“Hey, Ben,” I said. “Long time no see.”
I was trying to be funny, or trying to be something, but no one laughed. Dad managed a weak smile, walked into the living room, and sat down next to us on the couch.
“Ummm, Ben?” Mom said. “How about we all sit down and talk a little?”
Apparently, Ben didn’t feel like talking.
“Ben . . . ?” Mom said again.
It took her a few more entreaties, delivered with increasing levels of frustration, before Ben actually joined us, if you could call it that, since he took the seat farthest away from everyone—way across the room on an orange love seat. Not that there seemed to be much love coming from it.
I’d noticed what must’ve been an old science project of Ben’s sitting in what used to be my bedroom—a papier-mâché diorama of the solar system—and if me, Mom, and Dad were the sun, Mercury, and Venus, Ben was an outer planet. Pluto maybe, the one they’d downsized to a speck of cosmic dust.
Sides were being drawn.
“So, would you like to say anything to your sister, Ben?” Mom said.
That would be a no.
“Okay. You must have a thousand questions, Ben, we all do,” Mom said. “Jenny’s had a really hard time out there, and I think we should just get to know each other again. Can we do that? No one’s expecting you to feel like a brother to her—not yet—I understand that. This will take time. A lot of time. But maybe if we just talk, if we just get the ball rolling . . .”
Ben wasn’t in a ball-rolling mood. He rolled his eyes instead, just enough to get a tired sigh out of Dad. The kind of sigh that said, We’ve been here before, haven’t we, and I’m tired of it. Okay, so maybe things hadn’t been too rosy around the Kristal home lately.
“Jenny, I think this is just a real shock to Ben. I’m sure he’s trying to process it. To understand. We all thought you were . . . you know . . .
“Dead,” I said.
That seemed to be a buzzkill. Using a word like that. Anyway, it shut everybody up.
“I’m really tired,” I said. “Can I go to sleep?”
“Of course,” Dad said. “You must be . . . Jesus, we should have realized . . .”
Mom said she’d make up the sofa bed for me.
“Is that okay?”
“Sounds comfy,” I said. Then we all stood up as if we were leaving a restaurant. Everyone except Ben, who stayed where he was, eyeing me the way security guards eyeball shoplifters—good security guards, not ones like Mr. Hammered.
I waited inside my old room while Mom brought in sheets and pillows, Dad grunting as he pulled out the mattress from the inside of the couch, both of them trying very hard to show me how happy they were that I was back home.
“Can I give you a nightgown?” Mom asked. “I think we’re about the same size.”
“A T-shirt’s fine,” I said. “That’s what I’m used to wearing.”
“Really, you sure? Okay, I’ve got plenty of those.”
She brought in a blue T-shirt that said COSTA RICA on it, and Dad asked me if I wanted him to turn up the thermostat.
“No, it’s fine, Dad.”
It was the first time I’d called him that, Dad, and I saw him physically flinch, then blush. “Okay . . . well, good night,” he said, standing awkwardly by the door, looking like a first date who doesn’t know if he should kiss or quit.
“See you in the morning,” he said.
Mom gave me a hug—a real one—but after she left and closed the door behind her, she tiptoed back in with something in her hand. I’d already turned off the lights and slipped into bed, so I couldn’t see what it was at first. Then I did.
“I don’t know why I kept it,” she said. “Dad made me throw everything out. After the third year. Because it was too painful, I guess. He was right. It was. But I kept one thing, just one . . . for in case. Good night, Jenny . . .”
Goldy.
I nestled it under my neck, where the soft mane tickled my throat. I thought it smelled of childhood. The good kind.
Just before I drifted off, I heard someone walking up the stairs, then stopping just outside my door.
“Ha,” Ben said.
SIX
Laurie
She woke up at least five times during the night—she counted, the way other people count sheep. She’d been dreaming about Jenny—the six-year-old Jenny, who used to haunt her dreams on a regular basis, forever screaming for help that never came.
Laurie had been given industrial-strength sleeping pills back then, courtesy of her psychiatrist, Dr. Leslie, but she’d never taken them, even though she’d sometimes pretend to in order to stop Jake from hounding her about it. She understood—it was him being jolted awake by his dissembling wife’s sobbing on a near nightly basis.
Can you describe your emotional state? Dr. Leslie had asked her.
No, can you?
The thing is, she hadn’t wanted to stop seeing Jenny. She couldn’t see her daughter wide-awake, so seeing her in nightmares had to do. Being terrified awake or sleeping—was there really a difference?
She was deep into her short-lived God phase by then—having run back to the church the way you run back to your mother’s arms when you’re desperate for the comfort of home. If psychiatry couldn’t save her, maybe the church could—where you were allowed to call dream figures souls, and your emotionally wrenching nightmares visions.
Over the years, the frequency of those visions began to lessen, and Jenny became an unreliable guest. Laurie would go months without seeing her, years even, only to have her unexpectedly pop in like that family member who’d long ago moved away but couldn’t pass through without saying hi.
Tonight was different. As if someone had blown the dust off that family album and made it magically spring to life. Jenny wasn’t screaming anymore. She was shrieking with six-year-old glee as she galloped through the house on her favorite Palomino—life-size and snorting plumes of hot vapor—then suddenly performing pirouettes across the basement floor in Laurie’s cavernous high heels. They may have been the best dreams Laurie ever had.
After she woke up for the fifth time, she slipped out of bed. She had to see if an actual eighteen-year-old was sleeping down the hall.
Was that actually possible?
When she got to the door, she hesitated for a moment, wondering if all she’d see was a closed fold-out couch, unused Xbox, and dusty diorama—a daughter’s bedroom remodeled into virtual unrecognizability in an effort to obliterate memory. They’d been like Stalinists, Jake and her, airbrushing a once-important personage out of the picture as if she’d never existed.