Chapter 7
— Chapter 7 —
I wish they’d retired to Tampa.
I wish they’d fixed the house and sold it, used the money to buy a condo someplace warm, taken up golf, or canasta, or compulsive beachcombing. It would be easier to forget them if I knew they were alive and happy. It would be easier if I weren’t standing on their crumbling front stoop, key in my shaking hand.
I breathe deep, searching for an undiscovered well of courage somewhere in my body, but I am stuck in a swirl of exhaustion and vertigo like when I climbed Cadillac Mountain the summer after I moved to Maine. Same racing heart and wobbly knees.
I retreat to the landing and catch a hint of cigarette smoke in the cold damp air. It seems to be coming from the backyard. There’s a little path between the side of the house and an outcropping of bedrock. Sumac trees have grown through the spaces between the stepping stones, breaking them loose. I feel like I’m trekking through a jungle. I watch my feet as branches smack my face, trying to move quietly, even though whoever is smoking must have heard my car.
This intruder likes fennel, and Pepsi, and Camel cigarettes—same as my grandfather smoked. Babbo has been dead for over a decade, but whenever I get a whiff of the nutty scent of a Camel, I think of his rough hands smoothing my hair and the gravel in his voice when he called me sugar and asked what I was reading. So even though I know it’s not him, and I’m sure there are serial killers out in the world smoking his brand, by the time I make it to the overgrown juniper bush at the edge of the patio, my nerves have calmed enough to keep my knees steady.
There’s a teenager lying on a moldy deck lounger, staring up at the tree branches, blowing smoke to the sky, her dark hair falling all the way to the ground.
I stay behind the juniper and watch her in the careful way I used to observe deer in the yard, holding my breath, worried a sudden movement will send her running. But same as the deer, she’s fenced in. So am I.
She has a tarnished stud in her cheek like a dimple, silver rings pierced all the way up her ear, thick eyeliner smeared far beyond her lash line. Her layers of black clothes are held together with safety pins. This girl is trying so hard to be hard, but she hasn’t outgrown the plump of her cheeks, the soft slope of her shoulders. I can still see the roundness of her.
I remember her always covered in ice cream. Chocolate fingerprints all over my car. She called me “Aunt Frey” and whispered sticky secrets in my ear—things like “Did you see the ocean in our dream last night?” And when I drove away, leaving her was the thing that broke my heart, because I loved every inch, every moment, of her being. I could look at her face and know she was feeling a way I’d felt, like we were the same kind of human. And even though she was a little kid, she seemed to feel that way about me too.
She doesn’t look up when I clear my throat, but lowers the cigarette, holds it beneath the chair, as if I won’t see the smoke curling. I think she knows who I am too, that she saw me coming and chose to stay.
“What’s with the fennel?” I ask. “Aubrey.”
She flinches at her name, tries to pretend she hasn’t, sits up slowly like she’s deciding whether she wants to give me her attention, even though I already know it’s mine.
“It settles my stomach.” There’s a warble in her voice that could be nerves or could be the way she sounds now. “What are you doing here?” she asks, before I can ask her, in a tone that sounds so much like my sister it makes me reflexively angry.
“It’s my house.” The words are too loud and thick. I wish I’d whispered, or not said them at all, as if the upstairs window could be open a crack, and my mother might hear, and later I’ll get hell for running my mouth.
“Where were you?” Aubrey asks. This time she sounds sad and so much like my memory of her that it makes my throat ache. I search her forehead for the tiny divot just below her hairline. She scratched that chicken pox blister on my watch.
“Maine.”
Aubrey lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. She flicks cigarette ash on the patio and shakes her head, but maybe just to feel her hair move.
“So, what, you break in and hang out here?” I ask. I want to eat her cigarette. I can taste the heat of it on the air, particles like warm sand.
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look at me. She drops her foot from the lounge chair, kicking the flagstone with the heel of her boot, letting her leg bounce after each strike.
I take the chair next to her and try not to wince as I lower myself onto the faded vinyl bands, feigning faith that they will hold me, even as they creak against the metal frame.
“Give it,” I say, reaching toward her.
Aubrey angles the tip of the cigarette toward the ground, about to stub it out.
“Don’t! Give it!”
She passes the cigarette with shocking obedience. Her fingers are cold and rough. When she was a baby, she wrapped her tiny hands around my thumbs and took her first steps.
I take a drag, blowing clouds toward the trees, feeling calmer for it instantly.
“You smoke?” she asks, eyes wide.
I’m sure I’ve been maligned in my absence. I bet her mom accused me of everything from arson to animal sacrifice if it suited her anger in the moment. Smoking shouldn’t be a surprise, except I can’t imagine any adults in Aubrey’s life smoke anymore, at least not that she would see.
