“I don’t know!” She comes to a complete stop, throwing her arms up in the air. A cluster of seagulls go flying overhead, squawking their displeasure at her outburst, but I don’t react at all. This is what I need, what I want to hear.
No matter how painful it might be.
“You’re not…lying, are you? She really was trying to kill you?” I hate that I have to ask, but come on. I’ve heard some pretty fanciful tales come straight out of Sylvie’s mouth.
Plenty of times.
“You really think I would make this up?” She’s incredulous.
“Not at all. You have to admit it just sounds so fucking crazy. I know Sylvia Lancaster is a lot, but Syl. What you’re accusing her of…” My voice drifts.
“Is the truth,” she says quietly, her head dropping so she’s speaking to the sand beneath our feet. “I was out of school all the time for being sick.”
“I remember.”
“Sometimes she’d have me so doped up on prescription medication, I didn’t know what was happening to me, or how much time had passed. She’d keep me drugged for days. Even weeks. And I always felt nauseous. I threw up all the time. I think she was giving me something so I couldn’t keep anything down. Couldn’t even eat. My blood pressure would get so low, I could barely function. I would faint so easily. You saw me back then. You know how it was. At one point, I got pneumonia, and I couldn’t shake it for the longest time. I was coughing and hacking for months. I really believed I was going to die.”
Her words bring back all the memories of her at Lancaster Prep. Joking about death. Being so matter of fact about the subject too. She’d always tell me she was dying and she wanted to live life to the fullest, right in that very moment.
After a while, I thought it was horseshit. Just Sylvie being dramatic because that was her personality trait and she leaned into it heavily. I remember even asking Whit about it once, and he blew me off, saying it was just her way.
But maybe she was trying to tell all of us all along what her mother was doing to her, and we never believed her.
That’s so messed-up.
“She’s always had a hold on me,” Sylvie continues. For someone who said she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, maybe the dam just broke. Now she appears ready to spill. “When I was younger, I could never break the bond. How could I? I lived with her. Even when I was at Lancaster Prep, she still pulled all the strings. She’s controlled me since birth. Right up until I married Earl. When that happened, I felt—free. Like I finally got away from her for good.”
Irritation sparks in my veins at the mention of her dead husband. I could’ve been the one to help her get away from her mother, but she never gave me the chance.
“And then he died. I was at a complete loss. You don’t expect your husband to die when you’re my age, even if he’s much older than you. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. His children were fighting with me over money. Money I didn’t even want or need. It was a complete nightmare.”
Is it wrong that I don’t feel bad? God, I’m a callous dick. I hate that she suffered, but I could give a damn that her husband died. She should’ve never married that asshole in the first place. She should’ve married someone her own age.
Someone like me.
“My mother took over everything. She helped me with the funeral, with the meetings with the lawyers. All of it. She pulled me right back into her web, and like the weak person I am, I went willingly. She promised she would help me, and she did. At first. I thought she’d changed.” Sylvie finally lifts her head, her watery eyes meeting mine. “Like an idiot I believed her. She was just so supportive. Incredibly sincere, making me all sorts of promises. Then about a month after Earl passed, I was staying at her apartment, and one night I woke up to her standing over my bed with a pillow in her hands like she was going to—smother me. That was it. That was the end. I hadn’t seen her since, until Whit’s wedding, and she tried to talk to me afterward, but I’ve mostly cut her off. It’s just—it’s better that way. Easier.”
I’m still stuck on one tiny detail. “Wait a minute. You woke up to her standing over your bed with a pillow in her hands?”
She nods, her lower lip trembling. “I assume I woke up because I was gasping for air. She wanted to kill me that night, I think. It was right after the funeral.”
There’s a death that makes no damn sense. Earl was an old man, but he didn’t die of old age. Something happened to him, something that’s been kept hush hush ever since because I’ve never heard any details about it.
“It’s a lot to process, I know.” She says it as if she’s trying to reassure me, when she’s the one who should probably be getting all the reassurance. “Let’s go back to the house. I’m starving.”
Frowning, I fall into step with her like everything is perfectly normal, my mind going over all the details she just shared about her life, and how much she feared for it.
How her mother used to try to kill her.
I knew things weren’t right between Sylvie and her mother when we were at Lancaster Prep. She would drop those hints and imply that she had only a short time left before she would die. After a while, I couldn’t ignore what she said, but I was still just a kid. Maybe I didn’t want to know what Sylvie was actually referring to.
Actually, I know I didn’t. Easier to pretend she never said any of that shit.
Sylvie always had a flair for dramatics and she’s lied plenty of times before. But if she says her mother was trying to kill her, I believe her. Putting together everything else she’s said and done over the years, it makes sense, which is messed up.
Like seriously, what the fuck? What sort of sick bitch makes her child ill for attention? Who pulls her back in, only to try and smother her with a goddamn pillow?
Someone as demented as Sylvia Lancaster, that’s who.