I awake early the next morning, to my father pulling me up off the bed by my armpits. It has been a thin, sour, uncomfortable sleep; I am so dizzy with relief to see him that I throw my arms around his neck and weep. He grunts to me and speaks a few gruff words to Jim and Rhonda. Then he carries me out to the car, throws the backpack in the back seat, and drives me home.
But my mother is not at home, and neither is the baby, because there is no baby. There was a baby, for a minute, but then it just went out. That’s the phrase my father uses: “It just went out.” At first I think he means that the baby got up and walked away. It takes me a minute to realize that he means the baby is dead.
I have not lost my parents, not in the way I thought I would. But I understand that things are different now. When I unzip my backpack in my bedroom that night, the Little Sister is still alive. She blinks up at me like nothing has happened, like we are guilty of nothing. In the middle of the night I sneak out of bed, take my dad’s shovel from the garage, and bury her beneath the oak tree in the backyard. She does not complain or cry, but still I look away from her as I work, not wanting to watch the dirt fall onto her blue wide-open eyes.
II.
Two years later, my parents sit me down and explain that from now on they will be living in different places. This announcement puzzles me because my dad already does not live with us. He has been on a “business trip to Arizona” since my eighth birthday. This is the first time I have seen him since then. Even before he left, I had not exactly thought of him as living with us, because I no longer exactly thought of him as living. He would fall asleep in strange places, like the backyard or the kitchen floor; during his brief moments of wakefulness he would talk too loudly and hug me too hard, like a distant relative, or the Santa Claus at the mall.
“We still love you,” says my mother. “I mean, I still do.”
“Some people,” says my father, “are just not cut out to be fathers. I might have made a good uncle. This has been a whole different ball game.” He leans forward, puts his elbows on his knees. “That is how I want you to think of me,” he says.
“As a ball game?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “As an uncle.”
“I’m getting us a new apartment in town,” says my mother. “It’s next door to the Denny’s. We’ll be closer to school. And Dad will have his own apartment too.”
“Why can’t we stay in this house?” I ask.
“Don’t beat yourself up about this,” says my father. “It’s not your fault.”
It’s an answer, but not to the question I’ve asked.
The night before we move, I sneak out to the backyard once again. Grass has grown over the Little Sister’s shallow grave, but the spot is still visible. I don’t exactly want to see her again, but the idea of leaving her there beneath the earth fills me with loneliness and panic.
I take the shovel and dig her up. She is still alive, still glowing faintly. She stirs, blinks the dirt off her eyelids, and looks at me. Her eyes glisten wetly, as if she has just been crying or is just about to, but she doesn’t make a sound. I notice that she is bigger now, toddler-sized, with a round belly and plump wrists and a thick head of white-blond hair. Apparently her burial has not stopped her from growing. Apparently she is like a plant: pushed down into the earth, fattened like a root, nourished by darkness.
III.
Our new apartment does not have a yard, so I put the Little Sister under my bed, making a nest for her out of old T-shirts. She grows faster than a normal baby, faster than I do. By the time we have lived in the apartment for three months, she has corn-silk hair down to her shoulders and a mouth full of teeth. In two years she looks like a five-year-old, and in four years—when I turn twelve—she has almost caught up with me: a pretty blond girl with golden translucent skin and long limbs. She has a modest girdle of baby fat still lingering round her middle, but her limbs are lean and taut and sturdy. At night I crawl under the bed with a flashlight and pull up the Little Sister’s dress and compare our two sets of breast-buds, the progress of the sparse, shadowy hair between our legs.
My mother has never discovered the Little Sister, because she never cleans under the bed. She is busy: with her job at the school cafeteria and her boyfriend, Buddy Salvage. Buddy is also known as Mr. Salvage or Coach Salvage, because he is the gym teacher. He is famous at school because he tattooed his ex-wife’s name onto his shoulder and then later burned off TAMMY but not the rest of the tattoo, so that inside a heart it says I LOVE _________ and the blank is just scar tissue. He comes over for dinner three times a week and tells me unfollowable stories about wrestling and plays the “pull my finger” joke, then disappears into the bedroom with my mother for exactly thirty minutes before leaving. At school he pretends not to know me.
At night, after Buddy leaves, my mother sits at the kitchen table and makes life-affirmation collages. She cuts pictures out of magazines and glues them to sheets of construction paper. The pictures are of the mountains and the beach and other places we have never been.
“They say you have to envision the life you want,” she explains.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.
“Oprah.” She takes a drag of her cigarette and replaces it in the ashtray, then cuts out a small picture of ballet slippers and tentatively places it in the center of the empty page. She frowns, then removes it. “My feet are too big anyway,” she says. Then she stands up, gathers the magazines, and stacks them with the recycling by the door. She looks down at the pile, gives it a soft little kick with her foot. “The problem,” she says, “is that I have the wrong kind of magazine.”
IV.
When I am fourteen I get a boyfriend, or at least a boy who is sort of a friend and who I regularly allow to touch me. I like the rough texture and woody scent of his hands. I like the way he presses me down beneath him in the back seat of his car, as if it matters that I not float away.
