by Melanie Tem
She ought to write something about sadness. She ought to write something about death. Instead, she flipped through the diary’s gold-edged pages, not looking for anything in particular except proof that there had been life and thoughts and words before this day.
There were lots of blank pages left, even though the year was more than half over. She didn’t write in the diary very often. Most of the time, the things she thought about didn’t stay still long enough to get written down, or didn’t come to her in words.
She stopped to read a couple of entries about Jeremy Martinez, how cute he was, how one day he’d stolen her pencil and rolled it under the teacher’s desk in math class, and they’d both had to stay after school. Dad had told her that boys Jeremy’s age acted like that when they liked you.
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Dad didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t know how you knew when a boy liked you, but that wasn’t how. Rae would know. She’d ask Rae. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever thought Jeremy Martinez was cute. Jeremy Martinez was a dog. She had the fleeting, disturbing thought that she really hadn’t written that, that somebody else was sneaking words into her diary.
Here was something about a spring day. Lucy remembered writing that one. “Now I know what the word glorious means.” The word glorious stirred her, like listening to Tawanda Robinson play taps on her trumpet at the beginning and end of the sixth-grade assembly. She clearly remembered that particular day, that particular moment, the feel of the pencil moving across the paper, filling in the pale blue lines with shiny gray-black writing that was now smudged a little. The day had been filled with bird song and the smell of lilacs.
Lilacs were Lucy’s favorite flower. Mom’s, too. Every year while there was still snow on the ground, Mom worried that the lilacs would bud too soon and get frozen, or there wouldn’t be enough rain at the right time and they’d dry out, or there’d be a big wind right after the buds had opened and they’d all blow away. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, either. One year the ground had been covered with petals like pale purple snow, and Mom had stared out the window with tears in her eyes, holding the baby Cory.
Here was an entry that at first didn’t make sense:
Ethan and Mom played hide-and-seek in the basement today. They wouldn’t let me play.
She had printed it, so the letters were neat. Her cursive was still jiggly, like a little kid’s; she experimented all the time with different sizes and slants and ways to make certain letters, and she didn’t like any of them. She always got a C in penmanship. Once she got a D.
Mom called the police.
Quickly Lucy turned the page; gold flickered. Steam from the bathwater made the paper damp. Somebody was calling her. She turned the page back, smoothed it with the flat of her hand.
Sometimes Mom and Ethan are like the same person. Sometimes they’re like total strangers.
Lucy tried hard to believe that she’d never written any of this, that somebody was sneaking into her room, into her dresser, into her diary and writing stuff that didn’t have anything to do with her. Trying to get her in trouble.
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Trying to drive her crazy. She insisted to herself that she didn’t remember this, but she did remember, and the memory curled around her like smoke, hurting her eyes.
It was a long time ago. Last Christmas vacation, after Christmas, just before they went back to school.
The furnace was huffing and puffing in its dusty, cobwebby corner of the basement. Lucy liked to think of the furnace as their pet monster, keeping them warm.
Snow was piled crookedly outside the little, high, dirty windows, like blankets somebody hadn’t folded right to fit on the shelf. Lucy knew there were spiders everywhere, under everything, hanging from every beam, just waiting to spin sticky webs in her face, just waiting for their millions of eggs to hatch. The fact that she didn’t actually see any only made her more sure that they were there.
She was in Ethan’s room. She wasn’t allowed in Ethan’s room, none of them were, even though Ethan was long gone. Rae wanted this room, and Lucy wanted a room of her own, but Mom wouldn’t let them do it. Once Priscilla had come downstairs wearing Ethan’s green shirt, sleeves rolled like sausages above her elbows, tail long between her legs in front and in back. Mom had had a fit, even though Pris had insisted she’d found the shirt in her laundry.
Lucy was looking for the John Cougar Mellencamp tapes she was sure Ethan had stolen from her. Mom was in the upstairs bathroom giving Cory a bath; that would take a while. Dad was at the grocery store with a long list.
Still, Lucy was being as quiet as she could, and listening hard to all the footsteps that crisscrossed the ceiling above her head. It was weird to think of a ceiling as being a floor, too, having another side, a top and a bottom.
She didn’t leave his room as soon as she’d found the tapes under his bed because she was also hoping to find a clue. Maybe the grown-ups had missed something. Maybe Ethan had left a message in secret code that only she could decipher. Maybe in all the time his room had been empty it hadn’t really been empty, Ethan’s spirit or something had been hiding in there all the time, or something had grown or worked its way to the surface. If she could find it, she’d be a hero. Then Mom would quit crying, and Dad wouldn’t be mad at her anymore.
Lucy left the closet door half-open and felt around. Shirtsleeves wriggled.
A tennis shoe sat footless on a shelf. The closet smelled like the rest of the room, only more so; smelled like her brother Ethan. Until then she wouldn’t have thought that certain smells went with certain people. Wondering suddenly if she herself had a special odor, she surreptitiously lifted her forearm to her nose. The ceiling light made huge shadows when she moved, even inside the closet.
