Blood On Her Hands

Chapter 40

I didn’t speak to Nancy anymore.

It was difficult to do considering we shared a home and family members but my determination was unparalleled. I woke up hours before Nancy so that I didn’t have to run into her while going to the bathroom to get ready for the day. I got breakfast on my way to the library to get my work done. I spent the majority of the day working and if I finished before dinner time, I stalled with superfluous trips to the market or the town's main street.

What made avoiding Nancy easier was that she didn't try very hard to talk to me. If we ever ended up in the same room, she simply ducked her head and looked for the nearest exit. I always beat her to it. This fight had been vastly unlike any other we ever had. There was no amount of humor, warm meals, or naps that could undo the hurt. It was not as simple as an apology or bribing me with a gift. This was the kind of thing people never got over.

Julio was the only person who was not tip-toeing around the house. He walked on clouds since the burden of keeping Nancy and Darren’s affair a secret was off his shoulders. I imagined he made the startling discovery while he was waiting for the wedding reception to start. He saw a bottle of wine and it was all too tempting to try and forget what he saw. Then Adonis was dead. Julio was the only one who knew about the affair. He didn’t want to add on to the pain and grief so he tried to keep it to himself. Doing that ate at him. He experimented with alcohol and drugs to see if they would provide relief. It was all right in front of me the whole time. I just hadn’t noticed.

He had made it clear that he thought what Nancy did was wrong - I mean, everyone knew it was wrong - but he reinforced the shame she must have been feeling. He was extra warm to me but treated Nancy as an outsider. He’d go out to get me something to eat - which I was prone to forgetting to do these days - but let Nancy figure out her own food situation. He’d ask me about my day and ask if I wanted to hang out but wouldn’t give Nancy more than an obligatory greeting.

Tìa handled things a little differently.

“I’m not saying that what she did was okay,” she said. Her sugary fruit scented perfume wafted over to me as she settled into the couch. She straightened her pencil skirt and pulled a sequin throw pillow into her lap. Lint clung to the sleeves of her black cardigan and her hair was straightened to a lifeless state like Nancy’s always was.

I had yet to see her talk to Nancy about how she betrayed Adonis and I. I had yet to hear her make a single comment about what happened at all. Yet, here she was, a few days later, cornering me when she saw that I was on the verge of tears because I had seen one of the framed photos on the mantle. It was taken on a lake trip Adonis and the family had gone on. Someone had put it face down.

“It’s just that Nancy is your sister," my aunt said while waving her painted nails around. “She is your family. Family is for life.”

All three sentences seemed like more reasons to be in despair. Nancy was my sister and if only for that reason and that reason alone, she should have said no to Darren.

“You and Darren have been together for a long time so I understand if it takes time to get over it but you never married him! You don’t ever have to see him again if you don’t want to. Nancy, however, is your family. You have to forgive her.”

“It’s barely been a week,” I said, wiping my tears with the sleeve of my wool sweater. “She did this on purpose. She did it to hurt me.”

“Because she thought you hurt her first.”

“That doesn’t make it okay!”

I was thrown back into a memory right then and there - many memories actually. They flipped through my head like the pages of an album, the plastic crinkling and the thick pages piling up onto one another. Nancy trying to convince me that I shouldn’t need to be in therapy for my PTSD anymore, Darren telling me I couldn’t take a trip to see the sequoias on my own because I was ‘bad at those kinds of things’, Adonis providing a swift change of subject when my uncle went on a tipsy rant about how sensitive I was. The most sour tasting flavor of nostalgia saturated my tongue.