Clem nodded grimly.
Rhonda decided they should get it over with quickly, close the books back up and tuck them away in the closet, laying the past to rest again, all but forgotten, gathering dust on a shelf. She carried them out to the kitchen table, where her father settled into the chair next to her.
“Did you ever reschedule that interview at the science center?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Have you sent out any more résumés?”
“Uh, no,” she admitted. “This Ernie thing has been taking all my time.”
“But you’re not exactly getting paid for it,” he reminded her. And she knew he was right. What little money she had in savings was quickly dwindling, and those student loan bills would start arriving soon. But she couldn’t think about that now. She put it out of her head and opened the first photo album.
The first photo album starred Rhonda—Rhonda as a scrunchy-faced infant, Rhonda in Clem’s arms, Rhonda in her high chair, covered with grape jelly, grinning. Toward the end of the album, around the time the photos began to feature Rhonda on her own two feet—Rhonda picking a dandelion, Rhonda with arms outstretched to a blurry Clem—Daniel, Aggie, Peter, and Lizzy started appearing in the pictures. There were photos of them all celebrating the Fourth of July, with Peter wearing a cardboard party hat, blowing out a cake with four candles. They were all there at Rhonda’s first and second birthdays, and there were two cakes, one for her, one for Lizzy. There were no pictures in the album of her parents before Rhonda came along. No photos of their quiet wedding performed by a justice of the peace. Of their honeymoon trip to Pennsylvania Dutch Country. It was like their real life started once the baby was born.
In later albums, there were pictures of Lizzy, Rhonda, and Daniel in the teacups at Disney World, the two girls looking impossibly small, wearing Mickey Mouse ears with their names stitched across the front in red cursive; all three kids meeting Davey Crockett at Wild West World—Peter, who looked to be about eleven, wearing a matching coonskin cap. The Farrs and the Shales spent nearly every holiday together, like one big extended family: here was a picture of everyone but Justine, surrounding a monstrously huge Thanksgiving turkey, and another of them sitting in a sea of festive crumpled paper and ribbons on Christmas morning. Justine was the photographer of the family, so she was in few of the photos. Clem hated pictures—hated taking them and having them taken—so there were many shots of him turning away: a blurred profile, a raised arm, a fuzzy, unidentifiable ghost of a man.
RHONDA OPENED ANOTHER album, thumbed through the plastic-covered pages, traveling forward in time, and found the pictures her mother had taken the last night they performed Peter Pan. There was a shot of all of them lined up in their costumes, holding hands, taking bows. There was Daniel carrying Lizzy in her Captain Hook costume high up on his shoulders. Daniel sword-fighting with Peter after the play. Daniel and Clem standing together drinking beer. Daniel dancing with Laura Lee Clark, who wore a slinky sequined gown. Rhonda searched the photos, searched Daniel’s face for a sign of his leaving, of his having had enough somehow. All she noticed that was different on Daniel’s face was his lack of mustache. He was clean-shaven that night, a sign, maybe, that he was ready for a change.
He chose some other life, Rhonda thought as she ran a finger over his smooth face. And then Lizzy, her secret twin, Captain Hook, stopped speaking, and eventually joined her father, leaving for school one morning never to return.
These are the choices people make, Rhonda thought, trying to convince herself such a simple explanation could account for such loss.
“God,” Rhonda said, pointing to the photo of Daniel and Laura Lee, “look how dressed up she is! Like she was going to the Oscars or something.” Then her eye was drawn to something else: “Check it out, Dad—he’s got his hand on her ass!”
Clem nodded. “I think Daniel’s hand was quite familiar with Laura Lee’s derriere.”
“Were they sleeping together?”
Clem nodded again. “It wasn’t exactly a secret. Actually, Aggie always thought Laura Lee had something to do with what happened to Daniel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like maybe Laura Lee was pressuring him. Maybe she told him she was pregnant. Of course, Aggie had all kinds of…theories.”
“Jesus, I had no idea,” Rhonda said.
