“We have no money,” Noni explained. “I’m sorry. Your daddy never told me we were out of money.”
It was June when we moved. School was out. Low-relief mounds of mosquito bites marked my legs, red and itchy and bleeding from my attentions. On that sticky, heavy day, we all rode with Noni in the long front seat of the U-Haul. Joe sat closest to the window, and he alone craned his neck to watch the yellow house disappear behind us.
We helped Noni unpack the towels and sheets, the plates and silverware, our summer clothes, our books. Renee and Caroline would now share a room. Joe was down the hall, closest to the bathroom. I would sleep in a small, tucked-away space that had a low ceiling and no windows. Our old things looked wrong in the new rooms. At any moment I expected someone—our father perhaps—to pop out from behind a door and say Surprise! or What a hoot!, which were things our father used to say.
For dinner that first night, we sat on the couch and ate spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Accidentally we had arranged ourselves by age: Renee beside Caroline beside Joe beside me. I was wearing my nightgown, a short one, and the nubby orange upholstery itched against the backs of my thighs. The skin around our mouths was stained pink from the tomato sauce.
“Kids,” Noni said. She was standing in front of the couch. Unpacked boxes lined the walls. In the kitchen dirty dishes filled the sink.
“Yes?” said Renee.
“Kids,” Noni said again. “I’m feeling tired. Very tired.” Her hair hung lank around her face, her eyes gazed out from deep inside her head. The bones around her neck were thin and pronounced. They looked delicate, easy to break.
“I need some rest,” Noni said. “Okay?” She gazed from one of us to the other, her eyebrows up.
Caroline, Joe, and I all turned to Renee: she was the eldest, she was the one who knew how to answer our mother.
“Don’t worry, Noni,” said Renee. “I can do it.”
Noni nodded once as though something had been decided. She bent to each of us and hugged us, kissed us on our heads. There was a tickle of hair against my cheek, and then she disappeared down the long, dark hall to her bedroom.
Our mother did not emerge for three days. Then six. Then four. Then six again. This continued. Occasionally she would appear to cook dinner. Or ask us about our day. Or preside over a cut knee, a sunburned shoulder, a snotty nose. But primarily she rested in her room, door closed, curtains drawn, lights off. A bubble of darkened quiet that we feared to disrupt. How long did it last? Renee later claimed three years, give or take. Joe put it closer to two. When we were older, we called this period “the Pause,” but back then we had no words to describe it. We pretended that it was okay. This was temporary, we told ourselves. We must wait for Noni to finish resting. We must wait patiently for her to return.
THAT FIRST SUMMER we went feral. Joe and I became wild things, twigs in our hair, skin brown and dirty and scraped. Renee and Caroline tried to remain more respectable, more mature, but they, too, bore the marks of neglect and adventure. The house was never clean. We pulled what we needed from the cardboard boxes but did not unpack them fully. We played games, built forts, constructed castles that stayed up for days and then scattered underfoot as we played indoor tag or wrestled or fought. We slept in the clothes we wore all day, we did not brush our teeth, we bathed only when we began to smell ourselves or when Renee stripped off our clothes, pushed us under the shower, and turned on the tap. We ate food with our hands straight from the refrigerator or from the box of groceries that arrived every Friday, delivered by the stock boy, Jimmy, from the Bexley corner store. The food we received was odd or close to spoiling—leftovers, we came to see, unsellable. Charity. We were often hungry. We were always barefoot.
Joe and I explored our new neighborhood: only six miles from our old house, but it felt foreign. Another state, another country. There were people with brown skin, head scarves, tattoos. The houses were small, and domestic life spilled from windows and doors in ways that would have been unthinkable in our old neighborhood. In front yards men sat on beach chairs and drank from dull brown bottles. Women yelled at their children, who ran naked through a flicking sprinkler. A teenage girl blew smoke in practiced rings up toward the summer sky.
In twenty years Bexley would be deemed a commuter town and new expensive homes, new box stores, would arrive, but in 1981 it was small, forgotten, besieged by inflation and unemployment. On Bexley’s east side sat an abandoned mill where industrial furniture was once made for colleges and hospitals. Decades before, the company brought in workers from the city, settled them in cheap houses outfitted with the company’s own cheap wares. Now the mill stood empty, brooding, a sprawling, static octopus with graffitied tentacles of red brick and cracked windows and one tall, grimy smokestack for a head. All around the perimeter were scattered raw wooden boards, chairs with stuffing torn from seat cushions, tables with splintered stumps instead of legs.
Before the Pause, Noni often drove past the building, and always I would gaze at it with the fear and delight of a cowardly voyeur. During the Pause, Noni no longer drove, and so we had no occasion to pass the factory. But sometimes in bed at night, I imagined it: moonlight hitting the broken windowpanes, rats and cats and raccoons nosing through the interior, biting one another, fighting, scratching the furniture, defecating in empty rooms. I imagined a busy darkness, a dismantling that must be carried out under cover of night. The mysteries of the factory seemed to me similar to the mystery of Noni. Inside, invisible forces were at work, and they were full of a secret rage.
Our friends receded that summer. We couldn’t walk to the old neighborhood. Noni had instructed us to use the telephone only for emergencies. And besides, it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.
* * *
ON THE MORNING of my fifth birthday, Noni emerged to bake me a cake. We all watched as she lined up the ingredients on the kitchen counter: an ancient tin of baking powder, a wrapped square of hardened brown sugar. We did not volunteer to help. It seemed too risky. To us our mother was an exotic animal, a gazelle perhaps, that might startle if we moved too fast, spoke too loudly.
There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun. We each ate a thick slab of cake, Noni, too, and then she kissed me and walked again down the hall, the thready hem of her bathrobe skimming the floor.
She closed the door to her bedroom.
I burst into tears.
Renee, Caroline, and Joe exchanged looks. Caroline hid a smile with her hand.
“Fiona,” Renee said, “Joe’s got a surprise.”
Out the front door Joe disappeared, and when he returned, in his arms was a small rabbit. It struggled with kicking surges to escape, but Joe held it close to his chest.
“Happy Birthday, Fi,” he said.
My heart surged with excitement as Joe brought the rabbit to me. Gently he placed it into my arms. I stroked its soft fur, its beating heart a rapid tapping against my palm. The fur was black and gray, except for white around the rabbit’s eyes and on its stomach. The rabbit looked very scared, but Joe talked in a slow voice and I used my softest hands, my gentlest touch.
“Where did she come from?” I asked.
Joe whispered, “A secret.”