No surprise, then, that the screaming guitar and its unholy choir of demonic chords sent my mother into a towering drunken temper.
I remember hearing her footsteps overhead and the pounding on Elizabeth’s door and her shouts. “Do you want to hear this noise the rest of your life?” Then more shouting, on either end, until there was a door slam and the cold, ringing, uncertain silence that hovers in the wake of a fight.
The next day when we got home from school, me with a dandelion tucked into my hair for good luck and she sulking her way from the bus stop with her backpack slung over one slouched shoulder, a posture that later put her at risk of scoliosis, we came into the house to find a little girl peering anxiously out the windows, which I knew from photo albums was a younger version of our mother. The real one, the current one, was nowhere to be found.
“Who cares?” said Elizabeth scathingly, still annoyed with her yet simultaneously displaying something other than mere annoyance, something I did not recognize then—whatever veiled emotions recoil within a teenager whose mother frequently yells admonishments at her over a glass of something opaque.
(I recognized this reaction much later, when this memory returned to wander through the house and I had the opportunity to study it from the outside—to study the childish carelessness and the complex succession of rancor, hurt, and regret that passed fleetingly across my sister’s face with all the whispery impermanence of a hummingbird’s wings—and to understand the truth behind our behavior.)
Eventually we found our mother in Elizabeth’s bedroom. Well, I should say Elizabeth found her; she had run upstairs to her room while I deliberately counted my steps, as I was fixated on counting at the time, and there were certain magical numbers I had to reach in my counting if I wanted good fortune—in particular, seven, eleven, and twenty-one. I had just reached nine, counting my steps on the way up the stairs and having pocketed seven for later magic, when I heard the thump of Elizabeth’s backpack hitting the floor and a wordless shriek that sent me racing up the rest of the way in a flurry of curiosity. I found Mother sitting on Elizabeth’s princess bed, the sorry guitar flat on her lap. Each of the strings had been removed, tied into terrifying metal knots, and cast onto the floor.
As children, we were shocked and appalled at the defacing of the guitar, but really, it wasn’t as though she’d smashed it into pieces or damaged it irrevocably. If only we had known how easy it was to change strings—or known, in fact, that guitarists change their strings all the time. Strings get old, after all. They lose their vibrancy. They fray. Old strings sound like the muted voices of damned souls whose cries you can only hear coming up through the floor vents. And those strings were old—imagine one of them snapping in Elizabeth’s face the next time she put the full force of her teenage fury into her strumming. It might take out an eye.
“How could you?” Elizabeth shouted.
Agnes picked up her drink and smiled. The ice that remained, nearly melted, clinked against the sides of the glass. “So pick a new hobby.”
“Like drinking?” Elizabeth shot back.
(She did pick a new hobby shortly thereafter, in fact, and one that seemed at odds with her brief foray into the rebel-punk life: ballet. A rebellion against her own rebellion. Playing classical music from her stereo, she practiced her graceful movements. Sometimes, though, when Agnes had vanished into the house or into her own head, Elizabeth played her punk CDs and danced a dizzying mélange of ballet and the frenetic energy of crunching guitars—a paradoxical art. It was only much later, when she was older and more sensible, that she realized the very best rebellion against our peculiar family was to become, in fact, a terribly sensible, down-to-earth, and altogether normal human being.)
My mother held out her glass, taunting. “Go on, then. Give it a taste so we can see if this is the hobby for you.”
Elizabeth knew better than to take the glass, but she didn’t know better than to knock it out of Mother’s hand, where it thudded and spilled its contents over the floor, the room erupting in the acrid smell of alcohol.
It reminds me now of August Wakefield knocking the cup of tarry water out of his sister’s hands, letting the floorboards drink the dark elixir. Elizabeth had the same cold look on her face when she knocked the glass to the floor.
The sound of a slap left a bright handprint on Elizabeth’s cheek. She and my mother both looked momentarily stunned, and then Elizabeth shouted, “I hate you!” She swiveled but my mother reached out, grabbed her arms as she thrashed away, and held her fast, making crude attempts at apologies. Elizabeth struggled, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” through her tears.
They were retreating from me now—but it was only because I was backing away from the room, away from the shouting, my hands over my ears. I told myself I could not hear them. I closed my eyes so I could not see them either, but I nearly tripped over one of the knotted strings cast onto the floor, tied like a soft pretzel. I stumbled over it, and it sprang free of the careless knot until it was once again a curved line, dented periodically from years of pressing into frets. I picked it up and carried it with me to my hiding place.
I was there for hours, hiding among the white-sheeted shapes of old furniture, playing with the steel string. Beyond the arched window the sun set, plunged me into nightfall. No one came to find me. No one called me down for dinner. My stomach grumbled, and I crawled out from under a sheet covering an old piano, accidentally taking it with me in a plume of dust. The ancient piano with its yellowing keys grinned back as the falling sheet plinked out a few sour notes.
Worried that Mother had heard—that she would come yell at me for my music, too—I threw the sheet back over the piano and crept out of the room, peering around for any sign of her. The hall was dark with dusk.
No one was in the kitchen. I was hungry, but I didn’t know how to cook anything, not really, so I went looking in my mother’s favorite drinking spots. In the lightless parlor, I saw someone sitting on a chair against the far wall. “Mother?” I called out. “I’m hungry. Can we eat now?”
She didn’t respond.
“Please?” I stumbled around, feeling the wall. “Can you turn on the light?”
She was laughing low, in the back of her throat, a terrible old chuckle, and suddenly I thought, this is not my mother.
Instead of searching for the light switch, I fell back against a curtain and dragged it open, filling the room with uneasy twilight.
She sat in a wheelchair—an old woman, older than my mother, with black Xs where her eyes should be. Her hands were plagued by fingers bent and crooked as if broken and allowed to heal at contorted angles, and though her lips were sealed shut, she was laughing still, that dark chuckle behind closed lips. Gray wisps of hair wilted against her gaunt face. Her feet were bare, wrinkled, callused; she was missing several toes.
A scream rose in my throat, trapped behind my tonsils.
I ran from the room, bumping into walls; a stiff old portrait fell down when I slammed against it, landing sideways in its gilt frame, staring up at me from the floor. Scrambling away, I darted around the corner of the hall, my breath hitching fast—
And I ran right into a warm, solid shape, which wrapped its arms around me.
“Samantha! What has gotten into you?”