She flipped backward again and came across a photo she hadn’t remembered. She and Lizzy wearing matching powder-blue windbreakers. They had their arms around each other and were standing in front of Lizzy and Peter’s house. She and Lizzy must have been about nine or ten. It was fall—there was a pile of freshly raked leaves behind them. They had the same haircuts, same face shape, they were even dressed like twins. Twins in rumpled clothes. Plump, scarecrow girls with big, haunted eyes. They held on to each other tightly, like their young lives depended on it. They were smiling, but it seemed a forced smile, a give a big smile for the camera, stop looking so sullen and say cheese kind of smile. She wondered who took the picture—Aggie, Daniel? Through her own smile, she saw a glint of metal that must have been her retainer.
She let her fingers touch her lost friend’s face.
“Can I keep this one?” Rhonda asked her father.
“Take the whole album, Ronnie. Your mother and I don’t look at them much anymore. In fact, I think I even have that old video of Peter Pan if you want it.”
Rhonda nodded. She’d forgotten there was a video. Clem shuffled back into the bedroom and returned in a few minutes, videotape in hand.
He looked relieved to see it all go; like if you took away the proof, you could imagine whatever you like—even erase Daniel and Lizzy from the landscape of their lives.
Could it be that easy?
JUNE 20, 1993
LAURA LEE HELPED Greta with her crocodile costume, and when she showed it to everyone at last, they were all quite impressed. Even Peter was pleased, and he was not one to give compliments easily.
“You’re some crocodile,” he acknowledged with a wide grin.
The costume was made from a series of cardboard boxes. The largest box was the torso, and it was where Greta hid inside and crawled around. Another long, narrow box made up the head, and a series of boxes attached to each other with string going from largest to smallest made up the tail. The crocodile’s feet were made from four small boxes stapled to the body. The whole thing was painted bright green, and covered (everyone figured this must have been Laura Lee’s touch) with silver foil scales. The narrow box up front had round egg-carton eyes and a painted-on toothy grin that sparkled in the light (the teeth were made from glued-on tin foil also). Greta navigated through a small slit cut in the front of the body, just above the head.
“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock!” she cried out, her voice muffled as she clambered her way around the stage, chasing Lizzy, cardboard tail dragging, foil scales and teeth gleaming.
Even out of costume, she chased Lizzy. Greta took great delight in sneaking up on poor unsuspecting Captain Hook during breaks, or popping out from behind a tree first thing in the morning.
“Tick tock!” she snarled, snapping her arms menacingly as Lizzy jumped back.
“See,” Rhonda whispered when the others were out of earshot.
“I told you she had a crush on you.”
This got Rhonda a strong thump on the shoulder from Lizzy’s hook, which got caught in her nightgown, ripping it.
“Hey!” Rhonda shouted, fingering the rip. “I’m gonna make you sew this.” But Lizzy had walked away and was standing with the crocodile.
GRETA, AFTER PUTTING so much effort into the costume, was angry that she wasn’t in more scenes.
“Tick tock,” she snapped at Peter. “Shouldn’t the crocodile be there during the war with the lost boys, pirates, and Indians?”
“I don’t know, Tock. I guess I could stick you in here and there.”
Greta smiled to show she was pleased with both the plan to put her in more sc
enes and the new nickname.
She sat lurking at the edge of the action in nearly every scene, making her clock sounds, watching, just like she had done from the trees, only this time she had a front row seat. She was a part of things.
RHONDA HAD BEEN studiously avoiding her father, using the play as an excuse to be away from home as much as possible. She would run in for meals, let her mother heap tuna sandwiches or pork chops on her plate, while Rhonda sat in her white nightgown and told them little details about her day, like that Peter had let that awful Greta Clark join the play. But she couldn’t avoid her father forever.
“I think it’s time you and I had a talk,” he said to her after dinner, when her mother had cleared the table and was running water in the sink. Rhonda nodded. “Come into the office. You haven’t even seen where I hung your picture.”
So, reluctantly, Rhonda followed him into the office and saw her drawings, tucked behind the new sheet of glass, hanging on the wall beside her father’s desk.
