My Brother's Keeper

We stop in front of a red door at the end of a grand hallway.

The nurse opened the door for my father and me to enter. He has no issues entering the room. I have flashes of memories, followed by visions of blood and torture. Water splashing, electrical currents, and Odile screaming.

Oh, so you remember some things.

I choose to ignore her. I do not want to give her the satisfaction of knowing I recalled more and more than longer I stood in the asylum.

“Odette?” My father reaches out to touch my arm as I twitch more violently.

“What did they do to her?” I breathe.

He doesn’t answer me. Instead, he yanks me into the room, and the images stop.

When I glance behind me, our escort has disappeared, and we are standing in front of the head nurse.

“Hello, Odette,” Nurse Patterson greets me as my eyes focus on her.

My breath catches in my throat. She’s the first face I remember, and not for the reasons you would think. She didn’t take me under her wing and mold me into the perfect daughter. No, she was one of the crueler women who tied me to the bed when Odile would torment me.

My breath caught in my throat as I realized her face had caused a dormant memory to appear. I had always known Odile was present, but I had forgotten about everything that took place inside the walls of Eider Asylum.

Nurse Patterson was tall and slender, with a crooked smile and green eyes. I never got close enough to smell her, but something told me she bathed in the blood of missing patients. She always wore her blonde hair in a tight bun on the top of her head, and when she came into the room, every ounce of joy was sucked out, and in its place was panic, fear, and someone screaming.

Looking at her now, she appears polished and pressed with a crooked smile. She may have wanted to look inviting, but those soulless eyes told me she remembered everything.

I close my eyes to hide the tears. I don’t want her to know the memories are coming back. There was a reason I had forgotten, and something in my gut said she was behind it.

“Hello,” I whisper.

“It’s good to see you again. You look like the transition went well.” Her crooked smile sends a chill up my spine.

“Yeah, aside from my mother tormenting me, I have a quiet teenage life,” I retort flatly.

She cocks her head to the right and smirks. “School going well?”

I watched my father sit beside her and place his hands on his lap. If he felt anything was off in the room, he wasn’t showing it. He was calm and collected, at least on the outside. My dad can be hard to read, so he was just as chaotic on the inside as I was.

“I’m a senior,” I reply as I sit next to my father. I’m not sure why I thought that was a valid answer, but it said a lot. It meant I was surviving.

My mind is going crazy. There is this constant buzzing. Odile is silent, and I feel I’m being watched but not by the nurse. I glance around the small office. First, the mirror was covered by a black towel, so they knew how to keep my sister out. Second, there was a hole in the wall on the far right, back corner, nearest to the large, dark wood bookcase. I swear there is an eyeball watching, but when I blink, it’s gone. Then, finally, my face rests on Nurse Patterson’s.

She sits like royalty behind the heavy desk, her hands tightly pressed together. I can tell she’s breathing heavily, but she’s trying to control it. I can hear it hissing past me like a snake. Deep breath in, long breath out through the front teeth, past the lips. She snaps her fingers, and my eyes are locked onto hers.

The nurse’s nostrils flare. “Like I told your father, this is a safe place. The mirrors are covered, and the room has been warded. There is no way your sister will wreak havoc in this room.”

I nod and swallow the lump in my throat. I did not know I would come face to face with someone who had hurt me. I never thought of what I would do should I come to terms with what happened here.

“We would like to read Odette’s and Odile’s files,” Dad breaks in, noticing my avoidance of asking questions.

“Of course, I have both right here. Would you like to read them together, or do you need me to explain some notes?” She stretches her long slender fingers over the two files. I know what she is asking, but she’s making no indication she plans to leave the room.

“No, ma’am, I am fully aware of what is written in them.” He narrows his eyes, and the nurse smirks.

“Of course,” she replies, standing up from the desk and walking toward the door.

“If we need anything, I’ll find you.” My father gives her a triumphant smile as she exits the room, and he and I are left there with two files facing us on her desk.

My fingers shake as I reach out to grab Odile’s file. She has been present to me over the last few days, and to see her face in place of mine is not on my list of must-sees. We’re identical to the last freckle because we share a body. But something about the way Odile carries our face was different. She looks crazy compared to my lost little girl’s face in the latter file.

“Did you talk to her?” I ask.

Dad replies, “Several times.”

“What was she like?” I flip through the five inches of file.

“The opposite of you.” He laughs.

Odile Sloan is the teenage daughter of Laura Sloan (previously Swan). She assisted her mother’s boyfriend, Lenny Porter, in the murder of her mother (she most likely suggested the idea). A known witch, Laura Swan lived in an apartment off Graylag Court. Police were called when neighbors noticed an odd odor coming from Sloan’s three-bedroom apartment.

Lenny Porter was arrested while Odile Sloan was transported here to undergo psychiatric care after it was established she has split personalities, or as Odile has stated, absorbed twin disorder.

