Cloaked in Skin

The first thing Renee saw when she came home was the glass.

It glittered across the hardwood in tiny, wet-looking pieces, though nothing in the house was wet. She stood just inside the front door with her hospital bag hanging from one hand and stared down at the fragments scattered beneath the umbrella stand. There had been a photograph there once. She knew that because the frame was still leaning crookedly against the wall, its glass punched inward as though someone had struck it from the front. The photograph itself was gone. Only a strip of white paper remained beneath the broken frame, caught against the molding.

“Careful,” her mother said behind her. “Don't step on that.”

Renee looked over her shoulder. Her mother was smiling.

It was the same smile Renee remembered from the hospital, the same trembling mouth and wet eyes she had seen when she'd first woken beneath fluorescent lights and been told she was lucky. Her mother had hugged her then. Her mother's arms were too tight. Everything about the embrace felt slightly wrong, as though someone had rehearsed it and gotten the pressure imperfectly. She had cried into Renee's hair and kept saying, My baby, my baby, you're home. Renee remembered thinking that the smell of her mother's perfume was too strong. She remembered the hospital ceiling. She remembered the taste of blood in her mouth.  

The floorboards in the house creaked under an unexpected weight, and it was then Renee saw Evelyn standing in the hallway.

Her little sister had grown. That was the first thought that came to her, ridiculous and immediate. Evelyn had always been small for her age, all elbows and knobby knees, but the girl standing there was taller than Renee remembered, perhaps only by an inch, with her dark hair hanging straight around her face and both hands hidden inside the sleeves of an oversized sweater. She didn't run forward. She didn't cry. She didn't even smile. She only stared at Renee with a fixed concentration that made something cold move beneath Renee's ribs. 

“Evie?” Renee said softly. The girl tilted her head uncertainly. She hadn't seen her since the accident.

“Go on,” their father said from somewhere behind her. His voice was strained. “She wants to see you.” Evelyn didn't move. 

Renee smiled because she didn't know what else to do, lowering herself slightly so they were closer to eye level. 

“Hey, bug,” she said. The nickname came naturally. She had called Evelyn that since she was four, back when Evelyn used to crawl beneath the kitchen table and refuse to come out whenever their parents argued. “How’d you get so big? We haven’t been apart that long.” 

Evelyn's face changed. Her eyes flicked toward their parents and then back to Renee's face. 

“You're not supposed to call me that,” she whispered. 

Renee laughed uncertainly. “Since when?” 

Evelyn swallowed. 

“Since before.” 

Their mother immediately stepped forward. “She's confused, sweetheart. She's been through a lot.” 

Renee felt irritation flare through her exhaustion. 

“So have I.” 

“We know.” Her mother touched her cheek. “We know, honey.” Renee let herself be guided inside, but she kept looking at Evelyn. The girl had backed farther into the hallway, her eyes never leaving Renee's face, calculating in a way Evelyn never had been before.

Renee felt a lump form in her throat. 

Renee remembered the lake. That was the part everyone had told her she was lucky to remember. She had been skating with Evelyn two weeks ago, late in the afternoon when the ice was turning white beneath the low winter sun, although the memory had always felt strangely warm whenever she tried to hold onto it. She remembered Evelyn laughing behind her. She remembered the scrape of blades. She remembered telling her sister to slow down. She remembered the sound the ice made before it broke, a deep crack that had seemed to come from underneath the earth rather than beneath her feet. Then there had been black water, freezing so violently that Renee had thought her lungs were being torn apart. Then nothing. Her parents had told her that Evelyn had fallen in too, that rescuers had pulled them both from the lake, that they had been unconscious and hypothermic and transported to different hospitals because there hadn't been enough room for both of them. Renee had spent eleven days there. Evelyn had spent nine. 

Everyone kept calling it a miracle that they had survived. Renee had accepted that explanation because what else could she do? The pieces missing from the memory seemed ordinary enough for someone who had nearly drowned. Renee had spent enough time in the hospital surrounded by machines and masked people who spoke in careful voices to understand that trauma could fracture things. That was normal, she told herself. That was what everyone had said. 

But Evelyn was wrong.

Not sick. Not traumatized. Not merely different. Wrong in a way Renee couldn't explain, a way that seemed to reach beneath the surface of her sister's appearance and unsettle something fundamental in her. 

She knew how awful it sounded. She knew what people would say if she admitted it aloud, especially after everything they had been through. 

There was something about Evelyn that didn't fit the shape of the child Renee remembered. It was as though someone had taken everything that made Evelyn Evelyn and arranged the pieces incorrectly, preserving the outline while getting the details wrong. Her voice was too quiet. Her posture was too careful, her movements measured in a way that made Renee think of someone imitating a person rather than simply being one.

