by Lila Felix
A loud groan rumbles up the stairs. “Ugh! Nora, I’m not kidding. We’re going to be late… again.” For someone so small, she can bellow like an overweight opera singer.
I sigh, pull the downy covers over my head, and am clouded in darkness. Just a few more minutes. I am afforded none as a scrawny, angular weight lands on top of me. Knees like shelf brackets dig into my ribs.
“Nora, Nora, Nora… Get up.” My name piles one on top of another without a breath in between. Thin fingers clamp onto my arms and shake.
I pull away. “All right,” I mumble, my voice muffled by the heavy quilt.
“Nora. Nora. Noraaaaaa.” Because she can’t hear me, Frankie’s poking continues. It feels like she’s taken two forks from downstairs and is jamming them into my sides. I curl down the covers carefully, squinting at all the lights she switched on when she entered my room.
Frankie shuffles back and smiles, gummy, three teeth missing. Her hearing aid is in her open palm. “Can you help me put thissss in, Noraaaaaaa?” she says, her Ss hissing through the gap. I sit up and tuck her long, straight hair, which is the color of autumn leaves, behind her ear. She giggles and rasps, a slight wheeze in her defective chest. Bobbing her head back and forth, she sings some unintelligible song as I wrangle with her hair and constant movement.
I clamp my hand down on top of her head. “Hold still, Frankie,” I plead through gritted, fuzzy teeth.
She lurches forward just to make it more difficult, but I manage to slip the aid into her tiny, peaches-and-cream-colored ear. I position the headband my mother lovingly wound with pink satin ribbon. The aid whining itches my teeth as I grab her clothes and still her while clipping the little black box onto her sash. Smiling, she glances up at me with dark blue eyes, yellow streaks streaming from the irises like the rays of the sun. “Tanks!” she whispers and licks my hand.
“Oh yuck, Frankie!” I roll my eyes and watch my ferrety little sister bound out of the room and tear down the hall, sounding more like an elephant than a seven-year-old.
The bathroom door slams. I know I’m going to be waiting a while so I slip down into the bed and cross my arms over my chest, resting like I’m lying in a coffin. The warm air and street noises flowing through the window tell me I’m going to be sweating in a long-sleeved, high-necked dress, but I don’t have another option.
My mother’s holler coasts over the dark brown banister and hits my ears again. “We’re going to be laaate!” Her voice is shrill and getting shriller.
I hear a plate slam down on the counter. Heavy footsteps approach, darker and more electric than a storm cloud.
“I’ll get her,” my father says loudly, knowing all he needs to do is threaten. I hold still, out of stubbornness, out of fear, I don’t know, but I wait until I hear him slowly and deliberately stomping up the stairs. One, two, three…
I stay clamped still until he’s at the top and then I scramble out of bed, grabbing my clothes from yesterday off the back of a chair and scurrying to the door. My heart pounds hard for the moments it takes to remember that Frankie is in the bathroom, and then it steadies. Because my heart has a memory. It understands the pattern, and it prepares me.
I gingerly nudge my door further ajar with my foot to reveal him standing proud, gripping the bannister and looking like a painting of one of our long-dead relatives. His eyes are an oily swirl of an amber brush. Not a man, a figment, and definitely not a father.
He gives me a flat, unimpressed smile and says, “Good girl,” as he tracks my movements. My gaze connects with his for a moment before I have to look away. In his eyes are the reflections of the beating I didn’t know how to stop, and even though my heart remembers, the rest of me would like to forget.
I pad down the hall, eyes down, hands clasped, just like a good girl should, toward the bathroom door. He turns, clicking his heels sharply, and takes one step down. A good girl. I snort at the comment and he hesitates, one foot hovering in midair. I sense the angry electricity charging his bones and tightening his fists.
I knock on the bathroom door, gently at first, but quickening with every bad thought that enters my mind. He wouldn’t. Not with Mother just downstairs. I stare at the carpet and nervously blow air through pursed lips.
The boards of the stairs creak, always in the same place, and he pushes his weight down on it—testing, warning, and playing with my nerves. My mouth tastes metallic, and my hands pump nervously.
“Christopher, let me…” my mother shouts from the foyer, her voice edged in trepidation. The top of her head nods up and down over a tailored jacket and an unfashionably long skirt. She is graced with the same autumn-leaved hair color as Frankie. Her clothes may be dated, but she still looks beautiful. I sigh stiffly and tuck my slightly frizzy, dirty-blond hair behind my unfortunately prominent ears. My father watches me, his eyes crinkling in disgust with my every movement. I have his ears, nose, and hair… and he can’t stand it. I wish I could scrub out my face and start again. Not because it would protect me, but because it would mean I wouldn’t see him in my reflection.
My eyes round as he takes a threatening step in my direction, fury building in his arms, coursing down into his fingers that clench into solidity. I feel them even though they’re yards away. I know how each fist feels as it strikes my skin. Knuckled like clam shells and as hard as rocks. I grab my stomach, nausea and pain swirling together inside, and tap on the door more urgently. “Frankie, open the door,” I plead. I give him a sideways glance, and there’s a sickening look of satisfaction playing across his face because he likes to see me afraid.
