by Tanen Jones
She stared past me, up at the ceiling. I waited.
“Fine,” I said at last. “I’ll guess. But you won’t like my guess. Here it is: I think you and Mommy had something else in common besides your attractive tendency toward morbidity. It was something you said last night, actually, that helped me put the final piece in place. Do you remember what it was?”
Leslie barely blinked. She looked washed out, frozen.
I leaned in. “You said, She didn’t want us.” I sniffed. “Well, actually what you said was she didn’t want you. But I assumed you were just forgetting about my existence again. It’s so easy for you to do that.”
Leslie’s eyelids fluttered. She’d started to cry, silently, without moving.
“And that revelation came to you not when we were children and she avoided our presence, hated our voices, shut herself in the bathroom over and over—it was after you had your own baby. What’s his name again?”
Leslie’s throat moved as she swallowed. After a minute, she said, “Eli.”
“Eli. That’s right. You and Christine, you got yourselves tangled up so quickly. You met Dave and thought your life was fixed. Except he wanted something from you. He wanted a kid. And you wanted to give him anything he wanted. So you had the baby. And things with Mom were so long ago. You barely remember her. You didn’t think you were much like her at all. But then you had Eli, and…” I waited for her to finish the sentence, but she only cried some more. “You didn’t love him. Am I right?”
Leslie couldn’t answer me. Snot blocked her nose.
“I bet you felt really guilty. I bet you felt just like Mommy. You tried for a whole year. But you hated being a mother. And so you wanted to quit.”
Leslie squeezed her eyes shut.
“But you can’t just quit motherhood, can you?” I sat back on my heels and ticked off the options on my fingers. “There’s divorce and refusing custody. But then Dave would have hated you, and you couldn’t handle watching your perfect husband see that you were not the perfect wife. Plus, there’s that annoying child support! So, suicide. But then you’d be just like Christine. That’s so embarrassing!” I clutched my cheeks. “And Dave would totally tell on you. Not like Daddy, sweeping it under the rug. He’d ask for support from his family members, like a loony. Then there’s option three—you could smother Eli and blame SIDS.”
Leslie gasped.
“Aw, see, too scared for that. You don’t like to get involved with the police. Unlike me.” I winked. “So you fell on option four. You decided to run away.”
Leslie twisted out from under me. I let her go. She fell against the bookcase, wiping her nose on her cardigan, leaving long runny tracks on the cotton.
“What I don’t get,” I said at last, “is what your plan was this time around. Without Frank, you couldn’t make it look like a real carjacking. What, you were just going to ditch the car and buy a cash plane ticket?”
Leslie shrugged.
I laughed. “Wait, was that really your plan?”
“I don’t know,” she said through cracked lips. “I just thought I’d…get out somehow. Leave.” She coughed. “I put extra money in Eli’s college fund. Before Clery. For when I was gone.”
“You didn’t think Dave would look for you?”
She shook her head. “He’s in love with Elaine. She’s a good mother. He’d have…what he really wanted. And then he wouldn’t know that I…He wouldn’t have to hate me. He wouldn’t have to know that I wanted to go. Because if he knew, he’d want to fix it, and I can’t fix it.” She spread her hands. “I am like her. Like Christine. I shouldn’t have had a baby at all. I should have known there was something wrong with me. If Dave knew, he would have to think about it every—every time he looked at Eli, every time he thought about me. It would make him sick.”
“He loves you,” I said. “I watched him. I saw. You found the real thing.”
Leslie looked away. There was a long pause. “Did she really kill herself?” she asked finally, staring at the carpet.
“Who? Mom? Of course not,” I said, climbing off her and running my hands over my jeans. “She found option five, thanks to you.”
“What’s option five?”
“I am.” I smiled. “I helped.”
51
Leslie
“Helped…what?” I heard my own voice in my skull.
“You know,” Robin said. “Helped her get out. Helped her shuffle off this mortal whatever.”
“You’re lying,” I said. I was shaking. “You’re messing with me again. Stop—stop it—”
Robin gave a little shriek of frustration and rolled around on the floor. “Oh my God,” she moaned into the carpet, slightly muffled. “I thought you were over this by now.” She sat up and glared at me. It was nearing noon and the study had been slowly brightening as we spoke. Little flyaway hairs glowed around her head. “You did this all through our teens and it really fucked with my head, you know, Leslie.”
She said my name exactly the way she’d said it when we were kids, with that condescending lilt. Like she’d said it on the phone message the night of my wedding. I love you. I love you, Leslie—
“You blocked it!” she yelled at me now. “You just”—she folded her arms and did the I Dream of Jeannie boinggg—“blocked it out of your head, like it never happened! Well, it did happen, and it was your idea.”
My stomach lurched. I got up, clutching my belly.
“Sit down!” Robin snapped.
“I have to—” I gasped. “I’m going to—” I ran into the back hall and flung open the door to the bathroom.
I was dry-heaving over the toilet when Robin came in. She sat on the edge of the tub, next to me. “You haven’t eaten anything today,” she said after a minute of listening to me choke. “You should probably give up on that.”
