Archive of Our Own ^beta

Camilla’s life is a lonely one, these days. But it’s not so bad. After all, she’s gotten used to it—being alone.

After Nana died last year, after the small funeral, she’s lived in almost total isolation from the world, in the Macaulay family’s home on the outskirts of Richmond, a crumbling relic of an era long, long gone. It fits, then, that Camilla lives there. In many ways, she too, is a relic of time past. She is not fit for this world. She has not been in some time, not since Henry raised that pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger, leaving her splattered in blood and trying, to no avail, on her knees, to shove his brains back into his head.

The house was built in the early 1800s by her something great-great-great grandparents when they came to Virginia’s rocky shores from Ireland, fleeing—well, what everyone who came to America was fleeing: the past. The New World. The land of promise, of freedom, of opportunity. The Old World had failed them. Why not try out the new one? So they built a house and started a farm and ignored the lie upon which they laid their foundations, the lie they called good Virginian soil. 

There are lots of old photos of the house in its so-called glory days . Camilla and Charles used to look at them while sitting on Nana’s lap. My father was born in this house , she told them, and his father before him, and his father before him… After a while of this, Camilla would get bored and wriggle out of Nana’s arms to run around outside, but Charles always liked Nana’s old stories. He was more patient than her. 

Well, she thinks, who’s the patient one now? 

———

The last time she saw her brother—and she somehow senses that it was The Last Time—was at Nana’s funeral. She was an old lady and she passed peacefully. She was eighty-one. Two years earlier, the doctors had diagnosed her with Dementia. In her last days, she asked Camilla where Charles was, or where their father was. Sometimes, she called Camilla Maggie, her sister who died in a car accident sometime in the early 50s. She was pregnant. Her husband, who was off fighting in Korea at the time, took it so hard that, when he got the news, he pulled out his pistol and tried to swallow a bullet. He lived because his friend was just that bit quicker. What a difference a second makes. Just a second. If she’d been quicker. If she’d realized what Henry was going to do just a moment sooner. Surely, he would not have fired the gun if he thought he might hurt her. If she’d thrown herself around his neck—

If, if, if. No place for that. She’s already struggling not to drown as it is. Better not to think about Henry, then. 

Back to Charles—Nana asked for him. Camilla had no idea where he’d gone off to. He was somewhere out West. He’d left Texas and his married woman with it years earlier. He had a mailbox, but he never answered the letters she sent. She had to dig around to find him. She called Francis first, even though she knew well enough that Charles wasn’t with him. She just had to ask.

“Dear, it’s delightful to hear from you,” Francis said. “ Please tell me you’re coming to visit. I’m going mad here all by myself.” Poor Francis, all alone in New York. His marriage had ended in flames and all he had to show for it was a daughter he couldn’t stand. Not even Richard had stuck around. He was in Chicago—teaching, last she heard.

“I’m afraid not,” Camilla said, lighting a cigarette and taking a drag for strength. “I hate to bother you like this—“

“—Oh, don’t be silly. Your call is the best thing that’s happened to me all month.”

She ashed her cigarette. “Nana is very ill. She’s in the hospital.” Camilla had to take a moment to catch her breath and collect herself. “She’s in the hospital, and she’s asking for Charles.”

A terrible silence fell over them both. 

“Do you know where he is?” Camilla asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Francis said brusquely. She heard the faint sound of a glass chinking. “I haven’t heard from him in ages.”

“I didn’t think so,” she sighed softly. “But I thought I’d ask. Do you think Richard—?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say. Perhaps. Charles always liked him rather a lot.” He sounded somewhat bitter, and Camilla had to bite the inside of her cheek so she didn’t laugh. Oh, Francis. Thirty-five and yet he was the same as ever he was. It was almost comforting.

“Thank you, anyway,” she said. She wasn’t going to call Richard.

“Of course, darling. Please, do call more often. You can’t know how dreadful it is.”

(Oh, she could.)

“I will,” she lied, and hung up the phone.

It took a lot more effort but in the end, they tracked Charles down. He was living in Vegas, working at a casino. Camilla didn’t talk to him on the phone. She left it to their parish’s priest, Father Reynolds, an old family friend. Charles had been his altar boy, and they’d always been close. 

