The Truth Commission (22 page)

Double Avenger

Plain roll blinds covered the floor-to-ceiling windows and the interior lights were on. At the back of the main room was a kitchen lined with gleaming brushed-steel appliances. There was a granite countertop, a butcher-block island, and wooden cupboards. It was the kind of kitchen found in my friends' houses, only more expensive, artier. The counters were bare, except for a single plastic tub of vegan protein powder beside the double sink, next to an unopened bag of chia seeds and two empty kombucha bottles, proving that my sister wasn't original in all things. There were also two pill bottles. One was half full of gelatin capsules:
ADDERALL
. The other bottle was labeled
DESOXYN
. Next to them was a small plastic baggie with some brightly colored pills in it.

Brian looked over my shoulder. Pointed at the bottle of Desoxyn and whistled.

“That shit is seriously hard to get,” he said.

I put the pills down.

We went quietly upstairs.

Other than art supplies, a couple of tall drafting chairs and storyboards leaning against the walls, and three large drafting tables with pages scattered across them, the top floor was empty.

I walked over to check out the art. Drawings and stories: enough for another book, by the look of it. My eyes were drawn immediately to a panel featuring a close-up view of the bugged-out eyes of the Flounder. The sister character who was me and not me was crying. Her face was bruised, her lip cut, the damage rendered in my sister's distinctive and confident hand. I began to read. At first, my mind pushed back against the story, then it seemed to crumple in on itself.

The story was called
Diana: Double Avenger
. In it, the Earth version of Flounder is seduced by an unscrupulous art teacher who, in an effort to get close to Diana, tells the Flounder she's much more talented than she really is. In Vermeer, poor slug-like Flounder is brutally assaulted by a drawing master who coaxes her out into the garden maze. I couldn't quite figure out what the drawing master's motivation was. Money, presumably. Revenge on behalf of a competing family. Sheer wrong-mindedness. The plots of my sister's stories are always a little murky. The worst part was that the assault on the Flounder, which I suppose I should start calling by its proper name—rape—was clearly depicted.
Very
clearly.

You really haven't lived until you've seen several panels showing a misshapen fun-house version of yourself being sexually assaulted in multiple universes in illustrations destined to be seen by countless people.

I followed the panels, skipping quickly past the ones that tracked Diana's thoughts and feelings until I came to the ones in which she began to exact her revenge on Flounder's behalf. The story was so overblown and gothic that it was almost laughable—until I came to the panel that showed Diana pushing the Earth art teacher off a ladder on which he's standing in order to get something out of a cupboard. He sustains two sprained ankles. In Vermeer, Diana invites the drawing master to walk with her to the top of the palace. When they reach the highest point of the overwrought edifice, she pushes him over the side. He tumbles to his death. The drawing of his screaming face before he hits the battlements below was a masterpiece of perspective.

For the longest moment, I couldn't catch my breath.

The villainous art teacher didn't look like Jackson Reid, at least not the same way my parents and I looked like the thinly disguised versions of ourselves. My sister had that much sense of self-preservation. Only something about the man's eyes was similar.

I found myself wheezing. Sudden-onset asthma. Bron-chial shutdown.

Behind me, Neil asked if I was okay.

“Stay out!” I said. No one could see these drawings. Read this story.

I couldn't quite process it or understand how the story laid out on the desks fit with the story she'd told me. She'd always drawn our real lives and blown them up to super-sad-sack proportions. She'd been merciless about depicting my bad birthday party. She'd been unsparing about my dad's ouster as the president of the Diorama Club and my mom's various and frequent non-coping moments. This story was different. It had nothing to do with our lives. It was fiction all the way through.

But people would think my rape was true, even though I've never even had sex.

I backed away from the pages, vision blurry.

I backed away until I reached Neil's arms.

“You can look,” I told my friends.

Silently, they spread out to read the panels.

There were sharp intakes of breath and dismayed mutters.

