Page 53 of The Locked Ward

You were always the bad sister. You screamed at Annabelle, you cussed her out, you hit her, you despised her. Everyone knew that.

But nobody understood the context.

The role of the angel at the Christmas pageant was yours first. You’d learned your line and were about to get your costume.

Then Honey told the church youth leader Annabelle was heartbroken she wasn’t the angel, and couldn’t they find another spot for you?

Annabelle stood next to Honey, wiping away crocodile tears while real ones welled up in your eyes.

The youth leader glanced at you, her expression stricken.

But she was young and nervous, and there was no way she could stand up to the force that was Honey.

During the Christmas Eve performance, you took back your role. But Annabelle still got all the attention.

Annabelle didn’t deserve to be an angel. But neither did you.

Annabelle grew worse when she was a teenager.

You’d befriended a boy named Charlie whose father owned a car-repair shop in town.

He was a shy, smart guy who helped his dad after school and always had oil-stained fingernails.

On your fourteenth birthday, he biked several miles to your house to give you a bouquet of flowers.

Annabelle made it to the front door a few steps ahead of you and opened it.

“Carnations?” she scoffed, her mean laugh bubbling out, while Charlie’s cheeks flushed as deep a pink as the flowers.

After Charlie left, you slapped her across the cheek, hard enough to make a satisfying smacking sound.

She fell backward onto the couch, and you leapt at her, yanking her hair and screaming curse words at her.

Then a housekeeper ran into the room, crying out for Honey, while Annabelle sobbed dramatically.

The next day, Honey announced you were being sent to boarding school. Instead of shipping you off alone, Stephen accompanied you. He worked on his laptop for most of the trip, but as you sat next to him, you experienced a sense of peace you’d never felt around Honey or Annabelle.

You were given a tour by the overly solicitous head of school, who was probably hoping for a generous donation along with your tuition payment, then deposited in your dorm room, surrounded by suitcases and boxes.

“I hope you’ll be happy here,” Stephen said.

He looked like he wanted to add more, but the words seemed stuck in his throat.

He stretched out his arms, but you pretended not to notice.

He was a victim, too, but he’d made the choice to hand over his power to Honey. He could’ve fought her on your behalf, but he was too weak. That was why you left him hugging the empty air.

As it turned out, living away from home wasn’t a punishment. It was a relief.

Once you were away from the constant comparisons and competitions you could never win, you were able to view Annabelle dispassionately. You came to realize it wasn’t completely her fault she acted horribly toward you. That was Honey’s influence; she wanted to shape Annabelle into her own image.

And Honey was diabolical.

Now, as you sit on the hard couch staring at the slightly blurry images behind the plexiglass covering the television, you find yourself pulling up another memory, this one from when you were in elementary school.

It began when the landline phone rang one Saturday morning.

You picked up the receiver in the living room and were about to say, Cartwright residence, Georgia speaking , as you’d been trained to do.

But Honey answered a split second before you.

“Dee Dee, darling,” she trilled when she heard her best friend’s voice.

You lifted the bottom of the phone away from your mouth so they couldn’t hear you breathing, but kept the top glued to your ear as you eavesdropped. You liked gathering information. Sometimes it gave you a little edge at home, a way to even a playing field that was perpetually lopsided.

The senator’s wife told Honey she needed to talk, right away, in person. Privately.

“We can have sweet tea on the back porch,” Honey said.

“Better make it gin and tonics,” Dee Dee had replied.

You were tucked beneath the porch twenty minutes before she arrived, lying on your tummy on the cool dirt. There was plenty of room in the crawl space for a kid, and you liked the way the lattice spliced your view of the yard into little diamonds.

Your vision was compromised, but you could hear everything.

Dee Dee broke down almost immediately, sobbing as she revealed she was terrified the senator was falling in love with a beautiful young widow he’d met at the country club. He’d taken to spending the night away from home, which he’d never done before.

