The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [115]
The spinning lights of his cruiser turned the silent road into a carnival ride, spinning blue and red and whirling us around. He looked at us, at the car, at the empty spaces where our parents should be, and then he looked at the deer, the patch of white fur going red—from blood or from the cruiser’s lights, we can’t say. Without saying a word, he walked back to his car, his heels a heavy click-clack on the road, and he returned with a shotgun. There was the heavy metal slap of the barrel as he pumped it. We all watched, the three of us, as he raised the gun, looking at us over the stock, and his voice was gravelly when he said, “You girls need to look away now.” And we did.
He must have been a good shot, because for a moment there was just the scrabble of the doe’s hooves on the road, and then sharp thunder, echoing again and again into the night and making our ears ring, and then nothing. Cordy ran to the side of the road, gripping the sharp edge of the wire fence in her hands, and she vomited her ice cream into the pasture.
We never did anything like that again. Any of it.
We think about that night often, but what comes back to us isn’t the terrible ending but how free and happy we were together, and how we felt like together we could do anything, rule the world and damn the consequences. We remember the open windows, the breeze pushing hard against our skin, howling into the night, the sound of that song fighting the scream of the wind and the tires on the pavement, the way Rose stood strong and steady, protecting us from harm, and we remember the promise we made never to hurt anything ever again, and we wonder where those girls went, if they died with the doe that night on the road, or if they would have disappeared anyway.
NINETEEN
I know,” our father said, wiping corn kernels from his beard, turning birds out of the nest, “illegitimacy does not carry the stigma it once did. But it seems to me a capitally bad idea to bring a child into the world without a father.”
“My baby has a father,” Cordy said. “It’s not going to spring fully grown from my head.” They were alone at the table, our mother having struggled vainly through some soup and a fresh tomato, and excused herself to rest, and Bean off for the evening.
“What kind of father? You haven’t even been able to name him.”
“I am a bastard, too; I love bastards: I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in every thing illegitimate,” Cordy said. Which was mostly patently untrue, but we had always loved that line.
“And the father has responsibilities,” our father said as though she had not spoken. “You may feel you can give the child what it needs emotionally, but what about financially? He should be held accountable for that, at least.”
“I don’t want his money,” Cordy said.
“Wanting and needing are two different things, Cordelia. I am a fool, and full of poverty.” He moved his silverware, setting his fork and knife across the plate, handles at four o’clock. Cordy, waitstaff instincts kicking in, wondered if this was a signal for her to clear. She stayed put.
“I’m not a baby anymore, Daddy,” she said, thereby managing both to support and undercut her point with just one sentence.
Our father only harrumphed. “Do you even know who the father is?”
Cordy thought of the painter. He had spoken little to her, asked her for less, and in the end, she had gone to him, one of the few times that, in sharing her body, she had still felt she possessed it. Why did the thought of naming him feel like a betrayal? “It doesn’t matter,” Cordy said.
Our father slammed his hand on the table. The silverware jumped, chattered against china. “Goddammit, Cordy, stop being so irresponsible.”
Cordy looked up at him, mirror to mirror. “Why speaks my father so ungently?” she asked. Oh, Miranda, our father’s undoing. Shakespeare is full of fathers who will not let their daughters go, who desire to protect them, to keep them young, virginal, owned. But none melts our father’s heart so as Prospero and Miranda,