The twins don’t seem to notice. I keep almost telling them to look at Marla’s wrist, but I’m too scared to talk to Eleanor now that I’ve ruined everything. So the bracelets stay on and I don’t get a good look at whatever’s happening underneath them.
“It’s so UNFAIR!” Marla yells, so sudden my heart does that jumping-then-dropping thing it does when I’m swinging too high on the swing set by our old school. She punches her thigh with her fist. “I try so hard! I try so, so, so, so, so hard! And none of you care! All you can talk about are closets and boyfriends and stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. And I don’t get anything, even though I try the hardest and do the most and love her the deepest and understand her the best!” Marla’s not looking at us, but at the rest of the world—the giant pine trees and the pine needles covering the pavement and the mountains that are so far in the distance they almost look like fog.
We don’t rush at Marla. We would, if that’s what she needed, but it’s not. We don’t contradict her either, because in some ways she’s right. We stay quiet and let her yell at the ground and the sky and the too-happy-looking clouds.
When she’s all out of tears and words, we sit on the side of the road for a moment and catch our breath. We’re all four of us a little teary and strange. Too tired to keep walking, too overwhelmed to speak about it.
“We can tell Dad that Mom needs to go Away again,” Eleanor says at last.
“No!” Marla interrupts before the sentence is even over. “Don’t send her away! Why do you always want to send her away?” She is going to spiral into another freak-out if we don’t nod our heads and keep walking, so that’s what we do. For Marla.
It’s a slow street. There aren’t many cars. And it feels good to be shoulder to shoulder for a few minutes, without speaking.
There was a summer Mom was doing really well, and she took us to get ice cream every day, and we would sing songs on the walk home in loud voices. Mom would wave at trucks until they honked their horns for us, and we were raucous and ridiculous. I wonder if we’re all thinking about that right now.
Fifteen
Mom collects fabric. She once made a pink sundress for my teddy bear and a wedding gown for my favorite doll and a wool coat for my stuffed cat because I was worried he was getting cold in the winter months. Those are things that happened, even though they don’t fit in with the Way Things Are Now.
We’re not allowed in the sewing room, but the door’s open and when we walk by it we see Mom’s in there. I wish I could say she’s fallen asleep in the chair or on the little couch she does the hand-stitching on. But that is not the case. She’s on the floor. Her legs are splayed. It is a terrible, sudden kind of sleep. She’s right in front of the sewing room closet, like she’d been pulling at the door and fell asleep from the effort.
I see her first. “Mom!” I exclaim, which brings Marla immediately to my side with Eleanor and Astrid not far behind.
“Oh,” Astrid says. “Oh. Oh.”
Eleanor puts two fingers on Mom’s neck and the fingers of her other hand on Mom’s wrist like she’s some kind of doctor, and I don’t think I’ll ever be as old and together and sure as Eleanor.
“Do we need to call 911?” I say. It seems like the right thing to say. Like maybe I can be good in this situation too, but Eleanor shakes her head, and I guess she already knows what’s going on.
“She’s napping. We’ll let her nap.”
“We should tell Dad,” Astrid says, but she’s stepping aside, away from the situation. She picks at a piece of floral wallpaper that’s starting to become unglued.
“No!” Marla says.
“Astrid, take the girls into my closet,” Eleanor says.
“Now?” Astrid says.
“Now.”
Eleanor is a boulder. She won’t even look our way. She’s wholly focused on Mom and her pulse and propping her up and checking the mug on the table to see what’s in it. We are useless, compared to her.
“We can go to the mountains,” Astrid says. She takes a diorama that’s in the sewing room, one she gave Mom, who loves mountains, allegedly.
I don’t know what Mom loves anymore. Not us, I don’t think.
I erase that thought as quickly as possible. Thank myself for not saying it out loud.
The mountains are nice. They shimmer into existence a few moments after we enter the closet, diorama in hand. For a moment, they’re transparent and not real, but they quickly become solid and real and enormous.
They are purple and covered in glitter. Exactly the kind of magical place I’ve been hoping to visit since I first went in the closet with the park diorama.
They sparkle hard.
They sparkle enough to make us laugh and wonder at the prettiness and want to stay in the closet all night.