“Mom says we need to look out for you.” A fish swims in between my toes.
Mom’s always singling me out. “You’re too smart for your own good, little one,” she said only a few weeks ago. “We have to keep you a kid, okay? Let’s keep our Silly a kid.” She was talking to all my sisters, and Eleanor and Astrid nodded and rolled their eyes, but Marla truly hated it. I think she wanted someone to care about keeping her a kid too.
Whatever that means.
“I guess she’s not too concerned with protecting me anymore, huh?” I say. I can’t quite grasp the image of Mom from a few minutes ago. I know I thought the look on her face would stay with me forever—stony but hazy. Unfocused but forceful. Right this moment, though, I can’t pull up the image in my memory.
The goldfish slow and stroke my toes. A butterfly lands in my hair. It’s an old, forgotten feeling, like when my mother used to scratch my head as I fell asleep.
Eleanor looks at me. Hard. It feels like she’s trying to see if I’ve grown since the last time she looked at me.
She nods.
“We need this place,” she says. And for the first time, when she says “we,” it includes me.
Six
The closet door is still there, at the edge of the park, when we’re ready to leave. Waiting for us. Once it’s open, the park fades before disappearing completely.
I think I might be sunburned. Mom and Dad are asleep or quiet or whatever it is they are after a drink and a fight and a lot of slamming doors.
I need to tell my sisters about the weird comment Mom made, about having had a sister, but I have too many questions about the closet first.
“So none of the other closets do anything at all?” I say.
Astrid and Eleanor exchange a look. Marla clears her throat.
“Mine doesn’t do anything,” Marla says.
Astrid is silent.
“The other closets don’t work,” Eleanor says. “I told you that.”
Astrid stays silent.
“What about my closet?” I say.
“We can try it,” Astrid says.
“Maybe someday,” Eleanor says.
“It won’t work either,” Marla says.
“Who knows, now that we’re all together, maybe everything will work,” I say. “Like Astrid says.” I’m sort of dreamy-feeling from the park. My brain feels like it’s quilted or stuffed with down, pillowy and soft. Comfortable. I need it to last. I need my closet to work. I need to spend every afternoon in a new world in the closets, as strange and beautiful as today’s park.
Astrid must be right, I think. It’s what we get in exchange for a sick and sometimes mean mother. Sister-closet powers. It’s what we get instead of a family that has dinner together every night with vegetable sides and cloth napkins and super-easy conversations about how everyone’s day was.
“What kind of place are we going to visit next?” I say. My sisters all look tired. “LilyLee’s family goes on vacations in the French Riviera. Can we make it look like the French Riviera? I have a postcard, I can show you.” The postcard I have isn’t even that special. It’s a curve of sand hitting a bright blue ocean, and white sailboats dotting the water. You can see the algae beneath the surface, a darker shade of blue. Pretty but not spectacular. I collect postcards, so I know which ones are truly beautiful and which are sort of blah.
I love the name, though. The French Riviera. It’s a place where I could paint watercolors and drink drinks out of pineapples and eat little éclairs, which I know for sure are French.
“That’s not how we do it,” Marla says. She’s already pissed, I can tell. Everything sweet from our time in the closet is fading fast. She hates that I’m a part of it now. She hates that we are better as a foursome than they were as a threesome. “Maybe you should leave the diorama ideas to Astrid.”
“We can do so much better than France,” Astrid says. Her hair’s in her eyes, and she keeps having to pick it out. It’s long and fine and gets whiter and whiter the deeper we go into summer.
“You coming with me tonight?” Eleanor says, abandoning the conversation like it doesn’t matter at all, now that her secret boyfriend is obviously texting her.
“Where are we going?” I say. Eleanor laughs. Not meanly, but enough that I know she still thinks of me as a lesser being. Our being a team in the closet doesn’t matter out here, in the real world. She’s drawing a line, with me and Marla still on the stupid-little-sister side.
“I was talking to Astrid. We’re going out,” Eleanor says, her voice taking on this haughty tone she uses when she’s asking me to please clean up my stupid toys (even though I don’t have toys anymore), or when she’s explaining why eighth-grade math is way harder and more legitimate than fifth-grade math.