“Gretchen?” Dad, from his office, has heard the same series of noises. He doesn’t call out to see if me and Marla and the twins are okay. I don’t know if my sisters notice that kind of thing, but I always do. When a crash or a bang or a yelp happens in LilyLee’s house, her parents call out to ask if she’s okay. When it happens here, Dad rushes to Mom. He breezes past Marla and me in the hallway and peers down the stairs. We follow him and see her in a lump at the bottom.
“Oh!” Marla says, and rushes down before Dad is able to hold her back. Mom is crying the kind of tears that don’t make noise, and she’s hovering her hands over her ankle as if she’d like to hold it but can’t bring herself to touch the tender part. We hover too, the three of us reaching toward, but never touching Mom.
“I fell,” she says, and I’m laughing because it’s such an obvious statement that it must be a joke, but Dad doesn’t laugh, and Marla’s breathing speeds up. I look at Mom’s face to see if she was being dry and funny the way she sometimes is in upsetting situations, but she’s glazed over and pale.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Marla says. She’s waving her hands like she’s trying to shake bugs off her fingers.
“Let’s lift her up,” Dad says. “Marla and Silly, can you help me get her to the couch?”
“Silly should go to her room,” Mom says. Even now, even in her state of absentness, she’s doing this weird protective thing. “This is probably a little scary for you, right, Silly?”
I shrug. I don’t think I’m any more or less scared than Marla.
“I don’t want you to see this,” Mom says. “Go to your room.” Like it’s fine for Marla to see everything bruised and bloody and blurry and out of place.
“What about me?” Marla says. I would say she asks this exact question at least a dozen times every week.
“We need your help!” Mom says. “Silly’s too little for all this.” Mom’s words sound mushy and soft. They wind together, overlapping and turning a sentence or two into one mega-word.
“Right. Yeah. Of course,” Marla says. She hooks her hands around the back of Mom’s knees. She’s moving like a cat, like a kitten, like the most delicate creature on earth. But Mom screams out in pain from the touch, and Marla scampers away.
“Okay, okay, let’s call an ambulance, right? I have my phone here, so I’ll do that? And we can let the girls go upstairs?” Dad puts a huge hand on Mom’s head, a reminder of how very small she is in comparison. I wish he didn’t say everything like a question.
“Stop trying to be Prince Charming,” Mom says. Her voice has pins in it. Pins and knives and cactus needles and thorns. Everything sharp. She calls Dad Prince Charming a lot, and mostly with a sneer when Dad’s trying to help her. It always catches him off guard.
Marla and I freeze, like sad marble statues, and I’m sure my breathing stops too, and my heart, and my mind. All of it freezes waiting for whatever’s next.
“Go to your rooms,” Dad says. “Both of you. Don’t come out until dinnertime.”
We don’t go to our rooms. We go to Eleanor and Astrid’s room.
Or Marla goes to their room, and I sneak in behind her. There’s no chair under the door today, but they still don’t want me to come inside. Marla tries to shove me out the door, but I hang on to the frame and stand my ground because I am a sister too, and she can’t change that by being a completely impossible human.
“Oh. They’re already gone,” she says. Her shoulders droop, and mine do too, even though I don’t know what we’re missing, exactly.
Astrid and Eleanor are nowhere to be found, which is strange since I know they came up here earlier. But all over the floor and their beds and dressers are Astrid’s shoe-box dioramas. She makes them all the time, but I had no idea she had this many. One for every day of the month. Maybe for every day of two months. I’ve never seen them all out at once, a collection of little scenes and imaginary worlds.
Pipe cleaners and glitter and construction paper and wallpaper samples and neon shoelaces and Christmas bows litter the room—the remnants of her creations. Astrid is the only person in the world who can make a brand-new universe with a few rhinestones, a bunch of wrapping paper, and Popsicle sticks.
Usually the dioramas are hidden under the bed or displayed on bedside tables.
“What is all this?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.
“It’s for Eleanor’s closet,” Marla says. I have so many follow-up questions I’m worried I’ll choke on them, but Marla drags me out of there and tells me to go to my room for the rest of the day or I’ll never find out anything, and I either believe her or am so tired from all the commotion with Mom that I don’t have the energy to argue.
They should call me Sleepy, instead of Silly, because that’s mostly what I am these days. Sleepy and small, every time something else goes wrong in this terrible house.
Three