Treachery is an offense that lands you in the lowest circle of Hell. But we knew that much going in. By the bitter morning marking the midpoint of March, when winter’s final breaths rattled all the portraits adorning the great walls of our Romanesque house, we decided that Father had to die. 

Four months later, I am stewing in the stagnant, syrupy mouth of summer, and there is little else I can think of. I’ve hidden in the East Wing bathroom, lying flat on my back at the bottom of the chipped clawfoot tub (from France, Pam has told me many times as she’s made me scrub it) and waiting for the Valium to kick in. A cool sheet of sweat has already settled over my skin, and I can feel the fever burning its way to the far reaches of my mind. The hole in my stomach—mere inches shy of the artery—is screaming, screaming, screaming. I am going to die in this bathroom. 

I shut my eyes and study the dizzying flares of sunlight behind the darkness of my lids, forcing my breaths to become slower, heavier. I listen to the children playing outside. Playing, in this heat? No, that’s not right. That’s not right at all. I remember suddenly that there are no children here, not anymore, but there is laughter and music, and I can hear it. I can hear it. It must be the house. 

The house must know I’m home. 

They’re going to find me. Pam will see the car crookedly parked halfway up the lawn, and she will call them, and I have always hidden in this bathroom, and they know that. The rusted deadbolt isn’t going to hold forever. I am going to die in this bathroom. I am going to die in this house. 

I shouldn’t have come back. Clay left me everything—the car, the money, the guilt—and I could’ve gotten away, so far away that they’d stop looking. But there’s a red string of fate tethered like a noose around my neck, and every waking second, I feel the tug of the leash. So I came back. The Prodigal Daughter returns. 

But there is no one here to forgive her. 

I am a Beaumont of Beaumont Manor. But I don’t carry myself like the rest of them. Why should I? I am only the feeble-minded bastard child that no one wanted (no one except Father, of course). I have a crooked jaw and slumped shoulders and a thick, winding trunk of an artery in my stomach that twists and throbs with life. When I am angry or frightened or frenzied with passion, I’m seized by the stop and go of it, every heaving step followed by a great flourish of blood. It never ceases—never ceases, only slows to the faintest murmur. 

It is not murmuring now. It is beating like a war drum, so loud I can hear it pulsing in my ears to the broken tune of the bullet hole just northwest of it. My whole stomach is on fire, the kind of blue-hearted flame that makes everything else numb to the touch. I am going to die in this bathroom. 

But I am quickly realizing that none of that matters. They are my family, and this is my house, and it is our sickness that lurks in these walls. 

We are horse people by trade. Long ago, the first Beaumont to come to America found his fortune sitting astride the sleek stallions who bore his branding on their flanks. Then he built this house, these stables, this beautiful family with our great many talents in spite of our peculiar afflictions. 

By reputation, we are launderers. Dirty money is easy to make. Anyone can do it, and any nosy, needy, no good government goon can follow the paper trail. No, the real magic lies in making dirty money clean. Salvation is the business that will never die. And what better place to conduct it than a world where hundreds of thousands of dollars ride on the simplest whims of nature—what runs faster, what looks better, what trips and falls and doesn’t get up? Errors in accounting hide quite easily behind errors in evolution. 

But a lifetime of rinsing the blood off others’ hands makes you dirty in a way that doesn’t wash out. My father broke bread with senators and sicarios, judges and jailbirds, mob bosses and media moguls and men of faith that rubbed a rosary for him every night. All of them loved him. None of them saved him. Father was not the kind of man who could be saved. That is what I have told myself on the nights I cannot sleep and the days I cannot rise. The only one who could have saved him was himself. 

He saved his family instead. 

Mrs. Beaumont is not my mother. My mother lives in a psychiatric ward two hours east of us, in the land of squeaky tiles and cotton scrubs and lights that buzz and buzz and never die, Fate’s endless overture for lost souls doped up on Ativan. She entertains herself with tarot cards and watercolors and love letters to Father that are never delivered. I visit her monthly, and I don’t call her “Mother,” and I don’t call Mrs. Beaumont “Mother” either. I call her Pam. 