“They knew from the beginning she was part of it. Why did they let me out if they knew she did it?” I raise an eyebrow.

“I’m not sure how to answer this. So, from what I understand, because you and Odile were thirteen, the court did not find you competent to stand trial. When the cops came around asking questions, they weren’t talking to Odile.” Dad takes a deep breath.

I vaguely remember standing in the front lobby of the apartment building while two uniformed men asked me a list of questions. I don’t remember what they asked or who they were, but they offered me kindness.

“They were talking to me,” I state with a huff. They had planned out the details of the last confession. No wonder Lenny told me to get her out of my head and move on. Look what she did to him.

My father shrugs. “You did not know what to tell them, so you discredited everything Lenny said. They weren’t talking to the brains behind the murder. They talked to you, and you only knew he cut her up.”

Odile Sloan has already proven to be volatile. When under the guise of Odette, she is crafty and sweet, but once the sun goes down, the persona disappears. Odile has threatened to hurt her ward mates in exchange for secrets.

“What does this mean?” I point to the passage.

Dad leans over and reads it. “She learned a lot about the kingdom here,” he replies with a sigh.

“What do you mean?”

“Odile is conniving. She’s smart. Like you, she only knew what was fed to her. So she would bully the others into telling her about the curse on the kingdom.” My father puts up his fingers in air quotes. From that, I assumed he did not know of any curses or hexes my mother caused or fixed.

“And?” I press.

“You already know. The gates were sealed with blood magic. Coscoroba has been left to rot.” He narrows his eyes and bites his bottom lip.

I want to ask about him. How did he get stuck in all of this? These questions are better left for another day.

“What about the people? Why are they being punished for Odile’s crime?” I ask.

The last thing I want to consider is that our world is falling apart because of something I did. No wonder everybody at school hated me. They blamed me for the closing of the borders. I am what locked them inside. My mother’s curse wasn’t to release me from prison but to start a war. Or at least that is how it felt. She wasn’t protecting Odile; she was helping her.

The room swirled. I could feel her, but something inside the room kept her away.

“Odette? Are you ok?” My father’s voice is frantic, but I’m still sorting everything out in my head.

My hands were tied. I had to give the portal what it wanted.

“Are the people here in danger?” My voice cracked, but I needed to know.

“We don’t have enough reserves to last the coming months, and the wards are breaking.” His eyes wander away from mine and toward the wall with the bookshelf.

Why had he not told me? Why had nobody told me? Was this all tied to some coming-of-age prophecy?

“So, she was a witch?”

“Yes, not something I knew about the night I met her.” He chuckles darkly.

“Dad?” I breathe.

He glances over at me. “Yes?”

“They did bad things to Odile while she was here,” I whisper.

“I know. That was why I took you when I was given the option. You do not want to know about the bruises and sores found on your body.”

His expression was warm. I knew my father loved me, but I was still frightened. The memories I had of Eider, which had come to me since walking through the door, were dark. It was no wonder she was volatile and conniving. In so many ways, they made her that way.

“Why didn’t you take her?” I ask impulsively as I look back at Odile’s file and the face in the picture. Her brown eyes were narrowed and angry, and her lips pressed firmly together. She looked evil.

“Her bloodlust. Pax wouldn’t have been safe.”

Odile Sloan has undergone various therapies. This has led to many accidents and cases of mutilation. Odile does not take direction well when she is not embodying the persona of her sister Odette. We have tried electroshock, talk, water, acupuncture, and church therapy.

Doctor Lawrence spends each evening in Odile’s room observing her nightly routine to learn how she ticks and restrains her when she becomes unstable.

A sick feeling erupts in my stomach, and I understand why Odile had killed Doctor Lawrence in her room. I don’t want to say it, but I feel nothing but pain for her for a moment. While she deserves to be punished for what she did to our mother, that was not how it should have been done.

“She has magic. Why didn’t she use it?”

Dad averts his gaze back to the papers before us. “She was bound at nine after killing a young man from school.”

“So much murder. Was my mother an evil woman?”

Of all the things to never know. The very hands I used had committed the same crime before.

“No, your mother wasn’t bad. Something in the magic was. Odile only inherited a dark magic thirst.” He turns to face me, and his eyebrows furrow.

I wanted to ask if he could tell me more, but something in my gut said he didn’t know. Why would he know? He never knew Odile and I existed. It didn’t matter that I had been housed in a mirror or that Odile was drawn to our mother’s dark magic. He had no reason to know anything about Laura Sloan.

Karen, she was a different story.

“How do you know all of this?”

My question takes him off guard, and he laughs nervously.

“I’ve met with Lenny over the years, which is why I know about the mirrors. He said he learned because Odile would cover her mirror most nights to keep you from emerging. She was jealous of you.”

I looked down at my file and read the first line that caught my attention.

Odette Sloan screams at night to get the other girl “out of her head.”

