Chapter I #4
“Sleep is a waste of time,” she’d said once, lying across my bed, her long, blond hair waterfalling over the side of my mattress. It was exactly like her to be a petulant, slightly bratty kid in one moment, and a waxing philosopher in the next, with barely a breath between the two extremes.
Nobody had answered Dad’s traffic comment, but he didn’t seem dismayed. He was very used to people not answering him, and he simply tried again, taking a sip of my coffee and sighing happily. “The best coffee in the city, and it’s right on our block. How lucky are we, kids?”
How lucky are we, kids? was a true Dadism, and we all nodded our agreement while, again, not answering.
The woman next to us was getting bored. She went back to her food.
Mom finally pulled away from Bernadette and I saw that they’d traded places—Mom was crying and Bernadette was looking worried.
Then Dad looked up and for the first time caught the full extent of Bernie’s battered face, and he paused, a statue, with a bite of egg halfway raised between his plate and mouth.
Bernadette pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped it a few times, then handed it over to Dad.
I leaned in to watch over his shoulder, and to my surprise, it was an actual video of said volleyball getting spiked into my sister’s face.
I didn’t think my sister had made any friends in college, at least she’d never spoken of anyone, so I found myself focusing on who exactly had taken the video, although I recognized that wasn’t the point.
“Yikes,” Dad said, after he’d played the video three times, once holding the phone at a bit of an angle, so the woman next to us could get a better view. “That looks like it hurt.”
“The whole world erupted into a beautiful cacophony of color,” Bernadette said loftily, taking the phone back and winking at me with her good eye. “And then, yes, it did hurt, a fucking lot.”
Mom called the server over and ordered poached eggs and toast and “A lot more coffee, please,” and Bernadette watched the video of herself getting volleyballed in the eye with a weird smile on her face.
“You can’t say cacophony of color,” Clara said thoughtfully, to no one in particular. “Cacophony refers to sounds.”
“This was yesterday morning,” Bernadette clarified. “But it’s not why I came home.”
“You can tell us when you’re ready,” Mom said.
“I might not ever be ready,” Bernadette replied.
Mom wiped at her eyes. Out of all of us, she looked the most like Evelyn, especially when she was sad.
“Well, if you’re going to be home for a while, I do think you should get a job,” Dad said, and Bernadette gave me a look of such dramatic annoyance that I actually laughed.
“Let’s go to the museum today,” she said suddenly.
“I have to practice,” Evelyn replied.
“I have an assignment to finish,” Clara said.
“I’ll come,” I said.
“I know,” Bernie said, smiling at me, eye squinted closed, and I felt very, very happy she was there, no matter what the reason was.
We walked to the museum right from the diner, waving bye to the rest of our family and heading east. It was only a block away, and the skies had brightened; you could just see some blue coming out from behind the clouds.
I felt sort of empty, since I hadn’t eaten much, but also sort of full, because Bernadette was home.
She took off her leather jacket and swung it over her shoulder and then put her arm around me, squeezing, and then kissed the side of my head.
“Fuck, I love this neighborhood,” she said. We’d reached a corner with a little flower shop on it, and I caught the long leaf of a tulip between two of my fingers. “It always smells so good.”
“Right now it smells good,” I agreed. “Because we’re standing next to a floral explosion.”
She snorted. The light changed and we crossed the street and dove forward into the park and despite what Clara had said, the sound of the cars actually did die away quite quickly.
If you squinted and looked a certain way and suspended a little bit of disbelief, you could pretend you were in a deep, dark forest. A forest of another world.
I tried to do that, but Bernadette seemed to be in a bit of a hurry and took my hand and pulled me along before I could really get into it. She dragged me deeper into the park.
“Oh, you mean the Met?” I asked, because I’d thought we were going to the Natural History Museum, Bernadette’s favorite.
“Unless you have something better to do.”
“The Met is fine, but can you stop pulling me?”
She stopped pulling me abruptly, stopped walking altogether, and stepped off the path, her hands on either side of her head, her fingers tugging gently at the ends of her hair.
“Bernie? What’s going on?” I asked, taking a step toward her.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. Crying again. She rubbed at her chest with the butt of one hand. “I can’t.”
“Why can’t you tell me? You can tell me anything.”