“I can’t stop.” But as soon as I said it, the nausea subsided. I sat back on the bath mat.
“See?” Robin said smugly. “Now are you going to listen to me?”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” I whispered.
“I know you remember,” Robin said. “You just didn’t want to believe it. But it was your fault all along. I was only a kid. I followed you around. I practically worshipped you. And you said to me—”
“ ‘I wish Mom would die.’ ” I stared at her.
She nodded. “Exactly. That’s what you said to me. I just wanted you to be happy.”
“I was so tired,” I said. It was coming back in bits and pieces. “I was angry that she wanted to leave us so bad. She kept trying to…to leave us. And then Daddy would send her away, and she’d come back and hate us some more—so I wanted…I just wanted it to be over…” I focused my eyes again. “But you couldn’t have done it. You were only a kid.”
Robin snorted. “Mom weighed like eighty-five pounds, she was depressed, and they’d put her on downers. She was barely there. I found her half passed out in the bathtub, and I just…held her under.”
“No,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Robin whispered back. She laughed. “It wasn’t hard. She wanted to go. She didn’t fight me or anything.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t believe you.”
“Well, I can’t believe you!” Robin snapped. “When I told you about it, you said I was lying! I wasn’t lying!”
I stared at her. She was bright against the white of the tub, roundly healthy, pink-cheeked. Beautiful.
She couldn’t have killed anyone. She didn’t have it in her.
No…
The nausea returned.
I’d known for a long time what it was that lived in her.
“I did it because I loved you, Leslie,” Robin said, wringing her hands. “I didn’t think it would make you hate me. I was just a kid. I didn’t know how your brain worke
d.”
Like it was me that was crazy.
“But you did.” Her brow wrinkled prettily. She really looked hurt. “You never looked at me the same after that. You acted like I was some kind of monster.”
Had I?
I’d spent so much time flattening the memory that now it was fractured. I didn’t know whether I’d pushed Robin away. But it was true that before my mother died, we’d done everything together. Spent all our time together.
After my mother died, we slept in separate bedrooms.
I’d always thought it was Robin who’d never liked me, who’d kept her distance. When I was in middle school she got her own room, I’d told Mary. Suddenly she hated me.
She’d hated me, so I’d hated her back.
No.
She’d loved me, in her own disgusting, sharp-toothed way. And I’d abandoned her. Shut her in the guest bedroom to sleep by herself.
I didn’t hate her because she was a monster. She was a monster because I hated her. I’d made her this way, made sure she grew up alone and angry.
I lifted my gaze. There she was. Beautiful, horrible. Alive.
My mouth watered and I spat into the toilet over and over until the bile lurched its way up my throat.
“Now you remember,” Robin said, over the sound of my vomiting. “I knew you’d get there eventually.”
52
Leslie
When she went to Lakeview the first time, my grandmother came to stay with Robin and me in the house on Riviera. Not my mother’s mother—as far as I knew, we didn’t speak to her. It was my dad’s mother, Grandma Betty. She stayed for months, washing dishes and smoking at the kitchen table. I remember she still wore gloves to go to church, like it was the 1950s. My father joked to her once that you can tell how many generations a family is removed from poverty by how decked out its women get when they go visit God. The more accessories, the newer the money. Betty had frozen him out for the rest of the day. When I was eleven, after Betty’s funeral, Daddy told me Betty’s parents had been sharecroppers.
That first visit, she treated us like small dogs, letting us in and out of the house whenever we asked and feeding us promptly but otherwise ignoring us unless we made a lot of noise. The kitchen was hers for cooking and reading magazines and having her friends over, and we held almost zero interest. This wasn’t especially dissimilar to how our mother treated us when she was home, but for some reason, maybe other kids at school, I had got it in my head that grandmothers should dote on their grandchildren and spoil them and kiss their cheeks, and I was offended that Grandma Betty didn’t do any of that. Well, she insisted we kiss her cheek every night before bed, and if we made faces while we did it she told Daddy on us.
So it stuck in my head that the one time she treated us like people was the day that our mother was due to return from her sojourn away. She taught us to make snowflakes from sheets of construction paper. We made boxes full, pink and yellow, and when my parents came through the front door at last, we flung the snowflakes in the air like confetti, so that they clung to my mother’s perm and the yellow bouquet in her arms, souvenirs of our devotion.
My mother went to Lakeview two more times, and by the third time Grandma Betty was dead and we didn’t throw snowflakes anymore.
Robin was a long-legged eight years old, almost nine, when Christine returned. My dad was working all the time back then, sometimes sleeping at his office, and Grandma Betty had died the year before, so there was no one to take care of us. But the decade was different as well. A twelve-year-old was babysitting age; I was plenty old enough to care for Robin, who could ride a bike and make frozen dinners.
