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Sometimes, she can still see it all when she closes her eyes. The dark of the vehicle, the cold stars scaled on the sky, the empty air beside her. The mansion’s warm glowing lights, how the door had been made of a polished wood she never got to feel. A blurry masquerade of faces, from his to Father’s to Lyney’s to wide eyed girls who were her age or younger—she closes her eyes, and she’s there.
Lyney doesn’t exactly know the full truth of what happened. He thinks he does, but thinking and knowing are far different things. It’s like when an audience member believes they know how a trick works.
She’d told him—and Father let her tell him—that she had been saved before anything harmful could happen. She’d sat next to him in the blanketed dark and lied through her grit teeth, because she didn’t know what else to do. And Lyney did not notice how her blouse’s ribbons had been retied, sloppy and frantic, and that she was missing one of the bows in her hair, and he must have thought her body couldn’t stop shaking because of what could’ve happened to her, not because something already had.
They’d left the man behind in his home—a cooling corpse and an open basement, the faint scent of metal and gloved hands guiding them around the blood. She can’t remember much from those pieces, only that Lyney had curled her close with an arm round her shoulder, and that his touch had made her skin slowly crawl on her bones.
(It’d been too soon, too raw—and so, for the very first time, she’d been scared of her brother’s touch.)
The man’s face and eyes never quite went away, even though he was gone and Lynette had watched him die in front of her. There’d been nothing satisfying about it—his blood had burst from his neck in a stream, and then, somehow, there’d been more, and more, and more, until the floor was viscous and red and sprawling out to the tips of her shoes. She’d sat there, cold and hot and unable to feel anything past the hammering of her heart, too frozen to try to flee.
She can still remember the frozen terror fixed on his face, his eyes glassy like a piranha’s; she’s not sure what memory of him haunts her the most, the living ones or the dead ones.
(Father had let her burn the clothes she had worn that night, gave her new and clean ones after Lynette finished a shower that turned her skin raw and red. She wishes the touch would’ve gone away then, or at least in one of the other endless showers she can’t live without. But it never does. Maybe it never will.)
Some nights she falls asleep in her assistant’s wear, far too paralyzed to undress a body filled with lead. She curls her knees in close, wraps her arms around them, and huddles like she thinks a nice little cat would. The ribbons stick to her face and she doesn’t enjoy how the fabric feels when it settles on her flesh, but it doesn’t matter; she lays there, and she thinks, and she thinks, and she thinks.
She wishes she could’ve been a true cat then: it would have been so easy to slip out of the mansion, and in her dreams sometimes she is—an untouchable, silent little cat, who finds her way home to Lyney on soft paws, her fur untouched and clean.
It’s very easy to be quiet now, to blend into the shadows and let Lyney eat up all the light he wants. She’s more comfortable that way: the less eyes roaming all over her, the better. You can be killed for catching too much attention; sometimes, the spotlight draws more danger than you think, so if you are quiet and alert you can survive better.
(Or if you’re a cat or a puppet—that will help you more than anything else, she thinks.)
Maybe if she’d known this back then, she wouldn’t have caught that man’s attention at all. It won’t happen again. She doesn’t think she can survive it if it does.
There’s something to be said about living with a body that doesn’t feel like it’s your own. In that way, maybe she is a puppet. Always being jerked around by phantom hands.
Lyney, is, in many ways, her protector. He doesn’t always behave that way, but every time he believes there’s a danger to her — a faulty prop, a man who wishes to talk to her backstage — he’s there to shield her. It’s as if he has his own personal Older Brother Mode (she once made a remark about this, and he said if he does, then it’s on all the time). Sometimes it can be irritating: her brother playing the hero but giving all his armor to her, as if he’d rather be burnt to a crisp by a dragon than let her have a lick of an injury.
She knows Lyney is trying to make up for the past. He’s always blamed himself for waiting for her to arrive, for not questioning where she was instantly, but she’s never understood why. What could Lyney have done on his own? If he’d shown up too early, if Father hadn’t been there as she had, then what would have become of them? Doesn’t he understand not everything bends to the laws of magic and that there are some things that simply can’t be done?