Pam hates me because I am small and dumb and not her own. She always stared at me over the rim of her wine glass like I was some foreign creature who wandered into her house. I think it’s because I’ve got my father’s face, lean and dog-like, but my eyes are my mother’s. They are the sharp eyes of the servant girl who threatened to run and cry wolf. 

Pam need not worry; my mother doesn’t say much of anything these days. 

Anthony is the oldest, which means that he is perfect in every way. Almost every way. He can’t keep anything shut—not his mouth, not his wallet, not the fly of his pants. I remember the day when he was fifteen and I was ten and the yelling was so loud that I hid in the bathroom as the whole house trembled, the day that Father shipped him off to military school. There, they buzzed his curly hair and made him do push-ups and taught him to hide wolfish teeth behind a sheepish smile. And when he came back, Father forgave him. 

He went on to West Point, but he never saw combat, meaning he was not a real soldier in the eyes of Father and every other haggard veteran, the old men who still scream in their sleep and polish their shadow boxes of pretty medals from a time when they were desperate beasts scrambling in the dirt. But West Point is still West Point, and Anthony is still a silver-tongued son of Beaumont. He has been in and out ever since—in and out of politics, in and out of the country, in and out of our lives. 

It is Anthony who will come to bust the door down, I bet. It is Anthony who will find me. He always was a mama’s boy. 

Talia was the second-born, something she spent her whole life trying to compensate for. Blessed with prodigious genius from an early age, she was an award-winning novelist by the time her peers were graduating high school. In recent years, her poems and plays were less well-received, as was news of her fourth divorce, but I suppose the horde of parasitic biographers have had plenty to work with. 

I don’t pity her, even now. She was too proud to take anyone’s pity and just desperate enough to beg for their love. She only ever made one mistake. A big mistake. The kind of mistake that put a person in the ground. 

But Father forgave her too. 

Given the circumstances of our births, Clay and I were often passed off as twins. Fraternal twins. The true story goes that I was conceived first, an event now regarded as the biggest mistake Father ever made in his life, but Clay was born a month and a half early due to the sheer size of him. He might’ve ripped Pam in two. He often told me that he wished he had.

A few days later and a few doors down, I was born to the half-crazed servant girl, nearly killing us both, and Father waited with open arms to forgive me from my first breath. I don’t know why, but he wanted me. He saved me. 

He just had to lock my mother up to do it. 

So Father told everyone we met that Clay’s mother was my mother and Clay’s birthday was my birthday and I was so little because Clay was so big. Anyone wise enough to know the truth was wise enough to keep their mouth shut. 

Clay and I had the sort of cosmic connection that is referenced quite often in fiction but can be found in reality under only the most unique circumstances. I see it like this: when the universe—or whatever divine power governs it—recognizes that a combination of factors within it have blended together in a manner that is just so beautifully, perfectly, tragically fucked up, it allows just a shred of pity for the poor souls trapped within the tempest. They cannot escape the storm, but they can weather it together; in fact, the only way that they can weather it is together. We were each other’s lifeboat and lighthouse. He was my shelter, and I was his vitals. We were only apart for the two years he spent at college, before he busted himself up pretty badly and lost his riding scholarship, which was alright because he was flunking out anyway and Father was always going to forgive him. Then he came back to me, and the two of us were tasked with caring for things together, gardening and grooming and hotwalking and tossing feed to the hogs. Well, Clay and Father tossed feed to the hogs. I never went anywhere near the hogs. 

Clay’s blood is still on me, the spatters now stiffened into thick black flakes, a skin I will never shed. I cannot remember if it has been a matter of minutes or hours or days since he passed, but I haven’t showered since. My long hair clings limp and greasy to the sides of my skull, and the hole in my stomach reeks of slow death, and I despise Clay for having such a lousy aim. He was only inches from the artery. Now, I am going to die in this bathroom. 

