“Marley, honey. I think you need to go home,” my mom says in the calmest voice she can manage. She’s even trying to smile—the corners of her lips pulled back tight.
“No!” EE grabs Marley’s arm and pulls her close, clinging to her. “She just got here and we’re still making presents. Marley is helping me with something and it’s a surprise for you and Daddy. Please, Mommy. You promised we could have a sleepover.”
“Another night,” says my mom, soft but firm. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Truly.”
EE throws the friendship bracelet to the floor and says, “It’s not fair. Why don’t you turn the volume down on the television?”
My mom looks at my eight-year-old self, blinking, confused.
“The shouting from the TV. I don’t know what you were watching, but it seemed pretty violent.” EE glances at Marley. I know what’s going on inside Ellie’s head. My head. I still remember, even though it’s been five years.
Just play along. Come on, Mom. Don’t embarrass me even more.
I am pleading silently and my mom finally catches on.
“Right.” My mom sighs. “The TV, of course. That’s what the shouting was about. Look, I’m sorry, sweeties. It’s simply not a good night. I’ll explain it all to you later. Marley, we’ll do this again soon, okay? Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
She holds out her hand. My mother smiles but she means business.
Marley stands up dutifully. She looks down at EE and says, “Sorry.”
But EE is staring at the ground, pouting because the playdate is ruined, mortified that her parents fought in front of her best friend.
It isn’t fair and she knows it. I do, too.
A minute after I hear the front door close, my dad comes into my room, looking serious and sad and seriously sad. He sits down right next to me, but he doesn’t see me. I try to put my hand on his shoulder, but it goes right through his body.
He doesn’t even flinch.
I can’t communicate with my dad from the past, but I’m still going to try. “Don’t do it,” I tell him firmly. “Don’t do this tonight. You don’t have to say the words. No one is making you do this.”
He can’t hear me. I know this. I can’t do anything but watch. My stomach feels twisty and my whole body aches.
He rubs one hand along the top of his head and lets out a long, sad sigh. “Ellie, darling. Come here.” He pats the bed next to him.
Eight-year-old Ellie doesn’t move. She stands in front of him, stubborn as always.
“Why do you always have to yell at her?” she asks with a pout. Her voice is soft and trembly. She’s afraid to ask this question. It’s a big deal that she actually does. She worries her dad will get mad, will yell at her like he yells at her mom. But he doesn’t. He seems too defeated.
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry you had to hear that. It’s grown-up stuff. You’ll understand when you’re older. But for now, well, I don’t know how to say this so I’ll make it short and sweet. I need to leave. I am saying good-bye.”
He stands up, all ready to go, as if it’s that simple.
“Are you going on a business trip?” EE asks.
He looks at her sadly and shakes his head. “No, I need to go away for a different reason. Your mother and I … Well, I’m supposed to wait until she gets back. Supposed to wait until after Christmas, but that’s not going to happen. It’s too hard,” he says. He kisses eight-year-old Ellie on the top of her head. “Tell your mom good-bye. I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait, you’re leaving right now?” EE asks, stunned. “You can’t go until Mommy gets back. I’m not allowed to be home alone.”
“I can’t wait, Ellie. I’m sorry. Your mother is only across the street. You’ll be fine. You’re old enough. And it’s better if I go quietly. For everyone.”
I try to protest, but it’s no use. He’s gone.
EE starts to cry. I’m crying, too. This is awful. I hate it. I try to give her a hug but can’t. Of course I can’t. My arms move right through her body so I’m hugging myself, and I don’t want to be hugging myself. I have armor. I am protected. I don’t need affection—not anymore. I’ve learned to survive without it. EE is the one who is raw. Vulnerable. Eight years old and her whole world has shattered. Her daddy said good-bye three days before Christmas.
She thinks it’s a lousy night. She has no idea what this means.
How bad things are about to get.
How her dad isn’t saying good-bye for the night, but basically good-bye to fatherhood.
