“Plus, I don’t hit things that big.” I tugged her ponytail, trying to lighten the moment.
She gave me a weak smile, and I put my arm around her shoulders and led her into the living room, away from Finn on the deck. She’d stayed glued to my side the rest of the night, and the party had ended soon after.
Instead of hitting something as big as Finn, I’d picked a fight with Hope, the one person I was trying to bring back to me.
I was failing, though. Nothing I said or did made any of it better. She kept telling me it wasn’t anything I could fix. That she needed time. That me pushing her to feel better, to make love, to spread Maddie’s ashes, all of it was too much. So I went to work. Out on the water, where every movement mattered.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. The light was dim, but I didn’t need it to study the pictures anymore like I used to right after she died. I knew them by heart, every last detail, as if by studying them I could breathe life into them.
There were two, taken on a rare warm October day when we decided on a last-minute picnic at the Salt House. Hope was lucky and snapped a picture of the girls without them noticing. Kat is six and slight in build. She is holding Maddie, who is in her diaper, her legs ringed with baby fat and wrapped around Kat’s waist. Her head is resting on Kat’s shoulder and she is sleeping. Both arms are around Kat’s neck. She is under a year in the picture but Kat has thrust a hip out to support her weight, and her gaze lands directly on Maddie’s face.
In the other picture, we are lounging on the blanket, and Hope is laughing at something outside of the picture. She is sitting between my legs with her arms wrapped around my thighs. My face is nuzzled in her long black hair. I’m looking straight at whatever caught Hope’s attention. Jess’s legs are draped over Hope’s feet, and Kat’s fingertip is clearly in the side of the picture. I don’t remember what it was that we were laughing at. But it must have been Maddie. Because we are happy.
And she is the only one missing.
?4
Jess
“Dad’s gone,” a voice said in the dark. I opened one eye. Kat was in front of me. I blinked, sleep blurring my vision.
She was sitting with her legs folded under her on the edge of my bed, her face invisible under the brown curls tangled around her face.
“Go back to sleep,” I muttered, and pulled her sideways until she toppled over in a heap next to me.
The bed dipped and she popped upright like a coiled spring. She swiped at her hair, pushing it off her forehead. Her eyes were two blue circles staring at me.
“Did you hear what I said? Dad. Is. Gone.” She pulled the pillow from under my head, and the side of my face bounced off the mattress.
“Jesus, Kat! Knock it off—”
“Shh! Listen! Mom’s in there.” She pointed at her door. “They had a fight last night, and Mom threw Dad’s shoes out the front door and now he’s gone.”
She stood in front of me. Fists clenched, the vein on her forehead a bulging dark line. She was a bomb. A four-foot bomb waiting to explode. Or implode.
We did an experiment in Physics last year with a can of soda and a hot plate to learn the difference between explosion and implosion. How an object that implodes reacts from the inside out, collapsing into itself.
I looked at the clock. 5:58. On a Sunday morning. This was my family now: an implosion experiment in action.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up.
“Slow down. And calm down. Mom and Dad have fought before. They always make up. Big deal.”
Even as the words left my mouth, I heard the lie in them. I couldn’t remember a night my father hadn’t slept in our house.
But this was the new us. The post-Maddie us.
“You didn’t hear this one. Plus, Smelliot on the bus said Mom was over his house and he heard they were getting a deforest.”
“A what?”
“A de-for-est,” she said, pronouncing the word so hard, the vein on her forehead pulsed.
“That’s not a word. And what is a Smelliot?”
“It’s not a what. It’s a who.” She disappeared into her bedroom. A second later, she returned with a stack of lined white paper, a row of staples running crooked down the side. She flipped through them, paused on one, and thrust it at me.
I took it, my eyes following her finger to where her handwriting was dark and precise on the thin lines.
“Read,” she said.
On bus, minding my own self like mrs. whitley says to do when Elliot jumps to the seat next to me. Hey Ding-dong he says and he pinches my arm so hard my eyes water. Are you gonna cry now, Kat Poop, he asks and his stupid friend in the seat in front of us is laughing. I tell him my eyes are watering from the way he stinks. And then I call him Smelliot. His friend laughs and points his finger like I got him good. Smelliot’s face gets all red and he comes even closer to me and says your mom was over my house talking to my mom about how your dad is never home. Your mom and dad are getting a deforest, Ding-dong. The Big D he says over and over until I put my hood up and he shoves me and goes to the back of the bus.
I flipped through the pages. There were drawings on some, scribbles on others, but most were filled with her small handwriting. She snatched it away, the edge of the paper slicing my finger as it whizzed out of my hand.
“Cut it out. I only let you read it so you could see that word. It is a diary, you know,” she hissed.
I sucked on my finger where a thin line of blood had formed. “It’s a bunch of paper stapled together. Why don’t you get a diary that actually says diary on it so someone doesn’t lose a finger?”
She reached for my hand, looking sorry now. I waved her away, and her shoulders slumped.
“I had one Grandma bought for me, and I hid it to keep it safe, but then I couldn’t find it. And when I told her, she bought me another one with a lock on it. Then I put the key in a safe place, and now I can’t find that. And if I tell her, she’ll buy me another one, and then I’ll feel bad when something happens to that.”
“You’re a mess,” I told her.
“Don’t say anything to her,” she pleaded.
I rolled my eyes. Like I didn’t have better things to do than tell on my eight-year-old sister to my seventy-year-old grandmother.
“Anyway. I told you I didn’t hear him wrong,” she said, holding up the papers.
“It’s called a divorce. Who is this kid, anyway?”
She ran over to my desk and grabbed a pencil.
“Peggy’s son. Spell it.”
“What?”
“Spell that word.”
“Kat. Stop. You’re overreacting. Maybe Dad just went for a walk.”
“All night? I checked their room. Mom is in my bed, and their bed is still made.”
I sighed. “That doesn’t mean they’re getting divorced.”
“And Smelliot? Why would he say that?”