Marla’s other cold, cold hand grabs mine. I don’t want to tell her how scared I am, but I can barely feel my fingers. I don’t like any of it. I feel the opposite of the delicious UnWorry in my closet.
“Please don’t tell,” she says. Her eyes are too dark for her face, too dark for the sister I’ve known for all of my eleven years. And her hands are too cold to belong to a girl, especially in the summertime, but I try to ignore both of those things, because her voice is so soft and nice and she has that look of calm that I know I’ve felt before. “I need something that’s mine too,” she says.
I can’t argue. Especially not after last night.
We eat breakfast, and I try to talk to Marla about the bad closet and about what happened with Mom last night and about how to stay safe and have magic and how we should tell Astrid and Eleanor about what we saw.
“Beach!” Marla says in nonresponse, a cheerleader all of a sudden. Usually when we go to the lake during the summer, Marla sits on the dock and rips splinters of wood from its surface and complains about sand being in her sandwich. Today she is too eager and in this old bathing suit that must have been Eleanor’s or Astrid’s before hers. It seems especially cruel to get bathing suits as hand-me-downs.
“We should ask Mom if it’s okay,” I say. She has strange and specific rules about the lake, and new rules pop up all the time. We can’t go before noon or after three. We can’t go with boys. We have to be no more than five feet away from one another at all times. We have to bring a cell phone.
Asking Mom if something’s okay is Marla’s favorite thing to do, but she doesn’t seem that interested right now. She shrugs and leaves a note on the counter, but the note says we’re going to the store for sodas, not to the lake for a swim. It’s a side of Marla I’ve never seen before.
“What do you think Eleanor’s secret boyfriend looks like?” I say on the walk to the beach, wondering if maybe I can start a conversation in one place and make it go somewhere else. Marla shrugs. She seems already irritated by the sun and the sand the moment we get to the lake.
Whatever calm she got from the closet is fading fast. I try again.
“I haven’t heard from LilyLee in kind of a while. Do you think she has some new best friend?” I say. Marla shrugs.
“Do you miss anything from home?” I say. Marla shrugs.
“Did you ever hear of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’? It’s one of Dad’s fairy tales,” I say. Marla sighs and tugs at the bottom of her bathing suit.
“Why didn’t Mom tell us she has a sister?” I say, since being subtle isn’t getting me anywhere.
Marla gives me a funny look. “Had a sister, I think,” she says.
“Oh.” Of course I know she’s right, but I hadn’t thought about it in stark terms, and the word sort of bowls me over. Had a sister. It’s an awful thing, the past tense.
“Let’s go in,” she says.
No one else is on our patch of sand. This little area of the lake has always been only ours. We can see other families playing on the other side of the lake, at the other end of the strip of beach, closer to the lifeguard, or their own private coves, but we can’t be part of them.
Marla runs to the lake and I follow, splashing in behind her. She scowls at me when I kick too hard at the water and it hits her face. Marla’s not much of a swimmer, so she stands in the water, up to her waist, and watches me bob up and down in an unofficial stroke I call Mermaid Swimming.
I’m out of breath quickly and return to stand next to her. Our shoulders are burning, for sure.
“She started talking about it when we moved here,” Marla says. “About her sister, I mean. But you know she says so many things that don’t make sense. . . .” She takes a few steps back, closer to shore, so the water is barely at her knees. “I don’t think we want to know what happened.”
“Why? I want to know everything that’s happened to everyone,” I say. I mean it, too. I want to know about Mom and Dad and my sisters, but also LilyLee and her family and also the fairy tales and myths and fables in Dad’s office and the people on the other side of the lake and Astrid’s old secret boyfriend and Eleanor’s new one. I want to know it all.
“There’s probably a reason no one’s told us,” Marla says. “And anyway, Mom needs her privacy.”
These are Mom’s words, not Marla’s. Mom says them whenever we’re bugging her to tell us more about when she was growing up, or asking her if we can play in her room or use the sewing machine. “I need my privacy,” Mom will say, rubbing her eyes and raising her shoulders way up to her ears.