Michael was beaming suddenly, too, and looking oddly relieved. It was only then I realized he'd been wearing a worried frown ever since sending the telegram to Coralie announcing our sudden marriage. Men! I thought in fond despair. What had he expected us to do—claw each other's eyes out? It was absurd. As if I could help feeling fond at first sight of this sister of his—so child-like, so appealing.
There was some mix-up about our luggage. Before attending to it, Michael stayed until Coralie had filled the cranberry goblet with water from a silver carafe on the bedside table, dropped in a capsule which dissolved instantly, and swallowed the colorless mixture. Something wrong with her heart, Michael had said. From where I was standing I could see the box from which she'd taken the capsule, could even read the under- scored warning, printed in red One capsule only, mornings.
I went with Michael to the door, and when he was gone I turned back to the bed. To Coralie. To shocked surprise.
Gone were the soft eyes, the dimples, the child-like air. She lay back among her pillows, and over her face was a blank expressionlessness, infintely cold.
"We can talk now, without pretending," she said.
"Pretending?"
"You heard me." Stiff-armed, she thrust herself up to a sitting position. "You're not so naive as to think I intend to share Michael with you? He's my brother. In the past, all his attention has been for me. It's going to continue that way. You don't count at all."
She was a child, after all, I thought. Smiling. I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. "Coralie, listen to me. There's room for both of us—"
But she wasn't listening. Her eyes held that blank look of an ego turned in upon itself, and her voice was hot with resentment. "No doubt you think you'll have an easy time of it, winning him away from me. But you won't. Maybe I'm helpless, but I'm clever, too. I'll never rest till I drive you out."
An infantile threat, surely. I don't know why I took it seriously. Yet her anger was contagious. I found myself losing my temper, "And do you think I'll stand by, doing nothing, if you try it? I started for the door, determined to get out before I made an exhibition of myself.
"You won't do anything, you won't do anything," she taunted in a chant that followed me across the room. "No matter what you do, I'll win. Because—" Her voice fluttered uncertainly. "Because—"
Curious, I looked back. Her eyes were fixed, not on me, but upon the cranberry goblet. Slowly, as I watched, they turned to me. And surely that was fear lurking in their depths?
"Because," she said in a whisper now, "even if I lose I'll win."
A strange thing for her to say. It's only now that I know just how strange. But certainly, for a minute there, she must have seen the fate of the three of us in the cranberry goblet?
There were weeks, then, in which I learned just how clever Coralie could be. And it took me weeks to learn. I don't know how I could have been so stupid, so blind. By the time I saw the way things were going, it was too late for
