“So you went in your closet and it felt funny?” I say, drastically changing what Astrid said. I don’t want to call her closet the bad closet. I want to leave room for it to be something else.
“It was a long time ago,” Astrid says. “And we didn’t need another closet. It was ugly. It made things bad. Things we brought inside. And us. It made us bad, too.”
I try to think through all the summers we’ve had here to place which summer Eleanor and Astrid might have gone inside the bad closet. Which summer they acted bad or strange or unlike themselves.
I remember a week last summer when they tried Mom’s wine. It was late at night and they were being loud in their bedroom, and when I walked in, Astrid was hugging a bottle and Eleanor was wearing sunglasses and a life vest. They moved in slow motion, and it took a lot of giggling and slurring for them to articulate that they wanted me to leave.
They never thanked me for not telling Mom and Dad.
“Was it last summer that you went in the bad closet?” I say, but Eleanor shakes her head to end that part of the conversation. She’s mad at me and desperate to make sure I feel the deep, dark crevices of that anger and disappointment.
“All I wanted was to get out of this stupid house for five minutes. You had one small job and you couldn’t even do that right,” Eleanor says. I’ve never seen her like this, like Mom. Ready to explode with only a tiny push of an invisible button.
“I’m sorry. I saw these photos she was looking at and I got all weird and you know when I’m around Mom I can act sort of—”
“Silly, it’s late,” Eleanor says. “I’m tired. I had a bad night. You shouldn’t be pretending you’re, like, mature enough for this stuff. It’s okay. We don’t expect that from you. That’s why we take care of you. Because you need us. And we thought you might be ready for more, but clearly, clearly you’re not.”
“Okay,” I say. But it isn’t.
Thirteen
I go looking for Marla in the morning.
She’s not in her sad, gray-walled room with its tarnished brass bed that she begged Dad for. She’s not in the kitchen or the TV room. She’s not on the porch next to Dad, stealing the comics section from his paper. She’s not in the bathroom with the claw-foot tub that she likes to take long baths in. I think maybe I’ll check in Mom’s sewing room, but we’re not supposed to go in there, and I don’t want to get myself or anyone else into any more trouble. I even approach Mom and Dad’s room, but I can hear Mom’s heavy breathing, and I don’t think she’s awake.
Eleanor and Astrid have the television on downstairs. I hear loud voices and cheesy music and the volume moving up and down every few seconds, because Eleanor likes it loud and Astrid likes it quiet. I should not sneak into their room without asking. I’m in more than enough trouble with Eleanor already.
But I have a creeping feeling about Marla, and I need to know where she is, I need to see that she’s okay.
Guilt is this thing that feels gray and heavy. It’s a cement wall between me and the rest of the world. Sleeping and eating and writing LilyLee are stuck on the other side, with me stranded over here, unable to do anything at all.
I’ll do anything to tear it down.
So I head into Eleanor and Astrid’s room. The beds are made. The shades are drawn. Eleanor’s closet door is open, and nothing interesting is inside.
Astrid’s closet door is closed.
I look under the beds and take an extra-long look at Eleanor’s closet, in case somehow Marla is hiding in the back.
She isn’t.
She is in Astrid’s closet. The bad closet. Alone. I know it.
“Marla?” I say at the closet door.
“One second.” Her voice sounds far away.
“Are you really in there?” It is a stupid thing to say, but I say stupid things when I’m nervous.
“One second. I promise, Sil,” she says. Marla calls me Sil instead of Silly when she likes me, which is almost never. I stand outside the door with the world’s straightest back and widest eyes.
I do not open the door. It’s pretty possible that I don’t want to go in there, curious or no.
The things Astrid said about her closet—vague half sentences—were creepy. Eleanor’s mouth—the way it turned down and got crooked when she talked to me last night—was even scarier.
It would take a lot for Astrid to avoid something magical, I think. Eleanor likes night-lights when she’s sleeping and flashlights when she’s camping and explicit itineraries when she’s doing anything else. But Astrid is her perfect counterpart. She likes playing hide-and-seek in pitch black and sleeping outside instead of in the tent and running off for a little while when we’re on the beach, terrifying everyone but most especially Mom.
I’m not sure I want to see anything that Astrid is too scared to explore. Even if Marla likes it.
After all, Marla is odd. She likes poetry and worrying and the way things look in the rain. She likes Mom more than Dad. She likes eggs more than pancakes. She likes burnt toast and asparagus. She likes the New Hampshire house.