When they were done, they came back to stand around me. Dusk was crying, which was almost as alarming as the art around us.

“What
is
this?” she said. “Did something happen to you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Neil pulled me closer.

“How can she do this?” asked Aimee. “It's so sick.”

“I don't know what's going on. But I'm going to find out,” I told them.

Then the five of us backed out of the room as if its contents were toxic. We went down the stairs and out the front door in stunned silence.

Of Unreliable Narrators

“We'll wait,” said Neil when he put the car in park.

I knew it would upset Keira to see a strange car in the driveway if she happened to look outside and was going to ask them to park down the street.

Then I realized that I no longer cared what upset my sister.

I got out of the passenger seat, and Dusk got out of the back. She gave me one of her strong, skinny-girl hugs. Then, on lead soldier legs, I walked to our front door. All the vehicles were home. The entire Pale family waited inside.

When I entered the house, I saw my parents get up from the kitchen table at the same time.

“Normandy!” cried my mother. I realized I'd forgotten to tell her I'd be out all night. She wore her very worst track pants, and her hands were raw and red. If Keira got a look at her hands or her pants, they were sure to be featured in a close-up drawing.

“Norm,” said my father, worry straining his studied jauntiness to the breaking point.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot to call.”

“Were you doing something for school?” said my mother, her voice filled with hope.

Before I could get bogged down in a conversation with my parents, I headed for my room and looked into the closet. Keira wasn't inside.

I turned and walked the short distance down the hall to Keira's room. The door was shut.

“She's sleeping,” whispered my mom, coming up behind me. “She just got home. It's probably best to let her be. You know how tired she gets when she's working.”

I didn't respond.

Instead, I tried the knob. Locked.

I rapped my knuckles, which felt like they belonged to someone else, against the hollow-core door.

“Normandy!” said my mother, shocked.

“I think you might both be overtired,” said my father.

I knocked again, this time with the back of my fist.

“Keira,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Really, Normandy!” My mother's normally wan voice was fierce.

“I have to talk to her.”

She and my father said something about Keira's schedule, about her need to have flexible hours. I ignored them again and went back to my room. I went through the closet and into Keira's room. It was the first time I'd ever done that. It had always seemed like a door that only opened one way.

Keira was sitting up in bed. She showed only the mildest surprise to see me.

My sister's presence in the house, in the school, in this town is so outsized that the reality of her comes as a shock, even to those of us who live with her.
115

She wore a plain dove-colored smock that hung on her thin shoulders and would have looked expensive and chic in her new town house, but which in our worst-of-the-1980s suburban house looked a bit Walker Evans-ish. I don't think the smock was actually sleepwear, but everything she owns could double for pj's.

Keira tilted her head at me, taking me in with her staring blue eyes. Flyaway swirls of dark brown hair were held off her face with a simple, white cotton scarf. A girl out of time. That was my sister. Could anybody really be that ethereal?

No,
I thought.
No one could
.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, and pushed into the room.

“Normandy!” said my mother from behind me. I turned and saw my parents standing at the entrance to my side of the closet. Unlike my sister, my parents never invaded my privacy, not even when they should have.

“Girls?” said my father.

I closed the closet door and faced Keira.

Her delicate features were ever so slightly pinched, as if an ill-scented wind had just passed.

My courage coughed once, sputtered, and began to fail.

I didn't need to do this. Keira required special handling. She'd never been confronted with . . . anything.

I thought of the art I had seen.

I thought of Neil and Dusk sitting in Neil's car, just outside.

Truth telling was messy, unpredictable. But avoiding it was worse.

“I found your house,” I said.

Keira's lips, only slightly darker than her parchment facial skin, parted slightly. She licked them and put her bare feet on the floor.

“Oh?” she said.

“It's nice. High-end for this town.”

“You want to sit down? I have this new record. It's French. We could listen to it.”

My sister orders a lot of vinyl over the Internet—mostly European albums featuring old guys who croon in gravelly voices and young women who whisper. Self-conscious, pretentious records.

