* * *
—
I step off the elevator, waving good night to Pepe, our elevator man. A few flights up, someone else is ringing for him. Pepe slides the heavy brass gate closed. The outer elevator door shuts behind me. I stand in the foyer, feeling around in my book bag for my house key. Even from here, outside on the landing, I can hear Conrad and Leo fighting again. It’s so loud, everyone in our building must hear them. Conrad is screeching that his father understands nothing—he was just “holding” for some kid at school. It wasn’t his pot.
I slide down to the worn black-and-white mosaic-tiled floor of the foyer and lean my back against the front door. There is no way I’m going in.
“You’re grounded for a month,” Leo is yelling.
“You can’t do that! I have tickets to WWF at the Garden. It’s André the Giant,” Conrad screams. “I’m taking Leslie.”
“Give them to Elle.”
“I bought them with my own Christmas money from Mom.” Conrad is sobbing now. “You’re such a dick. I hate you.”
I’m at my desk doing my algebra homework when Conrad appears at the door. “Here, bitch,” he says, and throws his tickets at me.
“What did I do?” I say. “I hate sports.”
March
The sound of paper wakes me. An orange-and-white paperback book cover is sticking through the crack of my closed door, which now has a hook-and-eye lock. I watch in dread as Of Mice and Men slides slowly upward. It catches under the metal latch, lifts it up and out. The book cover disappears. My door handle turns.
“Mum?” I call out before he has time to open the door. “Is that you?”
I listen for the creep of his footsteps receding down the hallway before relocking the door.
April
The doleful drizzle hasn’t let up since we arrived at our grandparents’ house in Connecticut. My grandmother insists April showers bring May flowers, but this feels more like a heavy heart than the twiggy greenness of spring. Anna and I are spending two weeks with Granny and Granddaddy. Granny Myrtle has been having fibrillations and she’s feeling a bit wobbly. She could use some extra hands around the house. Anna is on spring break and wants to spend most of her time with them.
“Who knows if I’ll ever come back from California. And by then they might both be dead,” she says when she calls me from school to tell me the plan.
“Lovely. We’ll all miss you so much.”
“You know you will,” Anna says.
“I know. I already do.”
* * *
—
Now Anna and I lie on our old twin beds, where we have spent most of the past three days reading the books Granny Myrtle took out of the library for us. “These should keep you occupied until the nasty weather lets up,” she said, handing each of us a thick book. War and Peace for Anna, Wuthering Heights for me.
I hold my book up to my face, sniff the pages. I love the way library books smell: more important than regular books, a grand olden-days smell, like the steps of a marble palace, or a senator.
Anna yawns, stretches. “This book is too long. And too Russian. All that male, thrusty prose. I’ll never finish it. I’m going to go find something else on the bookshelves.”
Alone in our room, I watch raindrops slide down the window. Stare out into the brume. The crabapple tree has become a specter in the mist, its black-wet branches tapping at the pane. I don’t care if it rains for a month. I’m just happy to be here where I’m safe, where I can spend time with my funny, brusque, sardonic sister; where I can fall asleep without dread, where I know that my grandmother, no matter how frail, will love me fiercely, make fresh waffles, insist on washing my hair in the kitchen sink with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, as she has done since I was little, rinsing out its sweet-kerosene smell under the warm tap, my head leaning back at an unnatural angle, neck pressed against the sink’s cold porcelain edge. And yet even here, I’m prodded awake all night by my unconscious vigilance. I lie in the darkness comforted by Anna’s snores, before at last falling back into a restless sleep.
“You look like shit,” Anna said when she got back from California.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I said.
“I thought someone had punched you in both eyes.”
When Conrad first started coming into my room at night, I wanted to call Anna and tell her. But I knew Anna would tell Mum, even if I made her promise not to. Anna’s not like me. She thrives on confrontation. She doesn’t give a shit what other people think. She doesn’t need to be liked. Anna is a warrior. She would never, ever have allowed Conrad to get away with it. Nor would she have understood why I had allowed it to go on—that the only way I could protect myself from the shame and humiliation I felt was by denying any knowledge of it. But if I told Anna, she would attack him, tear everything open, expose me to him in a different way. Conrad would know I had known his dirty secret all along. And then it stopped, and I thought: Nothing terrible really happened. He touched himself, but he never touched me. No one ever needs to know. But recently, his visits have started again, and I wish I had told her when I could.