The reason we kill

Chapter 3

One month later Cara stood in a plain black dress next to an open coffin crowded with flowers. She held the metal cookie jar filled with fresh cookies in her hands. She placed it down next to the coffin. She looked at the bluish face of the woman who had meant so much to her. Yesterday an lawyer had come to their house and explained to Cara’s perplexed parents that the old lady’s will stated that all her material belongings should be made to money and that this along with everything from her account should go over to Cara as soon as she was 18. And now they were at the funeral. Her mother was pretending to be sad, sobbing next to her. Ugly little Abigail was standing on the floor next to her mother in a ridicules fluffy black dress and was talking nonsense. Her father was at work. She took one last look at the dead lady, then she turned and walked silently out of the door, down the street and towards home.

She was nine now, and she had tried, she really had, but she couldn’t accept her family. Her parents had just arrived with the new baby, another girl. This one was called Anastasia. She looked over the banister downstairs, not surprised to see her mother carrying ugly little Abigail. But the sound of laughter that she had expected wasn’t coming. Carefully she tapped down the stairs. Ugly little Abigail was sitting on the kitchen counter, and her mother and grandmother were feeding her chocolate sandwiches. On the floor directly under her stood the baby in its carry-cot. For a moment her stomach turned. The thing down there was everything but a baby. It was deformed like a melted candle. Its whole face and body were pulled to the right, leaving the left half of the face perfectly formed and pale, the right stretched out like a rubber mask of Frankenstein’s monster. The things hair was blonde and curly. Next to it on the floor, her father sat his hands on his face, mumbling something like ‘what have I done?!’. Suddenly the baby started to scream, a high piercing sound. Cara pressed her hands to her ears, but she could still hear it scream. She waited for her mother to come and take it into her arms like she had done so often with ugly little Abigail, she waited for her father to escape his trance. But no one even reacted. Slowly she let her hands sink back to her sides. Carefully she retreated down the stairs, down and down until she reached the ground floor. The baby was screaming, but nobody seemed to care. She was standing above it now, looking down at the helpless thing. And suddenly she felt something she had never felt before. She realized it was compassion, empathy. They were both outcasts in a world where nobody loved them, just that this tiny being couldn’t help itself. As she looked down at the baby, suddenly she began to see the beauty behind the strangely deformed features. She remembered the words the old lady had so often repeated: ‘sometimes the heart sees what the eyes cannot’. The old lady had told her to accept her family, and maybe now she could. She would protect this little being if it was the last thing she did. She knew that she wasn’t alone anymore.

Anastasia was five months old now, and ugly little Abigail was almost four. Anastasia was sleeping in a little travel crib Cara had found in Abigail’s closet. She had seen her mother handle ugly little Abigail often enough, she knew what to do. She and Ana were alone in the house, it was dark already. It was strange, normally her mother was home by this time. She sighed and kicked her legs up onto the bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chin, just as the phone started to ring downstairs. She stayed absolutely still, she never answered the phone. She heard the answering machine go on and closed her eyes. Then she heard her fathers voice, he was saying: “Cara, your mother and Abigail were in an accident, your mother’s fine but Abigail is still in surgery. I’ll be spending the night there, I’ll be at home tomorrow morning.” Cara’s eyes snapped open. Suddenly she was wide awake. Ugly little Abigail was in the hospital. Probably her parents were just overreacting, but what if… She wondered what her mother would do if Abigail didn’t survive the surgery.

Abigail was ugly, even now in death. She had died only a week ago, one month before her fourth birthday. Her dirty blonde hair was cropped short, her face was a bluish kind of color. So ugly, Cara thought. Her mother was weeping next to her. The doctors had put her on strong anti-depressants and her mother was eating them like sweets. Her father was staring down at the body of the dead child with an ironic sort of cool, and she, Cara, was standing with her littlest sister in her arms. Ugly little Abigail had an extravagant coffin lined with the most expensive silk her father had been able to acquire. Her mother fell to her knees and started screaming as if she were in some sort of pain. Cara took a step back, disgusted. She propped the eleven-month-old baby up higher in her arms, turned and left the funeral for home, eternally swearing never to enter a church again.