“Yeah, my mom showed me that when I was little,” I say.
“That’s cool,” he says. He lies back against the hood of the car. “Bet I can spot the next one before you.”
I purse my lips. “Does everything have to be a competition?”
“Makes it fun. I’m gonna win.”
I lean back, too, resting my head on his arm. It isn’t exactly comfortable on the car, but it’s still warm. Warmer next to Liam.
He finds the next two satellites.
“Show-off,” I say.
He pulls his phone out. “It’s getting late. We should head out.”
“Yeah, all right.”
I’m sad as we leave the tucked-away parking lot. It felt like we could hide from everyone in there. I realize how much I want a repeat of tonight, to spend more time with Liam, like this.
“So, was tonight okay?” he asks as he parks outside my house.
“More than okay,” I say.
“What’s wrong?” Liam asks.
“Tonight was great,” I say. “I know you said we could just be friends, but maybe—”
“I’m in,” he says.
“But I didn’t even finish,” I say.
“Whatever you want. You call the shots. I’m in.”
We turn to face each other, and he leans in slowly this time.
It’s a soft, brief kiss, nothing like before, and when we pull away, we’re both smiling. Somehow, I feel more shy now.
“Now that is how I imagined our first kiss. Sorry for getting carried away earlier,” Liam says.
“I got carried away, too,” I say, but my mind is echoing the phrase imagined our first kiss. “Good night, Liam.”
I have to force myself to climb out of his car before I ask him to take me somewhere else.
Somewhere not here.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I WALK INTO THE HOUSE WITH a smile on my face. I’m still replaying the evening’s events—with a special emphasis on the kissing parts—when the lights over the counters flare bright for an instant, a surge of energy that draws my attention. That’s when I see the sink, and the warmth on my lips is overtaken by dread, cold like a bucket of ice water dumped on me.
A dish is shattered—pieces are in the sink and on the floor. I think it used to be a plate, but now it’s nothing but shards of yellow ceramic. There’s uncooked pasta still in its package on the counter. I smell burnt chicken, and see a blackened pan in the sink among the shards. There’s a pot of water still boiling furiously on the stove, and I quickly move across the kitchen and turn off the blue flame. When the water calms, I realize how quiet everything is.
I walk into the darkened living room, and then I hear it. A whimper. I drop my bag and jacket on the floor and climb over furniture in the dark until I find Campbell and Juniper huddled up together in the corner of the room.
“Are you okay?” I ask, but my voice echoes off the walls. It’s like the house is amplifying the sound, making it feel dangerous to speak.
“We needed you,” Cam says.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” Juniper adds.
I can’t make out much in the dark, but Cam’s eyes shine where the light from the kitchen catches them. Dammit. I should have been here.
“I’m so glad, too, June Bug. What happened?”
“We burned the chicken,” she says. “So he threw the pan into the sink and shattered the plates and then Mom told him to stop and then . . .”
“And then” is enough. I can figure it out. He was mad. And she got mad. So he got madder. That seems to be an unspoken rule in our house: no one is allowed to be madder than him. I walk to the bottom of the stairs and listen, but I can’t hear anything. It’s awful and scary when he is screaming. But it is always worse when things are quiet.
“Did he take anything upstairs?” I ask Campbell.
“Anything?”
I glance at Juniper.
“Like a knife? His gun?”
Campbell’s eyes widen. I regret the question, but she answers anyway.
“Not that I saw.”
“Stay with Junie,” I say, and step onto the first stair.
“Don’t go up there!” Cam hisses.
I don’t want to.
“I’ve got to check on Mom.”
“Please, Leighton,” Juniper says, her voice catching.
“Okay, okay.” I back down the stairs. “I’m staying.”
I squat down beside the girls, and we sit still and quiet in the dark for several minutes.
“Hey, Juniper, how was school today?”
Juniper climbs into my lap before answering.
“Goooood,” she draws out.
“What did you learn?” I ask, my fingers fiddling with the soft strands of her hair. She needs a trim.
Junie seems to think hard about my question. The floor creaks upstairs, once. Then all is silent again.
“I learned about Amelia Earhart,” Juniper whispers.
“You did?” I ask. “What did you learn about her?”
“She was one of the first ever women to fly planes, and she flew all over the world.”
“That’s great, June Bug.”
“Leighton,” Juniper whispers. “Do you think Amelia was fearless?”
A voice raises and then quiets abruptly upstairs.
“Yeah, Juniper, I think she had to be fearless.”
Campbell’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling.
“What about you, Campbell? What did you learn in school?”
Cam ignores me. I reach over and squeeze her hand. “I’m here now, Cam. I’m sorry.”
She keeps staring. I can’t help but glance up, too. Even if I had X-ray vision, I don’t know if I’d want to look. My mind filters through the what-ifs. The worst cases. The nightmares.
She is hurt. She needs me, and I’m sitting down here. She might be crying or scared. He could have a knife, or his gun out. He could be threatening her.
She could be dead.
The floor creaks, and I look back down.
“Cammy? What did you learn about?” My voice is barely audible, but I know Cam hears me.
“I don’t remember, Leighton,” Cam says, her voice soft like mine, but cold.
