Chapter 12
— Chapter 12 —
After Jam and Aubrey leave, I haul myself upstairs to see if any of my clothes are still in my old room. I can’t picture my parents having the energy to turn my bedroom into a gym or sewing room, so the thought of finding my Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt and a pair of Skidz in the bottom drawer of my dresser isn’t completely irrational. And stale dresser clothes can’t smell worse than Jam’s bloody shirt, or the dirty laundry in the trunk of my car. Also, I want to see what it looks like for Aubrey to occupy the space where I used to live.
I walk past the closed door to Steena’s room, down the hallway to mine, where the door is open and light streams in from the paneled window that stretches across the entire back wall.
My furniture—nightstand, desk, vanity, trunk, bookshelf—is all gone, the outline of each still impressed into the dense beige carpet. On the faded blue wall, there’s a sun print of the lacy wicker edge of my missing vanity mirror. All that’s left is my old twin bed, headboard missing, with the same ruffled Laura Ashley comforter, and one of the extra chairs from the dining table serving as a stand for a knobby milk-glass lamp that used to live in the den. The bed is unmade, an Aubrey-sized nest in the middle.
I stand in the indent where my bookshelf used to be, brain scrambling to remember as many titles as I can. Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Ordinary Princess, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Hunky-Dory Dairy, Little Women, Travels with Charley, Wuthering Heights, Forever . I remember Margaret getting her period, and Anne Shirley getting Diana drunk by accident, and Jo March’s innate sense of independence. I adored Ramona’s illustrated bowl-cut hair, Ribsy the lanky dog, Blossom Culp and her dreadful future, the Little Prince and his demanding rose on B-612. There were the Bobbsey Twins, and Baby-Sitters Club, and Sweet Valley High. But there are so many books that have been lost to me. I can’t remember their titles, authors, character names, even though I loved them. There was a series about sleepaway camp counselors that I read over and over, wishing I could spend entire summers away from my family. I loved an author who wrote melodramatic novels about teens with terminal illnesses. I had a worn yellow paperback about a plain-looking girl whose sister was very popular, but her sister’s boyfriend realized he liked the plain girl better when she sewed him a camel-colored sport coat. I remember the description of the main character stitching suede patches over the elbows, and that her sister was beautiful but careless. In the recesses of my heart, I was holding out hope that someday I’d come back and find those books here. But they’re gone, and I don’t know how to search for them, so they’re lost to me forever.
My throat cramps. I lie on the bed and sob through sharp, stabbing breaths. I must be some kind of monster. My mother and Step are dead, and I’m falling apart over books. But my books never hurt me without putting me back together in the end. Most of the time when I cried in this room, it was because my parents were downstairs screaming at each other, or my father told me he wished he’d never met my mother because he would have been better off without any of us. I cried in this bed holding my stinging cheek after my mother smacked me with the bristle end of the hairbrush for wailing when she threatened to shave my head so she wouldn’t have to spend another moment of her life untangling my knots. I hid under this comforter wishing I could stop existing when Steena said the only reason I was even born was because Step owned this house, and our mother didn’t want to be a divorced single mom living under Babbo’s roof anymore.
“She had to marry Step,” my sister said, with a prim smile, “so I could grow up in a house with a yard in a good school district. She didn’t want you .”
And as a seven-year-old, I believed everything my family said. I was certain they were sad and angry because I was messy, lazy, stupid, and way too sensitive. I felt their pain and disappointment as heavily as my own. I would lie here and cry until I could barely see through my puffy eyelids at school the next day. In class, my jaw would ache because I’d clenched my teeth all night, and I’d have to muscle through a headache that made my eyes tear. I wouldn’t hear the homework assignment, or the spelling words for the test, so every Friday I’d have to bring home a folder full of red-marked papers that proved my family was right about me.
My first summer in Maine was a good tourist season, and I had enough money to go see a therapist. We talked about all of this, and I understand on a rational level that the way my parents and Steena treated me was about their own pain. I can intellectualize what was wrong and who was wrong and what should not have happened to me, but I still feel the twisting shame in the back of my throat. It follows me everywhere. And the more context I’ve given to my past, the more clearly I see that I never got to be the main character in my own life. I was a mirror, a reaction, an excuse, but never a child. I missed too many of the milestones you’re supposed to develop around, so I don’t really feel like a person.
In Maine, working at The Clam, no one expected very much from me, and I was careful not to let anyone close enough to see the gaps in my personhood. I worked hard and read books and only dated tourists who were leaving town in a week or a month or after the summer. Buck was my sole constant. He had too many of his own gaps to ever notice mine, so our friendship was vague, but well-balanced. I miss Buck more than my books. I’d cry for him.
I roll over and rub my hand along the cold bumpy wall. Someone took down my postcard collection and the paperboard long-boxes from my favorite CDs. The poster putty left oily polka-dot stains on the walls, and I wonder if someone got mad about that.
There are new pictures among the dots, hung with masking tape: pencil sketches on torn-out spiral notebook pages. Drawings of trees from the yard, the veins of a maple leaf, a hand with cracked cuticles, Coriolanus with a headless bird in his mouth. Every sketch is simple, but specific—some details merely gestures, but the rightness of the each gesture is disarming. It is possible to tell that the cat is Coriolanus by the perfect angles of his stripes, but the picture isn’t bogged down with every stripe. Those cracked cuticles belong to tired hands. I can identify the maple leaf even though she hasn’t drawn the outline of its form.
I know they’re Aubrey’s drawings, not pictures given to her by a friend, because they look the way I’d imagine she sees the world. Broad and delicate at the same time. She captured what I would find important about the same subjects. I can comprehend the very big picture and the very small details, but I’m hopelessly confused by the middle ground: surfaces that seem obvious to everyone else. I wonder if Aubrey actually feels this way, or if I’m projecting—if I’ve always been projecting onto her. But her pictures make sense to me in a way I cannot completely match to words.
Under the window, there’s a sketch of Aubrey looking in the missing vanity mirror. She included the lacy weave of the wicker frame and the top of the five-sided Colors by Benetton cologne bottle that I kept on the vanity, details that make me think she wasn’t just drawing from a memory of being in my room. And in the picture, Aubrey looks like she does right now, with the stud in her cheek and the ring in her nose, childlike awkwardness just starting to fade from her features. Her sketched face seems to be using the mirror to stare at me, and it’s hard to meet her gaze. I knew what she was up against, and I left her here anyway.
“You did not have a choice,” my therapist told me, again and again. “You cannot take someone else’s child, and you needed to go.” But I only believe it in my brain; the guilt stays in my body. My skin and bones and teeth and veins still wish I’d tried harder to fix things.