I remember how big her eyes looked under those sheets, like brown cue balls with lashes like paintbrushes. With the sheet over our heads I’d shine the light on her book and read out loud. God forbid I’d read without doing the voices. No way she’d let me get away with that. Whatever the characters in the book were, a fox, a dog, I’d have to sound like one. This one time I was reading her a story about a rabbit and she said, “A rabbit doesn’t sound like that.”
“How do you know? You talk to rabbits?”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “What’s your rabbit sound like?”
She made this squealing high-pitched voice that woke up our mom. Mom came in the room and said, “Do you know what time it is?” Dani popped her head out from behind the sheet and said, “It’s no-parents time.” Then pulled it back over our heads.
Mom said, “Come on, it’s after midnight.”
Dani popped her head out again and said, “No parents allowed.”
“This parent’s allowed.”
“No,” Dani said, “you can’t come in if you don’t give the secret knock.”
“I’ll give you a secret knock. Now, go to sleep.”
“No knock, no coming in. It’s the rules.”
Then Mom pulled the cover off our heads. “The rules are gonna change real fast if your father wakes up.”
That’s what it took for Dani to give in. That’s always what it took for Dani to give in—the threat of Dad doing something. She looked at me and said, “Put the secret reading light back in the secret place.”
I don’t know exactly when it started, but sometime around age seven or eight she got real quiet. Hardly ever talked around the house or even at school. And if she did you could barely hear her. Her voice dissolved into this permanent kind of whisper and you didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to you. You had to get real close to hear anything. And I noticed she stopped touching people; wouldn’t do it with her magic wand or her own hands. Wasn’t like we were running the most affectionate household. Dad’s affections always came as some kind of open-handed slap to the ass or to the back of the neck—trying to get other kinds of affection from him was like hugging a gravestone. Mom would throw an arm-lock around us sometimes, but Dani wasn’t having it; she started squirming away from hugs, turning her cheek away from kisses and stopped sitting on people’s laps. And her eyes—I swear they shrunk. The lids laid at half-mast like a camel’s.
One night—I was about eleven, Dani was seven—I woke up to this bizarre scratching noise coming from her side of the wall. It wasn’t knocking, it was scratching. And in my barely awake state, it felt like something was coming after me. When I realized it was coming from the other side of the wall, I knocked the three times: What’s up? And the scratching stopped. I waited for the four All-clear knocks. But they didn’t come. So I gave three knocks again: What’s up? Nothing. Just quiet. I let it go. Figured she was OK, and went back to sleep. A few nights later I heard the same scratching again. This time I knocked once: Come in. The scratching noise stopped and she gave me the four All-clear knocks. But something about it felt off. So in the morning I said, “Dani, what was going on with the scratching last night?”
She said, “I wasn’t scratching anything.”
“Then what was the noise?”
“The noise was scratching, but it wasn’t me scratching.”
“Then who was it?”
“Men.” She whispered this like it was her big secret.
“What men?”
“Invisible men.”
“If they’re invisible how do you know they’re men?”
“Only I can see them.”
“What do they look like?”
“They have knives.”
That’s when this fast chill ran up the back of me. “What do they do with them?”
“They scratch.”
“What do they scratch?”
“You know … My bed.”
“Do they scratch you?”
“No.”
“Let me know if they scratch your bed again. OK?”
“OK.”
I’m guessing all kids do and say things that seem a little, you know—out there. And everyone lets it go because they’re kids. But Dani wasn’t being normal-kid kind of weird.
It was a finger painting. Different shades of thick red lines smeared over one another. I could see how you might think it was a horizon line at sunset. Before it was dry, Dani took something sharp, maybe the point of her pencil, and scratched lines through the paint. Now, I don’t know much about painting, but when a seven-year-old is already going for different textures, you gotta think she’s got talent. Or something to say. Or both. Mom hung what she thought was a cute little sunset picture on the refrigerator. It was her habit to display things that signified normal happiness. But about this sunset, she was way off.
We were eating dinner in the dining room and Dad told me to get him another beer. OK. I go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator where this painting hung. It’d been there for a few months probably. And you know, things hang around long enough (like the Sears bullshit portraits of me wearing argyle and crooked teeth that Mom displayed on the living-room end tables) and you stop noticing them. So I grabbed the beer, shut the door, and there was this goddamn painting staring me in the face, stopping me.
My mother hung it horizontally, but Dani’s name was written sideways, going up the page. I moved the magnets that were holding it up, put my fingers on it and spun it around vertical, so her name was at the bottom, right ways up. And that’s definitely the way it was supposed to go, man.
You never know when you’re going to understand a little more of what’s going on inside someone. Looking at it vertically there wasn’t any sun in that picture at all, no horizon. But hundreds of unmistakable long red streaks of blood. Dani ran her finger up and down that paper with as many different shades of red as the Board of Education supplied a first-grader. Then she scratched lines into those streaks.
I don’t know what made me run upstairs and into my sister’s room, but I stood next to her bed, my father’s beer in hand, and just looked around. Nothing was strange, nothing out of place. I didn’t know what I was looking for, when I pulled the blankets off her bed.
Carved into the wood of her headboard, down near the mattress, were pictures of tiny girls’ bodies. Skinny legs and arms poking out of triangle dresses. Little floating stick figures without heads or faces.
Yeah, Dani was seven, but what the fuck? I was only eleven. I went back down to the dining room, put the beer on the table in front of my dad, and he said, “You grow the wheat yourself?” He looked at me, and I fuckin looked at him, my vocal cords feeling like stone columns.
I might have been fifty percent of one parent and fifty percent of the other one, but seeing the faces of these people I was supposed to love—and worse, answer to—I couldn’t recognize one crease, curve or color of resemblance. And those visions of Dad hurting and burning came back. You son of a bitch. If God really is your manufacturer then I’m gonna sue the bastard for faulty design.
“Don’t you say thank you to your son?” my mother asked.
Dad lifted his can. “Here’s to us, Jake. There’s few what’s like us, and they’re all dead.”
I said nothing. How could I? I had no idea what was