Cassidy was born two years after us, and I suspect that she was always Pam’s favorite. They shared the same button nose and reddish curls, the same dull, watery eyes that flashed with casual cruelty. Thus, she had the luxury of growing into a spoiled little fool over the years, the kind of lost child who has to travel the globe and waste large sums of money and play with people’s lives in order to find herself. Father forgave her, of course, after cutting her off, but she never forgave him. Not for that. 

She always had a temper. I remember how she lunged at Father without fear, how she struck first, hard and fast. She cried for Gage as she did it, to hell with the rest of us. She and Gage were always close. Not as close as Clay and me, of course, but very few people achieve that sort of closeness, that understanding. They were close nonetheless. 

Oh, Gage…what is there to say about Gage? He was here, and now he’s not, and that’s all there is to it. It’s hard to sum a man up in words when his whole life was nothing but numbers. Mathematically, he was brilliant, which is why he was named Father’s primary accountant fresh out of college. Naturally, any mistakes he made were forgiven. He was also emotionally obtuse and about as intellectually stimulating as a sack of flour. He only spoke when spoken to, and the conversation never lasted more than five minutes. But he was a fixed variable nonetheless, a much-needed constant in our lives. Now there’s just a zero—a vast, intangible emptiness where something once stood. 

When I look down at my left hand, I see the faded slash of scar tissue where Gage slipped and struck me instead of Father. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it wasn’t. It doesn’t really matter now, not when Father is gone and Gage is gone and I…I am not. Not yet.

I suppose there’s the brat too. Fittingly named for the month in which he was born eighteen cursed years ago, August Beaumont is the kid brother we never wanted and the supposed patriarch to whom we will never answer. He is Father’s last trick on us, a nasty little joke with fair hair and knobby knees and a sense of self-assurance that makes my hair stand on edge because I know it all too well. 

I don’t know which remaining son of Beaumont I’d rather face—him or Anthony. God willing, it’ll be neither, but I think I’ve given up on God already. There was no God back in March, only us and Father and the sweet, sinful whispers of the house itself. 

I don’t remember when the house began to speak to me, if it ever spoke to the others. That’s the thing about tragedies—there’s always a chorus. But only some characters choose to listen to it. I have always had a taste for the theatrical, for masks and costumes and whatever great invisible hands pull the actors’ strings. Had I been suited for college like the others, I might have studied theater. But I was dull, as Pam put it, so I have always stayed to help her with the house and Father with the horses, and I read what books Father provided in an attempt to fill up space in a head that I was told was always doomed to be empty. Well, so is a library before it’s filled with books and a stage before it’s filled with actors and this house before it was filled with ghosts. Now it’s really quite full. 

In the ancient times, a chorus was comprised solely of men, but the house spoke to me in all kinds of voices. Men, women, children. Sometimes they sang. Sometimes they screamed. I think I heard every single soul in this house, maybe because I was the only one lonely enough to lend an ear. But the house was not the first to call for death that winter. Clay was. There were three reasons, he decided, that Father had to die. 

The first reason was a matter of good and evil. Father amassed many little evils in the course of his life, and naturally, the rest of us were infected. That was why we all were the way we were, Clay explained as we sat together at the bay window in my bedroom, my fingers toying with the worn blue threads of the cushion and his fingers toying with my hair, weaving the same sort of braids he used to put in the mane of his thoroughbreds. 

“How are we?” I’d asked, looping a loose thread around my finger and watching the blood pool. 

“Well, you’re a saint,” he said. “But have you ever wondered why Tony can’t hold down a job? Why Talia can’t hold down a husband? Why I can’t sit a horse anymore, and Cassidy can’t find one single buyer for her paintings, and Gage…Gage does alright, but he doesn’t have anything to cling to that’s not in Father’s shadow.” 

“None of us do.” The skin of my finger quickly darkened to purple. I could feel it pulsing against the thread, an echo of the artery nestled deep within me. 

“That’s the issue. We’ve reaped the benefits of being his children, but we have to pay for his crimes too, cosmically speaking. It’s why we fall short. It’s why all six of us, as grown adults, have wound up back in this house, clinging to his mercy, when we could be free. What would death be, but the ultimate act of mercy?” 