That night, Renee woke to footsteps outside her bedroom.

She lay still beneath the blankets, listening as the floorboards creaked in the hallway. The footsteps stopped just beyond her door. There was a soft scrape against the floor, followed by a silence so complete that she became aware of the faint ringing in her own ears. Renee waited several seconds before sitting up. Her door stood open by an inch. She was certain she had closed it.

“Evie?” she whispered.

No answer.

Renee got out of bed and crossed the room, wincing as the cold floorboards pressed against her bare feet. The hallway was empty. She could hear the house settling around her, pipes ticking inside the walls and the distant hum of the refrigerator downstairs. For a moment, she stood there listening, half expecting to see Evelyn emerge from one of the bedrooms, her small face appearing around a doorframe. When nothing moved, Renee almost turned back.

Then she noticed the glass.

A few tiny fragments glittered beneath the umbrella stand, tucked against the wooden base where the broom had apparently missed them. She crouched to gather them, careful not to cut her fingers, and saw a strip of white paper wedged between the stand and the wall. When she pulled it free, a photograph came with it, folded backward against the molding. It was old enough for the edges to have yellowed, and a jagged crack ran straight through the face of the little girl standing in the center. Renee recognized the garden behind her parents' house, the plastic paddling pool they had bought one summer and thrown away the next, the pink dress Evelyn had worn until the seams split beneath her arms. Someone had deliberately cut through the photograph, slicing across the girls' faces until their bodies were all that remained recognizable. A second photograph lay beneath it, then a third, each damaged in a different way. One had been torn down the middle. Another had a clean, deliberate hole punched through the place where a face should have been.

Renee gathered them up and went looking for her sister.

She found Evelyn in her room upstairs, standing on her swivel chair to reach a high shelf. The little girl nearly fell when Renee appeared in the doorway, catching herself against the wall with a sharp gasp. Something small and metallic clattered inside the cabinet.

“What are you doing?” Renee asked.

Evelyn clutched something against her chest. “Nothing.”

“You nearly broke your neck.”

Evelyn shook her head as she slowly climbed down. Renee held up the photographs, and the little girl's eyes fixed on them.

“Did you do this?”

The color drained from Evelyn's face. 

“Where did you get those?” she asked.

“They were underneath the umbrella stand.” Renee glanced down at the photographs, at the little pink dress and the missing faces. “Why are all our pictures destroyed?”

“You shouldn't have those.”

“They're photographs, Evie. Of us. They're not going to hurt you.”

Evelyn's eyes darted toward the hallway. Her fingers tightened around whatever she was holding, knuckles whitening against the fabric of her nightshirt. Renee felt the words settle between them, and with them came a familiar, growing frustration. Every time she tried to get close to her sister, Evelyn retreated a little farther, as though Renee were asking questions she had no right to ask.

“Why are you acting like this?” Renee pressed. “Did someone do something to you at the hospital? You can talk to me, Bug.”

Evelyn shook her head so hard that her hair swung across her face. She looked toward the door again, and Renee understood, with a surge of anger that nearly made her dizzy, that her sister was hiding something from her. Perhaps the accident had damaged her memory. Perhaps the doctors had frightened her into believing something terrible. Whatever had happened, Evelyn was behaving as if Renee were dangerous, and Renee couldn't bear the thought that someone had hurt her little sister and left her too frightened to ask for help.

“I'm your sister,” Renee said, softer now. “You can tell me anything. You know that, don't you?”

Evelyn's breathing had become shallow. She kept glancing at the photographs, then at the door, as though expecting someone to appear there at any moment. “You keep asking questions. You're going to make them come back.”

“Who?”

Evelyn backed toward the dresser. “I can't tell you.”

“You can tell me anything. I'm not going to let anyone hurt you.”

“You don't understand!” Her voice cracked, and tears spilled down her cheeks. “You weren't supposed to find those. They said you weren't supposed to remember.”

Evelyn looked up at her then, really looked at her, and Renee saw something in her expression that she had mistaken for suspicion since the moment she'd come home. 

It was terror. 

Not the vague unease of a child who had endured a frightening accident, but the naked, helpless terror of someone trapped in a room with something she couldn't escape. Renee's skin prickled. She wanted to reach for her sister, to pull her close and make her explain, but Evelyn flinched before she had even moved.

“What did they do to you?” Renee whispered.

Evelyn pressed herself against the dresser, shaking her head.

Renee looked at her face, searching for the sister she remembered, for some sign that the little girl who had once followed her everywhere was still in there. 

