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The diamond was larger than her right eye. She put it in her purse to keep it safe and then she put her lips to Terry’s face. The rush of the water was loud enough to wipe their voices clean like anaesthetic, but she could still faintly hear him say that dreadful nickname. His hand tightened on her waist and she smiled at his big, dumb eyes while Valerie pulled the trigger. Terry convulsed at the sound and Dahlia jumped.
“This is so wrong,” said Valerie over the phone.
She paused.
“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”
Ten years old.
She had thrown herself at her mother and begged, but her father yanked her away while Iris stood in the rain, as obedient as always. Her father’s grip was steel and salt on her wrist, and Dahlia tried to bite him but he struck her across the face. She looked at her mother wildly, waiting for her to object, but her mother’s face was as empty as a clay vase and she turned to go back inside the training hall.
As her father started up the car and drove them out of Kurain, Iris put her arms around Dahlia in the backseat and said, “It’ll be okay. I’ll always watch over you.” Then they drove for two hours and their father stopped in front of a temple where an anxious fat woman was sweeping the floor. Dahlia screamed again as her father put his hands on Iris, and the snot ran from her nose into her mouth where there was a taste like sour strawberries.
“I hate you!” she yelled at her father. “I’m going to kill you!”
Her father actually looked spooked for a second. Then he smiled and jangled the car keys. “You don’t have any spiritual powers, sweetheart. What are you going to do?” Then he looked up at the sky, at the atmosphere. “It’s just the two of us now. Give Daddy a kiss.”
“Is this why you kept me?” she said afterwards with her eyes closed, the sheets beneath her twisted with sweat.
Twelve years old.
“Is this your sister?” the woman with the high voice asked Valerie, leaning down so that she could beam at Dahlia. “She’s so pretty.”
“No,” Valerie said shortly. “Not my sister. Just a brat daughter of a stupid man my mom married.” She tugged at Dahlia. “Anyway, we shouldn’t talk to strangers.” She started walking down the street and Dahlia tried to tell her that she couldn’t keep up, but Valerie didn’t slow down. Henry Rollins was waiting for her by the ice cream stand. Valerie had a crush on Henry, who had dark hair and freckles like constellations.
“Hi Val,” he said. “Hi Dollie.”
“Hi Henry,” Dahlia said. She waited there, bored, while Valerie tried to flirt with Henry. Couldn’t Valerie see that Henry wasn’t interested in her? Then an idea came to her and she smiled. “Henry,” she said again.
Fourteen years old.
The woman with the high voice was behind the counter when she went to the abortion clinic. She didn’t recognize Dahlia so Dahlia didn’t care. When she gave the forms to sign, Dahlia put ‘Melissa Foster’ and then she waited on the stiff chairs reading a home and gardening magazine. Afterwards when she was back in the lobby, the woman looked up and said, “Hey, aren’t you the Hawthorne girl?”
“No,” Dahlia said coldly.
She took the bus home and when she stepped through the door, her father looked up from the newspaper and said, “Did you get rid of it?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good.” He turned to the business section. “We don’t want any monsters in the house.”
“Of course not,” Dahlia said.
“Go do the math problems Terry left for you, sweetheart. We’ll talk later,” he said. She watched the slide of sweat from his bald head to his heavy throat, and she would have opened her mouth to say something, but then the clock chimed six. She could feel the vibration in her spine and there was a weight there that felt like pregnancy. She shook her head. No need to be foolish.
In her room Dahlia hauled the telephone directory collecting dust under her bed. She flipped through the white pages until she found the woman with the high voice. Her index finger slid to the address. Then she booted up her laptop and started to type. After dinner she told her father and her stepmother that she was visiting a friend, and she rode her bike to the woman’s house and put the note in her mailbox.
If you tell the Hawthornes, I will cut you to pieces.
Three days later her stepmother was holding the phone in confusion when Dahlia went into the kitchen for a snack. “What is it?” Dahlia asked her.
“Some woman called. She sounded hysterical. I didn’t understand anything she said,” her stepmother replied. She shook her head. “What a nut job.”
“Your mother looks shaken,” her father said some time later. “After that so-called mysterious phone call. She won’t talk to me.”
“She’s not my mother,” Dahlia said automatically.
Her father narrowed his eyes. “Did you tell her?”
Dahlia stopped swinging her legs off the couch and she made the rest of her body as immobile as she could, but that didn’t stop her father from lifting his hand and twisting his fingers through her hair. “Did you tell her?” her father repeated. She didn’t reply; she only gave him her most haughty look, and then he was reaching for the throw pillow and pressing it down on her face.