“It's barely seven in the morning,” I said. As though there was some agreed-upon standard time at which a person ought to listen to old French guy records. My sister's room was white and spare as a monk's cell. Her bed was ostentatiously small and simple, topped with a plain white down duvet. No art on the wall, except a small, beautifully executed and framed drawing of a rabbit with a guilty look on its face.

An old padded chair covered in a fine white quilt sat in the corner. A white wooden armoire held her few expensive clothes and, presumably, the rest of her meager but expensive belongings. Of course, she didn't have a closet, either.

At least she's not a hoarder,
I thought somewhat hysterically.

“Take the chair,” she offered.

I did. I'd never sat in it before. Normally, I stood in Keira's doorway or on the other side of the closet. It was disorienting to be in her room, but the chair was very comfortable.

“We went into your house.”

My sister, who'd begun to relax, stiffened and stood up again.

“We?” she said.

“We saw the art for your new book.”

Her head jerked once to the side, like an invisible companion had just said something surprising.

“I saw all the stuff about me.”

Keira did the head-tilt thing again, a confused canary. She touched her thumb to her chin. “Normandy,” she said. “You do know that's a fictional story about a fictional character.” Her voice was like a series of soft slaps to the face. I imagined doing something to make her speak up. Grabbing her by the neck, maybe. “I know you get a little sensitive about some aspects of my art. About my success,” she said as gently as only someone who means you harm can do.

I marshaled a response. I'd been silent for so long. Too long.

And then it all came pouring out. “Keira, you use me—or at least an awful version of me—in your art. I get nothing for it. You've been telling me all these terrible stories about what happened to you at school. About your affair with your teacher. About how he raped you. Only it was all some twisted lie. Now you've put it all in your new book and made all the bad things happen to me.”

Her fine lips curled. Her dimples showed. And yet somehow her face remained entirely humorless.

“As a fellow artist and as my sister, I expect you'd understand. It's like alchemy. No one knows how inspiration works. But source material is quite different from the imaginative product.”

“I know about Mr. Reid. About his husband. Did you hurt him?”

She reared back. “Of course not!” Then, without any hesitation, she continued. “I can't believe you and your friends invaded my privacy like that. You looked at my work before it was ready. Do you have any idea how many people want an advance look at my stuff? This is a serious betrayal.”

“What did you do to Mr. Reid?” I asked. I felt my fingers digging into my thighs.

My sister was so pale, she looked like an accessory in her own room.

When she turned to me, the smile and dimples were gone and her voice was glass.

“The new book wasn't coming,” she said. “People were waiting. Getting impatient. I was bored with Vermeer. People said I'd peaked already. As an artist.”

I waited.

“I haven't peaked, obviously. I'm only twenty. I just needed a kick start. Some inspiration.” She let out a laugh so full of disdain, it made me wince. “Turns out I need you guys,” she said, waving a thin hand. “My family.
You're
my material. And then I had a brain wave. I realized that I don't need to wait for you to do things. After all, I could
die
waiting for you to do something interesting. I'm a writer—I can make things up. For my stories.”

“Is this because of Mom and Dad? The affair?”

“Don't be an idiot. That was nothing. Half the kids in the world have divorced parents. Or worse. Your mind is really mundane.”

Keira stared toward at her bedroom window, covered in a hand-painted paper blind she'd made herself. “I think the new book is some of the best work I've done.”

“Mr. Reid,” I said. “What happened to him?”

“He fell,” she said simply, as though telling me that she'd eaten the last cookie.

“What about all those things you told me?” I asked.

“I needed to see how you'd react.”

I still didn't follow. Couldn't. “To what?”

“Don't be dim, Normandy. Sometimes you need to go above and beyond the basics of imagination. It's called ‘research.'”

“Did he touch you?”

“Of course not. He was gay. He thought he understood my writer's block. He kept trying to talk to me about how I needed to ‘move beyond my family in my work.'” Keira's voice was flat.

