Being angry with Dad turns into being worried about Mom, and that turns into this gray-colored anxiety that replaces all the blood and air in me. Like I’m filled with cold, shivering sludge.
“Is your diorama done?” I ask Astrid. Her door is partially open, and she’s cross-legged on the floor with glue and sunflower seeds and felt and pipe cleaners and this tiny turquoise elephant I’d forgotten we each had from Christmas stockings a few years ago.
“Not yet. We need an extra-good one,” she says.
“I really didn’t know anything about Mom’s sister,” I say. “You know sometimes she says things, and she said it when she wasn’t feeling well, and I thought maybe it wasn’t—”
“Everything out here is so, so sad,” Astrid says, cutting me off. “Maybe we don’t need to know anything else about Mom and Mom’s life and stuff. I’d rather play with the closets.”
“Me too,” I say, but it’s not quite true, and if I can’t be honest around Astrid, I can’t be honest around anyone. “Sometimes.”
I crane my neck to see if Eleanor’s in there with Astrid, but she’s not.
“Eleanor’s getting ice cream?” I say. Astrid wipes something away from her eye—an eyelash? A tear? I can’t tell—and nods. I should have guessed.
I picture Eleanor with a cup of chocolate chip and her not-that-cute, not-that-secret boyfriend, and I think I get it. It’s like a closet too. Being in love is probably a place that’s far away from this place—sweeter and more romantic and her own.
And I’d bet anything that for a time, being a twin was sort of like a closet too. A private kind of magic all their own. Maybe that’s why Astrid and Eleanor don’t seem as in tune with the closets as Marla and me. They don’t need them as desperately.
“This diorama’s going to be amazing,” Astrid says. “Better than a vacation.”
“Of course,” I say. We’re quiet for long enough to hear Marla still groaning in the next room. “Hurry up with it, okay?”
I think we both know how quickly everything’s changing. A little bit more shifts every day. Every day Eleanor stays with her secret boyfriend a few minutes longer and Mom does something a little stranger and Marla gets a little grumpier.
Another thing I think might be true: every day Marla’s wrist turns a new color. Every day she adds another bangle to her pile of bracelets. Things we’ve won at arcades and carnivals and gotten as treats in goody bags and bought at the mall and gotten as stocking stuffers. Bracelets I’ve never seen her wear before.
“I’m scared,” I say. It feels good to hear it out loud.
“We won’t lose Eleanor,” Astrid says. “That guy’s not half as cute as Henry.”
I don’t know how to say I’m more scared of losing Mom. I leave Astrid so that she can perfect our next diorama, and I wander the house looking for solutions.
There’s a pile of fabric in the sewing room, next to the sewing machine. I go through all of it, and find something dark blue and velvety. I think it was going to be for Astrid’s wizard costume last Halloween, but Mom was really sick in the fall, so she didn’t make costumes for any of us. We had to get store-bought.
I don’t know why the fabric is out here now, but I know it’s not because Mom was getting a head start on this year’s costumes.
The fabric is amazing, and Astrid would have loved it slung over her back for Halloween, but I can use it for something even better now. There are yards upon yards of it, and I lug it all to my closet. I hang it from the bar and the hooks and place it on the ground. The closet is darker and softer by the time I’m done.
I look around my room for more things to add. I stick plain metal and yellow and purple thumbtacks into the velvet. I have a mobile of the planets and an inflatable globe that I bring inside. Dad has this Astroturf he uses to practice his golf game indoors: a strip of fake green grass, and I sneak into his office to borrow that too. It fits pretty well. For good measure I throw pink pipe cleaners onto the fake grass and twist a few of them around the clothing rod above my head.
It doesn’t look pretty. It looks the way a lot of my craft projects look. I don’t have Astrid’s skill at making the ordinary look extraordinary. I don’t have her eye for detail. I don’t glue things with care. I almost don’t want to close the closet door. I don’t want to feel the sink of disappointment at my sloppiness. I don’t want it to be confirmed how messy and uncoordinated I am. How badly I need my sister’s supervision.
I should wait for Astrid to make a perfect diorama, but I need to feel okay now. I can’t wait.
I step inside. The door clicks shut and I squeeze my eyes. Squeeze myself.
When minutes have passed and I can’t stand the suspense any longer, I let my eyes open.
It’s night in the closet. It’s a velvety, navy-blue night.