The Mystery of Hollow Places(50)

I bury myself under the blankets again. Let Lindy take everything away. Who’s left to talk to? Where is there left to go? Why even bother getting out of bed? All those times I left Dad’s room, defeated, having failed to unearth him from his sheets—maybe he was onto something.

Then I sit up as I remember the last decision I made before falling asleep: to have faith in the one thing that matters. The one thing I know.

My dad is still out there, and he needs me to do my job. To take care of him.

After that, I move slowly. First I roll out of the sheets and boil myself pink under a too-hot shower. Then I take the time to dry my hair with a clunky hand-me-down blow dryer from Lindy, so it won’t freeze around me in the cold. I even dig out my makeup bag. Usually I skim from the top layer of cake-flavored ChapStick and, if I’m feeling ambitious, my un-daring and inexpertly applied brown eyeliner. This time I dig deeper for the works, a disk of blush, and even a tube of red lipstick, a castoff from Jessa I’ve always chickened out of using. Now I trace my mouth like I’m coloring with a crayon, slowly, then smack my lips the way Jessa’s fabulous aunt Annette taught us and lean in toward the mirror.

I try to feel the way I felt in the Prices’ bathroom, preparing to track down Lillian Eugene: unstoppable, armored, badass. But in the toothpaste-spackled mirror I’m puffy-eyed and still pale, with red wax lips. Quickly I scrub my failed attempt off with a tissue.

To stand in front of the bathroom sink and stare at myself is to stop moving, so I give up and get dressed in my warmest sweater and a decent pair of jeans. I pull on my woolen socks and a fuzzy winter hat Jessa bought me two birthdays ago, the one that looks like a strawberry with a green pom-pom for the stem. Just before stuffing myself into my puffy coat, gloves, and winter boots, I do a preflight check on the contents of my bag:

Dad’s hardcover copy of A Time to Chill.

The stack of photos and the MFA brochure from Lil.

Todd Malachai’s phone number and address—56 Pines Road, Windham, Connecticut—copied over from the smudged numbers still glittering on my palm.

The leftover cash from Lindy’s envelope: $92.03, after a tank of gas and the useless prom dress, which I’m now viciously regretting.

When everything seems in order, I zip my jacket up to the collar, turn the latch on the front door, and lock myself out, into a bright winter day. There’s a loose screen I can jiggle off the track to break in through the unlatched window in the back of the house if I get home before Lindy. (And if I don’t, I’ll probably lose the privilege to close the bathroom door while I take a crap.)

Then I start walking.

It takes me forty minutes to make it the two miles to the train and bus station on East Main. The whole way my boots slip over black ice on the sidewalks, and the wind frosts my jeans to my legs so that by the time I tramp snow onto the green marble tiles of Sugarbrook station, the denim has scraped my frozen skin raw. I pull off my gloves and fumble open the zipper of my coat with clawed hands.

For another thirty-eight dollars, I buy a round-trip ticket with a last stop at a Cumberland Farms/Peter Pan bus stop in Willimantic, which the guy who rings me up assures me is a (not-so-nice) part of Windham. The bus doesn’t leave until noon and won’t get me to Willimantic until three thirty, so I plop down on a bench behind the elevated wooden platform where they put up holiday displays—a miniature cobwebbed graveyard for Halloween, a piano-size cornucopia overflowing with papier-maché gourds and grapes and turkeys for Thanksgiving. Around Christmastime, Dad used to take me to the station every year to see the decorations. They put up a model of Sugarbrook with a toy railroad around it. Not as big as they do in Boston, but super detailed. There’s a set of palm-size, whitewashed buildings on the east and west sides of town representing Sugarbrook High and J. Jefferson Agricultural. There’s the ring of brick businesses and the Patty Linden Memorial Park, as big as a chessboard, studded with plastic paper birches, with a miniature stone fountain that really trickles water. There’s Christy Pond, an oval of rippled green glass with toy paddleboats moored at the dock. Pylons like matchsticks poke up where the old pier rotted away before I was born. A pretty accurate web of suburban homes spins out from the town center; there’s even a street Dad and I decided was Cedar Lane. On one end are the delicate little mansions and on the other, wee cookie-cutter houses. Though the town isn’t copied inch by inch, there’s a middle-size home in the middle of the street we declared to be our own. Pale blue instead of pale green, but with a tiny picket fence like ours. Each year, we would lean over the rope around the platform and stare into the miniature electric-lit window, watching for miniature us living out our miniature lives.

For Lindy’s First Christmas with Us (Dad referred to it in Capital Letters) he tried to get us all down to the station to see it. Except my brand-new stepmother had to work, and then we went on a painful holiday visit to magnificent Pahaquarry, New Jersey, to meet my new stepfamily. By the time we got around to Sugarbrook station it was January, and they were tearing down the town. Trees uprooted all over, polka-dotting the Astroturf with empty sockets. Blue and green wires tangling out of the dry park fountain. Paddleboats overturned on the dusty glass pond. And the houses—most were gone by then, whirled away to Oz (or the Sugarbrook station basement). I didn’t even bother peeking at mini Cedar Street.

The next year Dad got Lindy to the station on time, but I stayed out of it. This year and last, we missed it completely. By now the display is long gone. I guess they’ve just taken down their Valentine’s Day setup, because the pink glitter still speckles the platform planks.