“They’re beautiful drawings,” he told her. “I look at them all the time. You got every detail just right, right down to the buttons on the uniforms.”
Rhonda nodded.
“It’s the best birthday present I ever got.”
She nodded again.
“Ronnie, about what you saw…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhonda said, staring down at her sneakers.
“Of course it matters. And you deserve an explanation. I made a mistake. And you caught me. But it’s not a mistake I’m going to make again. Do you understand?”
“Not really,” Rhonda mumbled.
“What is it you don’t understand?”
“How you can be married to two people at once,” Rhonda said.
“I’m not. I’m married to your mother. And I’m going to stay married to her.”
“But you were married to Aggie.”
Clem reached into his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette.
“Yes,” he said. “I was once married to Aggie. A long time ago. Before I met your mother.”
“Does Mom know?”
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was waiting until you were old enough to understand. And now you are.”
But Rhonda didn’t understand. She didn’t understand how you could marry one person, then another. Once you got married, it was supposed to be forever. If she married Peter, she would make sure it lasted. But now, she wasn’t sure she could marry Peter, because, it dawned on her, the fact that his mother and her father had once been married might make them related after all. Her head spun. She had to get out of the office.
“I’m late for rehearsal,” she told her father.
“I didn’t think you rehearsed after supper,” her father said.
“Peter says the opening scene still isn’t right, so we’re going to work on it,” she lied.
Now it was her father’s turn to nod, and she left him there in his office, sitting in his swivel chair, staring into the eyes of the men on the submarine who were going down, whether they knew it or not.
AS RHONDA JOGGED out to the stage, she was sure she could smell a hint of cherry tobacco smoke in the air. There was a muffled rustling coming from beneath the trap door and she snuck up onto the stage, walking on tiptoes, yanking the door open quickly to surprise him. She surprised them both.
Peter was there in the hole along with Tock and was, Rhonda quickly saw, kissing the crocodile. So much for the lesbo rumors.
Tock’s hat had slid to the back of her head, the string holding it tight around her neck. Her BB gun was leaning against the dirt wall and beside it was Peter’s still smoldering pipe.
Peter pulled away from Tock, but she kept a hand on his shoulder as Rhonda looked down.
“We were working out some details about the play. About how the crocodile should enter,” Peter said. He seemed startled, but not particularly ashamed. He made no move to shake the girl’s hand from his shoulder. Tock just smiled.
Rhonda’s face burned, her hands ached from being clenched into fists so tightly, ached with the need to hit someone. But Rhonda was not a fighter. And she knew she didn’t stand a chance against sand-throwing, arrow-shooting Greta Clark and her BB gun. She wanted to hit Peter, but what if he kicked her out of the play? The idea that she couldn’t play Wendy scared her almost as much as the idea of losing Peter to Greta. So Rhonda let her hands fall open.
“Your mother and my father were married,” she said.
“I know,” Peter answered, like it was no big deal at all.
Tock laughed.
Rhonda reached down and grabbed the trap door, meaning to slam it, but instead closing it softly over their upturned faces.
JUNE 15, 2006
THAT IS ONE fucked-up picture.”
It was the first thing Peter said after a long silence. His brow was wrinkled, his eyes searching, straining as he squinted at the picture taped to the wall above Rhonda’s bed. It was the same way he’d studied those postcards from Lizzy years ago.
And there was Lizzy, his long-lost sister, looking back at him from Rhonda’s drawing. Lizzy at eleven. Lizzy the year of Peter Pan. The year she lost her voice. “That’s Ernestine Florucci with her,” Rhonda explained. “I only had the photo from the flyers to work with.”
“I knew who it was,” Peter said.
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his T-shirt pocket and lit one, still squinting at the drawing like the images were off in the distance somewhere.
Rhonda had spent the entire afternoon on the drawing, an image from her submarine dream. As soon as she was finished, she called Peter. It felt important to her that he see it. She hadn’t imagined how he might respond to seeing a picture of his sister—if she’d thought it through, she would have realized she was running the risk of having him shut down. Lizzy was another topic never mentioned, not quite as taboo as Daniel, but close.
