Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Anne’s biker jacket is missing.

Straightening up, she brushes lint off her hands and surveys the worldly possessions spilling over across her bedroom floor. Anne is spring cleaning; never mind that it’s halfway through spring already, or that being neater was her New Year’s resolution. Better late than never. She’s sorted everything into piles for disposal or donation, books and clothes and other paraphernalia that she’s somehow acquired. Amazing how much you can accumulate in the span of a few years, she marvels, and nudges a dusty snow globe with her toe.

The donation pile, with a very bulky sweater at its base, is threatening to topple over into the mess of things she wants to keep. Anne catches it just in time and props it up with a stack of books. On the top is some kind of simple guide to taxes, one of the first things she bought in this life. She doesn’t need it now; time to pass it on to another hapless victim of capitalism. Yes, it’s been a few happy years.

She goes into the hallway. Everyone else should still be out, which affords her the perfect opportunity to ransack their rooms for her jacket. She skips Jane, because the idea of Jane as a clothes thief is peak comedy; Cathy and Anna prove innocent; and the door to Catalina and Kitty’s room is wedged shut, so she reluctantly passes it by.

‘Rats,’ she says out loud. There’s a muffled noise from somewhere in the house. Knowing it’s probably something falling over in her room, she ignores it.

Anne changes course and heads for the living area, now in quest of a snack. She’s almost at the kitchen door when something heaped near the sofa catches her eye. It’s soft, and black, and — yes, when Anne looks closely, it’s her jacket. Tossed unceremoniously upon the living room floor, instead of where it’s supposed to be, tossed unceremoniously upon her bedroom floor.

That is: hung neatly in her wardrobe. Spring cleaning and such.

She picks the jacket up. ‘Where did you come from, love?’ she asks; Anne has a habit of speaking particularly tenderly to inanimate objects. ‘You weren’t here half an hour ago.’

The jacket hazards no response.

‘Oh… and neither were you.’

There’s a small bouquet of baby’s breath abandoned on the coffee table. Anne sniffs it appreciatively. It’s wrapped in white crepe paper, crisp against the powder pink blooms, and trussed up with a thin gold ribbon. But when Anne turns it over, there’s no card.

‘Ooh,’ she says cheerfully, ‘you’re a mystery. Which one of us are you for? Anna, or Jane, or Lina?’ Dropping a light kiss on the topmost spray of flowers, she moves to the kitchen and starts preparing a vase of water. ‘Cath or Kitty? Who’s the lucky girl?

‘We’ll get you a drink soon enough,’ she continues, and sets the vase down on the coffee table. ‘As soon as your intended recipient gets a good look at you.’

Anne isn’t expecting any reply, and so, when there comes the unmistakable sound of someone crying, she nearly spills the water.

Her first thought is that it’s a neighbour. Duncan, maybe, who lives in the flat to their left and has a dog. But while they sometimes do hear Alfie whine, he doesn’t sound nearly so human. For a moment Anne has misgivings and actually looks down at the flowers, just to be sure; then, shaking her head at her own foolishness, she heads back down the hallway and knocks on the only closed door.

‘It’s Anne,’ she calls.

Whoever is inside quietens perceptibly.

‘Can I come in?’

Anne pushes open the door. Immediately she nearly slips on something: it’s a tube of lipstick. Scattered from the doorway to the beds, like the grisly remains of a pageant contest, are various other products and accessories, and at the very end is an overturned makeup pouch. Carefully, Anne picks her way through the carnage; she hops over a nail buffer and sits down on the foot of Kitty’s bed.

‘What’s wrong, pet?’ she asks the huddle in the duvet.

Kitty makes a very sad noise, somewhere between a sob and a sniffle. ‘Nothing.’

‘Are you alright?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Let me get you something to wipe your face with, love.’

The box of tissues that usually sits on Catalina’s nightstand is missing. Anne starts to look for it. ‘There’s a sweet little bouquet outside,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘Who did it come for?’

The duvet shifts.

‘Do you know?’

Still no answer. Anne shrugs philosophically and rededicates herself to finding that tissue box.

‘I’ve been spring cleaning.’ If Kitty won’t talk, then Anne will. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of things I have. How long have we been around? Four years? Five? Whatever it is, not nearly long enough to justify everything I’ve had to sort through.’

