“You’re such a good mom,” I say. “You’re the best mom.” I lean against the bedroom door and kick my heels against it a little, wish I’d learned Morse code when the boys in my class were all super into it two years ago. I could call for help through the pounding of my feet.
“So ungrateful,” Mom says. Her mouth is turning down into its mean look, which I have seen from afar but never up close. These are the kinds of things Mom says to everyone, but never to me. This is the kind of conversation that always seems about to happen, but she’ll ask Eleanor or Dad or Astrid to take me to my room before it spirals out of control. This is the first time Mom hasn’t protected me from herself, and it hurts, makes me sick a little, but also reminds me of losing my first baby tooth or learning to read or getting on the bus for the first time. I’m joining my sisters. I’m growing up. They can’t deny it anymore.
“I expected so much more from you,” Mom goes on. “I’m so disappointed. Why do you think I’m like this? I never got what I wanted. You never give me what I want. You don’t care about anything or anyone but yourself.” She’s talking to me, but also to a place on the wall next to me, her eyes shifting back and forth. I don’t know if it’s more terrible when she’s looking right at me or when she’s lost track of me and is speaking to the wall. “You’re a terrible disappointment as a daughter.”
I can’t think of a way to escape, but Dad saves me before it gets more desperate. He’s on his way up the stairs.
“Gretchen!” he says, surprised at her words, I think, and maybe the swaying of her body. It looks like she’s on a ship, not stable ground.
I get it. We’re on rough waters.
“It’s fine,” Mom says with a slur, and I bet she doesn’t even know what she’s said, but I do and Dad does, and I have to wave my hand and shake my head and smile like it’s totally okay and we’re having some normal mother-daughter chat.
Mom starts yelling at Dad almost right away, and I should be relieved that he directed her away from me, but I don’t want her to be yelling at anyone.
When the yelling reaches the highest volume imaginable, the door to the twins’ bedroom finally cracks open, and a hand, Astrid’s, pulls me inside. The yelling is only moderately quieter behind the door, but my sisters huddle around me, and when I nestle my head into their arms and shoulders and close my eyes, I can almost block it out.
“Are you okay?” Astrid whispers right into my ear, so that I can admit only to her if I’m not.
“Has that ever happened with you and Mom before?” Eleanor asks, but she knows it hasn’t. She knows this is the day I have moved from special little Silly who needs protecting and turned into just another one of the girls.
It’s weird, how something can feel good and bad at the same time.
“What’d you do to upset her?” Marla says.
“I hate this house,” I say, which doesn’t answer any of them, exactly, but also answers all of them, I think.
Five
The curtains are drawn and the room is dark, except for a crack of light peeking through the bottom of Eleanor’s closet. Astrid and Eleanor picked out heavy navy curtains when they decorated their new room, and they almost never leave them open, so it’s night in here even when it’s daytime everywhere else. Astrid says she works better with just a few night-lights on, and Eleanor is almost never inside anyway. So the way the closet light breaks through the darkness right now is unmistakable. A cut in the night.
I know instantly that’s where their secrets are kept.
I guess closets are where we all keep our secrets. Dad keeps the books that are too adult for us to read in his closet. Astrid and Eleanor have always kept pictures of boys they like in their closets. In my closet in our old house I had a story I wrote about me being LilyLee’s sister and living with LilyLee’s family. Of course now there’s only other people’s discards in my closet, which is yet another reason to hate the New Hampshire house. I don’t even get a place to store my secrets.
Mom’s secrets must be in closets too. Maybe she keeps extra bottles in there or something.
“I want to go in,” I say, pointing to the line of light below their closet door.
“No!” Marla says, her voice cracking and desperate. A whole complicated series of looks are exchanged between the twins, and I understand that even if Marla was invited in before me, we’ll always be the younger ones and they’ll always have each other.
“She needs it too,” Astrid says to Eleanor. “Don’t you think?”