We hear footsteps upstairs, and three necks crane back to look at the ceiling in unison. One set of footsteps.
No, two.
The door opens fast, slamming into a wall upstairs, and I startle, scaring Juniper in my lap. I hug her tightly and briefly—in reassurance and in apology.
“She’s okay,” I whisper to the girls as our parents come down the stairs. I can see their faces only in part. Half in shadow, half illuminated by the far-too-bright lights in the kitchen. He looks smug. A stupid smirk on his face. I know it’s better than his anger, but I hate this face he makes. My eyes leave his ugly look and go to Mom. She’s tired.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“Oh, Leighton, you’re home,” she says.
“Are you okay?” I ask. He scoffs, crosses the living room.
“Of course I’m okay,” she says.
Of course.
“We were worried about you,” I add.
Mom sighs, opens her mouth to respond, but is cut off by “Welcome to the Jungle.” He twists the knob until it’s as high as it goes. Level: 100. The house is moving with the bass.
He goes into the kitchen, and something crashes into the sink.
“And no one thought to clean up the fucking burnt food,” he yells. More dishes clatter, and Campbell jumps to her feet.
“Coming,” she announces, her voice steady and clear, cutting through the music. Her voice holds none of the fear that had her so still and serious and soft a moment ago.
For some reason, Cam’s enthusiasm for cleaning up burnt food makes me furious. Mom’s casual of course makes me want to scream. I count to three in my head, my jaw shut as though it were wired that way. Don’t make it worse. Don’t make it worse. I need these words tattooed on my arm so I always reme
mber. I stand up and deposit Junie on the sofa next to Mom.
“Tell her about Amelia,” I yell over the music, and step past a kitchen lit so bright it hurts my eyes. I am sure the damn light is getting brighter and brighter, until I have to turn away from it, the outline of Campbell at the sink washing broken dishes imprinted on my eyelids. I blink, and the light is fine now. Back to its normal level of still-too-bright. It’s like the house wanted that image to stay with me, burned into my retinas.
I walk around the living room picking up the frames. I hang them on their nails, letting them swing back and forth until they find their own resting place. When I pass the window, there is a flash of gray, and Joe lands just outside in the grass. I keep going, hanging a frame by the stairs. I step into the bathroom and pick up the towels that fell to the floor. And then in my bedroom I fix the posters on my wall, which don’t hang on nails at all but on sticky tack, and I don’t know why they are always down, too. Why this house falls apart without being touched. In the girls’ bedroom, I unfurl stained-glass window stickers that have fallen to the carpet like dead flower petals and stick them back on the window. They used to form a butterfly, I think. Now they are just parts of an incomplete whole. The pieces we haven’t lost yet.
Joe lands on the windowsill outside, and this time I pause because it feels like he’s following me from window to window for a reason. I slide the window open slowly, giving him time to fly away. Then I reach my hand out, one finger extended, and he stays still as I brush my fingertip down his feathered side. Once, twice.
He turns and drops something onto the windowsill, then flies away.
I reach for the object.
It’s Juniper’s leather cuff, with her initials pressed into it. It looks a little weather-worn, but it’s intact. Joe brought it back.
It’s strange how some things are lost to us forever, and some find their way home, and we have no way of knowing which ending it will be until and unless they return.
A long time ago, Amelia Earhart flew away and never came back. She’s always described as being lost. But now she reminds me of a piece of crow folklore I read for my column. The Babylonian flood predates even Noah. In the older story, when the whole world floods, those who survive on a boat send out birds to seek dry land. First they release a dove—but the dove, unable to find land to rest on, returns quickly. The second bird they send is a swallow. Again, with no land to rest on or fresh water to drink on the wide, endless sea, the swallow returns. Finally, they send the crow, who flies off toward the horizon, the third bird entrusted to find land. She does not come back.
Maybe Amelia wasn’t lost to an endless sea. Maybe, like the crow, she found dry land, and decided to stay where she felt safe.
Maybe surviving can be fearless, too.
Auburn, Pennsylvania
October 13
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Chapter Twenty-Five
THIS HOUSE IS UNBROKEN THE WAY a healed bone is.
Something was bent at an unnatural angle, pushed too far, until it snapped, or shattered. But then it got better again.
When I was eight, we had a snow day. Mom was waitressing by then, and the diner didn’t close, so she went in, hugely pregnant with Juniper. Dad slept in, his body tired from long hours all weekend spent trying to get a roof job done before the snow arrived. I made breakfast for Campbell and myself, and we were watching cartoons when he finally came downstairs. The trash was overflowing in the kitchen. We didn’t take it out—I don’t know that I even could have lifted it—but when he saw it, he got so angry, and he threw it across the floor, spilling it everywhere. Then he grabbed a cabinet door we’d left open, slamming it back the wrong way so that it tore off the hinges, the crack so loud it felt like it broke inside of me. I grabbed Cammy and we ran to my room, hiding in the closet.
Mom found us there in the late afternoon.
