Elsa was always different. I think my mother's reaction would've made more sense if this were not the case. But my mother was driven by things I will never understand.
 
I was six years old when Elsa was born, so I remember her early years well. There were already signs that she wasn’t a typical child. One example: plenty of toddlers put odd things in their mouths, but Elsa only did so with plants. No random toys or found scraps, and she despised pacifiers. Once she was through breastfeeding, that was the end of the line for everything but food and plants.
 
I remember pointing this out to my mother. She scolded me for, and I quote, "Thinking such nonsense!" I brought it up one only more time. My punishment was so severe that I learned my lesson.

My mother was as devout as they come. She rarely made it to three sentences without interjecting the words "Lord" or "Jesus". By the time Elsa was walking, I never saw her without a bible near. She often hugged it to her chest, like a shield, protecting her from who-knows-what. Whenever she was nervous, she would trace the cover's inlay with her middle finger, whispering to herself. She quoted scripture with the accuracy of a scholar and used it to answer any questions I might have about, well, anything. I remember thinking she no longer had original thoughts, only quotes. Perhaps that was her intention.
 
Looking back, all of this strikes me as little more than mental illness. But I have my biases.

My father is patient in a manner I find equally confusing, only I love him dearly for it. He was even-keeled to the bone, and he never panicked. He would calmly hear us out, Elsa and I, even when he knew we were wrong. Not to imply he was lenient or easy to sway, because he wasn’t. But his responses never felt emotional and his expectations were clear.

He extended that same patience toward my mother as well. I believe his grace was wasted in her case, but I still admired him for it. He had a reputation as a wonderful teacher and I never doubted it.

Until the incident in the bathtub, we spent our lives in a small house near the coast, all hills and winding sidewalks and afternoon thunderstorms. But a crack began to show when Elsa started walking, and our home life outright shattered when she was five.

I was the first to see Elsa do it. She was sitting by herself, legs crossed, in front of a sapling that had sprouted near the edge of mother's garden. She looked at it curiously, tilting her head back and forth like a puppy, then wrapped her mitt around the stem. And I swear, upon everything dear to me, it grew. Two month's growth in a span of ten seconds. Elsa laughed as though she were being tickled, then let go and rubbed her hands together, happy as a clam.

"Elsa!" I shouted.

I wasn’t upset. I was elated. How amazing! But the thought that followed darkened my spirits instantly. What is mother going to say?

"I'm sorry, Elsa," I whispered fiercely. "Please don't be upset. But this is necessary."

I pulled the sapling out of the ground and tossed it over the fence. My mother knew her garden much too well to leave evidence. I thought Elsa might cry, but she just waddled through the garden as though nothing at all had happened.

I watched her like a hawk from then on.

Around that time, my mother's agoraphobia manifested in full. It started small, like with the aforementioned tick of tracing the seal on her bible. Then, one day, she felt something “very unholy” (her words) while at the nearest general store. Afterward, she would no longer shop there. She believed it had something to do with the stock boy, whom she'd never seen at church, and she wouldn’t stop ranting about how terrible the place looked since they added all those mirrors. I pointed out that he was from India and probably had a different religion altogether, and that the mirrors looked nice. She slammed the door on me in outrage. So my father, eternally patient, picked up the slack and started shopping on his way home from work.

And so it went, with my mother finding more and more places where Satan's influence was too much for her. My father would try to calm her for a week, maybe two, then he’d take the task on himself. Rinse and repeat.

In time, my mother no longer felt comfortable on the walk to church. So instead she called our pastor three times a week for counsel, and to discuss scripture. This made our house feel terribly anxious, with everyone walking on egg shells around her, but it also made hiding Elsa's talents significantly easier. Mother would sometimes watch us from her bedroom window, and some nights she would join us for dinner instead of taking meals in her room, but that was the extent of our interactions.

I was still a nervous wreck every time we went outside, though. I was very careful to hold Elsa’s hand if we were in the sightline of her window, to make sure she didn’t grab anything in the garden. There were some close calls, but all said and told, it was a fairly easy situation to navigate.

All until one Thursday evening when, out of the blue, mother decided she'd give Elsa a bath.

My mother hadn’t left the house in almost a year at this point, but she started saying, multiple times a day, how much she missed her garden. As though it were a thousand miles away and not right outside the back door. As a surprise, my father made cuttings of some of her favorite plants, potted them, and laid out an arrangement on the windowsill in the bathroom. Mother adored it. For a few weeks she left her room more often, and I remember thinking things were taking a better turn. And I wasn’t too worried about Elsa, since I’d been the one bathing her for the past two years.

The plants must have inspired mother to take on some parental duties again. It was still daylight out, and we typically bathed just before supper, but mother’s sense of time was pretty distorted at this point. It hadn't occured to me that she might bathe Elsa at three in the afternoon. I would have praised her for taking on the task had it not gone so awry.