The thread finally snapped. “For who?” 

“Us. Him. The world, considering it will have one less evil.” 

I can’t remember what I said to that, if I’m being honest, but I remember the house being discontent that night as I tried to sleep, the beating of rain on the bay window and chiding voices of children floating around me as I tossed and turned in my bed. It never snowed during the winter, just stormed and stormed. I caught the gaze of my great aunt’s portrait hanging above me, her soft, sallow face illuminated by flashes of heat lightning in the distance. I have been told that I share that face (parts of it, anyway), as well as her name, so it was only fitting that her portrait hung in my room. What I lacked, at least then, was her willpower. The story goes that when the house was besieged during the Civil War—what side we were on depends on who’s asking the question—she was a starving widow given the choice between letting her children live under occupation or die in freedom. She kneeled down in her pretty petticoats and rolled up her pretty sleeves and drowned them in the washtub, one by one. 

Was it her children who spoke to me then? Is it her children I hear now, laughing and playing as I hide in the very bathroom where my namesake pushed them below those chilly suds? 

The truth is that we’ve always been this way. Parents killing children. Children killing parents. Children killing each other. Father’s own two brothers had passed years prior—a highly dubious suicide and a mugging gone wrong that could’ve been a hired murder gone right. Ever since our ancestral father bashed his brother’s head in with a rock and built this house where his brains wet the ground, I think the Beaumonts of Beaumont Manor have favored a line of succession in which each generation annihilates itself, leaving one survivor to carry on the curse. We were fools to think we could break the cycle. All we did was play right along. 

The lock on the door rattles, pulling me from my thoughts. I force myself upright in the tub and sit in tense silence as I study the door. Nothing. I have always been thankful for it, that lock. Every child needs a lock to keep out the monsters. The Valium is kicking in now, I can tell, because the warmth in my stomach has become a blanket, a soft and fuzzy darkness for the rest of my body to fade into. I am still going to die in this bathroom, yes, but not yet. Not yet. I press down to find the quick but steady beat of my artery—that determined flow of life—and let it guide me back into my mind. 

The second reason, most obviously, was a matter of money. When this is all turned into a tabloid story, that will be the thing they focus on. Rich brat children kill rich bastard father and suffer the consequences, more inside. Gage was the only one who knew the extent of Father’s estate, down to the last penny, and he had told us that no matter which way it was divided, each of us would have enough for a fresh start. We could leave Pam the house and the horses and whatever loose ends Father had neglected to tie up. For Cassidy, that was enough. The only things she cared about were money and art (maybe sex too, but she found enough of it through the first two pursuits), and she was never the kind of girl who had moral reservations about getting what she wanted. Gage, too, seemed content with a large sum of money and no thumb to be stuck under. That left me and the two eldest. 

“We won’t tell Tony,” Clay explained over coffee on one of those stormy nights when neither of us could sleep or stay up alone. We sat on the black and white tile of the kitchen in our pajamas, listening to the rain and sipping cheap, gritty coffee out of Pam’s fine china (from Shanghai, she’s told me many times as she’s watched me handle it, as if her narrowed eyes could will my stiff, clumsy fingers to hold on tightly). 

“Why?” 

“Because he’s a loose cannon.” 

“And Talia?” My hand trembled as I brought the smooth lip of the cup to my mouth, savoring the way the coffee burned my tongue. “Will we tell Talia?” 

“No.” 

“Why?” 

“Because she’s a blabbermouth. And she still operates under the delusion that someday, somehow, she will earn Father’s favor.”

Talia and I had never gotten along, but I think we might have, if either of us had been born a boy. She could tolerate Cassidy because Cassidy was the doll-faced disappointment that Pam had doted upon since birth, and she could tolerate the boys because they were boys. She had grown up watching Anthony be more stupid, more unruly, and more expensive, yet better loved all the same. But I—simple in mind and plain in face and unspeakably treacherous in origin—was Father’s favorite, the one who got a pony and my own bedroom in the East Wing, away from everybody else. I don’t know why. I never asked to be the favorite. I never asked for a pony. I never asked for my own bedroom, the one with the blue wallpaper and the bay window and no lock on the door. 