It had gotten to the point where Rhonda rarely let herself think of Lizzy. It was like shutting a valve somewhere—the Lizzy pipeline—a trick she’d learned from Peter. But now, here was her once-upon-a-time twin. Back again, the valve broken by that damn rabbit.
When Lizzy stopped talking after Daniel left, nobody took it very seriously at first. She was upset, naturally, and if she was reacting a little dramatically, well, she’d always been dramatic, hadn’t she? She’d talk when she was good and ready. Aggie herself was so distraught about Daniel, she barely seemed to notice Lizzy’s new silence. Eventually, though, there were doctors’ visits—a speech therapist, a psychiatrist, even a pediatric neurologist over at Dartmouth, who ruled out a physical cause and called it “elective mutism.” But the diagnosis was essentially the one the laypeople of Pike’s Crossing had already made: Lizzy would talk when she was good and ready.
Months went by, and then years, and she continued to choose muteness. Then one morning, two weeks after they’d started high school, Lizzy disappeared. Peter had offered her a ride to school, but she waved him on. He was the last one to see her, her book bag slung over her shoulder, as she made her way down Lake Street.
But the Lizzy in Rhonda’s drawing was from a time well before that. It was the Captain Hook Lizzy she’d put in the submarine, just as it had been in her dream. The Lizzy who hung from her closet for fifteen minutes each day, trying to make herself grow. The one whose voice was good and strong as she belted out crazy songs or threatened to make you walk the plank. The girl who wanted, more than anything, to grow up to be a Rockette.
The drawing was done in pencil first, then gone over in thin black pen lines. She used cross-hatching to shade the submarine, making it a few shades lighter than the dark sea. Rhonda had used a blotchy, swirling ink wash for the water, and filled the ocean with terrible, nightmare creatures whose features could barely be seen in the wild, writhing water. It was like one of those drawings she’d been given in school years ago—a landscape where you were supposed to find the hidden images: a w
heelbarrow, a clock, a shovel, and a tea pot. Only in Rhonda’s ocean, monsters lurked. A giant squid, a toothy shark, a dragon with fins. And there were ghosts in the waves, horrible phantoms, their bodies lacking true form, only open-mouthed screaming faces.
Through the portholes of the submarine, the rabbit and two girls could be seen looking out into the dark sea. The rabbit, huge and looming with paws the size of the girls’ heads, stood at the front, working the controls. His eyes twinkled with mad fury as he urged the submarine on. The girls looked like they’d resigned themselves to fright, like they’d given up on being saved.
“So what’s it supposed to mean?” Peter asked, brushing hair back from his face, showing his scar, the mark that bound him to her, as he turned away from the drawing to look Rhonda in the eye.
Her heart rose up into her throat, filling it, rendering her unable to speak. She wanted so badly for Peter to understand the drawing. She half-hoped he would tell her what it meant. But he looked a little irritated about the whole thing, like it wasn’t worth him driving all the way into town for. She wondered what he would tell Tock about it. If he’d speak in patronizing tones—
Poor, crazy Rhonda. Rhonda and her fucked-up drawing. Rhonda who can’t let shit go. Poor thing.
“It’s just a drawing, Peter,” Rhonda managed to blurt out, her words crisp and defensive. “Just a picture.”
She wanted to remind him how he used to love her drawings. How he had once encouraged her artistic endeavors. When they were kids, he would pose for her, usually in one of his costumes. How well she knew his body then, each contour, each tiny imperfection. She filled sketchbooks with pictures of him. She could do entire pages of just his nose, trying to perfectly capture its gentle slope. Or his mouth—the thin lips, the slight gap between his two front teeth, which he could whistle through.
Afternoons when they’d go swimming at Loon’s Cove, Rhonda would connect the dots of the freckles on his back and shoulders, now untouchable to her, and tell him they were like constellations, then describe each picture she saw there. Sometimes it seemed his whole life was laid out there in the pictures on his back, and it was up to her to read it, to discern the meaning of each image like some early astronomer or a gypsy reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.
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