“What if this isn’t just another fling and he leaves me?” she’d cried. “What would become of me?”

You couldn’t see Honey’s face, but her tone was hard as steel.

Honey got angry a lot, but this seemed deeper.

You could practically feel her rage. “That’s not going to happen.

You’ve been with Michael for twenty years.

You married him when he wasn’t even a state senator!

That little tramp isn’t going to replace you. ”

“What are we going to do?”

“Teach her a lesson.”

That’s when you learned Honey and Dee Dee were essentially murderesses.

They plotted to assassinate the woman’s character.

They crafted a story that the young widow was a former prostitute who’d met her husband when he was her client.

It wasn’t true. But who could disprove it?

The husband was dead. The woman had moved here from Boston to be with him, leaving her friends and family behind.

She had no allies, probably because she was pretty enough to be a threat to all the other woman in their circle.

The Charlotte society rumor mill was perpetually hungry, and it greedily swept up this new bit of fuel.

The widow was shunned at the country club. Not invited to parties and galas. Other women became too busy to meet her for lunch. Whenever she entered a room, people grew hushed and stared, then broke into laughter.

It took only a few months for the widow to sell her home at a loss and flee town. By then the rumor mill was feasting on the fact that she’d turned into a heavy drinker.

Honey and Dee Dee had driven her off. Destroyed her as effectively as if they’d torn her from limb to limb. And they were utterly delighted.

What you intuited even as a child was the realization that it wasn’t the affair that devastated Dee Dee. What shattered her was the risk of losing the title Mrs. Michael Dawson.

And what you learned about your mother was that she would stop at nothing to secure her own place in society. If the senator tossed aside Dee Dee for a younger woman, who was to say your father wouldn’t do the same?

The mind-numbing TV show blends into the next program.

It features a group of people slowly hiking into the Grand Canyon, packs on their backs as they descend on a narrow, rock-strewn path.

You stare at the colorful layers of strata the TV hikers pass—light green, buff, gray, violet—and let your mind drift to the night of Annabelle’s last birthday party, the final one she’d ever have.

Dee Dee arrived early to help your mother with the arrangements.

She criticized the way the napkins were folded and told the servers the silverware needed to be repolished.

The years hadn’t been kind to Dee Dee, and she’d turned as tough and bitter as an overcooked piece of meat.

It wasn’t easy being married to a man like Michael Dawson, and it showed.

Dee Dee’s face was puffy from years of alcohol abuse, and her voice dripped with poison.

You desperately wish you could remember the order of what happened toward the end of the night.

The Dawsons were among the last guests; they’d retired to the library with your parents for brandy and cigars and conversation.

You were in the dining room with Annabelle, arguing; then you went to the bathroom on your way to leave.

You passed the senator on your way out of the bathroom. He acknowledged you with a brief nod.

Where was he coming from? Did he slip into the dining room when you left it? The flush of the toilet and rush of water out of the sink taps while you washed your hands would have masked the sound of conversations or footsteps.

You’re still concentrating hard on the images stored in your memory from that night when Peter, the tallest nurse, approaches with a somber expression.

Your stomach clenches as you wait for him to reach you.

“We found something in your room during morning sweeps,” Peter says.

You hope your face doesn’t betray anything.

“How did you get that piece of wire, Georgia?” he asks. “Did you pull it off the fence in the courtyard?”

You recite a nursery rhyme in your head, then count backward from twenty, doing everything you can think of to hide the effect his words have on you. Your mouth grows dry. It’s hard to swallow. They found the wire in your room. How?

Peter squats down so your faces are close together. “What were you going to do with it, Georgia?”

It’s safer not to say a word. It has been ever since you arrived here.

You see the new nurse, Opal, watching you from a few feet away. She shakes her head, her giant gray bun moving from side to side.

“I’m going to have to talk to the doctors about this,” Peter says. “They’re not going to be happy.”