Page 119 of Worse Than Wicked
“I’m glad you’re home for her birthday,” Mabel says, taking a seat on the top step.
I join her. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
In truth, I’ve missed a lot of days. Never a birthday, but a lot of others. Becoming one of the world’s youngest neurosurgeons doesn’t happen without sacrifice. But family is the most important thing. It always comes first. So when they need me, I’ve made it happen, no matter the cost. Mabel has done the same, determined to give our kids the family she needed growing up.
We watch the girl find one of the doors and traipse along the suspension bridge.
“Careful,” I call.
She finally finds the way out to the swings and drops down into one. The other one sways beside her, empty.
“Do you see it?” Mabel asks.
“What?”
“The other swing is moving,” Mabel says. “It must be her imaginary friend.”
I don’t tell her that it’s not imaginary. It’s him. His ghost is always there beside her. He hovers, never far away. I know that even though I can’t see him on the swing when it moves inthe breeze, he’s here. He’s never really gone. He’s beside us in the bed, making sure I never go too far when I wrap my fingers around Mabel’s throat. He’s in our son’s eyes. And he’s in me. He will always be in me, a part of me, maybe the biggest part. It doesn’t really matter which one of us died, because we are both still here.
For two decades, we were lived apart, one person torn in two, split in half, forced to live in separate bodies. Now we live in one. Because I am him as much as I’m me, and he’s me as much as I am. Like I promised Mabel all those years ago, the earth can’t hold us. Nothing can separate us, not even death.
“Mom,” Hemlock yells, leaning back and forward to make herself go higher with each pump of her legs. “Come swing with me!”
Mabel climbs to her feet and ambles over. I watch them swing together. I wonder if she’s thinking about him, or about her own ghosts, her own childhood companion. As far as I know, she’s never seen Dahlia again. But there’s a lot I don’t know.
I used to think I knew everything, had all the answers, could fix everything.
I used to want to see that light go out, the one that haunts me now, that’s never far from my mind, whether I’m watching my family or standing over the operating table. Life is not something trivial, not something to be toyed and trifled with. It’s not a game.
Watching a man die didn’t make me powerful. It made me humble.
It took losing the game we were all playing to see that.
But sometimes I suspect Mabel played a little longer, a little smarter. That she was still playing when we thought it was over. I will probably always wonder. Because no matter what she says, I can never know what’s inside her mind, can never openup her brain the way I do my patients and find the answers in black and white.
Did she plan it all?
She always played the long game. Was that her final move, her checkmate? Her final revenge, to take what I loved most in the world, the one thing that could break me more completely than I could ever break her? Is that why she didn’t light the match when we were both inside—because she wanted me to live, to suffer, like Royal forced her to do?
I remember his words in that room so often.
“One of us is going to be next.”
He knew. He foresaw it, even when I didn’t.
He knew she’d win, even before she made her final move.
When she went to the basement that day and talked to Jane without us knowing, did they come up with it then? Can I trust her, even now, a decade after everything went wrong? Is she still playing, even now? Or did her plan go sideways, and it was always supposed to be me on the lawn that night? When she sent me back into the house for her cat, did she plan for me to never come out? All these years later, when I’ve given her a house and a family, every material possession she could want and the child she never thought she’d have, does she still wish it had been?
Those are the questions that keep me up at night, ones that can’t be researched online. These days, she’s the one more likely to be found online, slipping unknown into someone’s server, extracting information like she extracts a carpet fiber from a crime scene to tie back to a criminal who thought they got away with it. She searches the way I used to, endlessly, fruitlessly. The network around the Black Widow Killer simply vanished one day, though, blown away like a spiderweb in the wind.
They never found her. As far as I know, no one has. But I wonder.
Even though Mabel is not the Black Widow Killer, they’re linked in some mysterious way that transcends years of silence, like it did the first time. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to let her go out there alone with her. To trust her. I still wonder what they really said, if they hatched a plan that day, two spiders spinning an invisible web, an hourglass of venom measuring out the lives of their victims in drops of blood.
One day, Mabel could signal for her to return. She could decide that I’ve suffered enough, and it’s time to let me join my brother at last.
I think, when it happens, I’ll be ready. I hope I’ve made him proud.
