Part 1Drowned to Save Her Sins

I was four years old the afternoon my eight-year-old sister drowned.

Afterward, my mother spiraled into a manic, consuming guilt because she hadn’t pulled her out of the river in time.

The following year, on the first anniversary of my sister’s death, my mother took me into the bathroom and shoved my head straight down into a tub filled with freezing water.

"Don’t fight it," she hissed, her fingers dug like talons into the back of my neck. "This is exactly how it felt when your sister went under."

The shock of the ice-cold water tore into my throat and flooded my lungs. Just as my eyes rolled back and my vision narrowed into the gray tunnel of unconsciousness, she yanked me violently into the air. She crushed my soaking, retching frame against her chest, wailing my sister’s name into my hair:

"Mommy saved you! Look, baby, Mommy got to you in time!"

From that day on, every single anniversary turned into a grotesque reenactment of her salvation.

I was the only prop.

When I was six, she decided my panicked thrashing ruined the authenticity of the scene, so she bound my wrists and ankles with tight nylon cord before pushing me under.

When I was nine, she reasoned that river water in mid-December was far colder than tap water, so she emptied bags of ice into the porcelain tub and held my skull under the freezing slurry for over sixty seconds.

When I was twelve, searching for raw realism, she scooped foul, decaying river mud into the water. I choked on the rot and coughed up blood for two weeks straight.

My father never once intervened. He stood in the doorway, an immovable, silent shadow, occasionally flicking an apathetic glance my way—as if he were watching an old kitchen appliance hum before shutting down.

Today was my eighteenth birthday. My transition into adulthood.

This time, my mother didn’t bother with the bathtub. She drove me out to the edge of the swollen, roaring Blackwood River—the exact bend where my sister had slipped beneath the current ten years ago.

She stroked my cheek with cold, trembling fingers, her eyes glittering with feverish devotion. "After today, you’re finally a grown woman. Your sister should have been this old, too."

Then, with both hands against my chest, she shoved me off the rocky ledge and straight into the violent, rushing rapids.

As the freezing torrent slammed into my chest, tearing the air from my lungs and fracturing my ribs against the hidden stones beneath, I didn’t feel terror.

For the first time in eighteen years, I felt an overwhelming sense of release.

When my sister slipped beneath the water at eight years old, she only had to die once.

Between the ages of five and seventeen, I had died thirteen times over.

My only birthday wish this year was that this death would be my last.

* * *

"Get your ass out of the water right now! Iris, do you hear me? Who do you think you are!"

My mother, Eleanor’s, shrill scream pierced the dull roar of the river.

I looked down at myself.

I was weightless, a pale wisp of vapor hovering two feet above the churning foam. Beneath the surface, the merciless undertow was violently sweeping a broken, lifeless body downstream, slamming it against jagged submerged boulders.

That body was mine.

The sickening snap of bones was swallowed entirely by the white noise of the rushing water, but I felt none of the pain. Instead, an impossible lightness washed over me.

Eighteen years of shivering. Eighteen years of living in a perpetual winter. And now, I was finally warm.

Up on the muddy bank, Eleanor was stomping her feet in frustration, the sharp heels of her designer boots sinking deep into the wet silt. She was wearing her tailored black wool trench coat—the grim, theatrical uniform she wore every year on this exact date.

"I’m counting to three! If you don't break the surface this second, you can forget about your college allowance for the rest of the year!"

Eleanor glared at the turbulent brown water, her eyes blazing with the venom of someone who couldn't stand being disobeyed.

No one answered her.

Only the rhythmic, hollow slosh of the river against the riverbed stones broke the silence.

A few yards behind her, Richard, my father, stood with his hands tucked into his windbreaker, trying to light a cheap cigarette. The flint scraped three, four times against the damp wind before catching. He took a long drag, exhaling a cloud of bitter smoke into the mist.

"Give it a rest, Eleanor," Richard said, his tone dry, as if he were discussing a minor traffic delay on the interstate. "You’ve spent over a decade training her lungs. She’s probably just sitting near the bottom holding her breath to spite you."

