Witt finished the round of his game. He cursed at having been killed or out of lives or coins or whatever. He looked me in the eye and asked me how my week had been. He kissed my forehead and messed up my hair, and I smiled so hard, I could feel water in my eyes. Then he said he was going to check on Emma, which he did. She let him in her room and he came out soon after, shaking his head and laughing. No one told me anything then. But when we were playing with our Barbies a few days later, Emma couldn’t resist shattering my ignorance. She was over the shock of it, and this thing that men did to women was now part of the fabric of her.
That day I was upset, do you remember it? And Witt came in to talk to me, do you remember? Well . . . I was upset because some jerk told me that sex is when a boy pees on a girl and then she has a baby.
I remember wanting to cry myself when she said this. I remember thinking that life could not possibly be that humiliating. And I remember thinking that I would never, ever let a boy pee on me even if it meant I could not have babies. The moment didn’t last long, but still—I remember the reaction I had and that I understood why it had made my sister run to her room and slam the door shut.
Witt told me what really happens. Boys don’t pee on you.
Emma explained about penises and vaginas and sperm. Then she took off the clothes of our Barbie dolls.
I suppose it’s strange that our brother was the one to tell us about sex. But that wasn’t the only parental duty he took on.
Our mother didn’t like being our mother. She said she wanted to be our friend. She said she was waiting for us to grow up so we could all do fun things together like shopping and going to get our nails done. She used to tell us about her plans to take us on vacations where we would get spa treatments and sit on the beach reading magazines and sipping drinks that tasted like coconut and had little umbrellas. She made them for us sometimes during the summer. She said when we were older, we could have ones that tasted even better and made you feel relaxed and happy. I would fall asleep dreaming that dream our mother put in our heads, the dream where we were all three like sisters.
There were lots of dreams back then, before our mother started her affair with Mr. Martin. Witt talked of college and wanting to be a lawyer like his mother. He sometimes had girlfriends and they would kiss in the basement. He learned to drive and got his own car. It was like he was paving the path for us to become grown-ups, and he did it with such glee that he made it seem like something worth doing.
This place feels big now, like it’s the whole world, like what happens here matters. But it’s not. And it doesn’t.
Witt said things like that after he went to Europe one summer.
This place is small. Very small. And you can leave here one day. You can become something else. Anything you want. And when you come back, this place won’t feel big anymore. It will appear the way it really is, which is very little and small. Almost nothing.
This gave me comfort, this thought of our home, our family, our mother being very small. So small that maybe the bad things I thought would happen would not happen after all.
I did not see my father’s car enter the driveway. It turned out that he had slept through the phone ringing. My father could sleep through an earthquake. They eventually sent a squad car to tell him his daughter was alive.
My father suffered, and I found his suffering unbearable to witness. I have had a lot of time to reflect on our story inside this house. And I’ve been through things that have shattered the prism through which I see our story, through which I now see everything, so very differently. He kept a nice house for us. It had four bedrooms so Witt could always be there when we were, even after he went to college. And it was close to town so we could come and go to meet our friends. Emma liked that because she had a lot of friends. For me, it was always a reminder that I did not.
Our father’s house after the divorce was bright with sunshine but dark with sadness. His sadness. He told us that ever since the divorce, he struggled to remind himself that happiness is a state of mind. The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. It’s pouring rain. The flowers will grow. I am going to die one day. I am alive on this day. He said that after the divorce and losing my girls, he could see that everything he had, everything he loved, everything that made his life feel like a life could disappear at any moment. He said we, his three children, felt like drops of water in his hands, moving toward the cracks between his fingers, where we could slip through and leave him, one at a time or all at once until his hands were empty and his life became an empty space, an empty heart, I think he said until his life was nothing more than air going in and out of his lungs. These were the things he would talk about at dinner, and it was dreadful.
Sometimes Witt would get mad at him, tell him he should find some friends to tell this stuff to, not us, because we were his children and not his friends. He would tell him to see a shrink, and that all his bad moods were not because of the divorce. Our father would say he didn’t need a shrink. Then Witt would say, Fine, then why don’t you just shake it off? But our father said he couldn’t shake off the problem of knowing that the more you have, the more you have to lose.
And then we were gone, proving him right.
A woman with short blond hair walked from her car toward the house until she was out of my view. After seventy-four seconds, I heard the door open and close in the foyer, then the sound of feet coming up the stairs.
I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep again. My mother slipped her arm out from under my neck and quietly crept from the bed to answer the knock at her door. She pulled a blanket up around my shoulders so gently, it made me shudder. This was what had plagued my father. In spite of everything she did that she shouldn’t have done, and everything she didn’t do that she should have, something that felt like love was in her and she would take it out at times like this and show it to us and make us hunger for more. All of us, each in our own way.
Emma would sometimes dress Barbie in an evening gown. Ken, still buck naked, would chase after her.
Please, Barbie, please . . . let me put my dick inside you. Please, I’ll do anything!
Her voice was derisive and full of anger. We were young, but we still understood why our father was driven mad by our mother’s indifference, and how his madness had taken over every part of his brain and his heart so there was nothing left for us.
One day Emma took Barbie and threw her against the wall. She said nothing. We both sat on the floor, silently, looking at the doll. She had landed on her back, her dress flowing around her, white teeth shining through smiling red lips. This memory was now before my eyes—so vivid, my heart was pounding in my ears. Emma was the one brave enough to throw a doll against a wall while I gasped and then covered my mouth. She was the one brave enough to bargain for our mother’s love, even though she risked losing it every time. She was the one brave enough to challenge our mother’s beauty by wearing red lipstick and short skirts. Every day of our lives here, Emma fought for what she wanted, for what we should have had, while I hid in the shadows she was willing to cast for me.
Emma shielded me from our mother’s storm, and whether she did it for my benefit or just because that was who she was and that was what she needed to do, it served the same purpose. She kept me safe.
Doubt filled me up top to bottom when I thought about those storms. Why had I come back here? I was free! I could have gone anywhere! Then I told myself why. For Emma. For Emma! And to make all the wrong things done to us right again. It was my turn now, to be the lightning rod. Still, conviction is not the same thing as strength, and I was terrified.
I heard some whispering at the door. My mother sighed with disapproval but ultimately relinquished her control over me. Three sets of feet walked across the carpet to the edge of the bed. My mother sat down beside me and stroked my hair.
“Cass? Cass—these people are from the FBI. They want to talk to you. Cass?”
I let my sister enter my mind. I let her push aside