1Written 2013 - December - 07.
Crystal and Carol Edgley suspect that it is ultimately impossible for some children to love their parents.
It's all very well for people like Stephanie, after all. Sometimes, when the twins are feeling alone and lonely and just a bit bitter, when they have walked out to a place where they can be ignored and talk quietly and vindictively and, above all else, honestly to each other because there's no honesty at home, they wonder how exactly it is that every blessing they've lost out on has gone to their cousin instead.
Because, yes, they are blessed, and they know it (of course they know it, they've had it told to them and been telling it to themselves for years on end by this point), but at the same time, they know that something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.
Because, yes, Stephanie's parents both work so she must be terribly lonely all the time, but at the same time the sisters want so desperately for their house not to feel so incredibly full sometimes, not with a crowd of people but with a horrible prickling back-of-the-neck feeling that someone's always watching and everything is wrong, and yes, Stephanie's father is a terribly odd person who Mother always says shouldn't be let to do anything much at all, but Carol and Crystal know for an awful unshakeable fact how much of their possessions are there only because Father's fingers do not know how to let go, and yes, Stephanie's life is the last thing from normal with how she fights with everyone and is strange and quiet and doesn't fit in, but sometimes the twins suspect that they aren't normal either, and at least Stephanie has a happy family life to show for it.
Because theirs? It's a lot of things. It's comfortable enough-they're fed plenty (more than they really want, if they're to be honest about it, but Mother and Father give them such looks and say such things when they don't finish everything, so they eat and eat and eat until their jaws ache and their heads hurt and their bodies are churning like wrong wrong wrong while their parents are staring them down over their own empty plates) and they have good, sturdy clothing (that Mother won't end complaining about but Father finds so endlessly amusing with his cruel, jerky little laugh that they're allowed the styles and colors they pick that let them be unnoticed, just for a bit, because the less fashionable you are the less you are noticed) and they've never once been without a place to sleep or a roof over their heads-but at the same time, it's not happy by any long shot of the word. They're not happy, and they certainly have never felt like they are loved by their parents.
They want to love their parents. They really do. For one thing, it would be easier (because isn't that just what children are supposed to do?) and for another, it would probably be nicer (as they have heard extolled endlessly in the churches Mother drags their family to, the sermons of which Father snores conspicuously through, love is patient and kind and unconditional, three things Crystal and Carol know are quite certainly not true of their parents), and for a third, they suspect it might make their existence easier (because surely every blindness of love could cover for the hurts they suffer?). As it is, they find that they cannot, somehow.
Because it adds up. It all does. They have no blisters to show for their lives, no bruises and scars on their bodies as proof, but there's things in their minds that they know don't add up to what they should, things in the way they stand and hold their shoulders and hate their own flesh, and maybe envy is a sin, but there's some kind of wrong in the way the world works too, if that's the case, because if children should love their parents then parents should love their children too, and if there is one thing that Carol and Crystal have learnt, from living in their bodies in that house with those people, it is that love is sometimes a commodity, and that it is not one that can be stolen or bought, and that their parents aren't much good with anything else.
And they know that they are blessed, and that sometimes blessing is enough, but at the same time they know that it very often isn't, that it isn't love that drives saints to heaven and sinners to reform the earth to their own image, that love is many great and wonderful things but it isn't everything, that sin has its own sway in many places, and maybe it is love that leads Stephanie's life to its odd extremes, but there's only drudgery and fear and wanting to avoid things that seem like they will always be there to whip Crystal and Carol to their parents' compromising standards, and it is not impossible for children to love their parents and parents their children, but at the same time, the sisters know that they, in this very specific case, do not love their parents.
And they know that there's something there anyway, something keeping them all cohesive and together. But when Mother is shouting and screaming and not eating, when Father comes home with his pockets far too heavy and an emptiness in his eyes, when the house feels packed full with just the four of them rattling about in it, Carol and Crystal know between all reasonable doubt that it isn't love.
More than that, the twins know that there would be no room for it, no matter what devastation tore apart their lives to try and piece them back together. Love is patient, they have been told, love is kind. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Just this once, though, they think it might fail.