Home was the place you returned to when nothing else remained. When the day receded over the river and darkness crept on silent cat paws across the land, when stars studded through the veils of remaining light — this was when Sara knew that the river-boat was her only solace. There was a comfort to it, this feeling of belonging, no matter to whom it was. Her parents were different in every slant of light, and Sara wondered if so was she.
Her father was languid in the aftermath, untensing, sitting in silence on one of the cheap plastic folding chairs on their deck. He’d changed his clothing: dark pants, a darker shirt, a newly-stolen watch that showed the wrong time. Her mother was dressed in white, her hair a glorious spill of light down her harp-shaped back. From the steps that led downstairs Sara watched them: her mother lowered her head to her father’s, her long hair haloing their faces in gold, and kissed him with as much sweetness as she could muster. But then her father roped an arm gently around her mother’s neck, tightened just slightly, deepening the closeness between them. Sara turned her head from them, went looking for her brother Jaime, who was sitting blank-eyed on the little sofa, the cat purring luxuriously in his lap.
“She was your friend,” Jaime said, unnecessarily.
“Yeah.” It was hard to speak around the sensation of her heart in her throat.
These moments of solitude, of bloodlessness, were almost unbearable. As soon as they came upon Sara she dreaded their passing. Days with her mother and her father on the boat-deck, where they feigned being a true family, Jaime half-hung over the rail to dip his fingers in the green water. Sara sitting downstairs with the red cat nesting in her arms, listening to the sounds of the finch coming from the bedroom she shared, out of necessity, with her brother. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she loosed the little gray bird out of the window. She wondered what her brother would do to her then.
Between the two of them lay long reaches of patience, even fondness, but most of the time such things were hard to remember. Much more familiar was the falling blow of his palm against her cheek, the sound of the finch’s contented croons from the shadowy bedroom, the rare outbursts of humor that startled them both. Sara cleaved to him like the child that she still was, but her brother was a year younger and incapable of caring for anyone, even himself.
She did not question his fury because in her world there was little room for anything else. She’d seen her mother carve skin from bone, her father pull sun-stroked hair sharply so that a girl’s neck was bent unnaturally, acts of rage where the anger lay underneath a mask of cool civility. She’d tried to make these memories vanish — but there was always another town, another victim, another ending. There was no way of forgetting when these patterns ran in endless rings.
“You should have known,” said her brother suddenly, into the silence between them. “She looked just like—”
Like the others. Sara could feel her throat closing, something rising in it like a howl. Yes, she should have known, but she hadn’t, perhaps mistaking her father’s recent silences for patience. Her mother’s restlesssness for distraction.
“I really cared for her,” she said, after an aching silence.
“I know,” Jaime said, and his voice was soft, and almost gentle.
The words went unspoken: that she shouldn’t have befriended Juliet, that she shouldn’t have brought her to their home, that she should have known better. And maybe, Sara thought, this was all true — even though she had wished so badly that it wasn’t. There were ghosts of a dozen dead girls on that boat, and these were ghosts that rose with the sun and never slept with the moon; they were memories, a glimpse in the fractured bathroom mirrow, the curl of a heart-shaped mouth or a tangle of yellow hair, the imprint of a familiar face on the backs of her eyelids.
Every prayer unanswered — every act a sacrifice. Almost tentatively, Sara sat besides her brother, wondering what their names would be next, if he would ever soften himself towards her. They were necessary only to themselves, set loose from the world, the memory of joy slipping away effortlessly unmoored into the past.
Sara was different among each of them. With her mother she was sweet, pliant, soft and quiet — learning to cooking dishes with no discernible name, receptive to her mother’s slim fingers in the matting of her dark hair, smiling with near-identical expressions. Her father, though, was harder to track; he was submissive to her mother in some ways, aggressive in others, and she did not know what he wanted from her. Servility, perhaps, or affection. They weren’t such different words when they went unspoken.
Her brother was stranger, if possible, withdrawn to the utmost and gentle in his savagery. Sara could not read him. She feared his anger and loved his compassion; he was the only one of their family who ever touched her gently, who let her cup the gray finch in trembling hands. He had long scores along his forearms, she knew, scars that he took pains to hide: long t-shirts, even her mother’s expensive creams which rendered them almost invisible.
They moored the boat near a lonely strip of trees which Sara’s father seemed to know well. He motioned to Jaime and Sara. “Come with me.”
But the words were spoken only to her.
Even parents needed secrets; Sara knew this. But her father had too few, and she had too many; she felt laid open before him, the feverish pulse of blood and the catch in her chest, the sharp gasp of her inhalation. He was familiar with every part of her, and this left her at an unfair disadvantage: because he was merely the stranger she’d always known.