Chapter 16
— Chapter 16 —
When I get back inside, Aubrey is doing dishes.
“You don’t have to do that,” I tell her.
“Somebody has to,” she says as she uses a sponge to scrub melted cheese off a plate. If Steena said that, it would be snippy, but there’s a shrug in Aubrey’s tone—it has to be done, so she may as well do it.
Her hands are wet, but her hair keeps falling in her face. She tries to blow it away like she did when she was a toddler playing with finger paints, but now the strands get stuck on the stud in her cheek.
“Here,” I say, pulling the elastic off my wrist. I gather her hair into a ponytail. She lets me. She still has a heart-shaped birthmark behind her ear even though Steena was always threatening to have it lasered off. I pull her ponytail halfway through the elastic a second time and leave it in a loop. Her hair is much thicker than mine. It won’t stay in my flimsy band for long.
“Thanks,” she says. Her face is flushed.
Mine is too. I don’t know how to navigate the space between us. I tend to maintain a wide berth with strangers, but I used to hold her in my lap until she fell asleep. I can still see the aura of that little girl, but it’s not fair to think that I know Aubrey now when I don’t. I wouldn’t touch a stranger’s hair.
She stacks the last plate in the dishwasher and washes her hands.
“Does it feel weird to have a hole in your cheek?” I ask.
Aubrey laughs. “It’s not real.” She reaches inside her mouth with one hand and, with the other, pulls the silver ball off her cheek, then sticks it to the metal disk that was holding it in place. They clack together. “Magnets.” She pulls off all but three of the earrings on her left ear, and all but one on her right. “Shray and I got them in the Village to make my mom mad. She thinks they’re real.”
“That’s brave.” I was always trying not to make my mother mad. I can’t imagine walking right into her line of fire on purpose.
“My parents do these stupid flyers for their business that are like, From our family home to yours. Wishing you a happy …whatever freaking holiday it is. Arbor Day? We have to pose together on the porch in coordinated outfits while a weird guy takes our picture, and then all the kids in my class get it in the mail. It’s humiliating.”
“So you’re trying to get out of the pictures.”
Aubrey nods. “It almost worked. But I forgot about Photoshop. She just makes me look like a mannequin.”
“Does that mean you’re not all in on the goth lifestyle?” I ask.
“ Now I am. I can’t let her think she won.” Aubrey laughs. “I like my eyeliner. And at least if I’m forcing her to photoshop me, I don’t have to walk around looking like the kid from those flyers.” She pulls a crushed pack of cigarettes from her pocket, holds it up.
Even though I don’t want to watch this beautiful child smoke, I know I have to be selective about my battles, just like with Jam. She won’t trust me if I start policing her.
We walk out to the patio. Sit side by side on the leg rest of a chaise lounge. Up on the ridge, the lights are on in the McCullens’ living room, and I can make out the shape of someone on the deck, maybe smoking, or just getting some air. I wonder if it’s a McCullen, or if someone new lives there now.
Aubrey grins, holds the box out. “Want one?”
I know I should decline, but every cell in my body craves nicotine. “You’re a bad influence,” I say, pulling a cigarette from the pack.
She lights mine, then hers. “That’s what my mom always said about you.”
When Aubrey exhales, she tips her head back, sending a plume of smoke out to the orange night sky.
I’d forgotten that it doesn’t get dark here on gloomy nights because the light pollution from New York City reflects off the clouds.
“Do you ever see your dad?” Aubrey asks.
My heart does the amphibial thing. “He died,” I say. It comes out like a question. I can’t tell if I’m hopeful or horrified.
“Oh,” Aubrey says, as if it’s news to her. “I’m sorry.”
Where is my father if he isn’t dead? Hans told me Step closed his business and retired a few months before the accident. It’s such specific information. I inherited his house. I couldn’t have misunderstood. But why doesn’t Aubrey know?
“I was told he died in the car crash with my mom,” I say slowly.
“That was your stepdad.”
“No.” My panic deflates. “He’s your mom’s stepdad. He’s my actual father.” I study the glowing end of my cigarette. I’m always afraid I’ll forget myself and touch it.
“Then why did you call him Step?”
“Because Steena did.”
“That’s kind of messed up,” Aubrey says.
“Yeah.” For a few months when I was seven, Steena had me convinced my real dad was in prison for robbing a bank. She told me she knew the address, so she could mail him letters. I wrote to my real dad every Sunday, detailing all the best things about me: that I was good at reading and nice to cats and could catch frogs with my bare hands. I hoped maybe if my letters were good enough, my real dad would try to get out on good behavior, and I could go live with him instead. But then Steena got mad at me for finishing the Frosted Flakes and stuck all my letters to the fridge. My mother thought it was hilarious. Step was red-faced and quiet for weeks.
“I wonder if it made him sad that you called him Step,” Aubrey says.
“Probably.” In the car on the way to visit his parents, he’d always remind me to call him Dad, but when I tried, the word felt prickly in my brain like it wasn’t mine to say. Most of the time I avoided calling him anything at all.
“Step was really nice to me,” Aubrey says. “He was like the quiet person you could go sit next to when everyone was…” She waves her hands, and her cigarette leaves a curling trail of smoke in the air. I know she’s referring to the precarious chaos of our loud Italian family. “Like they’re all hot lava and he was base.” There’s a bend in her voice.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Step dying would affect her. “I’m really sorry,” I say.
She sniffs. “That’s stupid. He was your dad. He’s not— my anything.”
“He was your quiet person,” I tell her, grateful that he was.
I hear her sniff again. “Thanks. I’m sorry your dad died.”