When Charles returned home, he looked thin and tired. His good looks were fading. He looked like he’d aged a decade. She stood on the sagging front porch, her arms around herself, as he walked up the drive. 

“Where’s Nana?” he asked hoarsely. 

“Back home now,” she said, leading him inside. A thousand pins and needles climbed up her arms and into her hair. She kept resisting the urge to look behind her, to verify he was actually here. She wanted to fall into his arms and cry; she wanted to slap him and throw him by his hair out into the street.

“Is that good?” Charles asked nervously. 

Camilla came to a stop at the top of the stairs, clutching the banister until her nails were digging into the wood and it stung. “They thought she’d be more…comfortable at home. She’s very old.”

Charles sagged against the wall, one hand coming up to cover his eyes. “Christ,” he murmured, sliding down the wall until he was sitting. “Oh God.”

Camilla wrung her hands. “Father Reynolds is with her now,” she said. “I’m going to make us some coffee.” She retreated downstairs, hating herself for her cowardice. Her hands were steady as she carried the kettle to the stove.

———

The kettle whistles and Camilla turns to take it off the burner. She carries the kettle to the back porch, where she’s already placed a cup and saucer. Her great-grandfather took them home from France when he served in World War One. He said he’d been gifted the set by a kindly French family who were grateful for the Americans’ service in kicking the Germans out. 

She checks to make sure the burner is off—what an anxious, Francis-like habit! how absurd!—before she sits down in her favorite chair, adjusting the cushion behind her back. She is pushing forty. In July, she’ll be thirty-nine. Despite her relatively sedentary lifestyle, she is starting to feel pain in her back if she so much as sits wrong.

She opens her well-worn copy of Jane Eyre and lets herself fall into its world of 19th century England and her wild, wily moors. It has been her favorite since childhood, and it’s obvious by the state of her copy. It’s practically falling apart at the seams. She can see the spine, but she takes care to be gentle as she turns every page. 

Once, she and Henry discussed the Brontës. While they both agreed they were in an entirely different league from Austen, who they didn’t much like, Henry still maintained that their literary value was negligible. What could be learned, he asked, from such stories? There was no glory. 

She thinks of that now and has to shut the book. Everything, everywhere, is a memory. She cannot escape. She has cocooned herself in a house of ghosts, and still she’s surprised when they visit her.

———

Both she and Charles were with Nana when she died. The Father had left an hour earlier, after administering to her her last rites. Nana held both their hands and talked to them as if they were children, reminding them to wash up before they went to bed. 

“Yes, Nana, we won’t forget,” they chorused as they had once, and Charles turned his face away, his shoulders shaking. 

When Nana’s eyes closed and she breathed her last, Camilla recovered first. It was so easy to fall back into her role. Yes, she was the strong one. Charles would not be able to pull himself together to make the call, but she could. She would. For as long as she could remember, she’d been his voice. He was not like her. She had steel in her spine. She would keep them both upright. She could not falter because then they’d both come toppling down like a tower of cards.

Once Nana had been taken away, she and Charles sat at the kitchen table. She poured them both a finger of whiskey. Cigarettes burned down to nothing, the smoke twisting as it rose far above their heads.

“What are we going to do,” Charles said softly, his chin resting atop his folded hands.

“With the house?” she asked.

Charles’ eyes grew cold, narrowing to slits. “No, I mean—in general,” he snapped. “You can have the fucking house if that’s where your priorities lie.”

She did not flinch, even if his words did embed themselves into her like bullets.

“Charles,” she said.

“What?” 

But she didn’t know what to say. I’m scared , but she could not tell him that. 

Charles deflated, all the fight going out of him. Life and aging, it seemed, had taken its toll on him, too. Where once he might have thrown a glass, screamed at her, or simply collapsed into tears, then, all he did was sink into himself, all the anger flooding out of him like water through a sieve.

“I’m all alone now,” he whispered. “There is no one in the world who loves me.”

Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet. “I love you.” 

But Charles did not hear her. He got to his feet and drifted from the room like a specter or a trick of the light.

———

On Sundays, she does not go to Church. She has no belief in God. She never really did. God forsook her a long time ago, when she was just a girl in braids with perpetually skinned knees from climbing trees.

