The truth was that I was interested, very interested, but not for the reasons Mother would hope. At night, before I went to sleep, I would lie awake and think about Haylee. She’s thinking about me, too, right now, I told myself. I wanted so to believe it. I could almost hear her and see her lying there in her bed in whatever Spartan room she w
as in, a room perhaps with bars on the windows. In my mind, she had no television or anything to provide her with her own music. She certainly had no telephone, and she wasn’t much of a reader. Haylee hated loneliness. She was terrified of the pantry when Mother locked us in it as punishment when we were little girls, far more terrified than I ever was. Now she surely had a lot of time on her hands to think. She had to be wondering about me and how much I might hate her. She had to.
Did these thoughts haunt her as much as I hoped they did? Did she ever ask her therapist to contact me for her? Did she dream of speaking to me on the phone? Did she stare out a front window and imagine me coming to see her?
I tossed and turned in my sleep, thinking about it. I was bouncing from anger to simple curiosity to sympathy. Which would win out? I wondered.
It was time to stop wondering.
“You’re really ready for this?” my father asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“I haven’t been there much, but during the times I have been there, I haven’t seen any significant remorse in her,” he warned. “Maybe it’s too soon.”
“You haven’t been to see her for a while, Daddy, and when you do go, you admittedly spend as little time with her as you can.”
“I don’t need to go regularly or spend time with her. I keep informed about her,” he said, but not convincingly.
“Do you? Frequently? Tell me honestly, when did you speak with her doctors last?”
“That’s not the point,” he said, a little annoyed. Like me, he was conflicted about Haylee and didn’t want any reminders of his difficulties in coming to terms with that. “I don’t want her to hurt you in any way anymore,” he said. His lips still whitened a bit from his inner rage whenever he referred to her. “She’s not going to hurt anyone in this family ever again.”
“She won’t,” I said, with as much self-confidence as I could muster.
Was I at least a little frightened? Of course, but I couldn’t let fear stop me. If I could overcome Anthony Cabot so often in that basement apartment that was a torture chamber, I could visit my twin sister and dare look her in her eyes, our eyes. I wanted her to see that I had not only survived but grown stronger. I might even thank her for it. She’d hate that, of course. It amused me to think of some ways to get back at her, to give her some pain. No question, there was some Haylee in me, too. The question was, was there any Kaylee in her, at least enough to feel regretful and help me quiet my own inner rage?
“Okay, if that’s what you want,” my father said, with obvious reluctance. “As you know, she’s been undergoing psychotherapy, not unlike what you had but obviously for different reasons and under different circumstances.”
“Will she eventually go to a real jail?”
“I don’t expect so,” he said. “She has no previous record of anything illegal. There’s no proof she was working with this horrid man, conspiring directly with him. The police are convinced that she simply placed you in his path, in the danger, not that it makes much difference to me.”
Or to me, I thought but didn’t say.
“You know I had to hire an attorney to represent her. The most they were going after her for was obstruction of justice, preventing the police from finding you. Why she did it is, of course, why she’s in counseling.”
“Yes,” I said. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but now I was even more determined. Despite what my father had said, I couldn’t help but wonder how successful Haylee’s counseling had been. How could any therapist even begin to unravel that knotted rope of emotions inside her? How deep had her anger and hate toward us all been? How could she possibly recover?
“I’d like to go to see her, Daddy,” I said, now more insistent.
He nodded. He could see that it was time to put his rage in a closet and find a way to go forward. “I’ll make arrangements for us.”
“I want to see and speak to her without you being there in the room with us, Daddy.”
He looked at me sharply, his eyes filling with concern. “Without me? Is that wise?”
“She’s still my sister,” I said. “I’m not afraid of her.”
“Yeah, well, I am,” he said, and then almost laughed. He shook his head. “She’s a piece of work. Your mother’s work,” he added.
I didn’t respond. Haylee and I were both pieces of our mother’s work. He should see that. Maybe I was more interested in Haylee now because I was afraid not of her but of myself. I had to get over that fear to complete my own recovery. Despite my resistance to it and Haylee’s resistance, too, Mother had us convinced we were too alike ever to be comfortable being different.
Would she prove to be right? Was I becoming more and more like Haylee, especially hard and vengeful, one of the side effects of my incarceration and my battle to survive? Her bedroom might be empty and her voice and footsteps gone from the house, but she could never be completely gone, not as long as I was here. I felt like I was absorbing her lingering spirit, keeping it part of me.
Two days went by without my father mentioning anything about a visit. Even though I wasn’t ready to return to any school, much less mine, I occupied myself by reading my textbooks and following the recommended literature list. I made our dinners, baked cookies and a cake, and looked after the house. I even washed windows. No matter what I did, time seemed to trickle like drops of honey or molasses.
I couldn’t get interested in television shows, especially soap operas. There were too many memories of Haylee, Mother, and me watching them together.