Before Dawn
The dress was midnight blue and made of silk and I had spent four months saving for it.
I want to be precise about this because precision matters here. Not four months of casual saving, the kind where you redirect what’s left after spending. Four months of deliberate, line-item saving, of packing lunch instead of buying it, of declining the work happy hours that cost forty dollars by the time you factored in the drinks and the cab, of wearing the black boots another season because they still had miles left even though the heel was beginning to go. I had found the dress at a boutique on a lunch break in March and had stood in front of the mirror in the fitting room for five minutes and understood that this was the dress for my twenty-fifth birthday dinner, the one I would remember wearing, and then I had looked at the price tag and put it back on the rack and spent the next four months earning it back.
I picked it up the Tuesday before my birthday.
The boutique owner, a woman in her fifties who had seen me come in three times to look at it, wrapped it in tissue paper in a box and said she was glad it had found its person, which is the kind of thing boutique owners say and which in this case felt precisely true.
I brought it home. I hung it in my closet in the guest room that had become my room two years ago when Madison had decided she needed the larger bedroom for her art projects, the ones she did for three weeks and then stopped. I hung the dress in the plastic bag from the boutique because silk requires protection, and I looked at it every morning when I opened the closet and it did something for me that I could not have explained clinically but that had to do with feeling like a person who was on her way toward something.
On the evening of my birthday, Madison took the fabric scissors from the sewing kit in the hall closet and went into my room and cut it into strips.
My name is Claire Beaumont. I am twenty-five years old, or was the night this happened, and I am a financial analyst at a firm in the city that requires me to be precise and accurate and to understand, at a granular level, what numbers mean and what happens when the underlying assumptions of a financial model are wrong.
I had been applying this professional skill to my personal life for approximately three years and had been arriving at conclusions I did not want to reach.
My parents were Robert and Linda Beaumont. My sister was Madison, twenty-two, who was described by my parents in all available contexts as sensitive, creative, and highly feeling, which were the words they used for the quality that I would have described, with my professional precision, as unwilling to tolerate being anything other than the primary object of everyone’s attention.
I had been the other daughter for as long as I could remember.