The mall in the city. I don’t want to go there. See kids from school. Uncomfortable. Rumors. That’s what Tasha texted.
Kids who miss Candy MontClair.
“Mom,” I say again. “I’m not ready. I don’t…I might see kids from school.”
She gives me what Maddie and Joey and I call the Look: a thing where her face somehow morphs into something blank and impenetrable, as though she’s waiting for you to react so she can summon up the proper expression: disapproval, resignation, slow burn. It’s a warning and a challenge at the same time.
Through the kitchen window behind her, the sun is rising, orange and gold backgrounding my mother like a gleaming crown.
“Toughen up, my dear.” My mother smiles. “People have been talking about me my whole life. You’ll come out of this stronger than before. We all will.”
She slips her phone into her purse.
“I’m counting on you,” she says, checking her watch.
“I still don’t understand why we can’t all go get Joey together,” I say.
“I don’t want to overwhelm him. This is going to be difficult. He’ll need a little time to adjust. I’ll pick him up, we’ll have dinner, stay a night in the hotel, and fly back.”
I’m not sure what would be overwhelming about having your whole family there when you get out of rehab. Wouldn’t it just mean they loved you?
She rubs Fuzzy’s head and leaves through the door to the garage. In a few minutes, her car starts, the garage door rolls up and then down, and then she is gone.
I look at the plate of bright yellow eggs, glistening strawberries, buttered toast. I stand as still as possible, listening or feeling for any sign of hunger in my body.
There is none, so I scrape the food into the trash and limp back upstairs and put on a fresh swimsuit. The sun is fully up now, the neighborhood is quiet; I can get at least two more good hours of floating in before Sue arrives.
8
“BROTHER COMES HOME TOMORROW, then?” Sue says. She’s stretched out on the honey-colored leather sectional with her bare feet propped on my mother’s favorite accent pillow. A color called Bungalow Rose that’s a cross between Pepto-Bismol pink and the strawberries from my breakfast, now crushed and bleeding in the trash.
“Yes,” I pant from the mat, slowly bending my knee in infinitesimal degrees. Sometimes Sue helps, one warm hand on the front of my knee, the other under the back. Mostly, we seem to have silently agreed that she will watch television while I lie on the mat and halfheartedly do my exercises.
Sue might possibly be my only friend now, and she doesn’t even know it.
“Bet you’ll be sorry not to have this big old house to yourself anymore, huh? Noisy older brothers, am I right?” Sue clicks from Forensic Files to SpongeBob SquarePants. The unhappy face of Squidward fills the giant television hung above our fireplace.
My eyes drift to the ceiling as I lower my leg. Carefully.
There are lots of rooms in this house, but Joey asked for the attic space when he turned thirteen. The highest point. Slanted ceilings, a perfect triangle, his drawing table perched right under the window between the slopes. You can see everything in the valley that is Mill Haven from that window, even the Mill, which my family built all those years ago, and which ran this town for so long. It’s been closed for years, since long before even Maddie and me and Joey were born. It sits on the edge of Mill Haven at the far end of Wolf Creek, nestled at the base of the mountains, surrounded by barbed wire fencing and keep out signs. The small buildings the workers used to live in plunked like worn-out Monopoly houses on the land surrounding the mill.
Joey tacked his drawings everywhere. The edges fluttered when he cracked the window for a breeze. If I was walking Fuzzy and Joey was home, I could look up from Aster Avenue and see him there, head bent over his table, shoulders at his ears, drawing. Sometimes he would glance down, noticing me on the street.
Pot smoke drizzled from his mouth as he smiled at me, a finger to his lips.
Shhhh.
It was just pot. Lots of kids smoked pot. Even my dad said so once. “A little rebellion, a little experimentation. That’s a teenager. It’s to be expected.”
“Actually,” I say to Sue, “he was always pretty quiet.”
Except when he wasn’t.
Only all that’s done now. Things will be different, right? That’s the plan. Like the Blue Spruce handbook says, Family should be prepared to provide a stable, consistent environment.
But Sue isn’t paying attention. She’s watching SpongeBob argue with Squidward. “I wish I lived in a pineapple under the sea, I tell you what,” she chuckles. “Be better under the water. Like you and that pool.”
* * *
—
Before Sue leaves, I give her twenty dollars to go up the attic stairs for me and bring down Joey’s clothes and art supplies. Maddie took care of cleaning it up when she was here, but she didn’t bring down everything. I’m hoping when he sees his pencils and sketchbooks that maybe, just maybe, he’ll want to draw again. That it might help him.
Sue shrugs. “You really need to see Cooper about that leg. I don’t think your progress is progressing if you can’t even make some stairs, yeah?”
“I’m tired.”
She goes up twice and comes back down with milk crates full of his stuff. She plunks the crates on the bed in Maddie’s room, which will now be Joey’s room.
“That’s a real nice space up there. Lot of light,” she says.
I could probably have gone up the stairs myself, slowly, maybe, since I can now make it up to the second floor and sleep in my own room, but the truth is, I didn’t want to. The attic room was Joey’s disappearing place and I don’t want to go up there.
Sue pauses by Maddie’s desk, looking at the pile of Joey’s drawings Maddie brought down from the attic. “Nice stuff. I was always happy drawing, when I was a kid.” She looks through the papers, touches the edge of one of Joey’s dragon illustrations. “That kinda got lost in life, you know?” She seems like she might say something more, but she shakes her head. “You got my check? I have another appointment over on Jefferson.”
I hand her the check. Listen to her thump down the stairs and out the front door, past Goldie puttering around in the den.
I’m transferring Maddie’s clothes from her dresser drawers to a giant plastic tub when she texts.
You okay?
Sure, I type back.
I sit down on the bed, relieved to be off my knee. It’s hard to imagine Joey in this room, sleeping in this explosion of weirdness that was Maddie before she left for Brown last year: tie-dyed bedspread. Batik-covered pillows. A hanging hammock chair in the corner. My mother hates Maddie’s room. She prefers solid colors and things that match.
If only we could match what my mother wants.
I don’t believe you, Maddie writes.
I didn’t think you would
Mom texted me. She’s on her way to Blue Spruce now.
She left a list of stuff for me to do.
Her lists! Well, you don’t have to do everything in one day, ok?
Yeah
Does anything involve leaving the house?
Yeah. School clothes. The mall.
It’ll be good for you to get out.