My sister was not accustomed to criticism.

“Everyone thought he was this animation genius and a saint and everything, just because he was a popular teacher.”

My sister shrugged and looked over her shoulder in the direction of some voice that only she could hear.

“He thought
I
was having a breakdown. Urged me to get help. We went for a hike so we could ‘talk it out.' I told him that walking was the only way I could think. He liked to be helpful. He had an interesting face. Really open.”

“Did you push him?” I asked.

“Normandy, you've always been so reductive,” said my sister, going from pretty to terrifying in the flutter of an eyelash. “He fell and I watched. I was too far away to catch him. Plus, I'm not very big.” She said this with icy satisfaction.

“You didn't tell anyone?”

Keira sighed. “A section of the trail collapsed, and he went with it. I didn't want to get into a whole big deal about it. No one knew I was there. And it gave me a great idea for the new Chronicle. So I came home and got to work.”

“And me?” I said.

“I told you the stories so I could watch your reaction. You've got
such
an interesting range of expressions. Even when I add all that flesh to your face. Is there anything more expressive than a human face?” She gave her head a little shake in wonder at human faces and all they could be made to tell. “If you keep working at your drawing, maybe someday you'll begin to see like an artist.”

“And the money?” I said, my voice nearly gone. “Why did you tell Sylvia you wanted to pay off the mortgage?”

“I knew she'd like that. Also, they'd get me my money sooner if they thought I was being generous with it. You saw that town house—I had to have it. Nanaimo isn't exactly awash in cool places.”

“So you're not going to help out Mom and Dad?”

Keira looked at me like I'd just said something insane. “Maybe Mom and Dad need to stop looking for handouts.”

“The only reason they thought you were going to help them out was because you said you were. Then you didn't.”

“It's not my fault our parents are failures,” said Keira.

That was as much as I could handle. More, actually.

“Okay,” I said. I got to my feet. I had an urge to run out of her room, with its atmosphere anesthetized by a lack of color.

I thought about asking her about the bottles of pills. But I didn't. I'd had my fill of her truth.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” I said.

She smoothed the fabric of her smock over her sides, then ran her hands over her bedding and nodded distractedly.

I let myself out of her room through the regular door, and found my parents in the kitchen.

“I think you need to know that Keira's new book is—”

“Normandy! You know how your sister doesn't like anyone to see her work before it's ready,” said my mom.

“Come on now, girls,” said my dad. “Let's be positive!”

“But she's—”

“Seriously, Normandy. It's unacceptable for you to interfere with your sister's work.”

I had to try. Just once more.

“She showed me being attacked in her new book,” I said. “And by ‘attacked,' I mean sexually. She drew that in her new book that she's writing in her new town house that you don't even know about.”

The silence that followed was the moment between the bomb blast and the debris raining to the ground.

My dad put both hands on the counter. He seemed to be using it to hold himself up.

My mother's jaw worked silently. Then she swallowed.

“I'm sure it's not that bad,” she said finally. “You're misinterpreting.” She gathered some steam and kept going. “And really, Normandy, what are you doing? Did your sister invite you to her new town house? I'm sure she just wants to surprise us with the news about her . . . purchase.”

For a split second I saw the way my dad stared, openmouthed, at my mother and I understood the terrible position he was in.

When he recovered, he said, “We're a family. We support each other. I'm sure your sister didn't mean to hurt your feelings.”

My ears rang and I seemed to be watching the scene from somewhere outside my body.
Hurt my feelings?
How was that any less serious than hurting me physically? Talking to my parents was pointless. They couldn't hear, they wouldn't see. They sure as hell weren't going to negotiate some useful solution.

So I went to my bedroom, packed up my laptop, and put a few other things into the cheap suitcase I bought to accompany Keira to her publicity events before I realized that I was being put on display as the Flounder. I thought of all those years I'd worshipped my sister. Was she really such a great artist if she had to steal people's lives? Twist them and make them ugly?