You'd Be Home Now (9)

“No, not that I know for sure.” She blew a strand of hair from her cheek. “But I just want the best for all of us, Emory. Check off all the boxes.”

She’s hired a puffy-haired woman with a name tag that says sue s., care angel to come to our house and help me exercise my leg, but that lady just ends up watching television when I give up, flat on my back on the blue mat in the living room, tears streaming down the sides of my face, silently crying from the pain, but really crying from so many other things, too.

Sue S. makes nine dollars an hour; how much should she be expected to care about me, some rich girl who lives in a big Victorian on a hill in Mill Haven?

The thing about being invisible is, you’d think it would feel light and airy and easy, no pressure, but it doesn’t.

It’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever known.



* * *



—

After I dry off and get dressed and join her in the kitchen, my mother nudges a plate of eggs, strawberries, and toast across the kitchen island.

She slides a piece of paper after that. The List.

I skim it, noting the usual: feed Fuzzy, give Sue her check, make sure Goldie’s left food for Daddy for when he gets home, and then I see it.

“Mom,” I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t shake. “This one. I don’t…I don’t think I can do this one. You can take Joey shopping when you get back.”

My mother’s voice is smooth as silk. “Nonsense, Emory. You need school clothes, too. It will do you good to get out. Walk around the mall a bit. Look, I’ve listed his sizes and exactly what you should get. Use the Uber account to get there.”

    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.