The door cracks and I get a glimpse of Frankie pulling her underpants up while walking away. She grins at me as she flushes the toilet, and then shudders when she sees Father’s shadow growing behind me. I watch her shrivel before him, and I armor myself.
Footsteps hurry up the stairs with the swish of thick material batting at slender legs.
I turn, breathing in the word shield.
My mother climbs anxiously, her waned eyes on my father, her hands out in front as she rushes. Brittle hope rises, and I wonder if she’s actually going to say something this time. If she’s going to say stop.
“Christopher,” she pants just before she reaches the top stair, her lip curling on the ‘pher’ part as she blows a loose strand of hair from her eyes. It floats up and lands back over her delicate brow. “It’s fine,” she says as she takes another step up, her long skirt trapping her leather heels and snagging her feet. “I…”
A loud siren wails outside. My mother’s attention abruptly snaps to the long, arch window over the landing, her face crossed with the black line shadows of the frame and the morning sun.
A collection of events. Each on its own is harmless. But together, one after the other, they change the world.
Startled and off balance, her hands grab at the air in front of her. Her eyes close and she falls backward. My father reaches out, but there’s endless space between them.
“Rebecca!” he sort of sighs and screams because he’s helpless. His voice is sucked away by the shocking sight of her body plunging downwards and her legs kicking like she’s riding an invisible bicycle. The shattering sound of her breath knocking from her lungs with every crack on the hardwood stairs pounds us both with airy hammers.
It’s just air. Air and tumbling. Pulling down, down, down. And as her body breaks, so does my very thin thread of safety.
There’s beauty in the fall, the weightlessness, the gravity fighting against the will. The curve of her body is a thin stream. And for one ridiculous, far-fetched moment, I believe she will fly. But there is no magic in my life. This world offers no pixie dust to lift our feet from the floor. So I watch her non-flight with detached horror and know that any chance I had just fluttered to the floor like a released pack of cards.
The landing is ugly. It’s hard and final. Weight catches up and she skids across the tiles in her slippery skirt. Her hair flounces out of its pinned updo, too much life to t
he curls bouncing over an ashen face. The view of her lying there spins up from the ground and hits me square in the chest. The pain is bigger than anything I’ve ever imagined. It keeps pushing, prying, trying to open me up right here in the hall.
Frankie shoves on the door, and my palm snaps to the panel to block her way. “I thought ya needed to go, Nora. Nora, let me out.” Her voice is panicky, high-pitched. She is unaware what exactly is wrong but she knows something is.
I brace the door as little, freckled fingers curl around the outside.
Shouldn’t it be slow when your world changes? It’s not my experience. It’s fast as lightning and stings as much. She was at the top of the stairs, alive, talking. A flush to her creamy skin from exertion. Now she lies on the black-and-white tiles of the entry hall, her body angled all wrong. Her mouth open. Her eyes still closed.
That hard, tumbleweed of reality is still pushing against my chest, trying to get me to release something. I pull at my clothes like they’re strangling me. I can’t breathe.
There were no words. There was no time. I didn’t get to say anything, barely opened my mouth before it was over.
It’s over.
I take a heaped breath in and hold it. My lungs bursting with numbing pain.
I turn to see my father perched at the top of the stairs, staring at me mutely for several seconds, the wail of more sirens gathering seeming otherworldly. The sky screaming for a take back. We move our eyes millimeter by millimeter to the body at the bottom of the stairs, neither one really wanting to see what we already know. Frankie’s tiny fists pound on the door like a heartbeat. “Nora, what’s wrong?”
Everything.
Everything.
Realization is heavy and it adds weights to my father’s shoulders until he sinks to his knees in a knight’s stance, mangled sobs heaving from his chest.
I think, He won’t move.
I think, He should run down and help her.
I know it won’t do any good.
She looks like one of Frankie’s dolls, a frozen sculpture, robbed of life, of grace. I almost expect her face to be cracked, shattered inwards like she was in fact shaped from porcelain. But she looks untouched. She looks like she was arranged this way, a mannequin that was never alive.
My father rotates slowly, still crouching, dirty-blond hair falling over his forehead. Hate waves creep toward me, pulling me to him. It’s a look I’m already very used to, but it darkens with every breath he takes.
Eyes half measured with tears and steely hatred, he whispers, “This is your fault,” and something inside me breaks, painfully pulled open with strong hands that hurt again and again. It’s my heart, my armor, my survival, all shattering and crashing to the floor.
Gently, I pry Frankie’s fingers from the bathroom door and close it carefully, ignoring her pleas. I don’t want her to see this. She can’t see this. Oh God, she can’t see this. Panic winds my breath tighter. I turn my back to the bathroom door, look up at the ceiling, which seems black and swirling with empty stars, and I scream.
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