“Can we come with you to get her?” Marla says when she’s all out of groans.
“I’m sleepy,” Astrid says, to no one in particular.
“She’s with the police,” Dad says. He speaks too low and too fast, the same way I do when I don’t really want Marla to hear what I’m saying to her.
“The police came?” Eleanor wraps her hand around the back of her neck, where I assume the sweat is the worst. I’m so distracted by taking inventory of my sisters I forget to recognize how I’m doing. Am I okay? Am I still laughing? Am I crying? Is my heart beating or breaking?
I’m laughing. Still. The laughs are bigger now. Audible and undisguisable.
“Silly, stop it!” Marla says. She’s crying and stomping her foot.
“The police came and got her. She was probably a little too, um, tired to be driving.”
“Tired,” Eleanor says.
“Your mom has had a really hard week,” Dad says. Marla nods, but the rest of us don’t respond at all. It doesn’t sound true. And Dad smiles that awful, trying-too-hard smile again.
“I think Mom’s really sick again,” I say. I can’t quite wring the laughter out of my voice entirely. But I try to sound serious. Everyone looks surprised I’m attempting to talk at all.
“She’s doing much better since we got here,” Dad says. “She went on a bike ride the other day! Didn’t you hear?”
I wait for one of my sisters to jump in, but none of them does. They look at the carpet and at the rosebud wallpaper, and I wonder how different our lives would be if the walls were beige instead of flowered.
“LilyLee’s mom goes to yoga every day and horseback riding with LilyLee every weekend and only ever sleeps at night,” I say. “LilyLee’s mom is taking her to Salem to see the witches, and they never have to move houses to help her feel better or anything.” I think about the postcard I’m going to get from LilyLee’s trip to Salem. Dad always said he’d take us there and tell us all the different witch stories in the world. He hasn’t.
“Silly,” he says, shaking his head and walking down the stairs, away from us. “You don’t understand.”
“Is it because of her sister?” I say. He comes back up. Eleanor looks confused. Marla mouths, Shut up. Dad clears his throat.
“I asked Mom not to talk about that,” Dad says. He looks at each of us, to see what we know. Eleanor and Astrid know nothing, so their faces tense and twist. “There’s no reason to know every sad thing in the world. And Mom doesn’t quite remember what happened correctly.”
“But where’d the sister go?” I say. “Mom says she’s stuck.”
Dad scratches his head like a gorilla. “She died, honey. A long, long time ago.”
“Is that why Mom’s so sad?” Marla asks, of course.
“What are you talking about?” Eleanor says. She’s never been the last to know anything, so she’s extra confused. “What sister?”
“You know how we’ve talked about ghost stories?” Dad says. He relaxes, figuring out a way to talk to us in his language. “Sometimes people are haunted. And ghosts aren’t white things in sheets. They’re the scary bits of the past that follow us around. You understand?”
Like this, I think. Like the way we’ll all carry this summer around forever. The way we’ll be haunted by Mom and her sickness and the twisty-turny way it unfolds.
“Mom’s haunted?” Marla says. Dad shakes his head and shrugs and nods, all in a row. I don’t know what it means.
Eleanor and Astrid probably have a billion questions, but no energy to ask them. And I’m pretty sure Dad’s wrong about the sister being dead and that he doesn’t know what I know—that Mom thinks her sister is caught in a closet. Now that we know about the magic closets, I know anything is possible.
Then Dad’s gone and Astrid’s looking for crayons to put in her diorama and we’re left waiting to see what happens next.
Not happily ever after at all.
I go to my room and they follow me. That has never happened before. I’m supposed to follow them.
I empty my closet of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” experiment and decide I’m stupid for thinking there was anything to it.
“You’re supposed to tell us everything you know,” Eleanor says.
“I tried,” I say.
“I wasn’t sure,” I say.
“Marla knew too,” I say.
I don’t say that I think Dad’s wrong. That I think the mysterious sister is caught in a closet. That Mom has been searching for her for weeks.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but Eleanor doesn’t reply, and Astrid gives the weakest smile that ever was, and Marla pulls her knees to her chest and cries.
Nineteen
It’s not long before I am desperate to go back into a closet.