“You can tell me anything, you know,” I said. “You can ask me anything, too. I’ll answer any question you want.”
I had surprised her, but only for a second. She was too smart to trust those words out of my mouth. “Who cares?” she shot back. “It doesn’t matter. You left.”
“I’m only in upstate New York,” I pointed out. “Not Mars.”
“You left,” Lisette repeated. “Dad says you did it because you wanted to. Because you didn’t want to have to look after me.”
I felt a flash of anger, and then a cooling jet of admiration. She was very good at this. It was a one-two punch of Bad Mother accusation and the words guaranteed to infuriate me,Dad says.When Lisette wanted to pick a fight with me—which was most of the time—all she had to do was use the magic phraseDad says, and she’d get one.
For the briefest second, I almost gave in and gave her the fight she was looking for. Then my anger popped, the air flapping out of it like a balloon, and I couldn’t. Instead, the words marched out of me, one after another, perfectly calm.
“I know I’m a bad mother,” I said. “But I work hard, I’m sober, and I’m around. I ask you to stay for the weekends, but you never come.”
“You’rearound?” Lisette’s voice was dramatic, near tears, and I still drank it in like water. “That’s how you’re my mom? By beingaround? You left.”
“This is important.”
“Sure it is.” There was all the pain and despair of a teenager in her voice. “More important than beingaround.”
I blinked hard at the wall, at the faded, flowery wallpaper. Vail and Dodie had gone upstairs, ostensibly to bed, but I could hear Vail’s footsteps in the upstairs hall and the water running in the bathroom sink. Vail said something, his tone caustic, and Dodie said something caustic back. Vail’s steps retreated.
We were here in this wretched house, which was full of awful memories and seemingly haunted by something malevolent and cruel. We were watching TV in a room with words scrawled on the wall. Our dead brother’s things were moving in the attic. Soon, we would all try to sleep as the nightmares crawled in.
I had always shielded my daughter from the worst things in life.It was what you did when you had a child, what made you a good parent. You told your child bedtime stories about unicorns and treasure maps, not about how you lost your voice screaming your brother’s name as you walked the hallways, how you only knew the cops in the house by their feet because you never raised your gaze. You didn’t tell little children about Ben, about how your parents looked through you like glass, about being lonely and scared, about dead people watching you work. About Sister.
That was fair. It was right. But Lisette wasn’t a baby anymore. I had been much, much younger than Lisette when I had first seen Sister standing in my bedroom. Maybe, at a certain point in time, your children craved the truth, because without it they didn’t know you anymore.
“When I was your age,” I said into the kitchen phone, “I lost my little brother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“He was six years old,” I said. “He would have been your uncle, I guess. His name was Ben.”
Another second of silence. Then, “Uncle Ben? Like the rice?”
It was rude, sarcastic, but I wasn’t fooled. Lisette was invested. I invented this kind of rudeness. I knew it well.
“Like the rice,” I replied.
“What happened?” she asked. “Was he murdered?”
The question was a punch to the gut. I thought of wrestling Ben into his clothes that morning, trying to get him to comb his hair. In my mind, I had silently decided that Ben had an accident, that he’d fallen somewhere and lost consciousness, that he’d gone quietly without knowing what was wrong. That it was just one of those things. Children died every day, didn’t they? They drowned in pools or played with matches or got into a bottle of prescription pills. The thought of anyone murdering Ben was, even now, too much to bear.
“I don’t know,” I managed to say. “We don’t know. We played hide-and-seek with him one day, and he hid and never came out, and we never found him. He died and we never found his body.”
“Didn’t you call thepolice?” she asked as if this had just happened, with the blithe certainty of someone who has never known this kind of pain. “Didn’t they look for him?”
“Yes, we did, and yes, they looked. We all looked. We never found him.”
“How could that happen? How could he just be gone?” She was in disbelief, and I had the strange double vision of being irritated and knowing that yes, I had successfully shielded her from some of the bad things in life. At least I had done that much.
“Lisette, he disappeared.” I found that I was suddenly infinitely patient. “That’s all we ever knew. So yes, I know I’m screwed up, but there’s a reason for it. Okay? And I’m sorry. I’m sorry the bad shit I grew up with got dumped on you. You didn’t deserve it, which was why I never told you this story. I thought I was protecting you. But I’m telling you now.”
The words were jumbled, ineloquent. The sentences spilled like stones, rolled away like marbles on the attic floor.
On the other end of the line, there was silence.
Then Lisette said, “Why are you there now? Are Aunt Dodie and Uncle Vail there?”
