“Mom.”
“I want you to tell me about the lake,” she says. “And LilyLee. And what you have been drawing and writing and watching and listening to. I want to know who is winning the most often at Monopoly and which of your sisters you are angry at today and whether or not you’ve made any new friends, and . . .” Mom’s getting kind of breathless at this point, and she’s run out of things to say or maybe is waiting for me to break in and start gossiping away, but that’s not why I took the phone from Dad.
“We went into Marla’s closet. And saw things. We’ve been seeing things. And I need to know if Laurel is really dead or if she’s stuck. And how she got stuck. And I understand why you’re so sad and we want to help you, but I’m not sure how. But Marla thinks she knows. Would you want Laurel back, if we could bring her? Is that what we’re supposed to do?” I haven’t said this much to Mom in months.
“Marla’s closet . . . ,” she says, part dreamy, part confused. “You know, that was my closet when I was little.” I feel the cusp of her believing or maybe remembering, but then it pulls away. It’s a wave in an ocean: lapping my feet one moment, drifting away, lost forever the next. “Is that a new game you’re playing?” There’s a flutter of sound in the background, and the connection gets fuzzy.
“No! The closet!” I yell, bringing my mouth close to the phone. “We see things in there! Things I don’t understand!”
“You’re not in my closet, are you? Not the closet in the sewing room?” Mom sounds panicked. “That one’s locked, Silly. You can’t go in there, okay? No going in the sewing room. I’ve always told you that.” Her voice shakes. I can hear other patients in the background asking her to get off the phone. They only have a few minutes of phone time a day, since they share the one hallway phone after their cell phones are taken away. I guess those are the types of things I’m usually trying to forget.
“You’re not listening!” I say. Marla has appeared by my side. I hadn’t noticed her coming down the stairs. Eleanor and Astrid are there too. All of them, suddenly, pulling at my elbow, at my hand, at my fingers, trying to get the phone away from me.
“What are you doing?” Eleanor whispers, pinching the skin of my arm so hard I almost do drop the phone.
“Mom. I know you know what I’m talking about. ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses.’ The magical closets. The bad closet. Your sister. What do we do?” I say, trying to hold on to the phone while my sisters wrestle me to the ground.
Marla manages to get the phone out of my hands, and she runs to stand on the coffee table while she distracts Mom with talk of the raccoons that have been digging into our garage late at night and the color she wants to paint her room when Mom gets back. It must work, or Mom’s phone time runs out, or Marla has wandered into a spot without cell service, because soon Marla’s off the table, and I’m still on the ground, and everyone’s yelling at me.
“What were you thinking, telling her that?” Marla says.
“She’s confused. You can’t tell her that stuff now. She’s, like, on medicine. The kind you were on when you broke your ankle. The loopy, weird kind,” Eleanor says, shaking her head.
“You probably freaked her out!” Astrid says. “You freaked us out!”
“You can’t make decisions without us. We’re doing this together. You can’t . . . we brought you in because we trusted you. . . .” Eleanor gets up and starts pacing the room. I’m almost surprised Dad hasn’t come back in from the porch, but that’s what he’s like lately. He wouldn’t notice if we burned the house down, probably. He’s not going to notice some loud voices and bumping bodies.
Eleanor lets out an end-of-the-world, end-of-her-patience sigh. It is long and loud and smells like orange juice and toothpaste.
“I think we should stay away from the closets altogether,” she says at last.
“Stay away!?” I can’t control the screech in my voice. The last thing we need to do is stay away. We need to go in more, to learn more, to figure it all out.
“Of course you want to stay away,” Marla says.
Eleanor crosses her arms over her chest and rolls her eyes. “Everyone calm down. We can go to the lake when we’re sad. Or watch movies. Or make sundaes. We don’t need the closets.”
“Now that you have your secret boyfriend you don’t need them,” I say. I’m so sick of Eleanor and the way she wants to control everything but also not be part of anything. I can’t stand the new way she dresses. The happy way she practically skips out of the house to see him. Her cell phone strapped to her hand at all times like a security blanket. “You’re in love,” I say. “You don’t need tulips growing from the sky. You have a boyfriend. You don’t need closets. Or us.”