I don’t eat dinner. I don’t sleep.
I have to wake Marla up in the morning. I shift around in the bed a lot, after a whole sleepless night here, and clear my throat, and “accidentally” throw my arm into her stomach.
“Oh, sorry,” I say when she opens her eyes. There’s a brief second of her trying to remember why I’m there, and then she sort of shakes her head like it needs to be cleared out. “You feeling better?” I get out of bed right away. Marla doesn’t smell great in the mornings, and the whole room feels small and hot, all close and raw and in need of an open window and a lit candle.
Marla doesn’t open her windows or have a collection of sweet-smelling candles in her room.
“Better?” she says like she doesn’t understand my question. She scrunches her nose. She must smell and feel how rotten her room is right now too. “Let’s get breakfast. You want to go get something? I bet no one’s making anything, but we could grab bagels down the street.” Marla and I have never gone to the bagel shop together. That’s something I used to do with Mom when we were awake before everyone else, back when she was doing well. It was a summer tradition, almost better than the pancakes and bacon on Sundays.
As far as I know, Marla doesn’t even like bagels.
“No more bad closet, right? You saw how we almost got stuck?” I’m hanging out near her door, ready to leave as soon as she confirms that she is not crazy. It sounds like Dad is awake. I can hear folky guitar music playing on his extra-special, don’t-ever-touch-them speakers.
Marla shrugs.
I’m panicking. It doesn’t matter what Dad says. I know Mom’s sister got stuck. I know we could all get stuck. I know the closet was writing us a warning.
“I like it in there,” Marla says. “Maybe Mom’s sister liked it in there too. Maybe Mom would have liked to stay in there. She doesn’t seem that happy out here.” Marla doesn’t look scared. She doesn’t look sick anymore either, or sleepy, or angry, or any of the ways I’m used to Marla looking.
“You need to be scared,” I say. I’m afraid if I say too much, she will cut me off entirely, but what I want to do is yell at her about safety and insanity and closets and locked doors that never open.
Marla looks at me. It is a hard stare. The kind that doesn’t budge, doesn’t blink. It is a stare I can feel from my burning face to my tingling toes. I’m not sure what she’s looking for, what assessment she’s coming up with, but she doesn’t say anything else on the subject.
“Bagels,” she says instead, just when I think the stare might actually suffocate me. “We definitely need bagels. You like that blueberry cream cheese, right?”
“Right,” I say. Marla nods, like we’ve solved everything, and pushes past me to open the door the rest of the way.
Everyone else is already downstairs. Astrid and Eleanor are opening and closing the fridge like it’s a magic trick, where every time you look in again you might find something new. Dad is looking at his paper but flips the pages so quickly I’m not sure he’s actually reading it. They are all pajamaed, with fleece jackets unzipped but on, since the door to the porch is wide open and the New Hampshire morning chill is intense today. It’s an immediate reminder that it won’t be summer forever, that fall is running right behind and will catch up someday soon.
“We’re getting bagels!” Marla says. Her voice is too loud for the morning, and more important, too loud to be coming out of Marla. Dad jumps in his chair. The paper makes a startled, rattling sound. Eleanor and Astrid slam the refrigerator door shut again and spin toward us.
“How nice!” Dad says when he recovers his voice. He smiles and looks vaguely proud, like he has somehow brought his daughters closer together in our time of crisis. “You should go get some money from Mom’s drawer! Wouldn’t that be nice? Like she’s buying them for us. She would love that.” Mom has a drawer in the kitchen where she throws dollar bills that were shoved in pockets or left on the counter. I hate that one of the only things that might be good about this morning—a hot bagel with blueberry cream cheese—is going to be taken over by Mom, or by Not-Mom, the Mom who exists only in Dad’s head.
“I’ve got it,” I say, so that Mom’s not the one buying. “Allowance.” Dad crinkles his eyes in confusion. He’s probably not sure whether to tell me how nice that is, or to insist that we use Mom’s money so we don’t forget for a minute that she exists.