She doesn’t realize, but soon she’ll know.
I start shouting in her face, hoping something will get through to her. She can’t see me or hear me or feel me but maybe if I yell loud enough. Maybe that’s why I’m here. To tell her it’s going to be okay.
“Don’t cry,” I say to EE. “You don’t need him. You are smart and beautiful and strong and the most popular kid in school. You run every committee that matters. You have all the power and everyone is envious of you. There’s nothing to be sad about. So your dad left you. It happens all the time. So many dads have left. Moms, too. You don’t have it so bad. You’ll be fine. Better than fine—you will be spectacular.” I need her to hear these things, but of course she does not. EE is oblivious. Stunned. Lost. A deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face. She doesn’t know what hit her.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!” I yell.
These words get stuck in my throat. The meaning of them stops me cold. Because now I am wondering …
Am I dead? Did that fall off the ladder kill me?
Is this whole reliving of the most painful memories from my childhood a part of the dying process?
And if so, what exactly am I supposed to do?
Am I on my way to heaven?
Or someplace else?
How am I supposed to figure this whole thing out?
chapter four
I blink and I’m somewhere else. Did I black out? No, it appears I fell asleep on the floor of my old bedroom. Thirteen-year-old me is curled up on the ground, right in the middle of the rug, kind of like a cat. I stand up and stretch, feeling as if I’ve just awoken from a deep, deep sleep. I think it’s the next morning. The sun is shining brightly outside. Rays bounce off the snow, creating a brightness that is almost blinding.
Meanwhile, eight-year-old Ellie is in bed, under her patchwork quilt. Her eyes look red and puffy, and I know why. She cried herself to sleep.
I look around the room and see that the friendship bracelets Marley and EE were working on are still on the floor in a heap of tangled thread—unfinished.
Suddenly we hear a knock and then the door opens. It’s my mom. She turns sideways and pushes through the beaded curtain to come inside. I scurry out of the way, not that she’d even feel it if she walked right through me. Not like I would, either, but still. I don’t like being reminded of my ghost-like existence. It seriously freaks me out.
So I move to the purple rocking chair in the corner of the room, where I know I’ll be safe, and I watch the scene unfold.
My mom is walking slowly, carefully. In one hand she carries a cup of hot cocoa with an island of fluffy whipped cream floating on top. In her other hand, she is balancing a plate of buttered, cinnamon sourdough toast. I can smell it from where I sit, all the way on the other side of the room. My stomach is rumbling and the very fact that I’m hungry seems like a good sign. That must mean I’m still alive, right? Ghosts don’t need food, I don’t think.
Eight-year-old me is under the covers, sleeping. My mom sits on the edge of the bed, watching. Smiling lovingly down at her sad little daughter—at me.
From this vantage point I feel as if I’m watching a movie. It feels cozy, somehow. No, not somehow. It feels cozy because that’s what my mom wanted, so that is how she made it. Last night, my dad walked out of our lives. That would’ve been sad enough, but my dad happened to walk out of our lives three days before Christmas. What a disaster. But now, the morning after
, all is calm. There is no yelling, no screaming, no more slamming of doors or breaking dishes. My mom has swept up the mess. Cleaned the house. Baked our favorite bread. The entire house still smells of it. She’s put on a cheerful face, because of me. I didn’t notice it the first time around. But now, five years later, I see it and I am touched by what she’s trying to do. Trying to make things happy and safe and warm.
“Good morning,” my mom says, her voice gentle, careful. “Did you sleep okay, Ellie?”
Eight-year-old me wakes up and rubs her eyes. And then it hits her.
“Where’s Daddy?” EE asks, her voice tinged with suspicion. She knows it’s not a good morning, despite the morning treat—hot cocoa and breakfast in bed—and despite her mom’s smile.
Mom sits down on the edge of my bed. She brushes young Ellie’s bangs away from her forehead. “Daddy went away, sweetheart.”
