Marla doesn’t sound so much like she needs me in there anymore. She doesn’t sound like she wants me. She doesn’t even sound like Marla.
It reminds me of the way Mom gets sometimes. The terrible transition from normal to slower-than-normal to not-normal-at-all.
“It’s so dark and cloudy in here,” she says, after a rousing rendition of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” which is not at all season-appropriate, but at least we know the words. “It smells like sleep. And like burning wood. And it’s telling me to rest. So I’m gonna do that. You guys go do your thing. I can take a nice long nap in here.” I try the door again. I don’t like the way her voice has slowed down so much that it’s all distorted and wrong-sounding. I don’t like that she isn’t trying to get out, that she isn’t concerned.
“If she doesn’t want to get out, the closet won’t let her out,” Eleanor says. She’s right. It’s how the closets work. They give you what you want.
This is what Marla wants.
“It’s too early to fall asleep!” I say. “It’s morning! We can go to the lake!”
“It’s really okay. I don’t think it wants to let me out right now.”
“You can’t stay in the closet!” I say. But Eleanor has backed up, and so has Astrid. They aren’t yelling for Marla to come out. They aren’t pulling on the door.
“Shoot,” Eleanor says under her breath.
Astrid wipes at her eyes. She has tears in them. The pretty kind.
“Why aren’t you trying to get her out?” I say. “Let’s take down the door! Dad has tools and stuff, right? We can take it off the hinges.”
“We told you guys not to go in,” Eleanor says. She shakes her head. I am getting sick and tired of Eleanor shaking her head.
“Stop telling me all the ways I’ve messed up!” I say.
“You did mess up,” Eleanor says. “You’re eleven. What are you doing keeping secrets from us? You can’t ask to be treated like one of us, and then act like . . . some baby playing dress-up.” There’s zero inflection to her tone, so it feels weird to cry or yell back, when she’s so monotone.
I let my mouth open a tiny bit, enough to let the shock slip out, and I blink, blink, blink at her.
“Maybe it will open up after she sleeps,” Astrid says. She hiccups back a few tears. She holds Eleanor’s shoulder, like that might somehow keep Eleanor’s meanness back.
“Who would want to be stuck in that awful place?” I say, but secretly I’m wondering if I could decide to get stuck in my closet, on one of my flower-climbing, purple-sea-swimming, glowing-orb-chasing adventures.
I can’t stop thinking of the girl in the palace memory. Laurel, who is like me. Laurel, who is maybe stuck in the closet too. Laurel, who Dad says is dead but Mom says is stuck. Laurel, who loved the closets too much, maybe, like Marla.
We listen to the silence behind the closet door. We sit and listen to the way Marla’s not coming back right now. We watch one another stop trying to open the door. We watch one another giving up.
We try to play cards, but everyone loses.
We play the alphabet game, but I can’t think of a name that starts with P.
“Your own name,” Eleanor says.
“Oh. Yeah,” I say. I shrug. The game ends.
Astrid makes half a diorama. Eleanor reads a chapter of a book. I close my eyes and imagine everything working out, but it’s hard to think of what that would look like.
Hours pass. Doing nothing makes my sisters tired, and soon Eleanor is snoring, and Astrid is breathing heavily, and all I can hear is the ceiling fan and the sound of my heart beating.
I hope maybe Marla has a star inside the closet with her. Something warm and bright and strength-giving. Something that makes her feel hopeful and UnWorried. Something magical.
Thirty-Two
It’s hard to sleep tonight, with Marla trapped in the closet.
I keep thinking I hear her rustling around in there. I keep thinking that we could try some other way to get inside. I’ve seen criminals use clothes hangers and credit cards to magically unlock all kinds of doors and dead bolts and vaults on TV. So surely we can open a closet door with some combination of household objects.
We didn’t do enough, that much I’m sure of.
Dad opens jars with butter sometimes. He’ll try a tight lid for a few minutes, elbow bent, mouth all crooked with effort, and then he’ll grab a stick of butter and push it into the cracks to loosen it up.
“We should use butter on the door,” I say. I am sharing a bed with Astrid, whose legs are splayed like a starfish. Her foot is digging into my shin, and I am huddled into approximately one-sixth of her bed.
“Mmmm,” Astrid says. I don’t know how she sleeps at a time like this. Eleanor is not sleeping, so she’s the one who hears me.
“Butter, Silly?” she says. She has a night-light on next to her bed.
“Maybe the door is stuck like a jar gets stuck,” I say.
“It’s not like a jar,” Eleanor says. “It’s not a normal thing. It’s not some solvable thing. We can’t fix it.”