“Don’t open the package,” Astrid says. “I don’t want to see anything else.”
“She said she doesn’t remember everything,” I say.
“But I remember everything,” Astrid says. “Maybe Marla’s right, to leave. Maybe we should all be starting over like Eleanor. Or maybe you’re right, bringing things out of the closet so that the real world is less awful. Maybe I’m the only one who is doing this all wrong.”
I’ve never seen this look on Astrid’s face. It’s all screwed up and flushed. She’s uncertain and sad. She’s not spacing out, staring into the distance or getting lost in a shoe-box diorama. She’s right here, feeling everything.
I hug her. She collapses into me and cries. Sometimes I forget how many feelings we’re all, each of us, storing inside. Maybe Astrid stares into the distance because she’s trying to leave them all behind.
“I remember everything too,” I say. It’s something I can give my sisters. Something certain and fierce. The things I’ve seen, and my promise that I won’t lose the memories. We stand like that for a while, with Astrid crying and me rubbing her back and wondering at the sudden way I’ve become the one doing the comforting instead of the one being comforted and protected. “I’m not looking away anymore,” I say.
Astrid pulls back. Her eyes are watery and sad and she needs me. She doesn’t have to say it this time. I already know it. And I think I almost deserve it. To be needed.
“Look,” I say, when Astrid has calmed down enough. “We have to open the package. Maybe it can help. The last package we got helped me learn about Laurel. Maybe this one will do something.”
Astrid nods once and I open it.
Inside, layered in so much bubble wrap you’d think it was fine china, is a painting. Oil, like Marla used to do. Small. Imperfect.
It is a night sky. Navy and gray and a little bit black.
No moon.
But stars. So many stars. Dozens of orange-gold stars.
In a corner, there’s Mom’s signature, and something else. A few words that are too small for me to read. Astrid makes a hmm noise, like they mean something to her, and I’m about to ask, but she turns it over so fast I don’t have time, and once we see the back I forget all about the front.
On the back, a note from Mom.
If she’s already gone, go get her.
Dad won’t remember her if she’s in there.
Remind her what the world has.
The real world. The one we live in.
PS: If all else fails, it’s all inside you.
Forty-One
We try to call Mom, but some other patient at the rehab answers, and she doesn’t understand what we’re saying because it’s so noisy in their hallway.
“Gretchen! Gretchen! Our mom Gretchen!” we say over and over again.
“Napkin?” the lady on the other end says. She sounds sleepy and confused. “Kitchen?”
“Gretchen!” I yell.
The lady hangs up.
We call Eleanor and tell her to come home immediately.
“Don’t go,” a boy says in the background. “Let’s get back in the water!” I picture Eleanor shaking her wet head, little droplets flying off her hair. I try very hard not to picture her kissing him good-bye. I don’t love the idea of Eleanor kissing.
“You have an idea?” she says.
I launch into a description of the note and the painting Mom sent, but Eleanor stops me before I get very far.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Deep breaths, Silly. I’ll be there.”
“You always have to go,” her secret boyfriend pouts in the background, and I think I hate him, regardless of how much she likes him.
“My sisters need me!” she calls out to him, while hanging up on me. She’ll be here in, like, two seconds. She’s a fast runner.
We get more fabric from the sewing room.
I can’t stop myself from trying the sewing room closet.
After all Mom’s warnings, the door isn’t even locked.
Inside are photo albums and music boxes and dolls and little-kid paintings. The leftovers from Laurel’s childhood. The person she was, the fact that she existed, are all hidden in the closet. I want to know if it’s magic too, but I’m too scared to shut the door. I only want my closet.
“We’re saving our sister,” I say, as we look at the place where forgetting happens.
The three of us stand outside my closet, ready and shaking and stuck between hopeful and hopeless. We have fistfuls of construction-paper stars and glitter and yellow thumbtacks. We have as much black fabric as we could scrounge up. We cut up Mom’s black wool coat and my navy-blue fleece robe. We are ready.
Except.
I’m a little scared that I’ll somehow get stuck too. I guess it wouldn’t be a terrible place to live, in a starlit sky that goes as far as my imagination asks it to. But still. I’d miss breakfasts with Dad and the lake and Marla.
I would really, really miss Marla.
I can’t get stuck if I don’t want to get stuck. If I want to be out here, the closet can’t keep me. But Astrid and Eleanor look scared too.