After that winter, Robin was not well liked by the nearby fourth-graders, so she spent all her time with me, something that was only now starting to grate on me. She was odd—watched old movies on TV and had recently started speaking in a fake mid-Atlantic accent and wearing clip-on paste earrings from the dollar store. When she wasn’t imitating Barbara Stanwyck, she was imitating me. It was something little sisters were supposed to do, so it might have soothed me, but she was uncomfortably possessive in her love, crawling across the room and into my bed at night, sleeping clutched to my arm with her hand in my hair. I couldn’t have my newest school friend, Diane Gomez, over without her listening in. We could see the white lumps of her sock-clad feet in the crack of space between the door and the carpet. Later, she’d make me list all the reasons I liked her better than Diane.
I did like her better than Diane, but I wanted space.
So that day I’d locked the door to our bedroom from the outside and gone into the backyard to lie on the tile with my shirt pulled up to my fleshy infant belly, trying to get an April tan before any of the other girls in class had one. Christine had been in the bathroom for three hours, taking one of her interminable baths, which I only later realized were influenced by the pills the hospital had given her. I’d been out there for an hour when I heard a cracking noise and saw Robin braced in the window, pushing up the painted-shut sill. “Leslie!” she called.
I twisted around to look at her. “You broke the window!”
“I did not.” She was half out of the house, one thin insect leg hanging down.
“It was sealed!”
“It came up when I yanked.” She tumbled out and brushed the dust off her denim skort. “I was tired of being in our room. Can I tan with you?”
“No,” I said, but she ran over to my side and spread-eagled out next to me anyway, pulling her shirt up too. I sighed. “Is she still in the bathtub?”
There were three women in the house, but only one she.
Robin nodded. “I think she’s gonna do it again,” she added. “I mean, not today.”
“I know what you mean.” Christine had always looked through us, like Grandma Betty, but now it was like there was nobody looking at all. She had given up speaking. The second time she’d gone to Lakeview, Daddy had told us she was going to learn to toughen up, but she had come back just the same, if not worse: sleeping all the time, not answering the door. Going to the grocery store required hours of getting ready, and sometimes she’d decide it was too late to go by then, and we’d order a pizza and hide the box in our neighbors’ trash can so Daddy wouldn’t see it.
Was I angry at her? Yes and no. I had never really been able to put into words what it was like to grow up as we did. Robin was the only one who understood, and that day in the backyard was the last time we would ever really speak to each other for the rest of our childhood. What it came down to, I thought, was that other children had been taught to have an interiority. Their parents tried to befriend them, encouraged them in having preferences, even down to what foods they would and would not try, appealed to their reason when rules were flouted. In our house, no adults ever bothered to justify themselves to children; the idea had a hippie tinge to it. To Daddy, having been raised by Grandma Betty, children were not really people, only people-in-training. There was little to do with them but wait for them to become reasonable.
When no one discusses your feelings, it never really occurs to you that you might have feelings. I did have feelings, of course, but sitcom ones, learned from TV and Are You There God? and church once a year. For the most part these shallow affectations were sufficient for any situation a twelve-year-old from the suburbs could find herself in, but every once in a while something unidentifiable would pass just beneath my consciousness, like the shadow of some enormous sea creature under the tiny bobbing craft above.
I said, “I don’t understand why she can’t do it.”
Robin was not really listening by this time, having gotten bored of tanning in the few minutes I’d spent lost in thought. She was crouched on the patio, upending her box of chalk. “Do you remember when it snowed?” she asked me.
“I wish she were already dead,” I said contemplatively. “Right now, it’s kind of like we�
�re all just waiting and nobody’s doing anything about it. And I never know what to say to people who ask, because Daddy doesn’t want…you know, it’d be easier to say, ‘She died.’ At least people understand that.”
Robin pursed her lips. She had no outward reaction to this speech. It was one of her greatest qualities as a kid sister: total unflappability. I appreciated that even as I recognized that she had lifted the pursed-lips expression directly from Agent Scully on The X-Files.
I tipped my head back, letting the sun turn my cheeks pink.
Robin scratched away on the tiles next to me. “You’re getting sunburned,” she told me after twenty minutes or so had passed.
I patted my face. “Really?”
But she was gone, back into the low darkness of the house. Toward my mother.
Did I know what she would do?
Yes and no. It was there, under the surface.
I rolled onto my belly to see the scene she’d drawn: pink-and-green snow falling onto a red adobe house. You could tell it was snow and not rain because there was a pink-and-green snowman beside the house. His arms originated from his ears, and he stood at least one snow-head higher than the two-dimensional roof. Robin had added a little speech bubble. The snowman was saying, I’M TANNING!
I laughed.
53
Robin
I brought Leslie a blanket. She sat at the kitchen table, all emptied out, orange at the corners of her mouth. “You loved me,” she said at last.
“I love you,” I corrected, hugging her around the blanket. She didn’t react. “You’re my sister,” I added anyway.
Nausea passed over her features again, and she almost got up from the table. “I should have stopped you. I should have—”
“Should have.” I made my fingers relax. “Her being here was killing us, Leslie. She wanted to die and Daddy couldn’t let her, and it was making us sick. He never admitted it. You could barely say it. But you were relieved.”
Leslie took this in. The kitchen was silent for several moments. “If I had stopped you, would you have stayed?”