“Get your sister a sweater,” my mother tells me. “Take whichever ones you see first; it doesn’t matter.” Her voice is clipped and forced—the strain, I will think later, of trying to hold one more minute when it has already held too long.
The house mushrooms around me into a shadow. In the dark, all I can hear is the same old empty ghost-creaks the walls always make, the sound of them settling down into time, and the constant whir of the attic fan, its metal shutters opening and closing at the top of the stairs. I never go up those stairs alone in the dark. I make sure of that. Nights that we have dinner in the kitchen and one of the other kids is using the bathroom there and my mother tells me to go use the one upstairs, I walk out of the kitchen and stand quietly in the dark in the dining room, count slowly to forty, and then come back in. Sometimes I stomp my feet louder and then softer and then louder again, to mimic the coming and going. Sometimes when I return to the white kitchen table, she looks at me and says, “That was quick.” Then I wait longer the next time. I just can’t tell her why I can’t go upstairs.
A few years from now, in fifth grade, I will sit in the school counselor’s room. It will be a routine meeting, one done in pairs arranged by the alphabet, and with me in the room will be one of the popular boys: tall, lithe, and tan, able to whip his foot just right into a soccer ball, sending it soaring.
“Are you excited to move to the middle school next year?” the counselor will ask.
The boy will look at her like she’s crazy. He already knows he’s in his most popular place.
“I’m excited,” I pipe up. “There will be so many kids.”
She smiles at me.
“I’ll be able to disappear,” I say.
To disappear is what I dream whenever my grandfather sits down at the edge of my bed. His brown eyes look into mine, then he contorts his face to spit his teeth into the palm of his hand. He holds them out to me. The teeth glisten like a sea creature. He grins, his mouth suddenly a rim of wet pink with a black sopped hole in the middle. “See,” he says, though he has shown me this so many times before, “I’m a witch. Don’t forget. If you tell I’ll always come find you. Always. Even after I’m dead.”
I turn my head away and fix my eyes on the yellow skirt of a doll that is also a lamp. Its body illuminates the skirt, dissolving it into a glow of radiant yellow. It burns in the dark room, and as he puts the false teeth on my nightstand, brings his hand to the edge of my nightgown, and lifts the cloth from my suddenly cold legs, I stare into the yellow and will myself into flame, into dissolution. His hand travels up my leg. His other hand undoes his zipper. I stare at the light so hard that around me the air splinters. I feel him tug my underwear down. I feel his fingers. The air splits into molecules. It is cold between my legs again—his hand has moved—and then his hand is back, gripping a thick part of him. He holds my legs apart. He rubs himself against me.
Around me, the molecules spin. I feel myself break apart with them.
I still hate the color yellow.
*
But as a child, standing barefoot in the dark dining room as, outside, the summer night slowly loses its glow, I am more afraid of what my mother will say. So I go.
I rush up the steps, trying to tune my ears away from the creaks of my climb. I will myself to listen to the fan instead of the stairs. The fan’s shutters mouth a slow roar, its breath a cold vacuum beneath. My little sister’s bedroom has the feel of an attic, the ceiling slanted; it’s really a hallway. I’ll have to go through hers to reach mine. The same way my grandfather does when he comes upstairs at night. On her dresser there’s a fuzzy sweater of baby-chick yellow, its arms folded behind it like wings. I stop. The feeling of staring at it—its pale yellow in the dark, my willing my body to be still and empty—will last forever. Then I decide: I’ll tell my mother I didn’t see a sweater at first. I’ll tell her I had to search. Behind me is Elize’s toddler bed. I can feel the idea of that bed pressing against my back. The knowledge that he, too, stands here. The times I’ve walked into my sister’s room and seen him standing over her. I struggle with my mind to go blank.
Then I’ve got to run.
From my own bedroom, I snatch a blue sweater, my favorite color. Back through her bedroom, under the fan, down the steps. I fly. I come to a halt in the dark dining room, the wood-slat floor cool and smooth beneath my feet. My body still. In the quiet my breath thuds as loud as the fan.
Stalling, still stalling.
Then I walk outside.
When I step onto the side porch my mother spots me and waves. “What took you so long?” she calls. “Come sit down!” After the smooth floor the grass feels sharp. It prickles against my feet, the bright outside light coming at me from a place far away. I slide onto the splintered wood of the bench and hand my sister the soft fluff of her sweater. I am in my body but not here, not really.
“Your father and I have something to tell you all,” she says.
This can’t be about my grandfather. She can’t know about that. There’s another secret?
“You all had a sister,” she says. “Her name was Jacqueline. She was Andrew and Alexandria’s triplet.” My mother never uses our full first names—my brother is Andy, and I, though I hate it, am Ali—and the words she chooses as much as their meaning tells me how much is wrong. “Do you remember how we said that Andrew and Alexandria were sick when they were born?” Nicola, looking at her as wide-eyed as a student, nods. That’s what they tell us when my brother faints: that he was sick when he was little, and that this is just the aftereffect. It’s what they tell us when the neighbor suddenly appears to look after us, and my mother pulls the packed blue duffel bag from the closet. “Well, Jacqueline was, too, but she was too sick. Too little. She died when she was five months old.”
The strangest feeling comes. I already knew.
*
Later that night, after my parents have tucked us into bed, I lie awake in the dark in the room I share with Nicola.
“Ali?” she says. Tonight I let her call me that. “Are we going to die, too?”
“No,” I say. “Shh, just go to sleep. We aren’t going to die.”
“But she died.”
I consider this. “Yes, but we aren’t going to. That’s a kind of dying you only do when you’re little. We’re big now.” I am seven and she is five. “We aren’t going to die.”
As I say this, I realize suddenly that I am lying. That we will, one day. I hope she doesn’t know this. I hope she doesn’t know about forever.
“Promise?” she says.
“Promise,” I say. And my sister is quiet after that. But I lie awake in the dark for a long time. How did I know about the girl?
Nine
Louisiana, 1992