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“You did… You set…” I try to pull together more words to complete the question, but I can’t. Instead, I just force out, “Why?”
Raleigh’s face is splotchy with color. Her lips press together in a bloodless line, like she doesn’t plan to answer me, but then I see her throat work. She’s having her own problems getting out the right words.
“Because-” she chokes, “because I thought you went there that night to kill me.”
I trip back a step, horror and heartache threatening to knock me down. “You thought I- what?! Why?!”
Raleigh seems to be forcing herself to meet my eyes. Her hazel gaze, just like her brother’s, is so intense it’s almost angry. “I hadn’t seen or heard from you in ten years, Clara. Ten. Years. And the last time I saw you before that, my home was on fire, and I was watching you run out with your mother and your uncle. You left me there.”
The accusation is cutting, worse because I’ve thought the same thing myself. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye before my uncle forced my mother and I to make our choice. Of course, I was only fifteen, a child. I didn’t get a choice. But if I had, would I have stayed with Raleigh, my beloved friend, my soul sister, on an estate that was burning to the ground? Or would I have followed my mother into the unknown?
To this day, I don’t know the answer to that question. And Raleigh can see that uncertainty on my face now. Her mouth twists in a grimace, her eyes going glassy with tears she refuses to shed.
“I loved you more than anyone else in the world,” she says. “I mean- who the fuck else did I have?! Mom’s been dead since the day I was born, so- My dad? Yeah no, he didn’t give a shit about me. My brother? I barely knew him. You were it- I was fourteen, and you were everything to me!”
She takes a long, trembling breath, and when she lets it out her eyes look a little bit clearer. “So you showed up that night, acting like you hadn’t changed at all- acting like nothing was different between us, and I thought, well fuck. I mean, I couldn’t believe it! You disappear for ten years, and then you show up asking for my help? Suspicious is an understatement. So…” She trails off, a bit of sheepishness creeping into her voice.
“So you tried to burn me alive?!” I demand, incredulous.
“Better than waking up with a bullet between my eyes!” she shoots back, but in her posture, she looks like she’s retreating, her shoulders hunching. For the first time, I see the cornered animal in her, how quickly she’ll lash out if she thinks she’s in danger. My anger deflates, just a little.
“I mean… best case scenario, you would just give up and run away once you were in danger,” Raleigh says, a little quieter. “You weren’t supposed to get trapped in the house. And the fire wasn’t supposed to spread quite that fast.”
It’s insane, the image in my mind of Raleigh pouring gasoline around her own house before lighting a match, all to chase me away. At the same time, she’s never not been reckless, as likely to shoot herself in the foot as she is to obliterate her target.
“Also,” Raleigh forces out, “I called your uncle’s men to come get you at the bus stop that I dropped you off at.”
Oh.
“...Oh.”
Despite her best efforts, Raleigh is having a hard time meeting my eyes now. “If you stayed here, it would only be a matter of time before Tommy pulled you into his scheming. Either you’d be his hostage forever, or a pawn. At least back home, you’d be a prisoner in familiar territory, right? For girls like us, that’s the best we can hope for, right? I told you it would be better for you to be with your uncle or to be far away. And at that point, I didn’t think that… you had it in you to get away.”
Through the tempest of my own emotions, our argument over breakfast comes back to me. There’s no fighting the role you were born into. You either accept it or you run.
At that point, she’d already given up on the idea that I’d run. Which meant that there wasn’t a choice for me. What she was really saying was that I should go back to the Speare estate and accept my lot in life.
As much as that hurts, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the realization that she had been talking about herself too. She was living outside the estate, but it was in a house her brother owned and monitored. She hadn’t even tried to get distance from him, she’d only reclaimed as much privacy as she could.
Since we both came to the estate, Raleigh has been taking more and more hits for my sake, all because she’s already accepted that her life is barely hers. The equal amount of protection and danger that her name affords her makes her a prisoner, and it always will unless she throws everything away and makes a new life for herself. And she’s not willing to give up her comforts- her car, her clothes, her hair dye, her artisanal coffees- for the sake of her freedom.
And although she’s made that choice with her eyes open, it galls her that she had to make it at all. There’s anger simmering under her skin every minute of every day, and I finally understand why. And why that anger has been pointed so directly at me since I got here.
I am a representation of the naivety she can’t stand in herself.
Along with that epiphany comes another, even more important.
She might be furious with me… but I’m not angry with her. Not for nearly killing me, and not for turning me in to my uncle.
I can’t tell if this absurd acceptance of betrayal means I’ve adjusted better to the mafia life than I ever realized, or if I’ve completely resisted its influence.
Without meaning to, without realizing it’s about to happen- I start laughing.
At first, it’s a bubbling giggle that I can’t suppress. Raleigh’s eyes almost bug out of her head, and her flabbergasted expression only makes me laugh harder. Pretty soon, I’m doubling over, clutching my stomach, fighting desperately to breathe. Am I becoming hysterical, or is it really just that funny?
“What the fuck is going on?” Raleigh demands. She looks half ready to slam the tunnel door on me to avoid catching my madness. I wave a hand at her, trying to reassure her that I’m not dying or losing my mind. When I finally take a full breath, it’s easier to compose myself.
“I-” I hiccup on a last laugh, “I’m sorry. It’s not funny but- but it also is.” I’m smiling so hard it hurts. Raleigh doesn’t seem convinced, and I don’t blame her. “What I mean is that I’m not mad. It’s- It’s fine.”
