We still don’t know how to get Marla out, after all that.
I’m scared we’ll forget her. I know time is running out, if what Astrid says is true. She’ll fade more the more time she’s in there.
I don’t want the three of us to be wandering from room to room, looking for our sister without knowing we are looking for our sister.
She’s one of us. We can’t pretend she was never here.
Dad is already starting to forget. He was made for forgetting, I think. He forgets the closet and the palace and the champagne river, I’m sure. He forgets what Mom has done to our family. He forgets where he put his keys. He forgets that he is a prince from a fairy tale.
He never forgets the happily-ever-after fairy tales, though. Those he always, always remembers.
I think when you are from a fairy story, you can only remember the things that are here in the real world. Once Marla is in the closet for more than a whole day, she disappears from his world.
The terrible forgetting starts at lunch. Dad comes home from work to have lunch with his girls and doesn’t ask about Marla. He does look confused, at least. He spends a lot of time craning his neck to get a good look at the front door and the stairs and the bathroom.
“Marla’s on a walk,” I say. “That’s why she’s not here.”
He squints at me.
“Okay,” he says carefully. “Okay, good. Walking’s good.” He gets lost in spreading mayonnaise on white bread, and I elbow Astrid so hard she hiccups.
“Marla might be gone for dinner, too,” Astrid tries. Eleanor shakes her head at us.
“Was she going to come over for dinner?” Dad says. The words hurt. I basically grab the sandwich out of his hands when he’s done assembling it. I eat it in exactly three bites and rush upstairs to sit outside Astrid’s closet. Palm to the door, I whisper for Marla to come out.
I don’t want to forget her too.
Thirty-Seven
Dad doesn’t set a place for Marla at dinner. He sits me and him on one side of the table, the twins on the other.
“Marla called and told you she wasn’t coming?” I say. I want him to remember. Eleanor slumps in her seat and starts shoveling overcooked peas into her mouth. We spent the entire day doing things to the hinges of Astrid’s closet door. We used screwdrivers and hammers and wrenches and even a drill. We used a lighter, thinking maybe we could melt the metal.
It didn’t matter. The closet door did not open.
We all know, but don’t want to know, that we can’t do anything to fix the situation. Marla has to want to come out, but every day she’s in there she’s farther away, less and less of the Marla we know.
“Marla,” Dad says, thoughtful and strange.
“Yeah. Marla,” I say, gesturing to the place where she isn’t.
“I don’t think I’ve heard from her,” he says. The words come out slow and questioning, like he knows he is supposed to know what I am asking about but actually he doesn’t understand at all.
“Don’t you think you, um, should?” I say. Astrid and Eleanor are silent. Astrid is peeling the skin off her chicken, and Eleanor has nearly finished eating already.
Dad stares at me. He moves his lips a little, trying to form the right word, the right sentence, but coming up with nothing.
Thirty-Eight
I read with Dad in the living room before bed, trying to craft the perfect way to tell him he is starting to forget his middle daughter and that he needs to get with it.
It is harder than you’d think, to phrase that right.
He eventually stands up and stretches. “I’m gonna hit the hay, Silly-Billy,” he says. His tall frame lumbers toward the staircase, but I can’t quite let him go.
“Dad?”
He turns to look at me over his shoulder. But instead his gaze catches on the row of framed photographs he hung on the wall when we moved in. There are four pictures, one of each of his daughters. School photos. The kind with accidentally bad hair and forced smiles and weird backgrounds. But Dad likes every picture of us. Always has.
His eyes linger on each picture, one by one. Mine: pigtails and ugly pink shirt. Eleanor: perfectly parted and combed hair, hint of lip gloss. Astrid: messy bun on top of her head and an enormous green turtleneck sweater. Marla: closed-mouth smile and the top of her gray dress.
Dad tilts his head. He points to the last picture but stops himself from saying anything.
“Marla looks good in that picture, right?” I say. I stand up, like that may somehow help him remember her. I’m tempted to shake him, thinking maybe the memories of his daughter are jammed up somewhere between his toes and his brain and I need to get them out.