“I just can’t, Winnie,” she sobbed.
“Does your chest hurt?”
“Everything hurts.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Like claws,” she said, and she made her own hands into hooked, pointy things, and dragged her fingernails down my chest, scratching against my sweatshirt.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.
She nodded. She had already stopped crying. Like a faucet. Tears starting and stopping with the blink of an eye. She looked at my sweatshirt, where she’d scratched me. There were marks in the fabric. She buffed them out with the palm of her hand.
“Why do you like this?” she asked.
It was a sweatshirt with the name of her college on it. She’d brought it home with her after her first semester, but she never wore it, so I took it.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It reminds me of you.”
“I hate it. I hate looking at it.”
“I won’t wear it again.”
“Take it off. Burn it.”
“I don’t have any matches.”
“At least take it off. It’s fucking … I don’t want to see it right now.”
I took the sweatshirt off, pulling it over my head and tying it around my waist. The shirt I was wearing also belonged to Bernadette. She squinted at it for a minute.
“Hey. I was looking for that.”
“Do you want me to take it off, too?”
She smiled. “No, you can keep it. It looks better on you. With your hair.”
We had the exact same hair. The exact same shade of brown. The exact same curl on the left side. Just one single curl in a whole head of hair. She touched mine now, and I touched hers. Inverted mirror images. Long and tumbling down our backs.
“I know,” she said. “I know exactly what we’re going to do.”
When we got home, three hours later, Evelyn was standing on the stairs holding a mug of tea she’d been bringing up to her room. When she saw us come in, her jaw dropped down to her chest.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“I donated it to kids with cancer,” Bernadette replied proudly.
She gave a little twirl. Even though I’d been there when it had all come off, I still couldn’t really believe it was gone.
A messy, short pixie cut was all that remained.
Her black eye was shiny and raw and still swollen mostly shut.
She’d put the leather jacket back on for our walk from the hair salon, and I didn’t think she’d ever looked cooler than she had in that moment.
Then Dad came around the corner holding a bag of recycling and he actually dropped it when he saw her.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can do this. I can handle this.”
“Dad,” Evelyn said.
“It looks. Very. Lovely,” he said.
“Thanks,” Bernadette said.
“Bernadette, it really looks so nice,” Evie said.
“I love it,” I said.
“I love it,” Bernadette repeated.
But then the faucet opened up again, and she was crying so suddenly that I didn’t even have time to react before Dad folded her up in his arms.
“Go upstairs, girls,” he said to Evie and me.
He didn’t have to tell us twice.
“What were you thinking?” Evie hissed to me when we reached the second-floor landing.
“What was I thinking? I didn’t do anything!”
“That’s exactly my point,” she said.
“What was I supposed to do? She said she wanted a haircut.”
“This has nothing to do with hair,” Evie said when we reached the third floor. She paused there, waiting to see if I would go into my room or come up to the attic with her. We sometimes still called it that. A ghost in the attic sounded cooler than a ghost on the fourth floor.
“If this has nothing to do with hair, why are you upset with me?” I asked.
“You were supposed to go to the museum,” she complained, and I followed her upstairs. “You weren’t supposed to facilitate any major life decisions.”
Clara was at her easel and Henry was sitting on the love seat we’d brought up a few summers ago when Mom and Dad had replaced the ground-floor living room set.
“What major life decision did she facilitate?” Clara asked, not turning around from her easel.
Henry was mostly transparent and kept winking out altogether.
He was much better at manifesting at nighttime, and I was surprised to see him at all, except I knew how much he liked to watch Clara paint.
They’d always had a bit of a special bond because he’d been there when she was born.
(The rest of us had been born at the hospital and Henry had met us only a day or two later; I’m sure Clara had been very exciting for him.)
“Bernadette cut off all her hair,” Evelyn said. She wasn’t looking at me, for some reason I honestly couldn’t understand, and she was pacing back and forth now, fuming.
“Really?” Clara said. “Huh. I didn’t see that coming.”
“She looks beautiful,” I offered.
“Of course she looks beautiful.”
“Something is obviously really wrong with her,” Evelyn said. “She doesn’t need to be cutting all her hair off, she needs to be resting and processing.”
“Hair grows back, Evie,” Clara said. “I think you’re being a bit dramatic.”