I get up to try again and Astrid wakes up with a groan.
“Please stop doing that,” Eleanor says while I rattle the doorknob. I can’t hear Marla anymore. There’s no snoring. No shuffling. No rustling.
“It might change,” I say, because it has to be true. “It has to open eventually. Marla will miss us. She’ll want to come back.”
“The closet in the sewing room. That’s probably where Laurel’s stuck. That’s why Mom doesn’t want us trying to go in. That’s why it’s always locked and Mom’s always in there drinking,” Astrid says. For once my sisters reached the same conclusions as me, and now they are saying the worst things in the world, the most unimaginable realities.
In a few hours Dad will wake up, and eventually he will not believe us when we say Marla is at a friend’s house. Because eventually he will remember that Marla doesn’t really have any friends.
Or he won’t remember her at all, I think. I’d almost forgotten what Astrid said before, about the time Eleanor stayed too long in the closet and she started to fade from memory. We have to get Marla out before that happens. Something like a ticking time bomb sets off in my chest, and I whir into panic.
“Maybe we need to tell Mom,” Eleanor says. “Maybe she knows how to get Marla out.”
“Mom’s the reason this is happening,” Astrid says, and I’ve never heard her sound so bitter and mad. I never would have guessed Astrid would be the one to get so angry at Mom. All of Astrid’s disappearing into different rooms and humming little tunes to herself during fights and losing herself in dioramas and paintings and her own imagination seemed sweet and Astrid-ish. But I guess she was storing up all this rocky feeling.
“If Mom knew what to do, she’d get her sister out. I don’t think Mom even remembers,” I say.
“That’s probably where she preferred to stay,” Astrid says. Something’s been set off in her, and she’s practically a brand-new person. “Mom was probably mean to her too. Maybe I’ll stay inside my own closet, and there will someday be a whole house of locked closets with little girls stuck inside, trying to avoid Mom.”
Angry Astrid is awful.
“Maybe we should tell Dad; he’s the one who’s here,” I say.
“Do you really think Dad could handle it?” Astrid says. “He’s barely holding it together now. And Mom’s doing well in Arizona. What if we told her and she got sicker? No. Marla’s coming out. I’m positive. I know Marla. She’ll come out and we don’t have to worry Dad and things won’t keep getting worse.” Astrid’s eyes fill with tears. She believes what she’s saying, I think, but only barely.
“We have to do something,” I say.
“Have Mom and Dad ever really helped make anything better?” Astrid says. “We’re stronger without them right now.” Her voice falls apart on the last sentence. Falters on the awful trueness of it. “We can do this. Marla will come out. We’re sisters. She wouldn’t leave us.”
“What if Marla never wants to come back to all this?” I say. I’m gesturing to everything—to the room, to us, to Mom not being here and Dad not knowing what to do. I gesture to the fact that we have a ceiling fan instead of an air conditioner and that we moved to New Hampshire for a mom who’s not here anyway. To the way even pancakes seem sad lately. Of course Marla chose a closet full of magic over us.
I wouldn’t mind returning the star to the closet, I think, and staying there with it. The star and the closet are the only things that help.
I tell my mind to stop thinking those thoughts. We can’t give up.
“There’s one more thing we can try,” I say.
Thirty-Three
The three of us end up in Marla’s room in the middle of the night, in a straight line, looking at the closet door.
“Marla’s closet doesn’t work, Silly,” Eleanor says. She is trying to sound nice but mostly sounds like she needs about a week to herself and a pile of chocolate-chip pancakes.
I open the closet door. It’s pointless to argue when we can go inside and see for ourselves.
“This is the memory closet,” I say. Astrid’s shaking a little, because she knows I wouldn’t bring them here for no reason.
I close the door behind us and the closet shifts immediately this time, like it knows how dire the circumstances are, how desperately I need it to come through for me. We are transported directly to the palace. Chandeliers. Marble floors. Violins.
“Oh,” Astrid says. “Oh wow.” Her eyes are so big they take up her whole face, pretty much. Eleanor sweats next to her. Her fingers tremble.
“But this closet doesn’t work,” Eleanor says, not able to give it up.
“Marla got it to work. Wait. Wait for it. This isn’t the big thing,” I say. Which sounds ridiculous, because of course this is a huge thing. It is a strange, strange day when a closet turning into a palace is not the strangest thing happening.