“Is he at work?” Ellie asks, oh-so-innocent. Her eyes are crinkled. She stares at her mom carefully. She knows better. Knows things aren’t right. But she’s pretending or at least hoping that last night wasn’t real. Or that she had a terrible nightmare. Or that her dad changed his mind and came back home, that her parents patched things up. She’s imagining lots of possibilities, each one better than the reality she is left with.
“Is he?” she asks again. It’s clear that her mom doesn’t know what to say. She hesitates now, bites her bottom lip, looks down at her fingernails, which are short and ragged from being chewed.
“Not exactly.” Mom takes a deep breath. “Honey, last night things didn’t go exactly as I had planned and I’m sorry for that. But maybe it’s for the best that you found out the truth sooner. I know your father talked to you about this before he left, but I’m not sure what he said, exactly. So I will give you the facts. Your father has moved out of the house. We are getting a divorce.”
“What’s a divorce?” EE blinks up at her mom.
She’s actually never heard the word before. It sounds strange on her tongue. Sharp and hard. Divorce. She says it again, to herself. It rhymes with force and it reminds her of the word divide. A forceful divide, violent, which makes a lot of sense. Especially when she thinks about life, sometimes, when her dad was around:
The shattered dishes.
The slamming doors.
The screaming and shouting.
If it sounds like divorce and it looks like divorce and it smells like divorce, well, then it must be divorce. No great shocker there. I know this now. But back then, my eight-year-old self was so innocent.
“Oh, Ellie. Mommy and Daddy both love you very much, but we do not love each other the way married people love each other.”
“But when is Daddy coming back?” EE asks, louder this time. Thinking her mom must not understand the question.
“He’s not coming back here. Not to stay, anyway. Your father and I are going to live in different houses from now on. And you’ll get to live with Mommy and with Daddy, on different weeks.”
My mom is speaking slowly and carefully. It sounds like she’s reading from a script. Maybe she is. Not now. There’s no paper in front of her. I mean maybe she had a script that she memorized. These words sound so foreign, so strange. Eight-year-old Ellie is confused and she looks it. This news is terrible, but her mom sounds so chipper. What’s up with that?
EE rubs some sleep from her eyes with the frayed cuff of her purple flannel pajama sleeve. She squints and mouths the word divorce silently, trying to wrap her head around it, trying to make sense of the meaning of her world, of her new life, of what will never be the same.
Seeing her process it gives me the chills.
“You have no idea,” I warn her. But she doesn’t hear me. No one does. There is nothing I can do. So what is the point of this?
Am I supposed to feel sorry for myself? Because I do. I was young and weak and naive. There was so much I didn’t see, so much I didn’t know, could not control, in my very own house, with my very own parents.
Just like now. I do not want to see this. I lived it once already. And ever since then, well, I’ve worked hard to forget. To shove these memories away. To punch them down, out of the way and out of my mind.
But like bread dough rises, they keep resurfacing. Growing bigger and more powerful.
“I don’t understand,” EE says.
My mom sighs and looks at me with tears in her eyes. She leans closer and kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s not about you. I love you so much. So does your father. We both love you more than anything. That will never change. But the two of us—your dad and me—we can’t live together. And this isn’t anyone’s fault. I’m sorry about the fight. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. You weren’t supposed to see us like that. We were supposed to tell you calmly, together, after Christmas. We wanted to make it through the holiday, to give you one more happy Christmas.”
“So where’s Daddy now?” EE asks.
My mother frowns. She looks off into the distance. What is she thinking, my mom? How much does she know about the future? I’m guessing she can’t know much about the fighting, or the court battle. My dad disappearing from our lives and the money disappearing from their bank accounts. Everything emptied out and untraceable. Coming home and taking all his stuff while we were away—me at school, my mom at work. No warning.
But that happens later.
“We’re going to stay here and your daddy is moving out of the house,” my mom says gently.
I cover my mouth with my hand. This is what I didn’t want to see. This is the worst. I bite the insides of my cheeks to keep myself from crying.