One day, while my mother is at work, I lead the boy into my room. I know what he wants to do; I do not want to do it for the same reasons he does, but I want to take some action to prove I am an adult. While the pain corkscrews up through me I turn my head to the side and imagine the Little Sister lying there beneath the bed silently, and for the first time I hate her.
After the boy leaves I crawl under the bed. The Little Sister looks at me with her knowing blue eyes. I reach out and pinch her tiny tender right breast, as hard as I can. But to my surprise she doesn’t grimace with pain. Instead, for the first time in her life, she smiles.
I get up and go to the bathroom and turn on the shower as hot as it will go. I bend over and let the hot water scour me. Then I get out, towel myself off, and crawl back under the bed with the Little Sister. I do not attempt to hide my wet salty eyes or the way my hands shake. I hold her hands in mine so that all four of our hands shake, together. She stares at me. She smiles.
That night at dinner, my mother and Buddy have one of their fights. The fight is about his tattoo. My mother believes that her own name belongs in blue ink on Buddy’s arm, etched into the scar tissue where his ex-wife’s name had been. She believes that she has earned this privilege by cooking him dinner three times a week for years, despite his failure to propose marriage or cohabitation.
Buddy claims that the tattoo remains an accurate depiction of his heart. He is still scarred and no amount of Hamburger Helper casseroles will change that. My mother argues that she never uses Hamburger Helper and Buddy accuses her of changing the subject. He announces that he is an honest man and that this is his best quality. He states that our mother knows this about him and has chosen him despite or perhaps because of this quality. He points out that most people, especially women, do not like to hear the truth, and he refuses to apologize for telling it. Then he gets up and leaves.
My mother walks out after him and does not come back for four days. When she returns, she is married to Buddy Salvage. His arm still reads I LOVE _________ but he has agreed to rent our mother an ornately be
aded wedding dress and have their photo taken at the Glamour Shots place in the mall. The dress is large, even larger than Buddy Salvage, so large it almost swallows my mother. It looks less like a garment than a vessel. It has a skirt full and wide enough to hold several stowaways, a bodice that squeezes my mother’s bosom up and out like the prow of a ship, and a veil that billows out like a ship’s sail, ready to catch the wind or whatever else comes along.
V.
My boyfriend tells me that he has seen Buddy Salvage’s wiener in the locker room and that it is extremely wide, like a Coke can. This knowledge is hard to suppress when I hear Buddy and my mother having sex in the bedroom next door.
At these times I crawl under the bed and torture the Little Sister. I pinch the soft skin of her inner arms and twist her breasts. I like to watch her close her eyes, silently enduring the pain, and then open them again and smile at me, like nothing has happened. Or possibly like everything has happened, like I have already done everything I have ever imagined or not imagined, so many times that none of it could possibly matter. Sometimes when I pinch her I whisper, “I’m going to kill you someday,” and when I say this, she smiles biggest of all. “I’m going to drop you in the dump,” I whisper, “and run off by myself. I won’t tell anyone where I’m going.” She smiles, as if daring me to do what I threaten, as if suggesting that this is what she has wanted all along.
But the more I threaten to kill her, the more I need her; the more I torture her, the closer we are bound together. At the end of the night I always cry and apologize; I stroke her hair and tell her I love her. She smiles again—but differently now, more gently.
One day, while we are having sex beneath the football bleachers, my boyfriend asks me to marry him. “I want to knock you up,” he says, “and I want to do it properly.”
I say yes, but then when I get home I am greeted by the blown-up picture of my mother and Buddy Salvage at the Glamour Shots place, framed and hanging above the mantel. I stand in the middle of the room and stare at it for several minutes. Then, without exactly deciding to, I drag the Little Sister out from under the bed, belt her into my car, and start driving.
I drive and drive, the Little Sister in the passenger seat. She has continued to grow, and now she appears close to my age; it is hard to tell, because the world has not marked her one bit. She has long blond hair and translucent gold skin and full buoyant breasts and a tiny curved waist. She looks like me, except better: how I might have looked if I’d never encountered cigarettes, or Tostitos, or birth control, or insomnia. I realize that I have chosen her: over everyone else, perhaps even over myself. I will never be able to bring myself to harm her again.
I drive and drive all night and when I run out of gas somewhere in Kansas I stop. I live in a motel until I run out of money and then I get a small apartment above a Laundromat and a job at Target.
VI.
I make the Little Sister a bed in my closet and then, when I move in with the floor manager who becomes my boyfriend and later my husband, beneath a false floorboard. The rest of my life will happen—my twins will pound across the floors with their fat sticky feet, and my husband will leave and come back and leave and come back again, and Buddy Salvage will call one day to tell me my mother has died of a heart attack, and I will drive home drunk from my mother’s funeral, swerving in and out of cars on the black highway, my strange survival gone unnoticed—and no one will ever find her. She will remain my own forever. My only sister, my first and last child, my sweet secret under the floor. She will become the most stunningly beautiful old woman. She will have long snow-white hair and skin that reminds you of a Japanese lantern: lightly crinkled rice paper, lit from inside by a soft golden glow. Every day I will brush her hair, tend to her fingernails and clothes, rub rosewater into her skin.
