“Help me,” Mae says. She’s trying to pry our window open. I squeeze my fingers into the crack under the frame and push.
“Go in a little, and then up,” I tell her. The window loosens and creaks as we finally get it open from the outside.
I scrape my leg on the sill as we crawl back in. It stings. I limp into the living room where Mae is already sitting on the couch, pretending like this is where she’s been all night. I sit next to her and we both pant quietly, ready for the sound of the key in the door. A few minutes go by and nothing. I’ve caught my breath. Maybe Dennis isn’t coming straight home. Maybe he’s going to that woman’s house.
“What’d you think of our neighbor?” I ask.
Mae shrugs, eyes still on the front door. “He seemed fine.”
I drape my injured leg over her lap and inspect the tiny beads of blood already beginning to clot along the surface of the scrape.
“Fine or fiiiiiine?”
“Ew,” Mae says, ignoring the question. “Stop picking at it.”
“But I’ve been in-jured on the job,” I drawl, lifting my shin towards her face. “How’m I gonna find a law-yer to get me the settlement that I de-serve?” Personal Injury Law Call and Response. A game we started when we had to live with the Wassersteins, since those ads played on endless loop in their living room.
Mae pulls the scarf off my neck and ties it around my leg like a tourniquet. “Why, it’s just as easy as picking up the phone!” she says dutifully, and then whistles the jingle.
“Do it in a bow,” I say, pointing my toes.
“You’re ridiculous,” she says but ties the ends in a bow.
“What do you think the Wassersteins are doing at this very moment?”
“Choking on a hotdog,” Mae says.
“Just one?” I snort, picturing the two of them gagging on opposite ends of the same hotdog like Lady and the Tramp.
Cronus emerges from Dennis’s room and stretches.
“Was that open before?” Mae points past our cat to Dennis’s door.
“Oh, right,” I say. The photo. I fish it out from my back pocket, and smooth it against my thigh. Looking at it now with Mae beside me, I feel very stupid for having thought it was her. Of course it’s not Mae. It’s Mom. Obviously it’s Mom. I’ve just never seen any pictures of Mom from when she was Mae’s age, and they do look exactly alike.
“What is that?” Mae says.
I pass her the picture.
“Where’d you find this?” she asks.
“In his desk.”
She stares at it. “I think I saw him looking at it the other day. He must think about her still,” she says finally and makes me put it back exactly where I found it.
Then I join her again on the couch and we wait.
LETTER FROM MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN TO DENNIS LOMACK
June 14, 1962
Dear Mr. Dennis,
Daddy says, long hair or no long hair, it’s impolite to call you Dennis. So, now I will call you Mr. Dennis. I went up to the lake yesterday with Cynthia and her little brother and I saw the burial mounds! I told her what you said about the Indian bones inside and her little brother Gus, who is a pain-and-a-half, heard and started to try to dig them up with his hands. He thinks he found an arrowhead but I think it was just a sharp rock. He kept sneaking up on us and poking the back of our necks with it and telling us we were cursed. Then he got stung by a bee, so I guess he got what was coming.
Then we saw girls from our school and they didn’t talk to us, but Cynthia’s mom said we just had to keep our chins up, and that we were on the right side of history, and that when those girls grew up they would be deeply ashamed of what their parents had done to our daddies. Then Cynthia’s mom gave us chicken grease sandwiches and I ate mine and pretended to like it. I think Cynthia was embarrassed. Daddy says you are coming back in September to help register people to vote.
I miss you! I miss going on our walks and your stories and having you and all your friends on our living room floor. It was like a slumber party and there was always someone to talk to. The house is so empty now and Daddy just paces back and forth. Here is the photo of me you took with Daddy’s camera.
Don’t forget me!
Marianne Louise
Chapter 3
LETTER FROM MARIANNE MCLEAN TO EDITH AND MAE
[1997]
my dear daughters,
please ignore my previous letter. a familiar itch behind the eyeballs, words not my own.
can you even read this? it’s the medicine that makes my hands shake. please do not be alarmed. tremors & earthquakes in my hands & feet & face. they’ll keep deforming me until there’s nothing left to deform.
every morning, they put me in an ice bath up to my neck. i have never been so cold. a nurse, sadistic bitch, sits & watches my teeth chatter. i’ve developed a nasty cough, pneumonia? but they say some of the fog has lifted. i am writing you girls a letter, after all. my two lovelies. my ribbit & rabbit.
i forgive you & try not to think about you. i’m ashamed, of course. i want to keep you, even thoughts of you, away from this place. the suffering is in the walls, in the floor, under the tables. it’s mixed into the paint. it smells like shit & fear. it gets into your nostrils & then it’s too late because it’s in you. my neighbor can’t stop crying (can’t or won’t?). i have only recently begun to distinguish between awake & asleep. i’ve started writing again. words repeat in my head, the only way to flush them out is to write them down. poems. your father is no saint, but he is a lot of things.
i love you, it’s a bell in the fog, the only thing that still exists.
be brave,
mom
EDITH (1997)
What have they done to her in there? What did I let them do? The paramedics and the police. I should have lied, but I was so stunned. I told them what happened, and then they twisted it.
The man with the gun holsters, pouring me an orange soda into a Styrofoam cup. He was younger than the detectives on television shows, practically my age, wispy mustache. He asked me question after question and stupidly I told him everything, and he rubbed my shoulders and wiped the orange from my mouth with a napkin. Why hadn’t I kept quiet?
I put her in there. She thinks so too. Why else would she need to forgive me? And now they’re torturing her because of what I said. Between the ice baths and the pills they’re giving her, it’s a miracle she can write at all. Her handwriting was always so small, neat, round. She would press down hard enough that it was almost an engraving. You could run your fingers over the paper and feel the words.
Here, though, her handwriting looks like a ghost sneezed. There is nothing in the way it looks that is hers. It could have been written by someone else. Her sobbing neighbor. Some fat slob in a turban. It makes me feel better to think it was somebody else’s hand shaking over the paper, that Mom was just dictating.
I read the letter again, a third time, a fourth time. I start to hear the words and not see them. my two lovelies. my ribbit and rabbit. That sounds like her. The sound of her voice in my head calms me—bell in the fog—even though the things she is saying—tremors… deforming me—are not very calming. I get to the beginning of the letter again, and