Because as mother was washing Elsa’s back, Elsa touched one of the cuttings. And with that small, simple gesture, chaos stormed into the room.

I was studying, just home from school, when I heard the screams. It took me a moment to place where they came from, but I quickly pinpointed the bathroom. There was such terror in that shriek that I did not bother knocking. Deep in my gut I knew it was about Elsa. So I barged into the bathroom, the door handle leaving a dent in the wall.

I nearly screamed, too, when I saw what was on the other side of the door. Mother's hands were around Elsa's throat and she was holding her under the water. I could see the veins in her neck from where her hair was pulled back. Elsa was thrashing, sending water over the edge of the tub.

“Stop it!” I shouted, but if she heard me she gave no sign. She was still screaming incoherently. The only word I could make out was devil.

An anger that I had never felt before rose up in me, white hot and electric, and I slapped my mother with such force that she stopped making any sound at all. But more importantly, she’d let go of Elsa.

Before mother could do anything else, I pulled Elsa up, wrapped her in my arms and whisked her out of the bathroom. My mother watched us go, wide-eyed with shock, then she started screaming again. I slammed the door.

I brought Elsa, sputtering and crying, to our shared bedroom, wrapped her in a blanket and left her on the bed. Then I grabbed the chair from beneath my desk, ran down the hall and wedged it beneath the doorknob so my mother could not leave. I tended to the whimpering Elsa until my father came home a half hour later.

Looking back, it's still hard for me to understand why my father didn’t have mom committed. It is not that he didn't believe me. When he came home and saw the state Elsa was in, the bruises already showing up on her tiny neck, he let me hysterically recount the afternoon's events. I saw no doubt in his face. But instead of making mother leave, he decided that the three of us would go.

The next day was a blur. He spent the bulk of his savings finding my mother a caretaker, then he purchased train tickets for the three of us. When I asked where we were going, he said, “To my sisters’ house.”

He explained some things to me on the train. Elsa mostly slept on the seat next to me, her knees curled beneath her chin, or looked out the window excitedly. She was handling this much better than the rest of us.

“Your mother was not born into a normal family,” he explained. "Strange traits showed up in her siblings, as well as her uncle. She would never say exactly what these traits were, only that they were otherworldly and wicked. She left home at fourteen, because she never felt safe among her family. Or that's what she told me. The one and only time her brother visited, he clarified that she’d been sent away, and it had been hard on her. She was taken in by her cousin's family, who ran the church out here on the coast."

"So she was adopted by the Applegates?" I said.

My father nodded. He'd met her at their church one Summer. He was saving up for his boarding fees in college and he'd been hired to paint the fences surrounding church property. He was smitten before she ever said a word.

"She'd grown up with strange blood and she always hated it," he said. "In her mind, only Satan could bring forth such wickedness. We used to debate it some. Well, at first. It eventually became a non-topic. I’ve never liked upsetting her, so I let it go. But I know she feared that this blood was inside her, too. She admitted it to me, just once, right after you were born. It was the first time I'd ever seen her cry." He looked out the window until he'd collected himself. "She's so frightened of anything out of the ordinary. Especially if it's related to her in any way."

"Did you know about Elsa?" I asked him.

He was slow to answer.

"I suspected, but I hoped it wasn't the case. But I never … "

He drifted off. I wasn’t having it.

“Why didn’t you do anything then?!”

My words stung him, but I’d meant them to. I was angry. I still am in ways. It might not be a popular opinion, but even virtues can be taken too far.

He took a deep breath and stared at his hands. "I never thought she'd go that far. I never thought she'd hurt her.” He looked over at me, and he was so sad that it melted my anger a bit. Not all of it, but some. “I didn't think she was capable."

We were quiet for a while. I noticed he couldn't look at Elsa, sleeping, cheek against the window. My anger flared up again.

"What are you gonna do with her?"

He must have heard the challenge in my tone, because his look hardened. And not at me. "Watch her. Love her. Protect her. I don't give a damn about any of this nonsense. She's my daughter, same as you. I won’t let anyone touch her like that again."

I nodded, relieved.

We arrived at my Aunts' house late in the evening. Sandy and Gretta were their names. The two of them decided to live together after Sandy's husband died, ten years before. Many mistook them for twins, but that's where the similarities ended. Sandy didn't talk much and Gretta rarely stopped.

Gretta was the one who answered the door. She practically lifted my father off the ground when she hugged him, then did the same to me. She was a big woman with a big personality. She kept laughing and saying "goodness!" over and over. She was clearly glad to see us. But she stopped abruptly when she saw Elsa.

"You were still in someone's tummy when I saw you last," she said. Elsa just blinked up at her. "Sandy!” she shouted into the house. “Put the kettle down and come meet little Elsa!"

Sandy came to the door, wearing a flour-dusted apron, hair tied up in a bun. She looked down at Elsa with folded arms.

"So this is the one who can help us with the gardening?"