Even before then, she hadn’t Charles’ passion for religion. He was devout . He was an altar boy under the first priest, Father Ilkes, and when he left—the rumor was something distasteful, but when she asked Nana about it, she got slapped and told never to bring up that matter again in her house, and certainly not in her brother’s hearing—he continued under Father Reynolds. Into their teenage years, he was a helpmate at Church, teaching the younger children rudimentary Latin and Bible stories.

She knows that people talk. About her impiety, definitely. It’s just another thing that’s off about her for them to gossip over. She isn’t married; she dropped out of college; she rarely leaves that old house. When a real estate developer came by the house to speak with her about selling it, she didn’t answer. She sat on the floor, her back to the door, until he left. 

She probably should sell the house, but she will not. If she sells it, then she has nothing. She will truly be all alone in the world. It would, she thinks wryly, truly make her Cain, forever cursed to wander the earth without a home for the crime of killing his brother.

Except she did not kill Charles. If anything, he was going to kill her. But in her loneliest moments, she doubts this. Charles is somewhere out there, and she does not doubt that one day, she’ll get a call that he’s dead, and she’ll know that she’s really the one who did it. They were never meant to be two people. They should have been one person. Charles always knew that. He was trying to get inside her, down to her bones, to meld them together. She resisted. And now look where she is. Alone in a house that’s rotting down to its soil. 

If this is her punishment for Bunny, and she doesn’t doubt that it’s so, then it’s also her punishment for that, her far greater crime.

———

Although Nana had been a pillar of their community, not many came to the funeral itself. Instead, they sent cards and casseroles. It was only Charles, Uncle Orman, Aunt Mary, and herself. Charles did not cry and neither did she. 

She stayed behind to watch them bury Nana. She didn’t leave, no matter Aunt Mary’s protests, until the last shovel of dirt had been laid. Then, and only then, did she go home. Charles, she was told, had gone to Church. He wanted to pray.

God, Charles used to pray every night before bed, his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles turned white, make me good. Make me good. It was an unfinished prayer. Much later, she read the complete plea: O God, make me good, but not yet. Saint Augustine said it. Had Charles, ever the devout, known the full prayer? Probably. Yet, he’d said it every night for years.

Later that night, she was woken up by the sound of a great crash and a curse. She tiptoed downstairs and found Charles, half slumped over the couch, a smashed bottle of wine at his feet. 

“Are you alright?” she asked, carefully sidestepping the spill to take his arm.

“Milly,” Charles slurred, turning to bury his face in her neck. She went still. 

“Let’s get you to bed,” she said in her most soothing voice. She wrapped her other arm around his waist, and—slowly, so slowly—they stumbled up the stairs to Charles’ room, left untouched. (It’s still untouched. She has not changed a thing. She tries not to think of why.)

Charles collapsed onto the bed. She knelt down to untie his shoes. He lifted his head with great difficulty to look at her. His gray eyes were watery and clouded. 

“We’re orphans, Milly.”

She removed the shoe on his right foot and moved to work on the left one. “We’ve been orphans.”

He shook his head and fell back, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He laughed harshly, a little manically. “The Father—the Father says I’m forgiven. What does he know about forgiveness?”

“He’s a priest,” she pointed out. “I’d imagine rather a lot.” She eased Charles’ left foot out of its shoe.

“Bullshit,” he spat, but there was no real conviction in his voice. He rolled over, curling himself into a little ball, and was asleep in seconds. 

She scrubbed a hand over her face. Then, she put his shoes in the closet, laid a blanket over him, and turned to go. However, at the door, she paused and turned back. She pressed a kiss to his head. She couldn’t hate him: he was her brother. They were orphans. Orphans who had nobody else in the world. 

He was gone in the morning, but she’d expected that.

———

Something Henry liked to say comes back to her now: blood will have blood. It comes back to her as yet another private torment, another thing she missed. Henry thought he was sacrificing himself for the good of the group, but he was wrong. The Gods are not satisfied. The Gods, or fates, or what-have-you. There is more atonement to do.

So, Camilla stays inside this crumbling monument to defeated ideals. She doesn’t call Francis, she doesn’t call Richard. She doesn’t beg Charles in her letters to come home. 

Her life has grown so small. She is so lonely. But this is the way it has to be.