Jenny, on the bed, ten years old, her reddish hair gilded by the late afternoon. Her treasured gingham skirt—the one she had rushed to in the store, buried her face in and begged for—pushed up in the most hideous way, crumpled like dead things are. Owen’s hand over hers, her freckled knuckles lacking their typical pink, his face dropping onto hers like a hammer onto a wall, the noises like kissing but also not, as though something were being excavated. Edith stood there absorbing the unclean smell, the color of Jenny’s face made wild and blotched, the twitching mobile of cutout trees hanging above her for which she was already too old.
Edith had not yelled, or rushed over to the bed and lifted her son from his place on her daughter, or beat her fist on the door to protest the quiet in a room meant to be filled with the babble of children. She gave an insignificant sound, one as echoless and quickly spent as that of a bird leaving a fence. Year after year she would remember this, how opening the door had let in a crack of hall light that divided her vision of her children, its beam separating the boy from the girl; how Owen had simply slipped off the bed and past her where she stood in the doorway. Edith went to Jenny on the bed and pulled down the hem of her skirt, patted the pleats in place, and held her, determined, like algae clinging to a sea-beaten rock.
Back in the kitchen, there was a water-dappled bunch of spinach in the sink, and chicken defrosting on the counter, and breadcrumbs to coat it in, and cornbread batter to mix, but Edith couldn’t bring herself to the task of preparation. Her attempts at the small and precise work of it failed, and that evening she and her family went out to eat. She slid into the diner’s red vinyl booth after her daughter and gripped the overstuffed cushion under the table while Declan told a long and familiar story, pausing to laugh and stroke his son’s hair. Appetizers in red-checked waxy sheets and Coca-Colas with paper straws and hamburgers and desserts appeared and vanished, and they all drove home in her husband’s bouncy station wagon, and only after all this did she tell him.
He dismissed it outright, even laughed. “But Owen’s younger,” he said. He told her that children learn and play in all kinds of ways, and that possibly, probably, she had just stumbled in at the wrong minute. “What are you accusing him of, exactly? Kissing his sister? Aren’t you always worried about them getting along? They’re our children, honey,” he said. “Remember? We made them. They can’t be too bad.” And he winked, and kissed her forehead. When she didn’t loosen, stayed tense and wouldn’t turn to him with her normal happy sigh after he snuffed the tobacco light of the standing lamp, he returned to her comfort. “Edith,” Declan said, in his thick accent that seemed to brighten dark subject matter, “what was Jenny doing when you walked in? Didn’t you say yourself she was still? Didn’t you say she wasn’t even crying?” In the dark, Edith nodded, rolled over to think under the scant light seeping in from the street. She reasoned herself away from worry and back to it, the flight of her thoughts as panicked as bugs moving towards brightness. It was true that Jenny hadn’t been giving any of her brother’s affection back, and also true that she was a child who lived most hours deep inside herself. Edith had visited her at school, watched her blinking on the periphery, untouched by offers of jump rope or jacks, content to balance on the beam that divided the playground’s concrete and sand, one foot raised a few inches, her arms spread.
Edith spent the remaining years with Jenny in pursuit of understanding. She accompanied her on long walks, let her lead the way through industrial areas and under overpasses, stupefied by the hours her child could spend entertained in this way. She helped her build her collection of buttons, the vivid jars that spread on Jenny’s windowsill and that she fixated on before falling asleep. She took her to films, felt no greater joy than when she heard Jenny gasp at the lush colors of Douglas Sirk. Though it gnawed at her, the question of what had happened in that room, that Jenny and Owen remained as distant as passengers on the same train, there were comforts, also: Jenny perched on the toilet, watching Declan as he shaved, transfixed. The sudden, unrelenting pressure of Jenny’s sharp forehead on the small of her back while she stood on the subway or chopped vegetables, a way of saying hello. When these reassurances arrived, brief as they were, she leaned into them, rested there.