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Vivian leans back in her chair and crosses her legs, her hands primly folded on her knee. Such a strangely ladylike gesture, especially coming from her. “Then why are you here? I didn’t ask you to follow me. You’re still trailing after me like a lost puppy.”
“Why did you come back?” I say. “I was doing fine without you. For years.”
“Oh, you mean painting us then covering us up? Is that thefineyou’re talking about? If so, I hate to break it to you, girlfriend, but that’s not fine. I mean, honestly, vanishing once should have been enough for you. But, no, you had to make us do it over and over.”
“I don’t do that anymore. I’ve stopped.”
“You’vepaused,” Vivian says. “There’s a difference.”
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because I stopped painting you.”
It’s how I have kept her at bay all these years. Painting her.Covering her up. Doing it again. Then again. Now that I’ve vowed not to do it anymore, she’s returned, demanding my attention.
“This has nothing to do with me,” Vivian says. “It’s all you, sweetheart.”
“Then why am I only seeing you and not—”
“Natalie and Allison?” Vivian lets out a knowing chuckle. “Come on, Em. We both know you don’t really care about them.”
“That’s not true.”
“You barely knew them.”
Vivian stands, and for a quick, heart-halting moment, I think she’s going to reach out and grab me. Instead, she begins to wind her way around the statues, caressing them like lovers. Fingers trickling up arms. Palms gliding across throats.
“I knew them as well as I knew you,” I tell her.
“Really? Did you ever have a conversation with either of them? One on one?”
I did. I know I did. But when I scan my memory, no such recollections appear.
“Now that I think about it, I’m not sure you even talked to them when I wasn’t around,” Vivian says. “At least not about something other than me.”
She’s right. It’s true.
“That’s not my fault,” I say. “You made sure it was that way.”
Vivian never wasn’t around. She ruled the cabin the same way a queen bee ruled the hive. The rest of us were just drones, buzzing around her, catering to her needs, her whims, her interests.
“That’s why you’re not seeing Natalie and Allison right now,” Vivian says. “I’m the puzzle you’re still trying to figure out.”
“Will you go away if I do?”
Vivian pauses before a sculpture of a woman carrying a jug on her shoulder, her toga slanted across her chest. “That depends. Do you want me to go away?”
Yes. And I hope you never come back.
I don’t say it. I can’t. Not that. So I think it. A mental whisperthat floats across the clearing, wispy as fog. But Vivian hears it. I know by the way her lips curl upward in cruel amusement.
“Nowthatbrings back old times,” she says. “You certainly got your wish, didn’t you?”
I want to run away, but guilt holds me in place. It’s a numbing sensation. A flash freeze. By now, I’m used to it. I’ve been feeling it on and off for the past fifteen years.
“I’m sorry for saying that.”
Vivian shrugs. “Sure. Whatever. It still doesn’t change things between us.”
“I want to make it right.”