Do Me a Favor

A secret's only safe if the other person is dead. That's what she told me, the day before. But even the dead don't want to keep secrets. Maybe in one hour, or a day or decade, it'll come pouring out of their graves like a macabre waterfall. 

It was a Monday. I woke to the sound of traffic, and I remember being puzzled; we always left the house before rush hour, when the city was still stretching its sleepy limbs. For a wild moment, I thought it was a snow day, until I remembered the mid-autumnal temperatures. Damn late nights and too much caffeine. And so I slipped out of bed, tiptoed along the hallway. Something hung heavy in the air. I found my little sister first. Baby, we always called her, though she was a tall, gangling girl of eleven, with large specks and a wicked grin. In death, Baby seemed more fitting. She looked smaller, tangled in white sheets,  a stroke of red across her neck. Rivulets of blood had congealed down her chest like a perverse bib. Her eyes were closed. Had it been done quietly, efficiently, while she slumbered? Or had she awoken and seen her sister's face, then the knife, then the blur of a hand before she'd pieced the two together? Then a hot, wet, strange, weird, pain, pain, black, choking, dying attempts at speech, and only then closed eyes. 

I turned from her corpse and retched, stomach bile stinging my nostrils. I undertook a solemn procession with three pit-stops: David's eyes were open, both parents' eyes were closed. No doubt she'd been very quiet when crossing their en-suite bedroom. With David and Alexandra, she could afford to be more careless. What chance did sleepy 11 and 12-year old children have against a 17-year old girl? 

Her room was empty. Later I found her in the garage, dead in the car. The easy way out, she teased in her note. She left the letter on the kitchen table. She'd done this for my good. We'd always joked around about 'preventative medicine;' taking antibiotics before falling ill to halt future sickness, or undertaking rounds of Chemotherapy before contracting Cancer. At the time, I thought we were laughing at the terrible logic, the dark, indulgent humor that came from mocking things that aren't funny. Maybe that was just me. She was laughing at something else, something that, with her strange view, seemed so obvious it hadn't needed clarification. This was preventative medicine. Ending it all before the secret came out. Now there was no chance of it ruining David and Alexandra's lives. Only mine, though in her madness she hadn't considered that part. She admitted to each murder, so I wouldn't be convicted. Only I know the secret, now. Everyone else is dead. One day it'll seep out of my cracks like pus, and she'll look down and know it was for nothing. She told me she loved me, in her letter. I loved her, too.