We lie beneath them, in their shadows. If we were in my closet, I’d want to climb them, I’d want to go on an adventure on their glittering slopes. But Eleanor’s closet is for feeling at home. Ladybugs swarm our knees and give us tiny ladybug kisses. An owl with huge eyes settles on a rock nearby. He doesn’t squawk or flap or anything. He watches.
It is weird to think of an owl being sort of like a parent, so I don’t say it out loud, but that’s probably what I need, so it’s what the closet is providing.
“Let’s stay here,” I say
“Maybe we really should,” Astrid says. I had expected her to say no.
“Eleanor would hate it.” I feel like I should stand up for Eleanor, after what I did to her today.
“Eleanor doesn’t want to be one of us,” Astrid says. She doesn’t take her eyes from the top of the mountain, a place that glints in the sun.
My stomach turns and wails. “We should check on Mom,” I say. “We should check on Eleanor. She shouldn’t be doing that alone. We shouldn’t be in here while she’s out there. She’s fourteen. She’s not a doctor.” I’m scared for her. We are making so many mistakes.
Astrid looks farther up, past the mountaintop. Far, far away.
“Don’t you think Mom would want to see this?” Marla whispers. Astrid is so distracted watching strange yellow clouds bounce in the sky that she doesn’t react.
“Sure,” I say, but I don’t know what Mom likes or wants.
“I’m going to bring a little bit of the dirt out,” Marla says. “Show her how it sparkles. I won’t tell her where it’s from. Yet. But she probably needs to see something really beautiful right now. I think it will help.”
“Maybe?” I can’t imagine a handful of dirt causing any real trouble, so I keep my mouth closed and let her do it.
“We could stay,” Astrid says. “I meant it, earlier. Maybe it would actually be better for us.”
“Better to never go back to the real world?” Marla says. Her voice wobbles.
“They’d forget us after a while,” Astrid goes on. “We’ve noticed that if we stay for a long time, we sort of . . . fade. Like, once Eleanor went in by herself in the morning, and by dinnertime Mom and Dad seemed foggy about her. Like they couldn’t quite think of her name, and they didn’t ask where she was.”
“That sounds terrifying,” I say.
She shrugs, like a slow fade away from everyone’s memory is no big deal. “Yeah, I mean, sort of. Yeah,” Astrid says, like I’m not understanding something. Marla doesn’t say anything at all, and that’s even worse. “It’s nice, though, to think you could disappear for a while. And when Eleanor came back out, it was fine.” Astrid is so pale and spacey anyway, she’s always been half faded. She’s never fully there.
“I don’t want to fade away,” I say. I touch Astrid’s shoulder and she clicks back into herself, the moment over. She shakes her head, undoing some kind of dizziness that was in her brain, and I dig my fingers into her arm to keep her here, unfaded. Marla clings to the scoop of dirt that she thinks will cure Mom.
“Yeah, of course,” Astrid says. “Me neither. Let’s go help Eleanor. You’re right. Of course you’re right.”
When we step out of the closet, Marla opens her hand to make sure the rocky dirt kept its magic.
It didn’t.
Her hand is empty. The diorama’s intact and simply a diorama again. The world is magic-less and Marla’s face is hopeless, like she really thought Mom was going to be cured by a pile of glittering dirt.
I’m starting to think Mom’s not going to be cured by anything at all.
“I’ll think of something else,” Marla says. “She’ll be okay.”
“We’ll be okay,” Astrid says.
I swallow nothing, hard.
Sixteen
Eleanor is under her covers. All the way under. It’s a signal that we shouldn’t ask her what happened.
The sewing room door is closed. So is our parents’ bedroom door. It must have gone badly, while we were at the mountain, letting Eleanor deal with it all by herself. No wonder she wants to pretend we don’t exist.
I fall asleep quickly, once I’m in bed. I’m light-headed after the closet, the memory of Mom asleep on the floor and Marla’s disappointment fading into nothingness.
Mom’s still sleeping in the morning when I get up.
Dad’s hunched over some huge book in the never-used dining room. “I’m reading about demons,” he says.
“Demons?” I sit on one of the straight-backed chairs and look around the bottom floor of the house, as far as I can see from here, for signs that my sisters are awake and about. I think they’re awake, but right now they’re nowhere to be found.
“And deals with the devil. And tortured souls. And witches,” Dad says. “Anything that makes good things go bad.”
“Why?” I think it’s because he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with Mom too, but Dad mumbles something about his upcoming semester at the university and some unit he’s going to do, and we don’t end up having a real conversation.
“Stories are the most important, useful things we have to understand the world around us,” Dad says finally. This he makes eye contact on, and I wonder if he could be right.
“Will you tell me more about ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’?” I say.