When we came downstairs, the trash was still everywhere, and he was asleep on the couch. But the cabinet door wasn’t broken. I tried to explain to Mom, in confused, urgent whispers, that the wood had cracked right at the hinges. But it was intact, like it had never broken. I decided I must have seen it wrong. That it had just been the noise of the cabinet hitting the wall. But I know Campbell saw it, too, because when Mom went to change her clothes, Cammy leaned in close and whispered, “It was magic.”
It was two years before the next explosion like that. There used to be so much time in between them. He’s always sorry. He says it won’t happen again.
I know now that the last is never true. It will happen again. And he probably does love us, but it’s never been enough to make him stop. Instead, it makes it worse—his love for us. And ours for him. It makes it impossible to leave.
It took me a while to remember the cabinet door, and the way doubt had erased what I saw. I forgot until it started happening again, and more frequently. The house always repairing the things he breaks.
The house doesn’t make sense, but neither does the way he splinters into something unrecognizable when he’s mad. It’s incredible what you learn to accept when so few things make sense, and Campbell and I learned to observe it in silence. To note the patched walls and fixed frames, and then fold that strangeness into a soft corner of our minds, where it could be ignored.
Chapter Twenty-Six
LIAM STARTS DRIVING ME TO SCHOOL. Every morning, he parks his Ford at the end of Frederick Street—across from the mailboxes that are now always covered in crows. He waits there while I walk my sisters up and make sure they get onto the bus okay. If the habit seems odd or unnecessary to him, he doesn’t say anything.
Within a few weeks, it feels like we’ve been doing this forever.
Liam couldn’t know it, but his consistency might be my favorite quality of his. I let myself look forward to Liam, and that anticipation starts to replace my fear of the crawl space at night. I fall asleep easier. It’s just a fifteen-minute ride to school every morning, but it’s a good fifteen minutes.
These drives aren’t like our first date. We haven’t even kissed again. We just talk, and laugh, and trade favorite songs.
On the second Friday of morning drives together, we have an exam in lit class.
“G’morning,” he says, yawning. He’s exhausted, thanks to football.
“Morning,” I say, and pass him the extra tumbler I brought. “Mine is coffee, but I noticed you never drink it, so yours is hot chocolate. Hope that’s okay. Or we can trade?”
“Perfect,” he says. “Thanks. So, what’ll it be?” He reaches for the stereo volume, turning his radio on.
“Used to Love Her” by Guns N’ Roses is playing, and a sour taste fills my mouth.
“Not this,” I say, reaching out my hand and turning the radio off.
Liam looks over at me, curiosity sketched across his face. “Not a fan?”
“Really not. Especially that one.”
“How about no music?”
“Thanks.” I drink some coffee and wait for the tightness in my chest to ease before I reach for my literature notebook. “Want me to quiz you while you drive?”
“Yeah, let’s do it,” he says.
“Okay—” I flip to the page with my study guide. We have a major exam on all of our summer reading books today. I browse for a good starter question, but these are all from our Tess of the d’Urbervilles curriculum from early September, so they’re kind of depressing. “How much did the end of Tess suck?”
“Is that a quiz question? Damn, I’m gonna ace this thing.”
“Just my question. Okay, focus. How does social class play into Tess’s ability to navigate her world? How integral was her social station to the outcome of her story?”
Liam seems to ruminate on the question while he executes a very safe stop at a four-way and turns. I like how unhurried he is. Nothing is an emergency. No rushed, frantic movements. “Because, if she’d been rich, she would have had options. Money means choices. If you have no resources, then t
he tiniest little thing goes wrong and you’re toast. Totally at the mercy of others. Also, she could have hired a sweet-ass attorney to defend her.”
The end of his answer makes me laugh.
“How’d I do?”
“Good, but I wouldn’t use the phrases ‘sweet ass’ or ‘you’re toast’ in your short essays.”
“Psh, where’s the fun in that? Give me another,” he says. “Quick, we’re almost there.”
“Ahhh, okay,” I say, browsing my page. “Discuss the relationship of men and women in the novel. How are these social constructs different today?”
“Oh good, an easier one,” Liam says.
On the page in front of me, I have bulleted points for this one. Six neat lines condensing gender discrimination over the course of a century into bullet points. It’s absurdly simplified. I miss what Liam is saying.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said it isn’t all that different, is it? It’s all over the news. There’s, like, a lot of harassment and assault, and I don’t know. It’s different, but it’s a lot the same.”
I glance at him sideways in the car, a little surprised by his answer. I didn’t really think guys my age were paying attention to those things. And I thought he was half joking when he called himself a feminist. But he notices a lot.
“You okay in there, Barnes?” We’ve pulled into his parking spot. “I feel like you’re anywhere but here this morning.”
Of course he doesn’t mean it, but I think of the game I use to distract Juniper on bad nights. Anywhere But Here.
“I’m fine.”
“Too much studying,” he says. “And too much football.”
“You like football,” I say.
“I like you a lot more,” he counters. “We are so overdue for another date.”
I smile. “I’d love that. But neither of us is going to have a social life if we don’t get through this lit exam.”
“Fair enough,” Liam says. His face brightens. “Hang on, stay right there.”
He gets out of the car, running around the front of it and tugging the collar of his fleece up to protect his neck from the bite of cold in the air this early. He opens the door for me.
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