Anne senses that Kitty is still listening, so she closes the wardrobe doors a little harder than usual and says, ‘Sweets, I can’t find your tissue box. Where did it go?’

‘It’s with me.’

‘And you let me turn the place upside down searching for it? You imp.’

At this, the duvet does have some kind of reaction; it twitches in a number of places and slowly unfurls, and then a hand appears, and pushes a rather squashed tissue box in the direction of Anne’s voice.

Anne sits back down at the foot of the bed. ‘It’s for you,’ she says, exasperated, ‘I don’t need it, I — is that blood?’

Let it be known that as a result of her execution, the unanticipated sight of any kind of red substance throws Anne into a frenzy of alarm the way nothing else can. Even ketchup, when improperly presented, can be an evil. Whatever it is on the tissue box, it’s smeared over the side and gets on Anne’s fingers. She yelps, and, unheeding of the white bedsheets, begins scrabbling at the duvet in an attempt to unearth Kitty.

‘It’s not blood, leave me alone!’ Kitty cries, but Anne is relentless. ‘What in the world did you do?’ she shrieks, and then, ‘Katherine! What happened to your face?’

‘Nothing!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Anne shoves the sheets aside. Kitty’s face is red and blotchy, and the area around her mouth looks slightly swollen, like it’s been violently rubbed. But before Anne can conduct a closer inspection, Kitty grabs the duvet and yanks it over herself with such force that she comes within an inch of catching Anne squarely across the jaw with her fist. This flurry of movement dislodges the crumpled tissues on the bed around her, which spill out onto the floor over Anne’s feet: mounds of smudged colour, reds and blacks and beiges. Remnants of makeup, Anne realises, as she picks at them with shaking fingers.

She turns back to the bed. ‘Kitty —’

‘Leave me alone!’

It’s one of those days that Anne wishes she didn’t have to parent anyone. Happens about once a week, twice in a difficult season. She fixes Kitty with a gaze that she hopes conveys tenderness, sympathy, and the authority of a mother-figure who must be obeyed. But how Kitty actually interprets it is up for grabs; she wrenches herself free from the sheets, and, with her hands over her face, flees to the hallway bathroom and slams the door.

Anne hasn’t got the slightest idea what that means.

Everyone seems to be looking for Kitty today. Catalina brings it up first over dinner; something about a change in schedule for Mass. Then Jane remembers that Kitty is meant to be finishing off her last page of algebra homework, which prompts Cathy to wonder when Kitty wants to visit her dance school for a trial class. Anna, dishing mashed potato onto everyone’s plates, says she hasn’t seen Kitty since she got home.

‘She’s been in the bathroom,’ says Anne.

‘Why? What’s up with her?’

‘Prizes for anyone who can find out.’

Cathy glances uneasily around the table as she spears a piece of broccoli. Besides Kitty, she’s the most sensitive in the family. But while Kitty is fairly open with her emotions, Cathy tends to play hers off with mischief. Which means that if Anne wants to spare Kitty a prank or two, she’d better get Cathy in check.

This time, however, Cathy surprises her. She puts down her cutlery and excuses herself from the table. They hear her quiet footsteps down the hallway, then her knocks on the bathroom door. For a long time there’s no answer — Anne looks around to impress upon the others that this was to be expected — until, miraculously, the bathroom door creaks open.

‘She’s out,’ says Catalina, dumbfounded.

‘Shh,’ says Jane.

Cathy is talking, her voice low and reasonable, Kitty’s anxious interjections weaving through the pauses. But whatever Cathy is saying seems to have some effect; after a couple of vehement exclamations, the talking dies down. The door creaks again, and now there are two sets of footsteps on the parquet. A second door closes, from a room nearer to them; and Cathy returns alone, her face pensive, and takes her seat at the table.

‘Lemonade, please,’ she says.

Jane passes her the jug. ‘So how did it go, love?’

‘Bizarrely. She won’t tell me anything at all.’

‘That’s not like her,’ says Anna. ‘Anne, go over it again.’

There’s a dull ache like an impending storm on the left side of Anne’s head, but she takes a sip of lemonade and tries to ignore it. ‘I found her crying in bed,’ she says. ‘She wrecked her makeup kit and scrubbed whatever she was wearing off her face.’

‘Violently?’

‘Violently.’

