“Katherine Rose Connor” by Antheia

1. 
   

There were pills beneath the sink; crowding the bathroom countertop, fallen behind the toilet, swept under the rugs. When did Katherine get so many prescriptions? Could it be that she always had them? 

Katelyn scoured the bottles for another name - any indication that her sister might have been using, abusing, and recklessly popping blue and white and yellow tablets that hadn’t been prescribed  directly to her. Except they had. All of them. On every single bottle,  printed in that same goddamn Verdana font, there it was: Katherine Rose Conner. She had been named after their mother. Not Katelyn – Katelyn was named as an afterthought in a poor mimicry of her sister, after she’d been a surprise second birth – but Katherine. Katherine had been named Katherine Rose born to Rose Katherine, and Katelyn, who had apparently been undetectable on the ultrasound thanks to an alarming position behind her sister in the ovular sack of the womb, was born as a last minute ‘happy surprise’ for the doctor and Rose Katherine both, the latter of which must have been so in shock that the best thing she could think to name her second daughter was Katelyn Peony Conner, so that Katelyn could grow up not only being mistaken as Katherine, but sharing the same goddamn nickname, to boot. Rose Katherine Conner, who’d not only birthed a daughter with her looks and intellectual charm and vibrancy for life, but who had also passed on her short tempered rampant emotional outbursts and overbearing mental illness. Apparently this existence required more prescription pills than Katelyn ever knew a doctor could write to one singular person. Especially one who weighed a hefty 115 lbs soaking wet, as her sister did.

 If Katelyn had a daughter someday, she was going to name her something entirely abstract and as unrelated to the ‘Kate [insert flower name] Conner’ formula their mother had devised as possible. Perhaps something like Sunny. Or Aphrodite. Or Carolyn.

“Do you know what milligram of valium your sister was on?”

Katelyn looked up from where she’d knelt on the carpet, plucking a spilled bottle of singular pink, trapezoidal tablets off of the shag rug and trying not to grow frustrated at how each pill was accompanied by a fingertip full of white coils that would cling to her skin and inevitably wind up on her tongue the next time she went to touch her face, as all loose synthetic fiber had a way of doing. “No,” She answered her fiance, William, who stood in the doorway holding three different prescription bottles in his hand, “The highest available dose?”

“I’ve got a two, a five, and a ten?”

“What’s the most recently prescribed one?”

“She crossed out the dates.” 

Katherine had done that with all of the bottles. Because part of Katherine’s fucked-up-ness meant she had an innate disgust for odd numbers, number patterns that weren’t ‘soothing’, and any number she’d ever seen while standing on a scale ever in her entire life.  Katelyn knew this because she’d had to hear about these repulsive compulsions every time Katherine saw one of said disgusting numbers over the last decade. 

“How many is left in each bottle?” Katelyn asked.

“None.”

“Then we’ll assume she took the valium with her.” 

2. 

Was Katherine really better at everything she did, or was it just that their mother had budgeted for one daughter and had decided that the one who’d had the decency to show up on the ultrascan monitors,  and to be born first should be the recipient of the funds intended to be applied to piano lessons, tennis coaches, ballet recitals and private academic tutors for one? Since Katelyn was tapping the heaviest vein - was Katherine’s fucked-up-ness a result of genetic predisposition or was it just that their mother had overwhelmed her developing mind with piano lessons, tennis coaches, ballet recitals and private academic tutors for one? 

If the former, Katelyn felt pity that she hadn’t been selected in the russian roulette of Conner mental illness. If the latter, Katelyn was grateful that her mother hadn’t seen enough potential in her. 

“Does any of this look familiar?”

Katelyn shifted to the edge of the passenger seat, looking out the front windshield as the car navigated along the narrow back road leading out to the row of lake cabins they’d summered at as children. “No. Wait, yes - that tree looks familiar-”

“The tree?” William didn’t seem convinced by her timber-oriented cartography.