Eleanor let out a sharp, mocking laugh.

"Spite me? She wouldn't dare!"

She stepped right to the edge, leaning over the rushing spray.

"When your sister went down in this exact river, in this exact depth, she didn’t even have the strength to fight the current!" Eleanor screamed toward the empty water. "And you? I push you in for five minutes, and you have the audacity to play games with me?"

Hovering above, I looked down at her face, twisted by a toxic cocktail of grief and narcissistic delusion.

Cora. That was my older sister’s name.

It was always like this. The moment Cora’s name crossed her lips, Eleanor transformed into a fanatic, entirely intoxicated by her own manufactured tragedy.

"Eleanor, the current’s pretty vicious today," Richard muttered, flicking an ash into the mud. For once, an ounce of practical thought crossed his face. "Maybe I should grab the fiberglass pole from the trunk and poke around?"

Eleanor spun on him, her glare razor-sharp.

"Poke around for what? You always soft-pedal her!" she snapped. "This is her baptism into adulthood. If she doesn’t endure this, how is she supposed to carry Cora’s life forward?"

Hearing those words, the phantom space where my heart used to beat gave an involuntary throb.

"To carry Cora’s life forward."

That was the sole premise of my existence. The only reason I had been brought into this world, and the only justification they ever needed to break me over and over again.

When I was fifteen, in the dead of winter, I came down with a fever that spiked past 104. I couldn't even stand; I was curled on the bare floorboards of my bedroom, trembling violently.

That day coincided with Cora’s death anniversary.

Eleanor kicked open my bedroom door holding a plastic bucket filled with dirty, slush-crusted snow she had scraped from the driveway.

"Stop playing dead. Get up. It’s time for the bathroom."

She grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me across the hallway.

"Mom... please, I'm burning up... I'm so cold..." My fingernails scraped against the doorframe, tears mixing with the slick sweat on my face. "Please, not today. I swear, I think I'm going to die..."

Eleanor paused for a fraction of a second.

Then, the heavy heel of her boot came down hard on the back of my hand.

"A fever?" she hissed down at me. "Cora spent an entire night submerged under the ice. Do you have any idea how cold she was? Your little fever is nothing compared to what she suffered! Get in the damn tub!"

She dumped the bucket of gray slush into the ice-cold water and shoved my head down. Floating ice cubes cut into my cheeks and lips like tiny blades. I fought underneath, clawing at the slick porcelain while the oxygen was violently squeezed out of my chest.

Eleanor stood over the porcelain rim, a mechanical stopwatch ticking in her palm.

"Keep still! Cora ran out of strength—you have to replicate her suffering precisely!"

Only when my eyes rolled back and my limbs went completely slack did she finally wrench me upward. She cradled my shivering, semi-conscious body against her cashmere sweater, sobbing dramatically toward the ceiling:

"Cora! Mommy saved you! Mommy wasn't too late this time!"

That fever turned into severe acute pneumonia. I spent two weeks in the ICU.

The day I was discharged, Eleanor never showed up.

She merely had Richard pass along a message: "Your mother says you’re far too weak. You don't have half of Cora’s resilience. From now on, you wash your face with ice water every morning."

And now, on my eighteenth birthday, I had finally delivered the perfect performance.

I hadn’t struggled.

I had let the river pull me straight down to the dark bed of stones, and I hadn’t surfaced.

On the riverbank, Eleanor glanced down at her watch, her brow furrowing deep into an irritated scowl.

"Iris! It’s been five whole minutes! Are you still playing dead down there?"

She bent over, snatched a jagged river stone, and hurled it into the center of the current. The stone plunged into the brown froth with barely a ripple.

"Fine! You want to stay under? Stay there!"

She dusted off her leather gloves and turned back to Richard.

"Richard, go get the pole from the trunk. She’s probably clinging to the bridge pillar underneath just to give me a heart attack."