The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [79]
When Rose was six and Bean three, our mother nearly ready to give birth to Cordy, we were in the kitchen playing while our mother baked. We had brought in a set of wooden blocks and were constructing a castle with wide towers and drawbridges that moved with the aid of our clumsy hands. After she put a cake in the oven, our mother wandered out into the garden, forgetting us, perhaps, absorbed as we were in our architectural fantasies. Finally the scent of chocolate bursting in the oven’s heat became too much for Bean’s empty stomach, and leaving Rose building the walls of an empty moat around our creation, she toddled over to the stove. With arms deliciously baby-fat, Bean reached for one of the dish towels that hung over the oven’s door handle and pulled down. She blinked at the rush of damp heat that flooded out, the smell wafting into her hair and the weave of her dress. Before Rose could stop her, Bean reached inside and put her hands on the heavy glass pan, wanting to pull the richness of that scent to her.
Bean’s scream was unforgettable, Rose says. But what we remember is the way Rose sprang into action—yanking Bean away from the oven and letting the door slam shut with a thick metallic rattle, then lifting her onto a stool and running cold water over her hands and arms, already blistering red and white from the stove’s furious heat. We don’t know how she knew what to do, how to grab a towel and fill it with ice from the plastic bin in the freezer, place Bean’s arms on it. Bean, eyes wide and tears stilled by Rose’s efficiency, but mouth still working thick sobs, watching it all, the way our sister had saved her from herself. And then Rose running for our mother, whose own reaction was slowed by the weight of her belly and the way her mind was so often far from us.
Looking at Bean’s face now, Rose could see her wounds as easily as when she had cared for her burns all those years ago. She stilled herself and walked over to the cabinet beside the sink. She opened the door and flipped efficiently through the half-bottles of medicine until she found some aspirin. Shook two into her palm, refilled the glass on the counter, and handed both to Bean.
“Take these. And drink some water. You’ll feel better if you sleep.”
Now, hours of dreamless rest and one tentative piece of toast later, Bean was sitting on one of the hopelessly outdated chairs in the library. The faded orange wool scratched against her thighs as she shifted. Bean had one leg curled under her, a bent-legged stork. Across the uncomfortably wide table lay a handful of discarded books: a few on résumés, one on the color of her parachute, and a coffee table photographic journey through the distended bellies of the third world. She had eschewed all of them in favor of a fantasy novel. Not her normal fare, but guaranteed not to make reference to anything that might evoke one of the beasts of her current craptastic situation, the way one of those modern-day tales of shoes and ex-boyfriends, or even the drama of small-town life in Ireland, might. Someone was always getting betrayed in those books, and the fact was, being a betrayer at the moment herself, she couldn’t bear to think about it.
“It’s about that time, Bianca,” Mrs. Landrige called from the desk, where she was sitting, her hands folded neatly in front of her. The library was empty. “Are you checking anything out?”
Bean looked up, blinking, and lifted her sunglasses up, squinting through the lights to the falling dusk outside. Another day in paradise, gone.
“Yeah,” she said, slumping forward against the table to pull the scattered books toward her.
“Yes,” Mrs. Landrige corrected her, and Bean parroted the correction without thinking. That was the problem with coming home. You turned smack back into a teenager again.
Her stomach had stopped swirling and now it growled insistently as she replaced the books