She was gripping the sides of the chair, and her eyes were wide. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead.
Kat never mentioned that she was being picked on by this kid, but that didn’t mean anything. She was like my father that way. They pushed away the things that bothered them and filled the space with movement. Always busy, always doing something, no time for sitting around mulling things over.
“How old is this kid?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He stayed back a grade when he moved here. Wait, that’s it,” she said. “Next time he picks on me I’ll say they kept him back because he was too smelly to go to middle school.”
“Maybe he picks on you because you say things like that.”
She twisted her face at me. “I say things like that because he calls me Kat Poop.”
“Have you tried ignoring him?”
“Ignoring him? He’s this wide and this tall.” She spread her arms out and up. She looked up at me, and I saw my father’s face. All angles and slopes with the way their cheekbones stuck out. The same deep-set eyes. Full of worry now.
“Does he pick on you a lot?” I asked.
She shrugged, as if to say, That’s not the point.
“Why don’t you tell Mom? She’ll say something to Peggy.”
“No way. Then he’ll think it bothers me.”
I eyed her. “It does bother you.”
“What he said about Mom and Dad bothers me. He only picks on me because I beat him in every race in gym. Then he blubbers to Mr. Scott that I stay behind him on purpose and cut in front at the finish line.”
“Well, do you? You know how you get.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you’re little competitive, Kat. And by a little, I mean a lot.”
She scowled. “I hate when you say that. Mom too. Besides, even Mr. Scott told him to stop whining about it, so it’s not my fault.”
“Well, don’t worry about it, then. He probably just said it to get under your skin.”
She looked doubtful. “You didn’t hear them last night. They said mean things. Like Dad told Mom she was killing him.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, and she nodded.
“Killing him,” she said again. We didn’t say anything for a minute, and I knew Kat was picturing my father saying those words. Picturing my mother hearing them.
Kat had her head down, and she was playing with the necklace around her neck, running the locket up and down the chain. The locket was so small, I couldn’t see it underneath her fingertip.
She’d been determined to put a picture of my parents in it, but by the time she cut the photograph to fit, all that was left was my father’s eye, a sliver of nose, one side of my mother’s face.
My mother had replaced the locket with one half its size. So little, it would slip down even the tiniest throat.
Not that I wanted to know this. I didn’t have a choice in it. Kat thought my sister just stopped breathing. But I’d come home from school too early to not know the truth. There’d been an ambulance outside. In her room, paramedics kneeling over her. An arm peeking out, a necklace wrapped around her hand.
Kat looked up at me now, her eyes on me, looking for some kind of answer, and suddenly my heart was hammering in my chest. I didn’t have any answers. This was new territory for me and Kat—I was eight years older—I’d always had the answers to anything she needed. But it was typical big-sister stuff—how to braid hair, how to do a back flip off the dock without whacking your head, how to change out of a wet bathing suit under an oversize T-shirt or the best way to cook a s’more without scorching the marshmallow.
This past year her questions were out of my league. Question after question, and not a single one had an answer. Why wasn’t Maddie in a graveyard like Grandpa? Are we ever going back to the Salt House? Do I still say I have two sisters now that she’s dead?
I’d been angry at first. Angry with my parents for giving Kat the necklace. Angry at Kat for wearing it in the crib. Then all that anger faded away, and there was just the feeling of missing her.
And then months passed, and little by little, even that faded. I forgot what she smelled like. I had to look at pictures of her to remember the shade of her eyes, the color of her hair, the shape of the birthmark on her tummy.
My mother was the one I worried about the most right after Maddie died. The way she cried all the time. Seemed like every day, at some point, her face would crumple, and she’d go in her bedroom and lie on the bed.
My father was the opposite. I’d never seen him cry. Not even once. And now, it seemed like all that not crying had built up and spilled out his pores, changing him on the outside. You couldn’t look at him without flinching.
It seemed like the only thing that had lived in my mind the past year was worry. And sadness. And more worry. My family was falling apart, and I’d spent the whole year worrying about it, thinking about it, and now it just seemed too much. Where were my parents? What were they thinking, fighting like that in front of Kat?
I took a deep breath, made my face stay expressionless so Kat wouldn’t see that I was upset. I leaned over and turned on my computer. I never let her play with it, and her eyes lit up.
“Stay here, and I’ll see what’s going on, okay?” I asked calmly.
She sat down and took the mouse, her eyes focusing on the screen. I left her looking through my photos and hurried through Kat’s room. My mother was spread out on her back, her long hair fanned out on the pillow.
In the kitchen, the stench from the mussel shells in the trash turned my stomach. On a regular night, Dad wouldn’t have let them sit inside.
But we weren’t exactly regular anymore.
I took the trash bag of shells down the stairs to the backyard. The lawn was still wet from the dew, and by the time I reached the water, small pieces of grass were wedged in the spaces between my toes. Seagulls circled above as the last of the shells tumbled out of the bag into the bay. I put the bag in the outside barrel and headed to the kitchen to start on the piles of dishes.
I’d just turned on the kitchen faucet when I heard the front door open and Kat’s feet pounding on the floor. I shut off the water and turned to see my father standing in the doorway with Kat’s face buried in his neck. He hugged her, then peeled her arms off his neck and hung her upside down, her legs still wrapped around his waist. He tickled her stomach, and a giggle filled the room.
“How about a ride on the boat today? It’s a beauty out there,” Dad asked in a voice that sounded like fluff, sweet and thick and sugary.
I wanted to tell him that Mom was spread out on Kat’s bed like a dead person, but the look on his face stopped me. He looked scared, like the kind of scared when your smile is bigger than it should be and it doesn’t match your face. Like the way I used to make Kat’s Mr. Potato Head. I’d snap in the angry eyebrows with the serious eyes but finish him off with the big, red, shiny smile for a mouth. Kat hated it, said he looked all wrong. Crazy, she’d say.
He looks like he went crazy.
“I’m babysitting,” I said quickly. Too quick.