Father saved me, Lyney, remember? she thinks, always trying to keep her head above the relentless current of memory. Nothing happened. I am fine.
But no matter how hard she tries, Lynette is not a magician like Lyney—and she can never make a lie the truth.
Do you know I love you, Lyney? she wonders when Lyney, without even being told to, separates her from the crowds because it’s a day where the slightest brush against a stranger’s skin makes her want to peel her skin away. Do you know I love you and Freminet far more than I could ever say? I want to ask what you two see in me.
“Come now, Lynette,” he says, eyes twinkling with their own special magic. “Let’s have an early dessert today!”
She wordlessly gives her hand (like she’s a child) and he takes it (perhaps because she’ll always be a little sister with an emphasis on little to him, even though they are around the same height without his hat), and it doesn’t go away, but it fades just a bit.
It doesn’t get to stay that way.
They’re relaxing for the night when it happens. Lynette is laying on her bed and staring intently at nothing while Lyney sits near her, messing around with his decks of cards. There’s a bit of a nervous energy in him from the sounds that his cards make in a shuffle that’s quicker than usual, but she doesn’t call it out yet. Freminet is in another room having some quiet time; she figures it won’t be long before he comes in.
In any case, all is going normal until she hears Lyney suddenly place his cards down on the bed.
“Lynette,” he says, gentle enough as to curl kindly around her heart, “can you tell me the truth about something?”
She instantly thinks he is going to ask her about their rehearsal earlier. Like always, he will needle her for any criticisms or feedback on how to make it all perfect. There’s no escaping this particular routine, so she mutely nods, head still pushed into her pillow.
“Chat mode activated,” she mutters, and he gives a forced, dry laugh. Something’s wrong, she realizes.
“I’m sorry if this is—if this is too much, but on that night, did that man”—he swallows—“touch you?”
The utter shell-shock the question puts her through nearly makes her shoot up as the floodgates open up for a freezing terror that grips her so tight it renders her breathing beyond difficult. She knows Lyney must see it, must know, because he shifts away as if to give her room to bolt.
There’s this near imperceptible tilt in the world. She wonders if Lyney feels it, the weight of what he’s asked, what her answers could mean for tomorrow. Perhaps that’s what sobers her up the most; emotion has always swiftly drained from Lynette like blood from a wound, and this is not different. She finds herself sober, but still lost, and suddenly so, so, sad.
I want to tell you, she thinks, as fierce as she can be, I want you to make me feel better. I want to think something can make me feel better. I want to forget everything. I want to feel normal again. I want to be whoever I used to be, because I wasn’t her for very long. I want to stop being scared. I want my body and mind to stop being my enemies. I want to be a puppet because I think it would be easier, and puppets are not afraid.
But Lynette lays there and she does not say anything, even though Lyney waits.
She knows he wouldn’t hate her if she told him. She knows he wouldn’t tell Freminet if she asked him not to. She knows, deep down, that telling him would be a good thing, and she needs to learn how to do good things for herself before she breaks from all the bad she drowns in.
“Lynette? Are you alright?” Lyney probes, still carrying that same gentleness. She curls her fingers into her sheets and stares at nothing, allowing herself to think for one more moment.
Lyney should know. He should. He’s the magician, isn’t he? He’s supposed to have a hold of all the secrets. Yet as she considers him more, how he has always protected her and clung to the lie that nothing happened to her that night, how he already has so much to protect and worry about, she realizes she can’t.
(And, maybe selfishly, she doesn’t want to think about the reality after. If she told the truth, it’d be permanent; it wouldn’t disappear like one of Lyney’s shimmering magic tricks on stage, and it wouldn’t be lovely like them, either. She could never take her words back, and it would become real to Lyney, and everything would be different, and she doesn’t want to try to swim through the currents of a world where her brother looks at her and sees that gaping wound and what it did to her.)
So:
“No,” she lies, praying that he won’t see through her, “he didn’t. Please don’t worry, Lyney.”
(Once again, she wishes she could be a puppet or a cat or anyone, really—anyone but herself.)