“I’m not going to stop until you tell me the truth,” he said.
Three minutes, she thought. She was getting better at holding her breath.
Terry came over the next night to help her with her math. Dahlia didn’t need his meagre help but it wasn’t math they talked about anyway when she closed her bedroom door. His hands trembled as he touched her skin and he said, “But you’re so young.” Then he traced a bruise on her forehead that she had tried to cover with makeup. “Where’d this come from?”
“I fell,” Dahlia said airily. Then she kissed him.
The river froze her bones when she jumped into it and so there was no pain.
Sixteen years old.
At boarding school she sat alone. In the corner of her eye she watched the girls dressed in black share a cigarette between them, their lips wrapping around it with a sensual pleasure. They glanced over at Dahlia and one girl said, “What you looking at, bitch?” Dahlia looked back down at her book of Japanese poetry.
The girl who spoke was named Penelope. One evening Penelope followed Dahlia out of the mess hall and to the door of the girls’ dormitory. “What are you doing?” Dahlia asked her, but Penelope licked the lipstick on her mouth and grinned.
“You know Caleb?”
“No,” Dahlia said.
“You liar. He’s my boyfriend. Mine.” Penelope dug her fist into Dahlia’s stomach and Dahlia wheezed for air as bruises spread along her skin. This was familiar, she thought. She had hoped to leave it behind when she left her father, but apparently not. Dahlia grabbed at Penelope but the other girl was older and stronger, and she shoved Dahlia into the brick wall. “You whore, Melissa, you keep your hands to yourself,” she said. Dahlia looked down at the ground where there were specks of blood.
The sight rejuvenated her. She kneed Penelope and then took her backpack and swung it. There were three textbooks inside. They hit Penelope on the side of the face, and Penelope shrieked in fury.
Penelope grabbed Dahlia’s shoulder again. Dahlia struggled and kicked, but Penelope shoved her head into the wall once, twice. “Stop it!” said Dahlia and she could feel fear coating the back of her throat, but Penelope only did it again. When Dahlia crumpled to the ground, Penelope kicked her in the torso one last time.
“Stay away from Caleb,” she warned.
Dahlia passed out. A physics teacher found her and carried her to the hospital. When they asked who had beaten her, she thought about Penelope and Penelope’s group of friends. “No one,” she said. “I don’t remember.” She touched the bandages around her broken ribs and made a mental note to start carrying a switchblade.
The next time Dahlia slept with Caleb, Penelope cornered her in the girls’ washroom above the library. Dahlia pressed her back to the cool grey metal and swung the switchblade up, up, right where it counted.
After that, Valerie was easy.
So was the rest of the job. After Dahlia turned eighteen and graduated from boarding school, she flew back to her home country. On a hot summer afternoon she cooked herself an omelette for breakfast in the apartment she rented with the leftover diamond money. Her mini TV was turned on where it sat on top of her fridge. A news anchor was talking about a house on White Chapel Road that had burned down, killing a jeweller and his wife.
Iris said, “You’ve changed so much.”
They were standing in front of Hazekura Temple with the trees losing their leaves, a full circle from where they began. It was their first meeting in years, the last time being when Iris had found Dahlia in the river. Dahlia studied her twin whose hood and long white dress made her look more like a ghost than a nun.
“You haven’t changed at all,” Dahlia said.
“How was England?” Iris asked worriedly. “You look thinner.”
“England was fine and you’re such a mother hen,” Dahlia laughed. The cloudiness in Iris’ eyes didn’t go away so Dahlia added, “You won’t find a boyfriend if you nag so much.”
“I’m a nun,” Iris said. “I don’t want a boyfriend.”
“You never know,” Dahlia said cryptically. Men would love sweet, innocent Iris. They would probably line up in droves to relieve her of her virginity.
Iris’ wrist was a bony curve. When they started walking down the path towards the bridge, Dahlia thought: we were once the same person. The thought made her shudder. She pretended it was only because she was cold. Iris showed her the birds that were nesting in her favourite tree, and Dahlia tried to smile pleasantly but instead her mouth looked slashed.
“Stop that,” Iris said. “You’re scaring me.”
Doug’s scent and Terry’s hands and Phoenix’s smile and her father’s sweat and Henry’s tongue and Caleb’s sigh and even Diego Armando’s voice as he worked the coffee into his throat and sated his thirst.