Whatever happened to that damn pony anyway? I never can remember. It must have fared better than Clay’s horse, the one that fell on him and snapped its back the day he lost his scholarship. I remember the way they both laid in the dust—two panting, groaning animals with wild eyes begging for mercy. Father gave the horse its mercy then and there, right between the eyes. Clay got his later. 

That was the thing about Father. He only tended to us if we were withering, and it seemed we were always withering unless he tended to us. He was the type to give boo-boos just to kiss them better. But maybe that’s the only way some people know how to love, and maybe that’s the only love some people know how to accept. The thought occurred to me after my last visit to my mother that February, when she cupped my cheek and told me how much I looked like Him, how my silence—no matter how cruel—created the same lovely space for her to fill. 

When I got back to the house, I went straight to the full length mirror in the parlor to study myself—the strange, unholy consummation of years of love and hate in the flesh. I saw my great aunt’s pale skin and high, flat cheekbones and my mother’s long, curly hair and dark eyes dulled from years of a certain kind of hunger, the lovesick eyes of a lamb waiting for slaughter. Interrupting the long line of Father’s face was my jaw, the crooked jaw he gave me. Even that was his as much as mine. 

Clay came up behind me, his own reflection interrupting my muddled, solitary portrait. I felt the unbearable warmth of his calloused skin against my own, the heaviness of his touch. “You’re cold today.” 

I mustered a chuckle. “I’m cold every day.” 

“Did you visit your mother?” 

“Yes.” 

“How was she?” 

“The same as usual—clinging to his mercy, waiting for his love.” 

“Are we not the same?” 

I didn’t answer. We stood together before the mirror for a moment, our reflections staring back sharply, as if endowed with some secret knowledge, some hidden truth. Clay loomed right behind me, his hand still heavy on my shoulder. His voice was as soft and sour as the sweat-soaked shirt on my skin. “We are. You know we are. My question is why?” 

“Because we love him.” I watched my reflection’s lips move, the way the words fell slowly from her mouth, her voice dim and drugged. It was a voice I knew but did not claim. “Everyone loves him.” 

Clay leaned closer, his breath tickling my ear as his grip tightened on my shoulder. His other hand found my waist, his palm flattening against the artery as it began to drum. “Everyone loves you too.”

It’s true. I am not gifted in the way that the rest of my family is. Was. I am not a great writer or speaker or athlete or artist. I am the dimwit, the idiot, the fool who dances beneath the blazing sun on the faded face of my mother’s tarot card. I was never a threat, and they all loved me for it. Everyone always ascribed some sort of moral purity to me, some unshakeable sense of virtue that I have never had and will never have, and I’ve always thought it’s funny how “nice” is the word people use when they don’t have something good to say. She’s such a nice girl, isn’t she? 

My reflection bared her teeth grimly. I could hear something more sinister echoing through the bowels of the house, something reaching for me with shadowy fingertips that can only touch but never hold. Not yet. 

It was my birthday that night, my true birthday. Father was the only one who knew or celebrated my true birthday. I never quite understood why, but it was our secret, one of our many secrets, and secrets are special when one is growing up. Only adulthood teaches you to taste the bitter pill beneath its sugary coating. 

I knew he would follow the same ritual he did every year, that he would arrive at midnight with his gift, one of those cheap chocolate cupcakes with a curlicue belt of white frosting and a single lit candle stuck in the middle, carrying the promise of a wish for me and me only. I waited in bed, wrapping my arms around my stomach and feeling the thrumming of the artery quicken as I heard approaching footsteps and the creak of the door. “Happy Birthday, kid.” 

My name never mattered much to Father. Sometimes I was kid and sometimes I was darling and sometimes I was baby and sometimes I was my mother, if he was really drunk. He brought the cupcake over carefully, his long face stretched and worn in the yellow light. He told me to make a wish. 

I wish you loved me. 

I wish you loved me differently. 

I wish I didn’t love you. 

