The Twin's Daughter by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

• Twenty-four •

It was difficult to believe that our home had been the site of a great party less than twenty-four hours before. People had laughed, eaten, danced, drank—some of us had even kissed. Those had been other people. It had been another world.

My father had said that Mr. Carson would need to spend some of his tightly held fortune to repair their ruined home. Well, it would take a lot more than money to repair the one room that had been damaged in ours. Once the police had completed their investigations there, once my aunt’s lifeless body had been taken away for further investigation—a process none of us could bear to watch—my father ordered the back parlor boarded up. Scrub away the stains on the chairs, floor, and walls? Spend money on new furnishings? I doubted enough scrubbing could be done, nor enough money spent to persuade me to ever set foot in that room again. If the room could have been cut neatly away from the rest of the house, like a gangrenous limb sawed off a wounded soldier, it would have suited me perfectly well.

The remainder of that dark day passed in a fog, prelude to a more proper mourning. Mother at last was permitted to change out of her blood-spattered dress, giving it to the police as yet more evidence. A servant from the Carson household, unaware as to what had passed in our household, came with a message of thanks from the Carsons for all the help my father and our servants had provided, further informing my father that the Carsons would be moving to their other home in the country until the one here could be rebuilt—as if any of us cared about that right now. As for the Tylers, they stayed on until late in the afternoon, seeking to distract us from the reminding sounds of policemen scurrying hither and yon, providing comfort when necessary, providing silence when that became even more necessary, urging us all to eat at least a little something. But none of us could eat. Food? Sustenance? What was that now?

Knowing that Kit was in the house did help. From reading books, I knew that some people run from tragedy, fearing that proximity could invite it to spread into contagion, while others race toward it, not from any noble feeling but rather with the joy-tinged excitement of one watching a play enacted upon the stage—it is not real if it is not happening to you.

But there is also a third kind of person who sticks to tragedy in order to see if they can genuinely help, the impulse coming from a generosity of spirit combined with an empathic nature that immediately recognizes that if they were to ever find themselves in such straits, this is how they would like the world around them to respond.

Kit belonged to this last group; I think that all the Tylers did, and for this I was grateful.

And yet, I could not keep Kit in my thoughts for very long.

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