“Villian of Nature”

She was found wrapped in a translucent sheet, which appeared to me as I neared her as a curtain that she had torn off of the rail above the curtain of my dining room. Shaking, I dropped my groceries. I had not seen her in three years. Not since I had heard of the incident where she had been found with a knife by her side, crying in the corner of her kitchen. She had still been holding a book in her right hand that the blood dripped onto, blending the ink which was gliding under her thumb over the words, “I hope she’ll be a fool” from the Great Gatsby. She read this specific section often, I remember, soon after she was engaged to Brennan. It was not her favorite book, but I found that she left it out around the house, this section highlighted as if she wanted to tell me something she didn’t know how to. Now I know that she was afraid to.

So many times I had watched her braid and unbraid her hair before her bridal rehearsal and tell me what was wrong with the reception- but it didn’t occur to me that it had nothing to do with the reception- she felt that there was something deeply wrong with her. She felt she was a fool, I finally could see, with her head bowed, which shocked me. I had always admired her strength even as little girls, her confidence. I should’ve known that someone else had instilled these ideas in her, like daily pills. Looking at the arrangement of gorgeous peonies made her feel sick to her stomach.

The night that I got a call from the hospital, they told me two things-

“You’re sister has...” with a deep and firm pause.... “stabbed her husband in his artery. It is a fatal bleeding.”

Then after what felt like a migraine through the phone as the doctor aggressively shuffled papers and called muffled orders, “She is being sent to the psychiatric institute for malnourished and disobedient women.”

I felt the pulsing of his voice turn into the pulsing of my head and I started to pull the pieces together- the book-

the way it sometimes looked like she had been crying at the same time that Brennan was leaving. He had threatened her.

More than once. And the bruises on her arms had nothing to do with her previous arm cast. The doctor had said nothing about the pocket knife found in Brennan’s shoulder pocket. The doctor said that my sister had, in a confused and aggressive, frenzy, pretended that he had almost used it on her. I remember dropping the phone and spilling to the floor slowly, as he said this.

And he had called to say...nothing but that she was something of a monster...a disobidient woman...a woman against the way her nature should be, a villian in the sense that she was not what she should be, not calm, not fragile. But now seen as broken, wrong to try to defend herself, what a man would never be blamed for. And never belittled to making up the situation in some kind of delirious fancy. The last thing Julia was- delirious. She was trusting and truthful, especially with me, but sometimes I didn’t see what she had wanted me to.

These memories flashed through me like his voice had over the phone, and I felt that dropping feeling again, that sinking, but this time, I did not sit and cry.

I moved towards her.

What had begun as numbness turned to urgency and I found myself sprinting toward her to wrap her into my arms. My baby sister, my Julia.

″ I love you, I’ve missed you, I love you.” I took her into my arms and wished I had been holding her all these years, wished that I had known where she was.

“Why didn’t you tell me where you were?” I asked, more angrily that I had meant to.

″ I was afraid that no one wanted to find me.” I could feel Julia’s voice crack all the way down to the bottom of her ribs, as tears dripped onto her bare chest.

“I will always be by your side. Always, always.” I held my sister, the woman, the girl I had always known but never shown enough how much I loved her until she really needed me. And three years later here we were.