I’m sleepy again, on command. The sight of her makes me tired.
The opposite is true for Marla, who comes to life when Mom’s around. She throws her arms around Mom’s middle and heaves out a hefty “MORNING!”
“Not now,” Mom says. She sort of flicks Marla away with her hand. Marla’s face goes from happy to an angry frown.
“I’m going upstairs,” Marla says to all of us and none of us. Eleanor and Astrid pop to attention and scamper after her.
“Can I come too?” I call after them. “Please?” The please is pathetic, and we all know it. Mom even winces on my behalf.
“Not right now,” Astrid says. “Maybe later, okay?”
But Eleanor shakes her head like later is totally not going to happen.
“Give me a hint about what you’re doing up there,” I say. I won’t follow them if they’ll only tell me a tiny bit, let me in on even a small sip of the secret.
Astrid pauses on the stairs. She likes riddles and clues and mystery. She thinks, all dreamy, her eyes rolled up to the ceiling.
“We’re here, but not here,” Astrid says. “We can go almost anywhere, but not move at all.” She leaps up the rest of the stairs.
I get up and half follow her, but stop myself before I’m too pathetic. I’m stranded, standing near the bottom of the stairs.
I picture monsters and dragons. I picture black holes and haunted rooms. I picture fairies and princes and treasure chests. I picture all the things I’ve always been told aren’t real, but must be.
Mom drags me back to reality, though. There is nothing more real and less magical than Mom’s dark moods.
“Your sisters should be nicer to you. I should have included my sister more,” Mom says, shaking her head at how quickly the girls ditched me.
“You don’t have a sister,” I say. Mom never talks about growing up, but I’m sure I would have heard about a sister if she’d had one.
“But I did,” she says. Her eyes are red and confused. Even as she says the words, she looks like she doesn’t believe them, and I know she’s not totally in her right mind at the moment. Usually in the mornings she’s pretty present, but not today.
“You did?” I say, one foot pointed in the direction of Astrid and Eleanor’s room, and the other foot pointed toward Mom, wanting to understand what she’s telling me.
“No. No, never mind,” Mom says. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I’m tired. I need some time alone, Silly.” It’s not the first time she’s said something strange and wrong, but it was so specific and odd, the claim that she has a sister, I have to tell Astrid and Eleanor and Marla.
We need to be in this together. They can’t leave me out here with Mom and her disconnected thoughts while they have some grand adventure.
Plus, I need to know what they’re doing up there. What secret thing the twins have been up to the last few summers, and that Marla is all of a sudden allowed to do too.
Four
Mom follows me upstairs. I thought she needed alone time, but sometimes Mom’s moods change so fast it’s hard to keep track, like she’s playing some complicated kind of Ping-Pong with herself and I’m watching, trying to keep score.
She opens the hall closet, steps in for a moment like she’s looking for towels or the vacuum cleaner, but comes out empty-handed.
“Mom? What’s in there?” I say. I’m hovering outside the twins’ room and would rather be in there, but not until Mom is tucked away in her bed for the rest of the day.
Mom runs her hands straight back through her hair. It is fine and unwashed, so the strands stick and don’t fall back into place. She sighs, a rickety sound that smells and sounds like cigarette smoke. She promised she would stop smoking.
“You think something’s wrong with me!” she says. Her lips wobble. Her hands shake. She doesn’t usually explode in my direction. I’m not important enough to explode at. “You think I’m a terrible mother. I don’t understand why you hate the family so much.”
“I didn’t mean it,” I say, but I’m stuck doing a strange math, the kind that is way too advanced for me. I don’t have any idea how we got from me asking what she’s doing to her being a terrible mother, but I’m squinting and counting on my fingers and speeding up my mind, trying to figure it out. “You’re a great mom! I love the family. I wanted to hang out with the girls. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need help with chores or anything. I didn’t mean to be rude.” I’m talking fast and loud and pretty much praying that my sisters will hear me and save me.
They don’t.
“I’ve done the best I can,” Mom says. She hangs her head and I imagine an enormous eraser, big enough to erase everything I’ve ever said that makes her feel this way.