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Then, without a word of explanation, she bolts out of the room.
26
“CATHERINE?”
I catch up to her in the front hall, where she’s leaning against the stairs, face cradled in her hands. When she hears me coming she jerks her head up, hastily wiping away a tear.
I know I should leave well enough alone, but she looks so small, so pathetic with her uncombed hair and stained shift. She lost so much blood yesterday that I can’t help but be worried for her, and that’s to say nothing of what must be going through her head right now, the hollowness of her loss.
She glares at me from red-rimmed eyes. “What do you want?”
I ignore the razor-sharp hostility in her words. “I’m sorry about...about what happened yesterday. Really, I am.” I reach out and touch her on the shoulder. She violently shrugs off my hand.
“You’re sorry,” she repeats tonelessly, studying the carpet. Then, lifting her eyes to mine, she takes a deep breath, raises her hand back and, with surprising strength, smacks me clean across my cheek.
Gasping, I stand there, too stunned to do anything except rub my stinging face. “What was that for?”
“You know exactly what it’s for,” she hisses.
I wince, vaguely wondering if it will leave a mark, and if it does, if it will dissolve by Friday. “No, I don’t.”
Glaring, she leans in so close that I can smell the lingering odor of blood, of sickness, of death that wreathes her. The front hall shrinks around us and grows quiet, the only sound the faint clinking of dishes as Ada clears the table in the dining room. Catherine’s words fall into the silence like steaming coals.
“You murdered my child.”
The accusation knocks me back, sucks the air right out of me. I reach for the sideboard behind me, steadying myself. “Catherine,” I whisper. “How can you say that?”
“Admit it,” she says, jabbing her finger into my chest, backing me farther up against the sideboard. “I saw you out poking around your herbs. You thought you could slip me something in my tea and I wouldn’t know. You make me sick.”
Blood rushes to my head. My face must be red as fire and it feels just as hot. I can’t get my words out around my suddenly thick tongue. “N-no! I would never.”
Her eyes narrow to slits. I shrink under her penetrating gaze, hopelessly aware that my guilt must be written on my face plain as day. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t go through with it; I thought about it, I prayed for the same outcome, and coincidence or not, the baby is dead.
I bite my lip, unable to meet her eye. “You never even drank the tea.” I feel rather than see the bitter, triumphant tilt of her chin.
“I knew it! For all your downcast lashes and moral high ground, you’re just as bad as the rest of us. Worse even, because you really believe you’re a good person. All the while you’re skulking around, plotting against me and my innocent baby.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t—”
“Oh, shut up, just shut up! I know what you are even if you don’t see it yourself. Did you know that I watched you that day with Tommy Bishop? I saw you from the window, the whole thing. You never laid a finger on that boy. Everyone else came running around after it was over and thought it was a street fight between two little brats, but I saw it all and you never touched him, not with your hands.”
My skin prickles cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her voice is low, deceptively steady. “Maybe you didn’t put something in my tea, but there’s something wrong with you, something different inside of you. You used whatever...” she searches for a word “...power you used on Tommy Bishop, on me to kill my baby. Have you forgotten that I was there at the pond? That sound that came out of you, it wasn’t...human.”
Snippets of memories, incomplete pictures from that long-ago day flash across my mind: matted fur and blood, the film of red behind my eyes as I found Tommy Bishop in the street, a pressure building and rising inside of me until my hands tingled and my body vibrated. The same sensations I felt when Emeline died and I wanted to strike out against Mr. Barrett and the pond churned with my rage. My stomach lurches and I push the memories away.
Catherine is watching me. “You’re evil,” she says with something between awe and disgust. “You’re really evil and you don’t even realize it.”
My last vestiges of guilt fade as her accusations break against me like waves, one after the other. I draw myself up taller, moving away from the sideboard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, firmer this time.
Catherine stands her ground. “Yes, you do!” Her voice is rising, her words cracking with hysteria. “You wanted my baby dead. You thought it was an abomination and you’re glad that it died!”
At one time I might have held back, but the words erupt out of me now, a swift torrent of bad feelings, barely suppressed grudges and untold truths held below the surface for too long.
“Of course I’m glad that it died! That thing would have ruined our lives. I saw it, and it wasn’t even a baby, it was...grotesque! It was unnatural from the very moment of its conception. How can you possibly think it would have been born healthy and right?”
Her face drains of color and she takes a shaky step back, as if she had never even for a moment considered this. But then her eyes narrow and she regains her balance. When she speaks it’s low and dangerous, like a snake in tall grass, ready to strike its prey. “You. Little. Bitch. My child was conceived in love. You think the world is black-and-white, that because Charles is my brother he couldn’t possibly love me in any other way. You could never possibly understand what he and I shared, and now you’ve taken away the only thing I had left of him.”