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Rachel has straightened Helena’s hair. It falls down straight and blonde and sleek over her shoulders, over the black-and-white clothes that Sarah doubts belong to her at all. The pink circles on Helena’s face are covered by concealer. Sarah’s sister, taken away and given back different – like Kira, who they only got back a week ago and who still seems startled every time she licks her lips and they don’t taste like gloss.
“Hello, Sarah,” Helena says. She’s standing outside Rachel’s office like a bodyguard. Sarah can see Rachel inside of her office, sitting at her desk, eyes bright and sharp and smiling. Sarah can also see Rachel in every inch of the woman standing outside her door.
“Helena,” Sarah says. “I’ve been so worried, we’ve been looking for you—”
“No you haven’t,” Helena says, gently amused. “Kira first. You don’t have to lie to me. Rachel told me.”
“And you trust her,” Sarah says.
Helena shrugs a shoulder, darts a hasty glance towards the glass door, and stands up straight again. Sarah wants to ruffle her hair back into disarray, but she doesn’t.
“I trust that you hurt her,” Helena says. “That is a thing that is true, and I trust it.”
“She hurt me first—” Sarah starts, and realizes it’s a losing argument. “Helena,” she says instead, “come home.” She reaches out and touches her fingers to Helena’s wrist.
She hadn’t noticed the knife. Small sleek little blade, up Helena’s black-and-white sleeve and now against Sarah’s throat.
“I learned,” Helena says, “very soon ago, that nobody has to touch me. Ever. If I don’t like it. If I don’t want it. I can stop it. I can stop you from touching me with your breaking hands.”
Sarah takes a step back and the knife vanishes. She looks through the glass door at Rachel, who is almost beaming with delight. Sarah wonders if she’d even wanted Kira in the first place. Sarah wonders if she’d given Kira up, just to buy time, and she hates this line of thinking: she hates that now she’s questioning if getting Kira back was too easy, if she’d done the wrong thing putting her daughter before her sister only she’d had to choose and of course she’d chosen Kira and Helena should understand, if anyone should understand—
“I need to get inside,” she says. “We can go home after that, or you can – or you can stay here, I guess, if you’re that bloody brainwashed. Again.”
“You can’t go inside,” Helena says sadly. “Rachel said.”
Sarah scoffs a laugh, takes a step back, tries to beat down the anger twisting through her chest and fails. After everything – after all she’s been through – after everything, to be stopped by Helena standing here in front of the door. The fact that Rachel can see this makes Sarah feel like it’s a pantomime, and she is so furious that it burns her alive.
“You know she’s just using you to hurt me,” she says. “You know she doesn’t give a shit about you.”
“She said you would say that,” Helena says. “Why is everything about you. Why does everything always have to be about you, Sarah, why do you take things away from other people and twist them into being about you. I never thought about that before but it’s always true. Everything I did was for you, everything I gave up was for you. Maybe I am here and it isn’t because of you. Maybe it’s because I am very tired of always being about you, and all of your ses—all of your sisters only wanting me to be you. And wanting to be you. And talking about you. And thinking about you.
“Rachel doesn’t want me to be you,” she says quietly. “She said I could stay. She didn’t send me away to anywhere and maybe she is lying but at least I can have it. And hold it. It’s okay if she’s lying, as long as when she’s lying she says stay. So. No, Sarah, you can’t go through the door.”
For the last few months, Sarah’s brain has been nothing but a litany of every mistake she’s made. Mistake: trusting Evie, and mistake: surrendering herself to the DYAD and mistake: kissing Dizzy and mistake: letting Beth jump and mistake: the million and one things she’s done that has landed all of her sisters in different disasters. She is so tired. She doesn’t have room on that pile to add mistake: not paying enough attention to Helena. Helena is a grown woman. She should have been fine on her own. She shouldn’t have needed Sarah to hold her hand – but she did, and of course Rachel knew that, and of course Rachel would be willing to hold Helena’s hand if she could slide a knife into it and then point that knife at Sarah. When Sarah gets in that office she’s going to ask if Rachel’s been getting off to this – how much fun she must be having, watching her photo-negative Sarah put a knife to Sarah’s throat.
“Piss off,” she says. “I’m going in and you’re not stopping me.” She puts her hand on the handle of the door. She tugs it open and that knife is back up against Sarah’s throat. Helena’s hand is so still it could be mechanical.
“Put down the handle, please, Sarah,” Helena says. Her voice is filtered through Rachel’s sad, pitying tones. It hasn’t been that long. It shouldn’t have been long enough for Helena to shift into Rachel – but what does Sarah know, really, about Helena. About how long Helena takes.
She tugs the door further open. The knife digs in. “You killed me,” Helena says. “Do you think I can’t kill you. Do you think I never wanted it, that I didn’t push it down over and over when I kept saving your life. She told me how good it felt to put a knife in you and I knew it. I remembered it. I’m not supposed to kill you now but if I do we will both like it and I don’t think you will like it very much at all.”
Sarah drops the door handle. She is looking into Rachel’s eyes through the closing glass door and she spits: “Psychopath.”
The knife digs in a little deeper, and Sarah is bleeding now. She watches Rachel’s eyes go to the blood and she watches Rachel smile and she listens to Helena say: “I didn’t know what that word meant. Nobody told me. None of you ever tell me anything. Rachel says it means monster when people want to feel good about saying monster. When they want to feel like it was something’s fault, but not theirs. I don’t think I like that word, Sarah.”
“Good,” Sarah says, shoving Helena with her shoulder until Helena backs off. She rubs the blood off her neck with the back of her hand and says it again: “Good.”
Helena’s eyes are the exact same as the wound on Sarah’s neck, they’re just the same. Helena blinks and the wounds are covered and then they’re back again. She wipes her knife on her sleeve, seemingly not noticing that she’s turning the white of it red.
“Go home, Sarah,” Helena says.
“She got her show,” Sarah says. “How long ‘til she gets bored of you, huh? ‘Til she leaves you behind like everyone bloody else that she’s dropped on her way up to the top of the bloody mountain. You know what, Helena?” She doesn’t give Helena time to answer. “When she throws you to the side of the bloody road like a doll she doesn’t want to bloody play with anymore, you’re gonna come crawling back and you’re gonna beg to be in our family again. And you know what? You know what?” There’s tears beading at the corners of her eyes, hot and angry. “I’m gonna let you.”
“So when you figure out that you’re being stupid?” Sarah says. “When you finally get it through your bloody skull that you’re helpin’ the bloody devil?” She wrestles the tears back, wrestles her breathing into something resembling normal. “Then you come home, Helena,” she says. “Because we miss you.”
She turns on her heel and heads towards the stairwell, blood singing violence in her chest. She pounds down the stairs. Rachel could send Helena after her, or send a guard after her, but what’s the point? She won. Sarah’s heart is wailing in her chest, hurt deep, and she left her sister behind. Hell of a show.
Sarah is three floors down when she remembers the gun in her jacket pocket. She stops with one foot in the air, hand on the guardrail, breathes and feels the weight of the pistol brush up against her ribs. There are six bullets in it, she’d loaded it up before she left.
She swallows. She keeps on taking the staircase down.