When Melissa awoke, she could hear her mother and her grandmother speaking in the apartment kitchen, their voices an underwater-like thrum from which only an occasional word would bubble to the surface. She thought the plan was for her mother to go home to Bronxville on the first train; she’d expected that her mother would be gone by now. Apparently, something had changed. She looked at the antique clock on the nightstand—it was so old that a person had to wind it, and the twin bells on the top were lusterless with age—and saw it was not quite seven-thirty. The curtains were drawn on the window, and so she emerged from beneath the quilt and opened one side: it was the sort of city morning where the clouds hung so low that the fog looked a little grimy. She jumped back into bed and curled her body into an egg, wrapping her arms as tightly as she could around her ankles and bringing her forehead to her knees. She liked to lie like this, her eyes shut tight. After a few moments, when she felt her forehead and the back of her neck starting to burn, she would pretend that she was a mythical bird being born, and slowly—as slowly as possible—stretch out her arms and her legs and her torso. She would blink. She would flutter her eyes like a creature seeing the world for the very first time. She would lie like this in the mornings some days before school, just after waking up, but she would also do it some evenings before finally getting undressed and into her pajamas before bed. It was especially fun to do it at the end of the day when she was wearing her more interesting tights. She would sit up and gaze at the patterns, and feel unexpectedly rewarded: the tights that looked like the night sky or the ceiling of a planetarium were always fascinating to her after she had emerged from her egg or (sometimes in her mind) her cocoon. She was intrigued by what the constellations and zodiac signs looked like after opening her eyes and uncoiling her body. She would compare the universe on her legs to the universe her father had created for her on the ceiling of her bedroom, a world of glow-in-the-dark stars (some shooting) and planets (Jupiter, with its playful, winking eye; a cherry red Mars; Uranus, with its celestial hula hoops).
She also liked to do this when she was wearing the tights with the pretend color comics that looked as if they belonged in a Sunday newspaper. She and her parents had gotten that pair at a museum’s gift shop a few blocks south on Fifth Avenue. The images were actually paintings by some famous modern artist. But her very favorite tights to be wearing when she was lying like this were the ones with the covers of old children’s books on them. Her father had brought them back to her from a business trip to London. She recognized most of the covers, but some were British editions: she knew all of the stories at least a little bit, but it seemed the English used a different image on the front of a lot of their books. They had a different Alice. A different Harry. A different Otter and Badger and Mole. Some of the covers were upside down, but it didn’t matter: she would study the characters and designs and recall the stories. She wished the covers didn’t stop abruptly near the tops of her thighs.
She was, of course, wearing her pajamas now. Not any of her tights. They were the pajamas she kept at Grandmother’s for visits such as these. Red check flannel bottoms. A Snoopy top.
She decided that she should paint her toenails. One of these days when they were in the city, her mother was going to take her for a pedicure. It would be her first—at least her first real one. She had been painting her toenails for years. Before that, her mother had painted them for her. Today they were pink, but the polish was chipped on a few of her nails. Perhaps when she and her mother went to the salon, they might even get what girls on TV called mani-pedis, where you got your toenails and fingernails painted. Very glamorous.
The assistants at her dance studio, the girls who were juniors and seniors in high school, always had their toenails painted. She noticed when they were climbing in and out of their ballet slippers or jazz shoes.
She tried now to hear what her mother and grandmother were saying, but even when she concentrated she could only pick out an occasional word. Clearly they were speaking softly because they didn’t want to wake her. Or, perhaps, because they didn’t want her to hear. If she were to guess, she would assume it was more because they didn’t want her to hear. Her mother was vague about what had happened last night at their home, but Melissa understood two things with certainty: first, something awful had occurred at Uncle Philip’s bachelor party, and people had died. Second, her father had done something very, very wrong. Moreover, the combination of awful and her father’s behavior had changed the landscape between her parents, and it was—she was sure—a shift that was dangerous. Dangerous for their marriage in ways that she didn’t quite understand, and dangerous for her in ways that she did. It threatened the stability of the life that she knew and took for granted.
What precisely had her father done? She had her suspicions. They were as hazy as her mother’s explanations, but she knew the basics of sex. She wasn’t a moron. She was in the fourth grade. And last night there had been a naked woman in their house. And the men, she conjectured, had fought over her. But was Mom upset because Dad had looked at this other woman? Or had her father done something more? And did that mean he had had sex with her? Or was it Uncle Philip?
She noticed that a strip of the wallpaper was starting to peel where it met the ceiling a couple of feet from the window. There was an ancient water stain—mildew-brown—a few inches above the top of the bedroom’s other window. The room, when you gazed at it from the bed, looked a little tired. This weary ceiling was so different from the one in her bedroom at home.
Once more she stretched, elongating her arms and legs—her fingers and toes. (There was some kid song about fingers and toes that they all used to sing in preschool. Perhaps even in kindergarten. She wished she could retrieve it right now, but it was floating somewhere just beyond her mind’s reach.) She guessed she should join her mother and grandmother and have some breakfast. Learn what she could. She might even hover for a minute or two just outside the kitchen, in the entryway to the apartment, and eavesdrop.
As she was on her way there, however—as she was walking silently past the apartment’s front door—she heard the bing of the elevator on the other side of the door, and then her father’s keys. A second later, there he was, opening the door. For a long moment they just stared at each other, neither saying a word. She saw that he had Cassandra with him in the animal’s cat carrier. Then he knelt, put the cat carrier on the floor, and wrapped his arms around her. She detected a trace of an unfamiliar perfume—definitely not her mother’s. She didn’t think he had ever looked worse.