I wish I didn’t look like you. 

I wish you were dead. 

I wish we were both dead. 

I blew out the candle, bracing myself in the darkness. 

And when he finally left that night, and I heard the click of my door that closes but never locks, I lay in bed alone, surrounded by the house’s throng of softly screaming voices and staring up at the steely eyes of my great aunt. I finally decided that Father had to die. Not because of good and evil or money, but for the third reason—a matter of blood. The blood between my legs on many a dark night when I didn’t have the strength to crawl from my bedroom to this bathroom. The blood Clay spat from his mouth the day he lost his riding scholarship and Father hit him hard enough to make his teeth rattle. The blood beneath my mother’s nails when she had clawed the walls of that first white room in desperation, and the blood of every one of my siblings who paid for their sins with a black eye or a split lip. The blood we’d spilled our whole lives. The blood we’d never stop spilling if we didn’t bite the hand that strikes. So what if it was also the hand that feeds? 

That was why we couldn’t just poison him or cut the brakes in his car or hire a hitman and remove ourselves from the situation entirely. That was why we had to put thirty-seven—yes, I counted—stab wounds into his body with our own hands before we dumped it into the hog pen. The curse of our family is a blood curse, one borne through blood and broken by blood.

On the appointed day, I led Father into the basement under the guise of wanting help with one of the many portraits we’d stored there. The rest waited in the shadows. I don’t remember giving the signal. I don’t remember condemning him to his death, but I must have. There was a flurry of blades and blood, and he fought back. I’ll give him that. I felt Gage slash my hand, and I listened to the way my own sharp screech mingled with Father’s as our eyes met in the dimly lit chaos for a fraction of a second. Prey became predator; predator became prey. He dropped his hands, and suddenly he was just an old man. He was just a feeble old man, and they were hurting him, and I was hurting him, and the ghosts were screaming, and I was screaming, and all I saw was red, red, red. 

As he was going down, he grabbed me by the shirt collar, pulled me closer. I struggled to move away, my artery squirming and shuddering as my heart pounded against the cage of my chest, but his grip was strong for a dying man. His fingers trembled as they reached for my face. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Please, please don’t touch me. 

“You too,” he hissed, his fingers leaving fresh, sticky streaks on my cheek. “You’ll get yours too.” 

We anticipated getting away with it. We were the sort of people who skirted the law enough as it was, and Father was the sort of man who made everyone look the other way when he wound up dead, a single, secret sigh of relief escaping a collective mouth. As far as local police were concerned, the case was cut and dry—he had a heart attack while feeding the hogs and fell in. And hogs don’t care if you’re dead or alive or rich or poor or good or bad. There wasn’t really enough left of him to tell what he’d been. 

What we didn’t anticipate was the way we snipped one single bloodied string of fate, and the rest began to unravel. 

The first month was the arrival of the brat. Naturally, Anthony and Talia had taken to fighting, as older siblings do, over who loved who and who got what in the days after the incident as Pam, drink in hand, smugly looked on. They hadn’t read the will. None of us had; none of us even knew where it was, but we knew of its existence. After the business with the police and the funeral home had been sorted out, and it was finally proper to have Father’s lawyer conduct the reading, we all found out that I was not the only bastard he had. I was just the one he kept. August Beaumont was a perfectly ordinary child raised by his perfectly ordinary mother for the past seventeen years, and in August of this year, he would inherit the entirety of Father’s estate without so much as a penny left to the rest of us. Pam fainted. Anthony and Talia continued to fight, and Cassidy cursed, and Gage stood in silent shock. Clay and I only looked at each other and laughed, the kind of desperate, wicked cackle that slips through the cracks when one’s sense of reality is shattered. The brat existed. The brat got everything. The brat was here to stay. 

We all hated the brat. Not because he got everything while we got nothing. We’d each gotten plenty in the grand scheme of things. Rather, he had suffered nothing to get everything. What blood had Father’s hands drawn from his body? What ghosts hung over his shoulder, whispering in his ear? He came to the house a stranger and would leave as its master. Like me, he was the perfect synthesis of Father’s cruelty and generosity, the two-headed beast that Beaumont Manor deserved. The rest of us didn’t stand a chance. 