Before I die I will do something—write a note, leave the floorboard slightly ajar—and my children will find her, delicate in death as a white moth on the windowsill, perfectly groomed and pristine. They will stroke her long soft hair and hold her cool clean hands with their warm ones and say, This was our mother’s secret: how beautiful, how strange. They’ll lift her from the floorboards and cradle her white head in their laps and say, Look at what she protected. Look at what she lost.
Doris and Katie
Katie O’Toole was no stranger to Oak County Hospital. She’d given birth there, four times; brought small children for broken fingers and wrists; paid post-chemo visits to her best friend, Doris; watched her husband’s life flatten into a thin bright line.
And yet, on her way to accompany Doris for some routine follow-up tests, new superstitions dogged her. Everything seemed like an omen. A black bird overhead, a bag blown into the street, a sudden sour taste in the mouth. Who had thought of the phrase “routine tests,” anyway? What part of this was supposed to be routine?
Doris emerged wearing what Katie thought of as her “uniform”: tailored pants, black caftan, chunky silver necklace. Her sleek dark hair was shaped into a close, flattering cut. Doris had what people called “style”; her motto was “No vanity, no dignity.”
“This will be the first time,” said Doris, sliding into the passenger seat, “that anyone will see me unclothed. Since Fareed went.” She always began conversations this way: midsentence, with no salutation.
“Oh, Doris!” said Katie.
When Doris’s husband, Fareed, had passed away, nearly a year ago, she’d been in remission for six months. Underneath the “falsie,” she’d told Katie, the scar looked red and shiny, like a nail polish she’d be embarrassed to ask for. Marauding Magenta, Siren Red, Raspberry Shock. At least, Katie told her, she no longer had to wear that head scarf—though it was a lovely scarf, black silk, just what a 1940s movie star might wear, given the circumstances.
As Katie backed out of the driveway, Doris extracted a compact from her purse and flipped it open. “When they find pink smudges on your teeth,” she said, grimacing into the mirror, “that’s when they come and take you away in the night. That’s when it’s all over.”
“Ha,” said Katie, keeping her eyes on the road as she pulled onto the highway. This morning she’d avoided mirrors, braiding her long silver hair in the dark. “I’m thinking of getting one of those Swedish mattresses,” she said. “You know, the kind that molds to fit your body type?”
“My friend Cecile had one of those,” said Doris, smoothing her hair with a careful hand. The motion reminded Katie of grooming a horse. “She said it was more sensitive than the person she shared it with.”
Katie frowned, and changed lanes. “What a thing to say about her husband!”
Doris shrugged. “Who said it was her husband?” She snapped her compact shut and put it back in her purse. “Speaking of which, what did you tell Mitch Durbin?”
Katie waved a hand dismissively. “I didn’t tell him anything. We’re both on the library board. It’s not appropriate.”
“He asked you out, Katie. You have to respond.”
“I suppose so.” She sighed. “I just don’t feel ready for all that. It’s only been two years.”
“And that’s your choice,” said Doris. “Just so you’re not holding back because you’re afraid.”
“Who would ever be afraid of Mitch Durbin?”
Doris said nothing. She was staring out the window.
“If I was meant to be with someone else,” Katie continued, “I would know. Right? Doris?”
Someone had replaced Tina at Oncology. Tina, who had sat at the reception desk and filed her nails and said, “I know, hon. I know.”
The new girl looked barely driving age. Who had allowed this—her hair the color of rusted metal, sawed off unevenly at the bottom? Plus, she wore something disturbing in her ear, a kind of disk that stretched a wide hole in the lobe.
There was so little in life that one could control.
“Ahem,” said Katie. The girl looked up.
“Lansing,” said Doris. “I have a ten o’clock appointment.”
/> “You can go on in,” said the receptionist, flicking her electric-blue eyes from one woman to the other. “Patel’s not ready, but the nurse can weigh you and stuff.”
“All right,” said Doris. “Hasta la vista.”
Katie reached out to give her friend’s hand a squeeze, but Doris had already turned away; she clicked across the waiting room and disappeared through the door without a backward glance.
Katie turned to the receptionist. “What happened to Tina?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The old receptionist.”
“Oh. The one with the ponytail? Kinda chunky?”
“I suppose so.”
The girl frowned. “I think she died, maybe.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “They said someone died.”
Katie found a seat on one of the waiting room’s gray metal chairs and picked up a People from the coffee table. But it was depressing, all drug-addicted actors and grotesque human-interest stories: pretty blond survivors of sadistic kidnappings, incestuous siblings on reality shows.
She looked up. The receptionist was staring at her.
“So,” said the girl. “Are you guys, like, partners?”
“We’re old friends.”
“Oh,” said the girl, nodding. “Cool.”
Katie went back to her magazine. A paragraph into an exploration of Gwyneth Paltrow’s smoothie-making habits, she belatedly understood the girl’s question. She felt her face grow pink.
“Old friends,” she’d answered: wasn’t that what lesbians used to call each other in public?
The Wrong Heaven Page 13