“We used to see who could climb the highest as children. I think that’s one of the trees… Oh, yes, there-” Katelyn pointed to their left, where an old dirt driveway had been recently uncovered from the thicket that had overgrown it. “That’s it. Turn here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

William turned. There were tire tracks already laid in the mud. That was a good sign! Twenty years since they’d been to the lake house; since their father had the car wreck and their mother had a blind date with the fish,  salamander, and algae that inhabited the lake. No one would have come this way since then, seeing as Katherine fired all of the cleaners and said ‘fuck you’ to the real estate leeches trying to convince her to sell the property their mother left in her name. If someone had traversed this terrain recently, it had to be Katherine.

3.

 Katherine’s clothes were scattered around the home; crowding the dusty oak floorboards, tile countertops, and the sofa that creaked beneath the weight of Katelyn’s knees as she knelt upon the center of it to reach for a stray bra that her sister had flung over the left arm. Katelyn didn’t need to hold the bra up to her chest to know it was the same 32B size as the one she wore, because Katherine had developed in all the same ways as she had down to the width of their areolas, a fact that Katelyn had been forced to learn two years prior when Katherine had stripped herself naked in a doped-up haze while Katelyn guided her to bed and rolled her onto her side. 

Perhaps if Katherine had let Katelyn go first for a change, they wouldn’t be in this mess.  Maybe Katelyn should feel more guilt for not trying to carry more of her sister's load. She wasn’t ignorant to the fact that Katherine was succumbing under the weight of it all. She used to sit for seconds and minutes and hours just thinking about how Katherine’s vibrancy was dulling. She knew good and damn well how many pills Katherine was on, that the variation was so similar to the ones they’d cleaned out of their mother’s bathroom cabinet after she’d decided to cradle a cinder block underwater, that Katelyn should have foreseen how Katherine’s  path to success was leading her down the same route out of those dusty double glass doors facing the foggy lake. 

“I can’t find her anywhere!” William shouted from the doorway, panic rising in his voice. Katelyn both hated and loved him for that panic. Even he was inclined to fawn over Katherine. 

“She’s not here,” Katelyn told him. It was true. Katherine was long gone.

“I’ve tried to call the police. It’s not going through!”

“There’s no service out this far.”

“What do we do?”

“Go into town.”

“That’s twenty minutes away-”

“You’ll get service.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No. I’ll wait here in case she comes back.”

“What do I tell the police?”

“That Katherine Rose Conner is a danger to herself. Take the empty pill bottles.” 

William nodded, grabbed his coat and hurried out the front door of the lake house without further argument, believing himself to be doing something helpful.

Katelyn was left alone.

It was funny, actually. She’d never been alone before. Not since the moment she was conceived. All her life, she’d had Katherine to hide behind, letting her sister take the fall for being so goddamn extraordinary while Katelyn got to settle for the shadows. And now here she was. No one to shield her. No one to outshine her. No one to take her fucking nickname. 

Katherine hadn’t been easy, but she’d been Katelyn’s cross to bear. Who was she without her sister to compare herself to?

4. 

Katelyn took three of the pills; blue and white and yellow in succession, because they worked for her sister, whose body was close enough in height and weight and chemical composition to Katelyn’s own for anything that she had ingested to have a similar effect on her. The clothes she pulled on, bra and t-shirt and skirt, fit her to a tee because they had been measured to cinch onto a form identical to hers. 

Then she walked, stepping into the identical footprints Katherine left in the mud surrounding the cabin, to the lake’s edge, where their fathers ashes were scattered and their mother had sank beneath the surface of and where Katherine herself had seemingly vanished into.

Katelyn clambered into the cold, ignoring the chattering of her teeth, until the salty water overtook her taste buds as the winter wind moved the ripples across her chin. 

As she floated in the center of the ovular lake she thought, not for the first time, how unfair it was for Katherine Rose Conner to leave her behind. 

Antheia is a poet and fiction writer born and raised in Eastern Kentucky. She is currently obtaining an MFA in Creative Writing from Mount Saint Mary's University.