I think Marla hates that part of me too. They probably all do.
I have not had a chance to look at my star since early morning, and the effects are wearing off. I have a headache, and suddenly I’m hating eating with plastic forks and knives. I’m hating these new spices and the yellow of the curry and the red of the rice. I’m hating the sound of the television—Mom would never have let us watch this much—and the sick feeling in my stomach when I think too hard about the drowsiness of her voice on the phone today. When I think too hard about anything at all, to be honest.
Much later, when I should be asleep, I stay up reading different versions of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and looking for clues about my father. Some illustrations look a little like him, but none of them describe what he’s like or what to do if you find out your father’s from a fairy tale.
After midnight I hear Marla’s door squeak, the floor creak, and her footsteps traveling past the stairs, past my room, down the hallway. Toward the bad closet. I can practically feel the chill and the darkness and the pinch of whatever terrible creature might be buzzing around in there.
I listen to the way she sounds on her tiptoes, an almost not-sound that is really socks against carpet. I hear the almost not-click of the twins’ door opening. She is nearly perfect at doing it soundlessly, but not quite. I grip my sheets. My chest is tight and my fists are tighter, and I should definitely stop her before she goes in there. But instead I scrunch my toes so that my feet basically become fists too. I watch the curtains make waving shadows on the ceiling. I think about my star in the jewelry box across the room and picture it glowing at me, keeping me calm.
I hope that Astrid will wake up, but I know she’s a heavy sleeper and Marla is excellent at being stealthy and silent.
I do not follow Marla into the bedroom. I don’t save her from the closet.
I try to talk my body into leaving the bed, but I can’t. It’s stuck. A thousand pounds or so of fear are keeping me down.
It’s not like I didn’t know I was afraid of Astrid’s closet. I mean, obviously I am. Any sane person would be scared of that closet. But I didn’t realize I had the kind of paralyzing, gray-colored, dizzying fear that I used to only have for snakes and the shows Mom sometimes watches on TV about murderers who look like elementary school teachers.
I stay awake for an hour at least, waiting to hear Marla’s featherlight feet tiptoe back to her room.
I’m a terrible, terrible sister, for not going in there to stop her. Or join her. Or do something, ever, to help someone. Like, really. I’m the worst.
Thirty
The next morning, Dad makes pancakes, which is alarming since it’s Thursday and not Sunday at all.
“We’re going to visit your mother!” he announces. He puts a Mickey Mouse pancake on my plate, and what I think is supposed to be a dog pancake on Astrid’s plate. He manages a pretty good heart pancake for Eleanor, who got back early from “Jodi’s.” Dad seems unconcerned with everything but the shapes of the pancakes and Mom. He is always, always very concerned with Mom.
I wonder what would happen if I visited the memory version of him in Marla’s closet and told him all my worries. Would he be more helpful? Would he get it? Would he be a different kind of Dad, like LilyLee’s, who checks on her grades and asks a million questions when we go to the mall, and pulled me aside once when LilyLee was sad about another friend to ask if I could tell him what was going on because he was so worried.
“No, thank you,” I say. I take a bite of the Mickey Mouse pancake’s ear.
“That was an announcement, not a question, Silly,” Dad says. He keeps a smile on his face, but I am pretty sure there’s a frown hidden underneath.
“I can stay here with the girls,” Eleanor says, like she is forty and not Astrid’s twin.
“I’m not leaving you alone in the house,” Dad says. He laughs, to show how zany he thinks we’re being and that we are obviously not serious. “You all going nutty? Don’t you miss your mom?” Astrid shakes her head, but that’s only because she has forgotten to listen to the whole rest of the conversation. “You can go to the lake today while I get all the details settled,” he says. “We’re going to leave in a few days. None of you have ever seen that part of the country. It will be wonderful.”
I think about the Arizona postcards. The ridiculous amount of brown and tan and brownish tan. The prickly cactuses that seem to replace trees there.