The Ghost of Adsophel

One.

When I was fourteen, my mother killed my father and then herself. She used one of his old hunting knives, serrated along one edge, rust burrowing into the hilt. They let me see the weapon afterward, at the funeral, once it had been scrubbed clean. Seventeen stabs for my father, they said. Just one for my mother. It was such an unassuming knife, I'd thought. Just a hunting knife. I'd scraped my fingernail against one of its serrated teeth, and my tears splashed warm against the cold, plain metal. I can't quite recall why I had been crying. I can't recall much about the funeral at all besides the cold, which bit so hard at my blue-black knuckles that they'd cracked open, flooding tiny rivulets of crimson.

I had been at my singing lesson when it happened, perched like a bony little bird beside Madame Janiver's sprawling grand piano. Madame Janiver lived four estates down from my parents. Close, but not close enough. I don't know what my sister was doing. Whatever it was, she had beaten me home. She had been the one to find the bodies.

Afterward, our aunt Mina had tried to insist I go stay with her. Mina was a proud woman, even bonier than I, with red-stained paper-thin lips and honeyed hair pulled taut against her pale scalp. Her nails always left little indents in my shoulders where she grabbed me, and whenever she bothered to smile, her teeth were just a little too white, a little too straight. I loathed her.

My sister knew this. Thea was eighteen, still a child by most measures, but adult enough by law that she had every right to keep me. She'd explained this to Mina, at first with dignified anger, and then in ribbon-shredded weeping, which I heard from the sitting room where I was pretending to sleep. Mina hadn't even waited for the funeral to begin picking apart our house, shoving our lives in boxes to sell or stow away. The sitting room was one of the last still intact, and I had been sleeping on the settee, because my father's cologne lingered deep within its threads. I did not miss him much; it's difficult to miss someone who was never around long enough to know you. But I found comfort in the evidence that he had existed, so I'd been sleeping on the settee. Thea's crying in the hallway had jolted me awake.

"That little girl is sick," Mina had hissed. I could imagine her wagging one spindly finger toward the sitting room door. "She's funny in the head. I could get her all the help she needs, I know dozens of wonderful doctors-"

"There's nothing wrong with her!" Thea snapped back. I imagined her clenched fists, nails biting into the meat of her chapped palms.

"At the very least, Amalthea, you must realize how damaging this... event... has been for her. She needs to be in the care of real adults, who have the means to provide for her properly. I'd been telling your mother for years-"

"Yeah, I know exactly what you've been telling my mother."

"Stop interrupting me, Amalthea."

"Stop calling me Amalthea, Mina. And stop trying to take her away from me." Thea's voice, which had dried out a bit, became watery and splintered again. She took a few breaths, and then said, "She's all I have. I'm not gonna let you take her. I'm not gonna let you ruin her."

Even after they had moved from the hallway, voices fading out of reach, I lay awake and twisted Mina's words around and around behind my eyelids. I dug deep into my chest, trying to dredge up enough energy to be angry at her, or at least chagrined. I felt nothing.

I wonder sometimes, what would have happened if Thea had let Mina take me. It wouldn't have saved me. I was a lost cause before I was born; that much is clear, now, and not a doctor in the world is crafty enough to have saved my life. But perhaps, if I had gone, if I had died differently, it would have saved everyone else.