Page 152 of Ruthless Sin
The air leaves me completely.
He told me in that room she was brave. He told me she didn’t give him up. He didn’t tell me she hummed. He didn’t tell me she hummed this song. The song she sang when I was small and the dark was too big and she was the only thing between me and it.
“She hummed it for you,” he says. His voice goes wrong on the last word. “I don’t think she cared whether I understood. She hummed it and I already knew who she was singing it for.”
My forehead goes to the frame. I press it hard against the wood.
She hummed my name when she died. Not in words. In the only language she was sure I would still have.
“I couldn’t paint her the other way,” he says. “I painted her the way she was when she was still alive and didn’t know what was coming. Laughing at herself. Forgetting the second verse.” A pause. “That’s who she was. Not the end of it. That’s who she was.”
I’m crying. I’m not stopping it. I cry with my forehead on the frame of her face until my body has nothing left.
He doesn’t come into the room. He doesn’t speak. He stays in the doorway and lets me be in here with her.
After a long time I straighten. I wipe my face. I turn around.
His hands are at his sides. The set of his shoulders has changed. Something put down.
“You kept your promise,” I say.
He nods. Once.
“Stay as long as you need,” he says quietly. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Don’t.” Rough. “Don’t go.”
He stays.
I stay in the room for a long time.
I don’t know how long.
The light moves a quarter inch. Then another. The smell of linseed oil is the smell of a room my sister has been alive in for three years.
She didn’t die unwitnessed.
The man who couldn’t save her painted her face in the dark for three years.
He has shown her to me.
Gratitude.
I don’t have anywhere to put it yet.
I lower my hand, and the breath comes out of me all at once, and I turn and walk to the doorway.
Nico steps back to let me through.
He looks at the floor as I pass him. He keeps his hands at his sides.
I walk through his bedroom.
The bed. The desk. The nightstand. The drawer.
I walk into the hallway.
I walk back through his side of the house. Through the connecting hallway. Past Renzo and Izzy’s door, closed. Past Sofia’s door, closed, the line of light under the gap on. To my own door.
