it was free of hate.
A few hours later I discovered that I did, indeed, want to go to my parents’ house. Why I wanted to revisit the backdrop to so many painful memories eluded me. Maybe I wanted to see my old things, remember the girl I used to be and feel relieved I was no longer her. I figured I might as well pack in as much trauma in as few hours as possible, then leave it behind me for good.
Tarzan’s take was that I felt compelled to “open that front door” so I could “process the pain” and “find closure.” Well, after waving Tarzan off I opened that front door and found myself in Brighton’s version of a Stepford Wives’ house. The inside of my parents’ council home looked like something out of a Laura Ashley decorating shop. Gone were the stained grey sofas and swirly brown carpets. The Virgin Mary altar and my mother’s collection of cheap trinkets were nowhere to be seen.
I stood in the middle of the sitting room, rotating slowly as I took in the delicate flowery wallpaper, the plush cream carpet and sofas, and the perfectly coordinated accessories. This place didn’t even smell like my parents’ house anymore. The rose and lily potpourri made my nose itch.
Who the hell had lived here? It couldn’t be John and María Benton yet there they were, smiling in photographs on top of a sleek oak bookcase—with books in it! And not just any books either, classics like Dickens and Dante, though they didn’t seem to have been read. I skimmed the titles, looking for Cervantes, but came up empty.
I stood at the shiny double-glazed window. The tatty net hangings may have been replaced with style number 43 but they covered the same bleak view I’d grown up with. I swung around and compared the middle-class sitting room with my memories, feeling displaced.