Chapter 26

Georgia finally arrived. I heard the key in the lock. The moment she slid up the partition, she screamed.

“What happened?” I questioned her, not the other way around, and not about her scream.

“I…I don’t…”

“To father? To Auntie…Virginia? To her child?”

Georgia pulled a handkerchief from her cleavage, like a clumsy magician. She brought it toward my face, but pulled away before touching it there. “Your nose,” she said. “Did you have a spell? A fit?”

“What kind of fits…do I have? Are they…simply seizures, or are they…something else? Did father…have the same?”

Did I speak these words or just imagine that I did? I could not be sure, then or later.

“Brother, you are not well.”

“What was…in the paper? The body in…the woods…who was it? Do they know?”

“Pennsylvania…I can no longer deal with your moods. Virginia may have been right all along.”

“That she should have smothered me…at birth? Is that what…you wish to do now?”