Cathy is chewing despondently on one end of a whole cucumber, apparently out of ideas. Catalina, glancing in the direction of the living room, asks, ‘What about the flowers?’

‘I’m afraid that’s beyond me at present.’

Everyone turns to the bouquet, now sedately residing in its vase on one end of the kitchen counter.

‘Well, it’s not mine,’ says Anna at last, when more than one of them looks at her expectantly. ‘Anyone else has admirers, secret or otherwise?’

‘If they were secret,’ Cathy points out, ‘we wouldn’t be able to tell you as much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Then as far as I’m aware, no, it didn’t come for me.’

‘Me neither,’ says Catalina. ‘Jane?’

Jane shakes her head.

‘So Kitty must’ve brought it home with her.’

Maybe that’s not a huge stretch of the imagination. Kitty has just started work at a florist’s, the same one where her friend Caroline is spending her gap year before university, and frequently brings home flowers just slightly too imperfect for the shelf. At its peak, it had come to the point where all receptacles in the house were occupied, and Anne had to ask her to stop. Still, those had been a couple of random stalks here and there; very different from a bouquet, no matter how simple.

‘Maybe Kit intended to give it to one of us,’ says Cathy into the ensuing silence.

Catalina frowns. ‘How would that explain the makeup fiasco?’

‘It’s correlation, not causation. Don’t finish all the potatoes, Lina, I have to take some dinner to Kitty later.’

‘You give her some of yours, then,’ mutters Catalina, but she carves out a substantial portion and leaves it on the plate. Kitty’s the family favourite, and there’s no one disputing that.

Anne leaves the table after dinner is done, too tired to stay for dessert, and curls up with a heavy volume of Keats on the sofa — proof that she’s out of sorts, because her cold, cynical soul normally can’t abide the Romantics. Around her are the comforting sounds of home: Anna doing the dishes, the click of Jane’s knitting needles, Cathy and Catalina having a row over Netflix. She’s just nodding off when someone bounces onto the seat next to her and flips Keats closed.

‘Go to bed,’ says Cathy, who’s surrendered control of the remote to Catalina. ‘You’re obviously exhausted.’

‘I want to see if Kitty’s alright.’

‘You won’t make it another five minutes at this rate. You have a choice between your bed or the sofa.’ When Anne only yawns in response, Cathy burrows a foot behind her back, and starts nudging her off the second option. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take care of Kitty.’

Despite the “caring” bit, the term has an ominous ring to it, especially coming from Cathy. But when Anne turns to argue, Cathy is looking at her, utterly beatific, her dark eyes huge, wisps of baby hair curling delicately around her forehead.

If only her girls weren’t so cute. If only she weren’t in such desperate need of rest. ‘Ask Jane,’ she says, and stifles another yawn.

‘Annie! You don’t trust us?’

‘Who’s “us”?’

‘Me,’ says Catalina, heretofore engrossed in a movie about a hammer-wielding blonde man with lovely hair.

‘And Anna,’ Cathy adds, certain that it will tip the scales. ‘Come on, since when have we done any irreversible damage to Kitty?’

Anne can think of lots of examples of temporary inconvenience inflicted on a range of victims, but none that can strictly be classified as damage, let alone irreversible.

Cathy smells a near-victory. ‘It’ll just be intel-gathering,’ she promises. ‘If there’s anyone Kitty will confide in, it’s us.’

‘Well, it’s actually me,’ says Anne.

Frowning, Catalina pauses her show. ‘No, it’s me.’

‘You’re included in “us”,’ says Cathy waspishly. ‘And I’m not about to start a debate on who Kitty’s favourite is.’

‘We could start a debate on who Henry’s favourite was.’

‘We don’t need a debate,’ says Anne, ‘it’s Jane.’

Catalina shrugs. ‘I call dibs on least favourite,’ she says, and clicks resume, upon which the blonde man unfreezes, hurls a mug, and shatters it on the ground. The crash that it makes leaves Anne even more disgruntled than the people in the movie, and she decides that it might be safer for everyone if she went to bed.

She tosses Keats to Cathy, who catches it neatly. ‘No psychological scarring,’ she warns.

‘Pinky promise!’ says Cathy cheerily.

That makes Anne feel even worse. My spirit is too weak — mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, she thinks tiredly, and betakes herself off to bed.