Instead, she saw a stranger wearing Evelyn's familiar features.

The thought came with such sudden, horrible clarity that it felt less like a suspicion than a memory trying to surface.

“You're not my sister, are you?”

Something inside Renee snapped as the thought solidified with her words. She shoved the stranger hard enough to send her stumbling backward. “What did they do to you!” she shrieked, the words tearing out of her throat before she could stop them. Evelyn struck the full-length mirror beside the dresser with her shoulder. The glass exploded inward with a gunshot-like crack, and the frame toppled against the wall. For an instant, the room filled with the glittering sound of falling fragments. Then Evelyn hit the floor among the shards, wailing, one hand clamped over her forearm.

For a second, Renee could only stare at the blood appearing between her sister's fingers. Then she dropped to her knees. 

“Evie, oh my God. Let me see. Let me—” 

Evelyn scrambled away from her, slipping on the broken glass, her face contorted with pain. “Stay away from me!” 

Renee reached for her. Evelyn recoiled so violently that she struck the dresser and curled into herself, both arms raised over her head. “Please don't make them do it again,” she sobbed. “Please. I won't tell them. I promise I won't tell them.”

It was then that Renee caught sight of the mirror.

Most of it had fallen, but several large shards remained caught in the frame, each holding a different, fractured piece of the room. In one, she saw a woman kneeling on the floor, one hand outstretched toward the little girl huddled against the dresser.

Renee stopped breathing.

The woman had her hair. Red, tangled, frizzed into uneven clumps that stood away from her scalp, broken off in places as though someone had tried to force it straight again and again, burning and pulling until it had forgotten how to lie naturally. She had Renee's clothes. Renee's hands.

But the face—

The skin was stretched so tightly over the woman's cheekbones that it looked almost translucent, the hollows beneath them dark enough to seem bruised. Her lips were colorless. A thin line of blood ran from one nostril, while another seeped from the ear on the side of her face turned toward the glass. And her eyes were wrong. Not dramatically, not enough that someone glancing across a room would necessarily notice, but wrong all the same: a sickly amber ring surrounded each pupil, bleeding into brown that was too pale, too washed out, nothing like the warm, dark eyes Renee knew she should be seeing. 

The mouth stretched slowly across her face, pulling at skin that seemed too tight to accommodate it. For one awful second, Renee watched the expression spread, a fraction at a time, until the corners of the woman's lips trembled with the effort. Then Renee felt her own cheeks ache. Her mouth was open. She was smiling, too, instinctively.

A sharp electrical pain tore through her skull.

She hit the floor hard enough to bite her tongue. 

The room flashed white. For an instant, she wasn't in the bedroom anymore. She was strapped to a chair beneath fluorescent lights, the air thick with antiseptic and something sweetly rotten. Hands held her shoulders down. A gloved thumb pressed beneath her jaw and turned her face toward a mirror.

“Again.”

A voice, patient and exhausted.

Look at yourself and tell me who you are.

“Renee Vale,” another voice repeated. “Renee Vale. You are Renee Vale.”

Photographs lay scattered across a metal table. Faces crossed out in red. A girl with red hair. A girl with brown eyes. A name printed beneath a photograph, the letters blurring as she tried to read them. Somewhere beyond a pane of glass, a woman was crying.

Renee clutched her head. The pain shot down her spine, and she tasted blood.

Evelyn stared at her, eyes shining with silent tears, her jaw clenched to keep her sobs locked away. She didn't dare to move. 

A different memory surfaced: a white room, a girl sitting alone on the edge of a narrow bed, her hands folded in her lap. Someone had told her she would be given a family. That she would be loved. That she would never have to be alone again.

Then the mirror again. A hand beneath her chin. A voice telling her to smile.

“Who are you?”

“Say it until you get it right.”

Across the room, Evelyn was still crying. She had pressed herself into the corner between the dresser and the wall, cradling her injured arm against her chest. She watched Renee with the awful resignation of someone who had known this moment was coming and had been too young to stop it.

Renee tried to speak. She wanted to apologize. She wanted to cradle Evelyn, to hold her close and tell her that she was still her sister, that she remembered the lake, the skating, the little red mittens, the sound of her laughing. But even those memories had begun to feel like photographs: flat, fragile things someone had placed inside her and told her to call her own.

Beneath them, somewhere she could barely reach, was a girl whose name she could no longer remember. A girl who had been taken from somewhere and taught to become someone else.

She looked at the blood on Evelyn's arm, then at the shards of glass around them, each reflecting a different fragment of the face she had believed was hers. She could still feel the shape of that smile pulling at her mouth.

The wrong girl had come home.

And she was the one wearing someone else's skin.