This place is small. Very small. And you can leave here one day. You can become something else. Anything you want. And when you come back, this place won’t feel big anymore. It will appear the way it really is, which is very little and small. Almost nothing.
This gave me comfort, this thought of our home, our family, our mother being very small. So small that maybe the bad things I thought would happen would not happen after all.
*
I did not see my father’s car enter the driveway. It turned out that he had slept through the phone ringing. My father could sleep through an earthquake. They eventually sent a squad car to tell him his daughter was alive.
My father suffered, and I found his suffering unbearable to witness. I have had a lot of time to reflect on our story inside this house. And I’ve been through things that have shattered the prism through which I see our story, through which I now see everything, so very differently. He kept a nice house for us. It had four bedrooms so Witt could always be there when we were, even after he went to college. And it was close to town so we could come and go to meet our friends. Emma liked that because she had a lot of friends. For me, it was always a reminder that I did not.
Our father’s house after the divorce was bright with sunshine but dark with sadness. His sadness. He told us that ever since the divorce, he struggled to remind himself that happiness is a state of mind. The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. It’s pouring rain. The flowers will grow. I am going to die one day. I am alive on this day. He said that after the divorce and losing my girls, he could see that everything he had, everything he loved, everything that made his life feel like a life could disappear at any moment. He said we, his three children, felt like drops of water in his hands, moving toward the cracks between his fingers, where we could slip through and leave him, one at a time or all at once until his hands were empty and his life became an empty space, an empty heart, I think he said until his life was nothing more than air going in and out of his lungs. These were the things he would talk about at dinner, and it was dreadful.
Sometimes Witt would get mad at him, tell him he should find some friends to tell this stuff to, not us, because we were his children and not his friends. He would tell him to see a shrink, and that all his bad moods were not because of the divorce. Our father would say he didn’t need a shrink. Then Witt would say, Fine, then why don’t you just shake it off? But our father said he couldn’t shake off the problem of knowing that the more you have, the more you have to lose.
And then we were gone, proving him right.
A woman with short blond hair walked from her car toward the house until she was out of my view. After seventy-four seconds, I heard the door open and close in the foyer, then the sound of feet coming up the stairs.
I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep again. My mother slipped her arm out from under my neck and quietly crept from the bed to answer the knock at her door. She pulled a blanket up around my shoulders so gently, it made me shudder. This was what had plagued my father. In spite of everything she did that she shouldn’t have done, and everything she didn’t do that she should have, something that felt like love was in her and she would take it out at times like this and show it to us and make us hunger for more. All of us, each in our own way.
Emma would sometimes dress Barbie in an evening gown. Ken, still buck naked, would chase after her.
Please, Barbie, please … let me put my dick inside you. Please, I’ll do anything!
Her voice was derisive and full of anger. We were young, but we still understood why our father was driven mad by our mother’s indifference, and how his madness had taken over every part of his brain and his heart so there was nothing left for us.
One day Emma took Barbie and threw her against the wall. She said nothing. We both sat on the floor, silently, looking at the doll. She had landed on her back, her dress flowing around her, white teeth shining through smiling red lips. This memory was now before my eyes—so vivid, my heart was pounding in my ears. Emma was the one brave enough to throw a doll against a wall while I gasped and then covered my mouth. She was the one brave enough to bargain for our mother’s love, even though she risked losing it every time. She was the one brave enough to challenge our mother’s beauty by wearing red lipstick and short skirts. Every day of our lives here, Emma fought for what she wanted, for what we should have had, while I hid in the shadows she was willing to cast for me.
Emma shielded me from our mother’s storm, and whether she did it for my benefit or just because that was who she was and that was what she needed to do, it served the same purpose. She kept me safe.
Doubt filled me up top to bottom when I thought about those storms. Why had I come back here? I was free! I could have gone anywhere! Then I told myself why. For Emma. For Emma! And to make all the wrong things done to us right again. It was my turn now, to be the lightning rod. Still, conviction is not the same thing as strength, and I was terrified.
I heard some whispering at the door. My mother sighed with disapproval but ultimately relinquished her control over me. Three sets of feet walked across the carpet to the edge of the bed. My mother sat down beside me and stroked my hair.
“Cass? Cass—these people are from the FBI. They want to talk to you. Cass?”
I let my sister enter my mind. I let her push aside the vision of that indestructible doll, taunting us from the floor. I opened my eyes and sat up. The woman with the short blond hair was standing by the edge of the bed, and I knew this was the gatekeeper to finding my sister.
“Cassandra? My name is Dr. Abigail Winter. I’m a psychologist with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man with me is Special Agent Leo Strauss. We’re here to see how you are, and maybe just talk a little bit if you feel up to it.”
I nodded my head. The words were in my mouth—words that I had carefully crafted and rehearsed. But they were trampled by a stampede of emotions.
I started to sob. My mother pulled me close and rocked me back and forth.
On the other side of my mother was the woman with the short blond hair. Dr. Abigail Winter. Through my watery eyes and the breath that was heaving in and out of me, I could still see her clearly, and how she was looking at my mother.
I fixed my sight on her and her alone, over and in spite of my mother’s body that was enveloping me.
“Find Emma!” I said through my gasping and crying.
My mother let me go and pulled back far enough to see my face. “She said that before…” She was still looking at me as she spoke to them. “But she doesn’t say anything else. I think something’s wrong with her!”
Agent Strauss spoke then, his voice calm. “Cassandra … where is Emma? Where can we find her?”
The words I said were not the words I had rehearsed.
I was not being a very good artist to my story.
FOUR
Dr. Winter