“I don’t.” I take another drag, pass it back to her. “But I worked in a bar and soaked up so much secondhand, I get headaches when I’m away too long.”
“You can’t smoke in bars anymore.”
“My boss didn’t care about rules.”
She shakes her head. This time I’m sure it’s not about her hair.
“We’re both quitting,” I tell her. “Next week.”
“Yeah,” she says, with the tiniest hint of a smile.
My promise is just bar chatter. An affectation I picked up to cover for being shy. Somewhere along the line I figured out that when you talk to strangers like you’re already lifelong pals with a past, present, and future, they respond as if you are. But Aubrey’s smile makes me want it to be true. Like we might pinky swear and x out boxes on a calendar at the end of every day we don’t have a cigarette. I can’t get over that she’s Aubrey and she’s grown and right in front of me and her smile can still turn me inside out.
The first time I saw her, all pink and wrinkly in the hospital, hours after she came into this world—her eyes already dark as mine, like she didn’t need any time to sort out what color they’d be—I thought, Oh, I know you, kid. I know you . And she mattered more than anyone else had before. Or after. There was hope in the world all of a sudden. Someone who felt like kin.
And I still left.
I didn’t think of her getting older after I left. I never let myself calculate her age or wonder if she liked horses yet, if she knew how to tie her shoes. I left and it hurt so much that I couldn’t stand to feel it anymore. I couldn’t stand to believe Aubrey existed past the last time I saw her. So, I may as well be sitting next to a unicorn, and my mind can’t make sense of it. She keeps watching me in sideways glances. Maybe she can’t make sense of me either. Only I’m a really shitty unicorn.
“So, you hang out here?” I ask again.
She hands the cigarette back instead of answering.
We’re having this conversation in the wrong order anyway. There are more important things I should be asking, saying, but my body aches, my thoughts are slow. Her nose looks like Steena’s nose, like Steena’s dad’s nose too.
“You probably can’t hang out here,” I say, blowing smoke away from her, passing the cigarette. “Your mom hates me.”
Aubrey’s face clouds over, eyebrows drawing in—the same expression she’d get as a kid when someone told her she couldn’t have a toy she wanted. Her pensive look would melt most mortals. “My mom hates everyone.”
“Well, she hates me the most, and she’ll crucify me for getting anywhere near you.”
“She doesn’t care where I am.”
“I’m sure she does.” I put my hand out for the cigarette.
Aubrey rolls her eyes at me but gives it over, watches me smoke.
I pass it back. “It’s really good to see you,” I say. “You’re so… grown up.”
Aubrey’s stare intensifies. Her face goes red. “Fuck off. I don’t need you to notice me.” She turns away. Plants both boots on the ground. Stubs the cigarette, even though there were a few puffs left. “It was fine here without you.” She storms off, around the other side of the house, her boots squishing in the soggy grass. Doesn’t look back at me at all.
It’s probably for the best.
Aubrey didn’t fully extinguish the cigarette, so I watch the smoke fade into nothing. I miss my grandfather. I’m sure if Babbo were alive, he’d be disappointed in me. He wouldn’t care about the books I’m reading. He wouldn’t call me sugar anymore. But I miss him as if he would. As if I could still be his good little girl, and he’d smooth my hair and let me drink his coffee.
Aubrey left the patio door unlocked, so I go in that way. The sunroom runs the width of the house. It’s part of the addition my parents had built when I was born. There are tall crank windows lining the back wall, staggered glass block at either end. They never got around to buying curtains. On sunny days the warmth and stagnant air always induced a specific kind of nausea that crept into my head, making my upper lip sweat; but even on an overcast day, to be in this room is to feel exposed.
There’s a sitting area at one side of the room, dining area at the other. And on the dining table, there’s a huge rat in a huge cage. It gives me a funny kind of hope to see him. If Aubrey keeps her contraband pet here, it’s likely she’ll be back soon. That’s not something Steena can pin on me—she’s the one who can’t keep track of her kid.
“Hey, buddy,” I say.
The rat chatters at me with so much purpose it feels like we’re having a conversation. I’ve never liked rats, but this one is disarming.
“I wonder what your name is,” I say.
He climbs the bars to get a better look at me. He is most definitely a he . His large, furry balls bob as he moves. Behind him are the ruins of a shoebox castle with paper towel roll turrets, stuffed with timothy hay and halfway gnawed to pieces. Beyond the castle are two full water bottles attached to the bars, a plastic bowl filled with pellet food, and another overflowing with baby carrots and wispy fennel fronds. The surplus makes me think that Aubrey worries about leaving him behind, doubts her ability to get here every day.
Other than stray bits of chewed cardboard strewn around the cage, the table is empty. The sunroom is relatively clean. There used to be leaning towers of The New York Times stacked against the walls. I wonder if my mother finally found the courage to part with her papers, or if Steena threw them out like she always threatened.
