“It’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s that she doesn’t notice,” I’d say, but even though she’s my best friend, LilyLee didn’t understand the difference.
Before bringing the egg upstairs to my closet, I check the mailbox, looking for a note from LilyLee. I’ve been sending her postcards every other day, but there’s nothing from her. Two weeks ago she sent a postcard of Boston Common and said she would feed the ducks for me. And a week before that she sent a postcard of some old-time movie star and a list of movies we should watch when she visits Labor Day weekend.
For the first time, I wonder if she’ll even come.
“Is the mail working?” I ask my sisters.
“I got a package from Henry,” Astrid says. We all pause at the name Henry. His name is a huge stop sign in the middle of our morning. Red and warning and dangerous to pass through.
“Quiet!” Marla says. She turns on the mixer, a rumbling sound meant to cover up the conversation. Nothing has ever made Mom angrier than when Astrid started going out with a boy named Henry last year.
Astrid presses her lips together.
“You’re letting him send things here? What if Mom sees?” I say.
“When’s the last time Mom left the house, even to check the mail?” Astrid says. It’s a fair point, but still. Not worth the risk. It’s bad enough that Eleanor has a secret boyfriend. Astrid shouldn’t also be in contact with Henry. If Mom’s ever going to get better, it will be because we’ve all been good. Doing all the things she hates will only make Mom sicker.
I think it but don’t say it.
Eleanor looks up from her phone. “What should I wear to dinner at his birthday party?” She’s missed the whole conversation, that’s how much she must like the secret boyfriend. She hasn’t told Marla and me his name. And if we asked whose birthday party she’s going to, she’d make something up. But still.
Marla turns the mixer on even higher. She drops a bag of chocolate chips on the floor not once but three times. It doesn’t make a very satisfying or loud sound, but I guess it makes Marla feel better.
“Maybe something green?” Astrid says.
Eleanor wrinkles her nose. This is not the answer she wanted. “Why?”
“I like green?” Astrid has already lost focus, and I think Eleanor and I are going to laugh about it, but we don’t. Or I sort of do, but Eleanor wipes away a few tears.
“I need more help than that,” she says in a small voice. She is starting to sweat. It always starts on her forehead; she can’t hide the shine there. “I need someone who knows stuff.”
What she means is: she needs a mom.
We all look at the stairs, the trail to our parents’ room. Then we all look away, just as quickly.
There’s nothing left to say, so everyone returns to our activities and the thoughts in our heads. It’s the perfect time to sneak away with an egg.
The egg and I go into my closet. I hold it between my hands, cupping it. When the door’s closed the light goes cozy and pink again, but the egg doesn’t move.
Until it does.
It shakes and shudders.
It grows and cracks.
It breaks open.
I was thinking a creature of some kind would emerge, but sunshine is what bursts out of the shell. Beams of light, the same yellow as the yolk of an egg, the same sheen the whites have when one’s first cracked open.
I reach my hands up to touch the beams as they shoot from the broken shell, and discover they have texture to them. They make my fingers tingle, almost putting my hand to sleep, but not quite. It’s the feeling of a sparkle. The sunbeams sparkle against my hand. I’ve never felt a sparkle before. I like it.
I love it.
The closet doesn’t flood with light. The beams stay independent, like lasers decorating the space, crisscrossing in the air above me and next to me and eventually through me, so that my middle, too, gets that sleepy, sparkly sensation.
The beams pick me up in the air and fly me around. They roll me, like I’m rolling down a hill, but I’m in the air, so it’s smooth and strange instead of stumbly and awkward.
I never want to leave my closet.
Except that I want my sisters in here with me. I want to be all together. I don’t want to be alone anymore.
And if Astrid’s right, the closet could be even more incredible with all four of us in it, harnessing some kind of sister power.
So I leave the warm feeling, the sunbeams and their pretty pattern, the unusual sensations, tickly and soothing at the same time. The trip in the sky, carried by sunbeams. I want to get my sisters in here with me. I want more eggs and more beams and more feelings of calm and happiness and easiness and thrill.
When I emerge from the closet, Astrid’s already in my room.
“Priscilla,” she says, a one-word sentence that says more than a whole paragraph could.
“I needed to,” I rush to say.
“You have to come downstairs,” she says. “Eleanor needs our help. Mom’s roaming, but El needs to get to the birthday party.”