“Thank you.” I wish Step had been my quiet person so I could be sad in a clean, uncomplicated way.
We’re quiet together for a while. In the orange-dark, I can see the pine tree I used to climb, the tool shed I pretended was a cabin just for me, next to the little swamp that was dry in summer but full of water from fall through spring. It’s frozen now, the ice milky and dull, reflecting orange light back up to the clouds.
We don’t own the land beyond the swamp, but it’s empty, so until Step’s deer fence marked off the definitive line, the sparse woods beyond felt like ours too. This was all farmland back in Hachaliah Bailey’s day, so none of those trees are very big or old or special. There are still crumbling stone walls marking off pastures that were left to seed decades before this was a neighborhood, and when I played in the woods as a child, it felt like my own kingdom.
“When did you start hanging out here?” I ask.
“I found my mom’s key about a month after they died,” Aubrey says, which means sometime last summer. “Austin was being an asshole. I just needed to go somewhere else.”
“How is your stinky brother?”
“Same as when you left. Full of shit and way too loud.”
I laugh, but then Aubrey pulls up her sleeve and shows me a sprawling scar down the ulna side of her forearm. “He threw a jar at me last year when I wouldn’t open it for him because I didn’t want to risk spilling pickle juice all over myself right before the art fair at school. But then I missed the whole thing because my dad had to take me to the ER for stitches. And all my mom had to say about it was ‘Why didn’t you just open the jar?’?”
I know objectively that Austin’s actions and Steena’s reaction are shocking, but I carry scars on my body from my sister’s soulless rages, so I’m not shocked, just sad.
“Was he at all sorry?”
“He called me a narc—like I could’ve hid the blood gushing out of me. It didn’t even matter. They let him get away with everything.”
“Are you okay?” I ask, not knowing how to say what I’m really trying to get to. “Like, in general?”
Aubrey makes a scoffing sound in her throat, halfway between a laugh and a hiccup. “It’s not like you care.”
“Of course I do.” I would say that I never stopped caring, but I’m not sure that’s fair or true. I pushed all my love for Aubrey to the furthest corner of my heart, plastered over it, and walked around pretending the new wall had always been the limits of me.
“For now, you care.” She sounds exactly like my sister. “Until you fuck off like you always do.”
I’m tempted to point out that I only actually fucked off one epic time, but I don’t think that matters from Aubrey’s perspective.
While I’m trying to figure out what to say, Aubrey stubs her cigarette and goes inside. I finish mine, staring at the orange sky, eyes stinging from the smoke and cold air and tears. The lights go out at the McCullens’, their house becomes a shadow, and it feels like I’m alone in the woods.
Later, when I’m lying on the couch watching Tara Lipinski skate around the ice like a bejeweled swan, Aubrey comes downstairs. She stands in the doorway, as if she’s not sure she’s allowed in the room.
“Don’t tell me who wins,” I say. “I missed this one.”
She holds out a grocery bag and walks it over to me. “I got you these.”
Inside the bag are two boxes of hair bleach. A different brand from what I bought, but similar to the color I’d intended.
“Thanks.”
“Shray bleached his hair last year, so I asked him what he used. We had it at the store.”
“That’s really nice of you,” I say, willing myself not to cry.
“It took him three tries,” Aubrey says. “But I figured that…, ” she points to my head, “probably still counts as one.”
She sits on the couch by my feet, won’t look at me. “I sold the furniture,” she mumbles. “That’s how I keep the heat and electricity on.” She flinches like she’s waiting for me to yell at her.
“Thank you.”
Aubrey looks up. “You’re not mad?”
“I don’t care what you do with the furniture. You saved me from frozen pipes.”
“Oh.” Her face softens.
I know she didn’t see it as an act of taking care of the house, but it was.
“How’d you sell it?” I ask.
“Chip from the furniture store downtown took the bigger things on consignment,” she says. “He’s sold about half. I used eBay for smaller stuff. And there’s a junk shop in Danbury I go to sometimes.”
“The grandfather clock?” Other than my books, it’s the only missing thing I’ve noticed that made me truly sad.
Aubrey shakes her head. “My mom took that. As soon as she found out you got the house, she hired movers and grabbed everything she wanted. My dad told her she couldn’t—that she wasn’t even allowed in the house anymore. But she did it anyway.”
“Figures.”
“Yeah.”
“When did you find the time to do this?” I ask. I wouldn’t have been able to get through all the steps involved with selling those things when I was her age. I’m overwhelmed by the prospect of it now.
“I don’t do my math homework,” Aubrey says, and her eyes light up when I laugh. “Shray helped me. He has a crush on a kid who works at the junk shop, so it’s, like, not a bad way for him to spend a Saturday. We’re not—we’re not the kind of kids who go to football games for fun, you know?”
“Jam and I weren’t either.”
“Is Jam okay?” Aubrey asks.
“I think he’s using,” I say, because I don’t want to lie to her.
“I think my dad snorts coke sometimes.”
I can tell she’s watching for my reaction carefully. “I think he probably does,” I tell her, remembering the bug-eyed, hyped-up version of Charlie that seemed to appear without warning.
She nods like she’s readjusting parameters around her father in her mind.
We watch Tara Lipinski crying as she finishes her program.
“I really thought you’d be mad I sold that stuff,” Aubrey says.
I’m never going to not love you , I think, but I can’t get the words out, so I just shake my head. No. I am not mad. Of course I’m not mad.
Aubrey stays up with me, watching the ’98 Olympics, like we could have if I’d stayed. I don’t know when I drift off to sleep, but when I wake up in the middle of the night, the lights and the television are off and she’s gone.