Across the room, on the glass coffee table, there’s a potted cactus that doesn’t look deprived, and the exact same biology textbook I had in high school. I open the cover and see Aubrey Wells written on the inside in messy, looping handwriting that looks a lot like mine.
“I think there’s been some updates to science since this came out,” I say to the rat.
He chatters again and sounds so happy. When I look over, he’s holding a baby carrot in his little hands, gnawing at the smaller end.
My stomach rumbles. I have not eaten since the risotto last night. Nicotine dulled my hunger, but not enough.
I check the fridge. The fennel is gone, but the unopened can of Pepsi is still there, and there’s half a bag of baby carrots. Stealing carrots from a rat and soda from a teenager feels like a miscast cliché, but I’m dizzy and aching, long overdue for a pain pill that will bring bad news to my empty belly.
I crack open the Pepsi and chug until I have to burp, crunch carrots while I check the cabinets. The pantry closet is empty, and opening it releases the trapped smell of Pine-Sol. Shelves that used to store soup cans are stained with rusty ring marks. I can still picture the archives of pudding mix, boxes of macaroni, jars of the marmalade Babbo used to make that no one wanted to eat, the ever-present almost-empty bag of flaked coconut from that one Easter when someone tried to make a lamb cake.
Whenever Steena got stuck babysitting me, she would mix concoctions from the pantry and dare me to eat them. One time, when I was nine, she made me eat pasty spoonfuls of ketchup mixed with pistachio pudding powder until I threw up on the kitchen floor. It happened just as our mother and Step pulled in the driveway and Steena gave up on trying to clean it before they got upstairs. She told them I dreamed up the concoction myself, it was something I wanted to eat, and she tried to stop me.
“Freya doesn’t listen, Mom. I’m telling you,” Steena said, in her whiny uptalk. “She’s disgusting and strange, and I don’t think it’s fair that I have to babysit her for free. We’re not even whole sisters! We’re barely sisters!”
Steena read somewhere that a seven-year age gap between siblings was almost like being an only child, and she liked to point it out every chance she got. On top of our age difference, once her dad pulled himself together and got remarried, she only lived with us sixty percent of the time, and for most of it, she was busy with friends, school, clarinet, dance, and bad moods that kept her locked in her room with Mr. Mister blaring on her boom box. But it still wasn’t like being an only child. I would never have pushed myself off the swing set or bitten my own arm hard enough to need stitches, and I didn’t have a personal compulsion to eat ketchup pistachio pudding.
I remember that I couldn’t stop retching while I tried to clean my puke off the kitchen floor. The grout shredded the paper towels, and it felt like the harder I tried, the more the mess grew.
My mother leaned against the kitchen wall, watching me, stone-faced. “I don’t understand how I gave birth to someone so senseless,” she said. “I should’ve quit while I was ahead.”
And even though Steena lied about what happened, I felt like my mother’s assessment of me was true. I should have known better than to take my sister up on a dare. There was never any upside. The only prize Steena promised was her attention, but for some stupid reason, it was always enough. Even though she was mostly mean to me, I desperately wanted to be Steena’s whole sister, and I would bask in the tiniest ray of her regard as if it were full-blown sunshine.
I close the pantry and keep searching. In the cupboards next to the fridge, where we used to keep Tupperware, I find an open box of Cap’n Crunch, a sleeve of saltines, a dusty jar of Nescafé, an unopened bag of pretzel logs, and store-brand peanut butter and jelly striped together in one jar.
The sun won’t set for another hour or so, but in our little valley, it has already slipped behind the trees. I flick the switch for the brass chandelier over the dining table and take a seat next to the rat cage. He was sleeping but wakes to watch me plunging pretzels into the peanut butter stripes.
In the wall of windows, my reflection grows brighter as the daylight wanes. When we ate dinner as a family at this table, my chair faced the windows, and I could watch us eating. I feel like I can still see us, the tableau burned in my mind. Steena, listening to her Walkman, pushing broccoli around her plate. Step staring into space. My mother shouting about how she shouldn’t have bothered to cook, since no one appreciates her anyway. I see my nine-year-old self, anxious and flinching, crossing and uncrossing her fingers under the table, over and over, as if it could keep the yelling from getting worse. I wonder when our last supper happened. Whenever it was, we did not know it would be the last. Our brains don’t seem to mark time in persistent unhappiness. It all feels endless, until it ends.
My hunger is greater than my appetite. The peanut butter and pretzel form a sticky bolus, catching in my throat. I wash it down with the rest of Aubrey’s Pepsi and push the last shard of pretzel through the bars of the rat’s cage. He grabs it eagerly and drags it into the castle.
I go back to Jam’s so I can fall asleep in his bed, listening to his crooked heartbeat.