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She was on her hands and knees, gingerly poking through the clothes and papers and junk on Ethan’s closet floor, trying not to think about spiders, when she heard a commotion, and then the door to Ethan’s room banged open from the inside. Lucy froze. Something had been in the room with her all this time. Something was breaking out.
With her hands sunk to the wrists in her brother’s things, she crouched and listened. If she turned her head, she could just see out through the opening in the closet door and then through the bedroom door, which she’d carefully shut behind her but which was now wide open, into the dusty, warm, inhabited basement that seemed to stretch on forever underneath the whole house.
Mom was standing out there in the basement, facing Lucy. The white streak in her hair made a dull glow, like the snow piling up outside all the windows.
Mom said, “Ethan!” and held out her arms.
From between Lucy and her mother, something jumped. There was a sudden, sickening, too-sweet stink, like a sick baby, or like when chicken gets left too long in the back of the refrigerator. It was Ethan. Lucy knew it was Ethan because Mom had called his name.
Mom cried out and dodged, covering her head. The creature that was Ethan hit the doorframe, which rattled, but only a little, as though he didn’t weigh very much. He crumpled onto the floor like a balloon with the air let out of it, then got up and turned and started after Mom again.
Mom moaned, “Oh, Ethan, I’m so sorry,” and then ran. Lucy struggled to her feet. Ethan’s leavings on the closet floor tangled around her ankles, but she pulled free and stumbled to the door of the room, in time to see Mom halfway up the basement steps and Ethan—thin, stiff as cardboard, unmis-takably Ethan—right behind her.
He hadn’t come back for her. She’d waited a long time, clutching a split plastic baseball bat because it was the only weapon she could find. As far as she knew, he hadn’t caught Mom, either. She didn’t know what had happened to him that day. Outside the basement windows, which were s
mall as picture frames and not that high above her head, she’d seen feet in boots, big round knees in blue pants as somebody squatted in the snow, a hand with flashing rings wiping the glass, part of a face peering in.
When finally she’d gone upstairs, trailing the orange bat behind her, the cops were there. The family had been gathered around Mom like football players in a huddle.
The police hadn’t found anything. No signs of forced entry, they’d said.
No footprints in the snow, though it was snowing hard enough, Lucy thought, that footprints could have been covered up while they were standing there talking. Lucy had thought they looked at her mother funny. Lucy 52
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had hated them. She’d wanted them out of her house. She’d been afraid to tell anybody that she’d seen him, too, and that she’d also seen somebody else—
a bigger man than Ethan, a man with blue pants and black boots and rings on his fingers.
But she’d written about it in her diary. Now, sitting in the steamy bathroom on the day of her brother’s funeral, she smoothed her fingertips over the page again, liking the way they looked against the pink paper.
Ethan and Mom played hide-and-seek in the basement today. They wouldn’t let me play. Mom called the police. Sometimes it’s likeMom and Ethan are like the same person.
If anybody ever broke into her diary and read that, they wouldn’t know what it meant. They wouldn’t have any idea what had really happened. But she knew. She turned the page. Somebody else had written in her diary. Lucy stared. Thick black letters, sort of halfway between cursive and printing, catty-corner across the top of the page.
Mom’s handwriting, like when she left a note on the refrigerator that she was at the store and would be home soon, and you were supposed to do the dishes before she got back. Lucy looked at Mom’s writing compared to her own, and was suddenly, giddily, hopeful: someday when she grew up, she’d know what she was doing too.
Dear Lucy [the message from her diary said]. Don’t be afraid. Ethan won’t hurt you.
Love, Mom.
Lucy read the words over and over, ran her fingertips across them to see if she could feel the words on the page. She lifted the diary to her nose, even touched her tongue to the paper. When had Mom written that? Now that Ethan was dead, would she still say those words to Lucy?
She heard the phone ringing. The water in the tub was almost overflowing, and not hot enough now for a bath. Lucy turned off the faucet, pulled the plug, and, carrying her diary under her arm, ran for the hall phone. She got to it just before Dominic. He made a face at her, mad, half playing. She poked him in the ribs. When he screeched, she couldn’t hear what the person on the phone was saying, and she stuck her finger in her other ear to shut out Dom and the rest of the house noise.
Dom went running out onto the porch with his squirt gun. He wasn’t ready for Ethan’s funeral. Lucy told herself it was okay, the funeral wasn’t for hours yet. They had to make it through the rest of the morning and lunch 53
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and the first part of the afternoon. Hot morning sunshine streamed in the front window, and you could see streaks in the glass and dust in the air that weren’t there any other time.
Mites. She’d stared at the picture in her mother’s book: huge mouths and pincers, lots of legs, no eyes. No eyes; that especially gave her the creeps.
There were billions of mites in the world—in the air, on your food, in your sheets, up your nose. They lived off dead stuff: the hair in your brush, dead skin scales. Most people never knew they were there, but now Lucy did, and now she felt them and tasted them and saw them everywhere, and they made her sneeze. She felt her own skin dying.
“Hello?” she said again, impatiently, into the phone, and then suddenly, and for no good reason, the thought came whole into her mind: Ethan was dead.
