“Don’t you dare say that!” she screams, grabbing my arm.
I freeze. No adult has ever screamed at me like that, from the depths of her soul. Now her chest is heaving. She clamps down hard on my wrist and brings her face close. “They only told me there was going to be one of you,” she growls, her mouth within biting distance. “Not two. You weren’t supposed to be here, Sutton. You weren’t supposed to come.”
I stare at her. “Who told you?”
But she doesn’t answer. “I was so afraid I’d break you. I break everything I touch.” She’s launched back into that chanting, lullaby voice. “But I guess it’s too late. You’re already broken.”
“Get off me,” I protest, straining against her, trying to push away. But she’s so much stronger than she looks. Her wiry arms tighten around me until I can’t breathe. “Stop it!” I scream. I can smell the sweat on her body and feel the hard bones under her skin. My gaze searches around me. I see the dark, open mouth of the canyon below.
She hugs me tight, but it feels as if I’m being embraced by a snake, squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and then swallowed whole. I wriggle some more. “Let. Go!”
But Becky doesn’t let up. “My little girl,” she says close to my ear. I open my mouth wide, trying to gulp some air, but all I get is a mouthful of T-shirt. As her arms clench tighter and tighter, I hear her words once more: You weren’t supposed to be here, Sutton. It’s too late. You’re already broken.
My mother is here to kill me, I think in terror.
And then the memory evaporates into darkness.
20
THE ESCAPE
Becky writhed in her hospital bed, her eyes rolling back and her limbs flailing. She let out a keening groan. Emma staggered backward into the hallway. She felt something wet on her arm. Her wrist was dotted with half-moons of blood where Becky’s nails had broken skin. Her cheeks were wet, too—not with blood, but with tears. Something had broken inside of her: The love, the hope, had withered away. Maybe Becky had killed Sutton. It didn’t seem so difficult anymore, to conceive of her mother as her sister’s killer.
I trembled from the memory I’d just recovered, fearing she was right. The crushing way Becky had squeezed me, the sad way she’d looked at me, as though saying good-bye for the last time. You weren’t supposed to be here. They told me. She was hearing voices in her head—voices that told her to kill me.
Emma watched through the doorway as two nurses and an orderly surrounded Becky’s bed. “Get her strapped down,” said one of them, a middle-aged woman wearing pink-heart-print scrubs. The silvery tip of a needle flashed in her right hand.
A hulking, crew-cut orderly leaned over Becky, grunting as he fixed the leather straps around her wrists. But Becky was too quick for him. Like a cat, she slid away from under his grip, sinuous and fluid. When he grabbed her shoulders, she let out a shrill, tortured scream. The orderly glanced over his shoulder. “A little help?”
“On it,” the nurse said, dropping the syringe on a tray. She grabbed Becky’s bare feet. Suddenly, there was a horrible crunching sound, and then a scream. The nurse flew back, blood pouring from her nose. It took Emma a second to realize that Becky had kicked her. The orderly’s grip loosened for a split second in surprise, and Becky sprang to her feet. She grabbed the syringe off the nightstand and wielded it like a weapon.
“Stay away from me,” she hissed, her voice hoarse and raspy.
The orderly raised his palms. “It’s going to be okay, Ms. Mercer. No one’s trying to hurt you.”
Becky looked wildly around the room. The nurse was still lying on the ground in a fetal position, clutching her nose. The orderly had taken a few careful steps toward Becky. She held up the needle higher, pointing it at him. “I’ll do it. I swear I will.” The orderly stopped and took a step back.
Emma froze. The hallway was empty and quiet. She was the only one here who might be able to intervene, to take Becky by surprise. She couldn’t allow her sister’s killer to escape.
Taking a deep breath, she lunged forward and made a grab at Becky, wrapping her arms tightly around her mother’s skinny shoulders. Becky shrieked and threw Emma’s arms off her, body checking her with surprising force. Emma fell to the floor. She scrabbled away as Becky appeared in the doorway, the syringe still in her hand. Becky paused for a moment, staring down at Emma with wide eyes.
“Sutton … ,” she whispered, her eyes shifting to just above Emma—to me. Neither Emma nor I knew which of us she was talking to anymore.
Emma’s lips parted. She wanted to move, but her limbs hung heavy and useless. Becky leaned toward her for another moment, then spun on her heel and, with a scream, ran toward the stairwell at the other end of the hallway. A confused babble broke out from the social room. One of the ward’s inhabitants yelled, “Run!”
“Someone call security!” spat the nurse in pink-heart scrubs, staggering to her feet.
She and the orderly rushed past Emma in the hallway. The patients who had been watching TV were shouting, some of them crying and others bellowing curse words. An old man in a nightshirt went running out of his room toward the stairwell in his own bid for freedom. He was pinned by a muscular orderly and wrestled back toward his room. A siren started to whoop through the linoleum halls.
“That night at the canyon.” Emma repeated Becky’s words out loud. Just thinking about Sutton’s last night alive had sent Becky into some kind of fit. Had it been guilt she’d seen on her mother’s face, or something more like … excitement?