The second month claimed Cassidy and Gage. A suicide and a freak accident, just like Father’s brothers. As summer came, the feeling of loss became a permanent haze sticking to our skin. The house grew louder than ever, a cacophony of pain trapped in its walls. Clay and I clung to each other in the loneliness as we always had. We wore the same clothes. We ate from the same plate. We shared the same bed. 

The third month took Talia. Car crash, a nasty one. The kind where the casket’s not just closed, but empty. Maybe there was a deer. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe Anthony cut her brakes after seeing her cozy up to the brat and play big sister for the first time in her life. But compared to the rest of us, she was innocent. That’s when Clay and I realized that our family curse was not the sort that could be satisfied with a single sacrificial lamb or takes its fill of divine justice. No, it was a glutton that grew hungrier with every drop of blood. 

So we left. Gathering what savings and valuables we had, we left Pam to drown in her tears and her wine while Anthony and August argued over the things that rival sons always argue over. It didn’t matter. We were free. We were finally free. 

But our freedom was short-lived. As we were staying in a cheap roadside motel sixty miles south of where we’d grown up, living off of hot dogs and half-melted ice cream cups and our own desperate dreams of what the future would hold, Clay took a phone call. Lying on my back on the stiff bedspread, I watched him leave our room and stand outside on the balcony. I couldn’t make out his voice, but through narrow blinds and the cloudy glass of the window, I watched his face shift from shock to anger to a grim expression I’d never seen before. It was strange how much he looked like Father when his face darkened. 

The next few minutes all blurred together. Clay came in and shut the door behind him. He pulled out the pistol he kept in his back pocket. Click. Boom. I saw heaven, only briefly, in the glaring maw of the white hot pain that swallowed me whole and spat me back out on that motel bedspread, now warm and wet from the spray. I attempted to stand on rubbery legs, then felt the scratch of the carpet on my knees as I fell. Ears ringing and eyes blurry, I reached out for him with the grasping hands of a child. Click. Boom. I felt the heaviness of his body, heavier than ever before, and he was a ghost boy without a face and I was a ghost girl soaked in the darkness and wetness of him, and for one moment we were one as we were always meant to be before I left him and emerged as myself screaming like a second birth, my crooked jaw agape. I grabbed the gun. I grabbed his keys. I ran barefoot out to the car, the hot, jagged tongue of asphalt licking my skin, and I drove sixty miles and staggered up the driveway to come die in this bathroom. Al Fin. 

The wound in my stomach is begging to be touched. I peer at it through the fog of Valium, allowing my fingers to creep up to the angry, glistening ring of darkened blood. In this light, I see rubies (from me, from the stomach of a bastard and a fool and a murderer, I imagine telling Pam when she’s forced to look at me one last time). I’ve never worn rubies. Maybe my mother did, once. Maybe my great aunt did. Maybe I’ll ask her. 

The lock rattles again. This time I hear voices—real, adult voices—and I know it is only a matter of minutes, a matter of mere rust and rot beneath paint. I want to see my reflection one last time, to look into my misbegotten mishmash of a face and finally know her. 

I haul myself out of the bathtub and stumble towards the mirror on shaking legs, my artery’s familiar hymn drowning in its own death rattle. Leaning against the sink, I dare to look up. 

But I am not alone. I have never been alone in this house. Not one, but two long faces stare back from the mirror, two figures in bloody clothes, haggard and pale and decidedly not human. My father stands behind me, bearing every slash we gave him. 

Father, Father, my father. I pretend I don’t, but I know my father. My father is the ever-present monster under the bed, the creature in the closet, the ghoul that lurks just beyond the bend in the hallway where the light doesn’t touch. I love my father, and I hate my father, and I am my father. 

I am that I am. So quoth the original Father. 

His slack jaw pulls into a smile, teeth bloodied. “See you in hell, kid.” 

My reflection smiles back, fingers digging into her wound. “See you there.”