I used to have to imagine what that would be like, to have someone watching over me. To close both eyes at night. When the custody battle happened, and our mother did start doing all those things for us, I still kept one eye open. And that was when I understood what Witt was trying to tell me. It wasn’t about the things he described. I know there are a lot of kids whose parents work all the time and have to do the things Emma and I did for ourselves. But they still close both eyes. It’s not the many things. It’s the one thing that’s behind the many things. I don’t even know what to call it. It didn’t matter that Mrs. Martin started doing our laundry and checking our homework, because she was only doing it for herself, for the case. It was not for us—that was the one thing that was still missing.
Emma didn’t seem bothered by this the way I was. She started wearing three outfits a day and throwing them on the floor of the laundry room. She wasted food so we ran out of things before the housekeeper was coming. One time she even poured out an entire gallon of milk, right down the drain. And she created stuff to do that required rides and waiting around. She joined the cast of a school play. She started playing field hockey again. She started a study group that met at the library.
She came to me one night the way she used to do, after our mother was asleep. She crawled into my bed, under the covers, and pressed her cheek against my cheek. I could feel her heart beating fast like she was excited, and I could feel her face smiling against my skin.
Did you see the look on her face when I told her I needed a ride to rehearsal at six and then a ride home at eight? Wait until she has to come to the show on both a Friday and Saturday night. She’ll miss the whole weekend at the club. And I signed her up to help with costumes!
Emma was making her pay, and it made her happy.
When it stops and she stops taking care of you, Cass, I’ll do it. You know that, right? I’ll always take care of you.
I felt my own heart beating faster then because even though I didn’t know if she actually would take care of me, if she would be able to even if she tried, she meant it with her whole heart.
I closed both my eyes that night.
Our father was not happy. He nearly went insane watching all this unfold. He would pace back and forth, his face bright red, talking to his lawyer on the phone, trying to explain that everything our mother was doing was a charade. He had driven us to school every morning. He had gone to the events, and gone alone. He had supervised our homework, coached our sports teams, watched movies with us on Saturday nights. He had moved out only to prevent fighting in front of us, and now he never got to see us. This woman from the court was coming into our lives, looking at one picture, a snapshot, and deciding our fate based on a fa?ade, a lie. She couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see all the other pictures taken on all the other days when Mrs. Martin hadn’t prettied us all up for the lens.
My mother used to hire a professional photographer every fall to take our portraits. He came all the way in from the city and charged not only for his time, but also for the black-and-white prints that would come to hang in white wooden frames on the walls of our hallway upstairs.
The hallway has a balcony on the other side, which opens to the foyer below. My mother liked that people could see from the foyer to the wooden railing that lined the balcony and then just above it to the wall of portraits. There were over thirty of them by the time Emma and I disappeared, starting from when we were born to that last fall when Emma was seventeen and I was fifteen.
I used to wonder what people thought when they saw those photos from the foyer, people who didn’t know us well enough to come upstairs, but could see our photos from the foyer as they were greeted by Mrs. Martin at the front door. The photos were so expensive and so beautiful—our faces always looked peaceful and angelic. Some of the worst fights between Emma and our mother came on the days of the photos. Every time the photographer came, Emma would refuse to wear what she was told or to put her hair back or to smile. You could not know that from just looking at them from below. And you would think that the person who went to all this trouble to pay for these pictures and frame them just right and hang them just so must cherish their subjects more than life itself.
That’s how I felt about the woman from the court. How she was seeing only the pictures that my mother had hung on the wall and drawing conclusions from them that were not even close to the truth. Just like the guests who caught glimpses of us from the foyer.
My father eventually conceded, settling the case and making us live with Mr. Martin and Hunter. The woman had recommended this to the court, and fighting her would mean another year in a legal battle, making me and Emma talk to more people and take all kinds of psychological tests. Our father said he would have to call witnesses at a trial, including friends and relatives, and try to get them to say bad things about Mrs. Martin and how the woman had told him that all of that would be very harmful to me and Emma. He said he was settling to save us from more pain. When he told me this, I wanted to scream at him, No! I want to fight! Lead me into battle and let me get bloody! He was our general and we were his soldiers and I, for one, was willing to die for the cause.
I would not learn until years later, after combing through my past with Witt, that what my father was really afraid of had nothing to do with me and Emma. He had become so upset about the affair and the divorce that he had started smoking pot again the way he did in high school. My mother had no proof, but she knew my father very well and she was very clever. Her lawyer threatened to file a motion to force my father to take a drug test. He surrendered the next week. Looking back, I think it would have led me to the same conclusion about my father, and that is that as much as I loved him, he was a weak man. I don’t think it matters that his weakness made him smoke pot to ease his pain rather than the fact that he was just weak. The result was the same for me and Emma.
The woman said to me, It can be a rude awakening to see the truth about your parents during a divorce. People will stoop to low levels just to punish their spouse for leaving them. I knew what she was implying—that our father was making up all these bad things about Mrs. Martin and these good things about himself because he wanted her to pay for cheating on him and leaving him. But because I knew the truth, because I knew what all the other pictures looked like—the ones that didn’t make it to the wall in our hallway, the ones that were never even taken at all—the rude awakening was not what she had said, but instead the realization that grown-ups can be wrong, they can be stupid and inept and lazy at their jobs, and that they won’t always believe you even when you are telling the truth. And when they have power over you, these stupid, inept people who can’t see what’s right in front of them, when they don’t believe you when you tell them, bad things can happen.