“If he loves me, why did he leave on Christmas?” EE asks.
“I can’t answer that. But it has nothing to do with you,” my mom says as she gently rocks EE in her arms.
Yeah, right. I snort.
Suddenly I feel something on my head. A light ping. I look down. It’s a kernel of popcorn.
“Very funny,” I call to the sky.
More popcorn pings off my shoulder. “I’m not hungry anymore,” I try next. “That was ages ago.”
But no … the Girl in Black seems to take pleasure in torturing me, because suddenly it’s raining popcorn.
“Can I at least get an umbrella?” I ask. Except as I’m talking a kernel of popcorn lands in my mouth. It doesn’t taste bad, but that doesn’t mean I want more. Not like this. The popcorn is coming down fast. It’s like an avalanche. More popcorn than I have seen in my whole entire life. It surrounds me, which would normally be an excellent development, but right now? This is too much. It’s too crazy. I’m afraid it will bury me. Also, it’s butter overload. I can actually feel the grease. Yuck. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I call out to her, because by now the popcorn is up to my knees.
I’m waiting for some sort of sarcastic remark, since I’m the one who asked for the popcorn in the first place. But instead I’m met with silence, which is somehow more irritating. I know the Girl in Black is watching me, mocking me. And the popcorn keeps coming down, harder and faster like butter-flavored hail.
“Stop it!” I say. But I get no reply. And I hate being ignored.
I stand up and try to shake the popcorn off, but it’s impossible. I try to dodge the stream but it follows me, like a storm cloud in a cartoon. It is only raining popcorn on me—nowhere else in the room. Soon it’s up to my waist. Then my chest. Then my shoulders. I try eating some, because it is delicious, and I am, in fact, hungry. But it’s coming too fast. It’s up to my chin. Then a pile rises high above my eyes. Just as I feared, I’m now buried in popcorn. I cannot see. And when I breathe I inhale popcorn kernels. Ugh.
Then suddenly it’s gone. Every last kernel, even the one that was stuck in my left back molar. No more butter smell, no more grease. I am clean. Now that’s thorough.
Phew. I thought I’d never get out of that nightmare.
Except when everything is clear—when I can see again—I realize something terrible. I�
��m in yet another scene I don’t want to relive.
I remember this night all too well. It’s an hour past my bedtime and eight-year-old Ellie is packing her suitcase. She takes sweaters, T-shirts, pants, pajamas, socks, and underwear. She also crams in her three favorite stuffies: a rabbit named Roscoe, a dog named Dojo, and Ursula the unicorn. She’d never forget Ursula. She’s taking everything that matters to her, and has no plan to come back. After zipping her suitcase closed, she goes to the window and pries it open. She drops her suitcase down first, and then crawls out herself, into the night, jumping down and landing on the ground below. Luckily our house is only one story.
I follow EE out the window and then scramble across the street. I almost get hit by a speeding car, but jump out of the way just in time. I mean, I think I almost got hit. I don’t know if I can die if I’m already dead, but I’m not taking any more chances.
I linger behind my eight-year-old self as she knocks on Marley’s window. Marley parts her curtains and rubs her eyes. Seeing EE, she smiles and waves. Then she unlocks and opens the window. It takes both hands to shove it open, but she’s strong. EE climbs inside, with me close behind her.
Not that these girls realize I’m there, of course.
“What happened?” Marley asks. “I tried calling you last night and all day today, but you haven’t answered the phone.”
“I know,” EE replies tearfully. “My parents are getting a divorce.”
“My aunt Ruthie got divorced three times!” Marley says. “She lives in Arizona now, on a ranch with five horses.”
Clearly Marley is not understanding the significance of this moment. How sad and serious it is. It’s not Marley’s fault, but I’m frustrated nonetheless. I see my younger self struggle to try to explain, which is especially hard since EE doesn’t completely get what’s going on, either. Not exactly.
EE wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “My dad is gone. He left.”
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