“Cassiopeia. Cepheus. Ursa Minor. Cygnus. Perseus. Orion.”
Since she had finally spoken, I grew brave enough to ask, “What does it mean?”
“Names of stars.”
Until then I hadn’t known the stars had names. Arm extended, finger pointing, Wavy traced out shapes above her head, as though she were guiding the movements of the stars. A conductor directing a symphony.
The next night, Wavy smiled at me as Mom crawled around looking for the unwanted doll. A minute after we were tucked in, the baby was again among the dust bunnies under the bed. Eventually that became the doll’s name: Dust Bunny. If Mom failed to look for the doll at bedtime, I said, “Oh, no. I think Dust Bunny is missing again,” to make Wavy smile.
While I had a growing friendship with Wavy, my mother had only anxiety.
In the first month, Mom took Wavy to the doctor three times, because she wasn’t eating. The first time, a nurse tried to put a thermometer in Wavy’s mouth. It didn’t end well. The other two times, Wavy mounted the scale and the doctor pronounced, “She’s underweight, but not dangerously so. She must be eating something.”
Dad said the same thing and he had evidence to back it up. One night, he came home from work after we were all in bed, and woke us up shouting, “Oh, goddamnit! What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Wavy wasn’t in her bed, so I ran downstairs alone. I found Dad in the kitchen with the trash can lid in one hand and his briefcase in the other. I’d never been in the kitchen that late. In the day it was a warm, sunny place, but behind Dad, the basement door stood open and dark, like the mouth of a monster.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to bed.” He put the lid on the trash and laid his briefcase on the table.
“What’s going on, Bill?” Mom came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“She was eating out of the trash.”
“What? Amy, what are you—”
“Not Amy. Your niece.”
Mom didn’t take Wavy to the doctor again to complain about her not eating.
After failing to solve that crisis, Mom became obsessed with sewing for Wavy. The dresses you could buy hung on her like sacks and were too frilly, which Wavy hated. The first day she wore my Christmas party dress, she tore the lace collar off.
So Mom sewed dozens of dresses that Wavy unraveled, plucking at the seams until a thread came loose. From there she could unravel a dress in less than a week. Mom rehemmed her dresses each time they came through the wash. It slowed the unraveling down, which was a practical solution, but Mom didn’t want a solution, she wanted a reason.
One of the book club ladies said, “Does she have toileting problems?”
Mom frowned, shook her head. “No, there’s no trouble like that. She’ll be six in July.”
Wavy and I eavesdropped from the other side of the kitchen door. Her games all involved sneaking around and finding people’s secrets, like the cigarettes my father hid in a coffee can in the garage.
“I wonder if she’s acting out over some inappropriate contact,” the book club lady said.
“You think she might have been molested?” another lady said, sounding shocked but excited.
That conversation led to Wavy’s first visit to a therapist. She stopped unraveling her dresses and Mom went around looking triumphant. To Dad, she said: “I think we’ve had a breakthrough.”
Then she discovered the curtains in the guest bedroom, which were what Wavy took to unraveling when she stopped doing it to her clothes.
Mom and Dad yelled at each other while Wavy stared through them.
“Why does there have to be something wrong with her?” Dad said. “Maybe she’s just weird. God knows your sister’s weird enough. I don’t have time for you to get hysterical over everything she does. We have to wrap up the books on the fiscal year-end.”
“I’m worried about her. Is that so horrible of me? She never talks. What’s going to happen to her?”
“She does too talk,” Leslie said. “I hear her talking at night to Amy.”
Mom slowly turned to all of us, narrowed in on me. “Is that true? Does she talk to you?”
She stared into my eyes, pleading with me. I nodded.
“Well, what does she talk about?”
“It’s a secret.”
“There can’t be secrets, Amy. If she tells you something important, you have to tell me. You want to help Vonnie, don’t you?” Mom got down on her knees in front of me and I saw how it was. She would make me tell my secret. I started to cry, knowing I would tell and it wouldn’t help Mom or Wavy. It would just rob me of something precious.
Wavy saved me. With her hand over her mouth, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
My mother’s eyes bulged. “I—I—I.” She couldn’t get a word out and even Dad looked stunned. The silent ghost girl could speak in complete sentences.
“I want you to go back to the therapist,” Mom said.
“No.”
Things might have gotten better after that, if it hadn’t been for the other secret between Wavy and me. She liked to sneak out of the house at night, and I went with her. Breezing down the stairs on bare feet, we eased open the kitchen door and walked around the neighborhood.
Sometimes we just looked. Other times, we took things. The night of Wavy’s sixth birthday, when she had left her cake uneaten, she jimmied open Mrs. NiBlack’s screen door. We crept across the kitchen to the refrigerator, where Wavy pressed her finger to the lever to keep the light inside off. On the bottom shelf sat a half-eaten lemon pie, which we carried away. Crouched under the weeping willow in the Goerings’ backyard, Wavy tore out a chunk of pie with her bare hand and gave me the plate. She went around the corner of the garden shed and when she came back, her piece of lemon pie was gone. No, she wasn’t starving.
Some nights we gathered things. A wine bottle scavenged from the gutter. A woman’s high-heeled shoe from the median of the highway, where we weren’t supposed to go. An old hand mixer abandoned outside the Methodist Church’s back door. We collected our treasures into a metal box stolen from the neighbor’s garage, and secreted it along our back fence, behind the lilac bushes.
When autumn came, the lilacs lost their leaves, and Dad found the box of treasure, including Mrs. NiBlack’s heavy glass pie plate, her name written on the bottom of it on a square of masking tape. Mom returned it to Mrs. NiBlack, who must have told her how the pie plate went missing: stolen out of her fridge on a hot July night, a trail of small dirty footprints left on the linoleum.
Or maybe something else made Mom suspicious.
As the weather got colder, I wanted to stay at home in bed, but when Wavy got up and dressed, I did, too. If I didn’t go, she would go alone. Half of my fear was that something would happen to her. The other half was a fear that she would have adventures without me.
So I went with her, shivering against the cold, while my heart pounded with excitement. At the library, Wavy went up on tiptoe to reach her spindly arm into the book return. In the day, my mother would have driven us to the library to check out books, but stealing books was sweeter.
Wavy smiled and withdrew her arm to reveal treasure. The book was thin enough to pass through the return the wrong way, but it wasn’t a kiddy book. Salome, the spine said. We leaned our heads together to consider the strangeness of an adult book with pictures. Odd pictures. The cover was worn and layered with clear tape to protect it, and the pages were heavy. It felt special.