His being dead kept sneaking up on her, the same way he himself had all that time he’d been missing, the same way he still did, though now she had the feeling he wasn’t looking for her. Showing up in windows and mirrors and dreams. Following her too close down stairs, so that she almost fell. Making the floorboards creak and the curtains move when he played hide-and-seek in her house at night; it wasn’t his house anymore, he’d lost it, he’d run away, he didn’t live here anymore because he’d been so bad, he was dead. Singing.
Saying to come with him and do what he was doing. Singing to Rae, really, but Lucy could hear the tune and most of the words.
He really was dead. Mom and Dad had seen the body. They’d identified it. They’d said, “Yes, that’s our son, Ethan Michael Brill.” Rae had asked Mom exactly what they’d had to say, and that’s what she’d told her. The funeral was at three o’clock this afternoon. He really was dead.
The man’s voice on the phone was asking again for Tony. It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning and Dad was still asleep. Lucy didn’t say that right away, though, as if it were a shameful family secret not to be shared with a stranger. As politely as she could, she demanded, “Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Jerry Johnston.”
She still wasn’t recognizing him right away; he could sneak up on her. He hadn’t even said hello to her.
He had no right to be calling here anyway, invading her house, telling bad news, making her say stuff she didn’t want to say. She imagined the phone lines like hypodermic needles in and out of her house, sucking stuff out, injecting other stuff in.
“Dad’s still asleep,” she said, finally.
“Oh.”
“He’s—he doesn’t feel good.”
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“I’d like to speak to your mother then, if I may.”
“Mom’s taking a shower.” Water in the pipes made the old house cough.
It also made her think, unwillingly, about things that were hollowed out and then filled with other things: walls and pipes and molecules of water, dancing and sticking together.
“Well, then.”
Jerry Johnston’s voice on the phone was just a voice, without particular power. That was because he wasn’t here in the room, with his bulk, his beige eyes, his baby-powder smell. At first, a long time ago, she’d liked his voice, but the longer she’d had to be in the same room with him, the more uncomfortable his voice had made her, even a little afraid.
“Well, then, is Rae there?” he asked.
“Rae?”
“Let me speak to Rae, please.”
She didn’t have to let him. She could have refused. She could have said that Rae was at a friend’s house or taking the trash out or at the park with Molly. She could have said that Rae had run away, or Rae was dead. He’d never know. She had the power.
But Rae was sitting right there on the couch, and she’d looked up at the sound of her name. “Just a minute,” Lucy said sullenly, and shoved the receiver into her sister’s hand.
“Well, Jesus, you don’t have to throw it at me!” Rae gave her the finger and then said into the phone, in the same mean voice, “What?” There was a brief pause, and then Rae said in a different tone altogether, “Oh, hi,” and her face changed. Her whole body softened, delicately twisted, spread. She stretched out along the nubby blue couch and raised one knee. Her toes flexed like a cat’s; the toenails were red. She was wearing baggy orange short-shorts, and Lucy could see way up to the lace on her yellow underwear. Her head was tilted, so that her bright blond hair draped across her cheek and across the hand that propped up her head, red-nailed against tanned skin and bent back at the wrist.
Cradling the receiver there, Rae smiled a little and nodded as she listened.
She didn’t say much, but what she did say had a tone to it that Lucy, no matter how much she practiced, couldn’t quite get. Rae was flirting. Lucy felt a grudging admiration for her older sister, a strong desire to be like her.
/> “Oh,” Rae said quietly. “Okay.” Lucy wondered uneasily what she was agreeing to.
Jerry Johnston must have a penis and everything. The thought made Lucy blush, made her feel funny in the lower part of her stomach. Of course she’d seen her little brothers’ penises lots of times, but they were like noodles, small and soft, and she really found it hard to believe that a penis ever got big and 55
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hard like the ones in Rae’s magazine. If Jerry’s went with the rest of him, it must be awesome. Lucy almost giggled.
Her brother Ethan must have had a penis, too. She’d never seen it. Ethan was dead. Pretty soon his body, all of his body, would start to decay. The funny feeling in Lucy’s groin turned to nausea, and she pressed her palms there.
She forced her thoughts back to Jerry Johnston. He was kind of cute. He had pretty eyes and a nice smile. He was probably available, too; he didn’t wear a wedding ring, though there was a giant square turquoise and silver ring on one of his pinkies, and she didn’t think there were any pictures on his desk. Dad had a family portrait on his desk at work. Ethan was still in it.
“Sure,” Rae said warmly. “I will.”
It was disgusting to flirt with Jerry Johnston over the phone when Ethan was dead. Lucy turned resolutely away from her sister, but kept listening.
Finally, Rae said lingeringly, “Bye.” Then she sat with the receiver still to her ear, waiting, Lucy supposed, for Jerry Johnston to hang up. Lucy stayed where she was, leaning against the wall; she expected Rae to yell at her for eavesdropping, and she got ready to yell back. Instead, the older girl lowered the receiver, sighed, and said almost dreamily, “That was Jerry.”
“I know, dummy. I answered the phone.”
“He called to tell us about Ethan.”
“He already told us Ethan’s dead. What else is there?”