Interesting. I don’t remember this happening. I remember crafts, mostly friendship bracelets. I can recall being tied to the bed, but not what caused it. I can vaguely recognize a few faces other than Nurse Patterson’s. I can’t remember ever screaming about Odile being in my head. You’d think I would remember something like this. It isn’t something I could easily forget.

“Dad, what did they do to me here?” I raise my eyes to meet his.

Odette Sloan has become the dominant persona. Odile Sloan seems to have been repressed. Because of the death of Doctor Lawrence at Odile’s hands, it is at the request of Doctor Stuart that Odette Sloan is released to her father, Donald Stephenson.

“I don’t know. The first few weeks you were with us, you weren’t coherent. Then as time passed, Odette became your only persona, and we thought Odile had been fully absorbed.” No wonder he didn’t want me to go to the hospital. He didn’t want me to remember their actions because I was better.

“Dad?” I close Odile’s file after scanning the extensive list of medications.

“Yes?” he replies.

“If Odile got our mother’s dark magic, who got the light?” I glance at my hands.

He whispers, “We always figured you would. Odile always showed signs of dark magic from a young age. You have shown very little. I think this place took it from you.”

My heart pounds. I knew nothing of magic. I was surprised to find out how it worked and where it came from. She said she could use it, and something told me she was right, but she lived in a different world inside my body. So was the magic tied to the person, or was it connected to the spirit?

“How?”

My father leaned close to my face and whispered so only I could hear. I wondered if he had the feeling we were being watched as well.

“All these treatments. I think they took your magic and hid it so you couldn’t open the door.”

His theory didn’t seem too far out in the left field. It was possible, I guess, for the magic to be stolen and stored. However, the second half didn’t sound right.

“Why don’t they want me to open the door?” I breathe.

“Odette. Nobody wants to see their children die. To them, their royal heirs are more important than Pax. They forgot the story.”

I wonder what this story is he keeps talking about. There are two worlds. One is under the lake, and this one is in the mortal world. I didn’t know a connection. I had lived my life inside a mirror before being let out. To me, this was my world.

“What story?” I ask.

His eyes widen, and his top lip quivers. It’s like he forgets I don’t know these things. Odile knew them. I reflected on who she wasn’t. He could not expect me to know everything she did. I was clueless.

“Of how this all came to be, Odette. Who the two of you were named for? Your mother’s name is Laura Swan.”

I sit there and ponder the idea. I know only one fairy tale, but there’s no way it’s real. Then things click together slowly. I understand the importance of opening the portal. My great-aunt was the Swan Queen. Pax is the last male to have the same DNA strand as Prince Siegfried. A once wholesome love story is turning dark as I realize what I will become. A flipped version of who the real Odette was.

“As long as your mother was alive, Pax and the others were safe. When she died, he became a target. The only way to stop a battle royale is with a few war casualties.”

I rolled my eyes. It was a nice way of saying collateral damage.

“They’ll go mad, Odette. With greed and envy. Five royal families against one fifteen-year-old boy. What do you think will happen?”

I know what will happen. My mother’s jealousy was going to lead to my brother’s death. She planted the prophecy and the steps to open the gates. Five royals had to die. It didn’t say which ones. So, each house knew they had to eliminate five of their rivals, and Siegfried’s throne was theirs to take.

We had to leave. Something told me the best way to make sense of what was happening was to visit where it all started.

“We need to go. Can you drop me off at school?” I want to take the files and run, but I don’t want anyone coming after me.

“Yeah, what are you going to do?” Dad asks.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I need to check a few things out.”

When Nurse Paterson returned, my father thanked her for her hospitality. She says nothing, merely smiles her crooked smile and clenches her fists together. She’s doing her best to keep everything under control while he’s inside the hospital.

“It was great to see you again, Odette,” she says as I walk past her.

“Same to you,” I lie.

We head briskly down the hallway toward the door that leads to the reception area. I choose not to look at the patients, instead keeping my eyes straight ahead. We’re near the door when two hands grab me by the arms and throw me up against the brick wall, to my right, between two doors.

“Where’s my money, Odile?” the being growls on my face.

I can see a pair of yellow eyes and dry skin, but I’m still dazed from my collision with the wall.

“I’m not O-Odile!” I stutter as a burst of strength comes over me. I push the being off me, across the hall, and through the opposite wall with both hands.

My hands are shaking, and my heart is racing fast inside my chest. My father stands there with his mouth agape. He grabs me around the waist and yanks me into the reception area. With a wave, he pulls me out the front door and toward the truck in the parking lot.

Tossing me inside, he turns to look at me and asks, “What the hell just happened?”

“I do not know, Dad,” I respond between deep breaths.

“Where did the strength come from?” The pitch of his voice matches mine as the excitement of what had happened settles in.

“Do you think?” I looked at him and tried my hardest not to smile.

Was my strength tied to the magic he believed was stolen? Was there something about me that made me different?

“All I know is if that had been me, I would have left this place in a body bag.” He turns the truck’s ignition, and we zoom out of our parking space.