Free The Syndrome by John Case Page A

to flunk that math test.
Rainbow
flunk? You bet….)
    She frowned. It wasn’t enough. What if Adrienne came and knocked and …
    She scribbled a note to her sister and took it downstairs. Ramon was out front helping Mrs. Parkhurst out of a taxi, so she just ducked behind the desk and stuck the note into the slot for her apartment. If Adrienne came, Ramon would look there. He was very responsible.
    Back upstairs, she went out to the balcony and made a little fire in the
chiminea.
The sun was going down now, splashing the sky with a swirl of violet and orange that reminded her of a Gauguin. As she stuffed some twisted-up newspapers into the
chiminea’s
belly, she tried to remember
which
Gauguin, but couldn’t. Atop the newspapers, she crisscrossed a few pieces of Georgia fatwood, and crowned it all with a length of piñon wood. Then she lit a match and watched her construction bloom into flame.
I’m practically a Boy Scout
, she told herself.
    Returning inside, she checked the bath. It really did smell fabulous, and she saw with satisfaction that the froth of bubbles was deep and luxurious, and almost to the top. Sheturned off the water and stuck a finger in—
hot hot
, as Marlena used to say.
    Then she left the bathroom.
    Getting a step stool from the broom closet in the kitchen, she went into the bedroom and, with the help of the stool, retrieved an old scrapbook from its hiding place at the back of the closet’s top shelf. Climbing down, she carried the book out to the balcony and, seating herself beside the crackling
chiminea
, opened it.
    There were maybe a hundred snapshots in the album, each affixed to the page by little dabs of glue in the corners. They were family pictures, mostly, showing herself and Adrienne, Deck and Marlena, over a number of years. There was a picture on the first page of herself in a swing, hair flying, as Marlena pushed her from behind, her own face alight with laughter. In the background, a redbrick rancher.
    Elsewhere on the same page—a snapshot of Adrienne at the free throw line, her eight-year-old face frowning in concentration; Deck, standing beside the barbeque in the backyard, a spatula in one hand, a Bud in the other; Nico and Adrienne at the beach, building sand castles; Adrienne, putting the finishing touches on a gingerbread house; Nico sitting next to Deck, with her arms around the pumpkin that she’d carved; and so on. There was even a photo of Nico in her prom dress, just before she went to Europe and all hell broke loose.
    If you judged the family by the album, it was very nearly perfect, and about as wholesome as a Minnesota spring. But Nico saw what was not in the album as well as the people who were. And what was missing was the nightmare, manifest in the absence of Rosanna—whose face she couldn’t even recall.
    There were no pictures of her older sister, not a one. It was as if she’d never existed. Which meant that the album in Nico’s hands was a part of the deception. Forget what had happened to
her.
She, at least, was alive. At least
she
had a past. But her sister—her sister didn’t even exist as a memory. First, she’d been slaughtered, and then she’d been erased—like a Moscow apparatchik whose existence was suddenly, terminally inconvenient.
    Nico removed the photo of herself and Marlena at the swing, and turned it over. Written on the back in her foster mother’s spidery hand were the words:
    Swingin’ with my honey!
July 4, 1980
Denton, Del.
    Even that was a lie, Nico thought. The ranch style house in the background was nothing like the peeling and dilapidated mansion she’d known in South Carolina. Had she ever even
been
to Delaware? She didn’t think so.
    Crumpling the picture in half, she laid it on the fire in the
chiminea
, then watched the paper flatten, even as the faces faded to black. Finally, the snapshot flared into flame, and sparks snapped from its surface, swirling into the chimney above it. One by one, Nico fed the fire with