“It’s a great idea. Come on, let’s.” She took a step closer to him. Her eyes were the exact color of good weed—like something you could fall inside to get high. “Please. You and me. Tomorrow night?” She made her eyes big, and even though he knew it was the kind of trick girls did, it worked: he felt his body responding, felt a sudden ache through his fingers, like they wanted to touch her all on their own.
He took a step away from her. “I’m babysitting my niece tomorrow,” he said. He was glad for the excuse—and also a bit disappointed.
Katie shrugged. “Can she keep a secret?”
Trenton felt himself relenting. “As well as any six-year-old.” He added: “She goes to bed early.”
Katie smiled. “So we’ll be alone,” she said. She stared at him for a second, and her smile faltered. “Hey, Trenton?”
“What?”
“I really am sorry. About the party last night. It’s complicated, with me.” She touched her fingers to her lips and then brought them to his cheek.
Trenton jerked away instinctively. He hated people touching his face.
“See you tomorrow,” she said, and then she climbed out the way she had come, through the window.
ALICE
Next to the bookshelf in the Blue Room is a place in the wall gouged at various heights: three foot ten, four feet three, four foot four.
This is where Trenton marked his growth, year by year, picking and chiseling with the Swiss army knife Richard bought him for his fifth birthday—briefly confiscated by his mother, who thought he was too young, but then commandeered by Minna from Caroline’s underwear drawer and returned to Trenton, as a bribe, to keep him from telling when he caught her smoking from the bedroom window.
This is how we grow: not up, but out, like trees—swelling to encompass all these stories, the promises and lies and bribes and habits.
Even now—especially now—it is hard to say what is true.
One thing I do know: it was Thomas’s idea to run away.
I ran away once when I was a little girl. That was the year I got a suitcase for Christmas, after I’d begged my parents for a briefcase like the kind my father took with him to work. I loved my father’s briefcase, with its dark velvet interior and recessed compartments, and places for his pipe, his eyeglasses, and his papers. It was as clean, as ordered, as regular as my father himself.
My suitcase was small and powder blue, with brass latches and a fleecy soft interior and little pockets for putting in whatever I liked. It wasn’t my father’s briefcase, but I liked it even better, especially the small lock that kept it closed and the accompanying key, which I wore like a necklace. Inside, I kept my prized possessions: three silver barrettes; a snow globe my grandparents had brought me from New York City, featuring a tiny bridge and even the miniature figure of a girl standing on it who looked just like me; a small china doll named Amelia, missing one arm, which I’d rescued from the trash after my older sister got tired of her.
For months I carried that suitcase with me everywhere, even though my sisters ridiculed me endlessly about it. I even insisted on taking it to school, and my teacher, Mrs. Hornsby, let me keep it by my desk, instead of among the jumble of overcoats and rubber boots and mittens dripping snow by the radiators in the back.
One night, I came out from the bath and found my sisters in my bedroom. They’d broken the lock, just snapped it in half, opened the suitcase, and laid everything out on the rug. Their fingerprints were all over the snow globe. Poor Amelia was discarded facedown on the floor. They were laughing hysterically.
I lunged at Olivia, my middle sister, first. She’d had bad pneumonia as a kid and was weaker than Delilah. I managed to wrestle her to the ground before she kneed me in the stomach and Delilah hauled me backward. She pinned me and sat on my chest.
“You know why Mom and Dad bought you that stupid suitcase, don’t you?” Delilah leaned forward so that her hair tented around me. Her face, mean and gloating, was all I could see. “They want you to run away.”
“You’re a liar.” I was doing a bad job of trying not to cry.
“They told us so,” Delilah said. “They never wanted you in the first place.”
I spit at her. She slapped my face, hard, and finally I couldn’t swallow back the tears anymore, and I started to cry, huge heaving sobs that nearly made me throw up. Later, they must have felt badly; Olivia made me warm milk with honey and Delilah braided and pinned my hair so it would curl in the morning. But I didn’t forgive them.
I had my revenge. The next day, a Sunday, I snuck away through the crowd congregating after church and circled back around to the stairs that led into the basement, where the church held socials and doled out soup on Easter. It was colder than I’d expected, and darker. For hours I shivered alone, listening to the distant echo of voices, praying both that I wouldn’t be discovered and that I would.
Eventually, when I couldn’t feel my fingers and my toes had gone numb in my boots, I went home. The sun had set, and I remember the strangeness of the streets in the dark: the gray crust of snow over everything, the rutted sidewalks, the Christmas displays behind vividly lit windows.
I saw my sisters even before I pushed open the gate: both of them pressed face and palm to our front windows, the glass fogging with their breath, watching for me. Behind them, my father was pacing and my mother was sitting on our small cream-and-yellow-striped sofa, white-faced, with her hands in her lap.
Standing in the dark, knowing that I would go inside and everyone would fuss over me, was one of the happiest moments of my life. It was like staring into a snow globe and knowing I could shrink down and pass through the glass, that we would all remain forever suspended, safe, even as the world continued, dark and vast, outside our little boundary.
My sisters squeezed me until I thought my breath would run out. My mother cried and called me darling even as my father made me lie over his legs so he could spank me. I went to bed with a backside red as an apple, but my mother brought me soup so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia, and Olivia and Delilah piled in bed with me and read from my favorite book, The Wind in the Willows.
Thomas and I should have had an ending like that. We were to take his car to New York City, and from there a bus to Chicago, where Thomas had a cousin who would help us get set up. I imagined several jewel-colored rooms filled with books, a fire in the grate, and snow falling softly on dark streets outside our windows. I imagined lying with Thomas under a blanket filled with down, talking late into the night, waking up with the tips of our noses cold and the windows patterned with frost.
I imagined that we would be happy together, that together, we would be home.