Page 50 of Slander
"Daddy, those pictures aren't?—"
"I've seen them."
The fork goes loose in my fingers, and I set it down before it can fall.
"They're not real," I say, and I hear how it sounds even as it leaves me, thin and fast. "Daddy, listen to me. Somebody made those. There's a thing now, with computers, where you can make a picture of anybody saying anything, doing anything, and it looks real but it isn't, it's—it's called AI, and somebody used it on me, somebody'stargetingme?—"
I watch his face so carefully, how anger boils through.
"Listen to yourself," he says quietly.
"Daddy—"
"Listen to how that sounds, Sophia. Computers making pictures. Somebody targeting you. Forces working against you insecret." He folds his hands on the table, the way he does before a prayer. "Your sister said the very same kinds of things. When she was at her worst. That everyone was against her. That there were things happening that only she could see."
"This is not the same as Hannah."
"Isn't it?"
My mother's looking at her plate. My mother’s spent her whole life looking at her plate while my father builds the cage one quiet board at a time.
"Hannah wassick," I say. "Hannah had an illness, and you all called it sin for years until?—"
"We prayed for your sister."
"Youprayedfor her while she got worse." My voice shakes, and I let it. "She got two trips to the hospital and a thousand hands laid on her head before anybody in this family would drive her to an actual doctor, and you know what finally made you? It wasn't God. It was thestate.It was a stranger with a clipboard telling you that you'd let it go too long, that a sixteen-year-old in crisis needs medicine and not a prayer circle?—"
"That isenough."
That's the closest my father comes to shouting, and the table goes silent under it.
He breathes, gathering himself the way he gathers himself in the pulpit.
"Your sister is managed now," he says. "Medicated. And I thank God for her every day. But I look at her, and I look at you, and I see the same thing in both my girls. I’ve asked the Lord every night what I did—what's in this family, in my blood or my house, that he would give me two daughters who are?—"
He stops.
He doesn't say the word. He doesn't have to. It's sitting there on the table with the corn pudding, plain as anything.
Damaged.
"Say it," I tell him.
He doesn't.
"You think we're broken," I say. "Both of us. You think Hannah getting help justhidit, and now you're looking at me, waiting for the crack to show, and nothing I say is going to change your mind because if I tell you I'm fine that just sounds like Hannah telling you she was fine. There's no answer I can give you. You've built it so there's no answer."
It's my mother who breaks the silence, and what she says is worse than anything my father's managed.
"There's something else, Sophia."
I look at her. She's still not looking at me.
"Carol from two doors down from your place." My mother folds her napkin into a smaller and smaller square. "She says there's a man. A motorcycle man, with tattoos, coming and going from your street at all hours. Staying the night."
And there it is. The second board.
"His name is Njal," I say.
