S
he sneaked down the stairs one night. To the place they went when the mother wasn’t home. Perhaps he and Susan whispered stories down there, or played games like Hungry Hippos or chess that six-year-olds are not allowed to play. Maybe they sanded the bookcase that her father was trying to build, or they mopped the floors as a surprise for Mom. It was a secret they shared though no one had ever told her so. It was the thing that made the air thick; made the house—its shutters and roof and swinging screen door—like an angry face. The thing she asked at night: Why not me? Does he love her more?
He didn’t seem to like her more. She was weird. She knew things before you said them. She knew when Dad was in one of his moods and wanted to sit by himself in the big chair, and she knew when the lady at Olsen’s Diner was going to try to pinch their cheeks, and she even knew that Liz had hidden her Skipper Barbie in the trunk of the Caprice Classic for safekeeping and then forgotten about it. Mom said Susan knew things because God had made her extra smart, but Liz thought it was because she was an alien, like from Canada.
It wasn’t fair that they stayed up late after sending her to bed! It wasn’t fair that they did fun things, secret things, while she had to lie in the dark and wait for sleep to come. What if she wasn’t sleepy? But grown-ups could be scary, too. Maybe they did bad things. Maybe they were all aliens, casting spells on the human member of the family. She’d go down to the steps and find dead bodies, and they’d be drinking blood from skulls. It was possible.
Liz sneaked down the stairs and watched at the foot of the basement steps. A lit bulb in the ceiling made everything too bright. Near the half-built bookcase something moved. Her father’s back was to her. He made sounds like an animal. She’d watched people make babies on
Melrose Place,
only they did it in a bed with sheets over their bodies. Her father’s pants were around his knees and she saw his pale bottom. At another time, she might have giggled: Daddy’s bottom!
Behind him, she could see Susan. Her eyes were wide open. She didn’t say
Hello,
or
Go away,
or
You’re in trouble: Dad said you had to go to sleep.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t see Liz, though she looked right at her.
Liz thought maybe she was dreaming, only it was too scary to be a dream. A grown-up thing. Maybe her real family was dead.
Susan blinked and a tear rolled down her cheek.
Oh, stop. Please stop. She doesn’t like it,
Liz wanted to say. But what if she did like it? What if this was what grown-ups did after they turned eleven years old? “Stop,” Liz whispered, but her father didn’t hear. There was dirty black water in the basement, and it churned in rhythm with her father’s thrusts.
She thought maybe she was far away, and another girl stood in her place. A quiet girl made of tougher stuff than she. “Stop,” Liz said again, only louder. “You’re not allowed to do that.” Still, her father did not hear.
Through her tears, Susan saw Liz and smiled. It was a bad smile, a dead smile. Her sister was dead inside. Yes, she understood now; that’s why her sister knew so many things. That’s why she seemed like an alien. That’s why their parents were frightened of her. She was dead inside.
Liz ran back up the stairs and climbed into her bed. She tucked the blankets in close and closed her eyes. She counted slowly. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi…One hundred Mississippi. She chewed on her nails and bit her cuticles until they bled. In this house bad things happened. In this house no one was allowed to yell. In her mind she screamed.
T
he girls were looking out their bedroom window. Liz was crying. She didn’t remember why she was crying. She thought it might be about a dream she’d had the night before. Or maybe it was about something that happened. Something bad she saw in a basement. The rain had ended a week before, but the weather outside was still icy. She imagined opening the window and flying away.
Susan took her hand and squeezed it. Liz didn’t say anything, or even look, because she didn’t want Susan to stop.
Outside, a white Buick pulled up to their house and they both smiled. Georgia O’Brian got out of the car. “Pillows,” Liz sniffled, and Susan answered, “Poker.”
Georgia was the best babysitter in the world. When she came to the house, they could do whatever they wanted. They could slide down the stairs on their blankets, and they could skitter across the kitchen floor in socks. They could Rollerblade in the basement, and they could pile all the pillows in the house into one room, and make an impenetrable fort.
“Race you!” Susan said. She let go of Liz’s hand and sprinted out of the room. Liz followed, but her shorter legs and rounder belly didn’t make for much of a contest. They got to the back door just as Georgia came through it. “So big,” Georgia explained. “You girls grow another inch every time I see you!” She lifted first Susan, and then Liz, and swung them each in a circle. Georgia was gi-normous. So big that when she walked, the floors rumbled. Bigger than most grown-ups. “What are we doing tonight?” she asked.
Susan grinned. Georgia was one of the few people that Susan ever let touch her. She hated most people, and when she saw them she covered her ears even if they weren’t talking. She’d been tested for autism or autopsy—Liz forgot which—but the doctors said Susan wasn’t retarded or mental. Just really weird. “Poker,” Susan said. “In a fort for princesses,” Liz added.
Georgia’s expression grew somber. “Do you have any money?”
Liz shook her head and Susan giggled.
“No money at all?”
Liz dug into her pocket and produced a stick of Big Red gum. Georgia smirked. “Gum? Do I look like I was born yesterday? Gum doesn’t count as money. Only peanuts!”
They found the peanuts and played four hands of seven-card stud before Mom and Dad came down the stairs dressed all nice in black shoes and starched collars. They waved good-bye, and Liz wanted to get up and hug them, but she knew Susan wouldn’t like it, so she didn’t. They weren’t very nice to Susan, and Susan wasn’t very nice to them, which Liz guessed was all part of being twelve years old.
As soon as Mom and Dad were gone, the three of them charged into the television room to watch
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
When the show was over, Georgia told them to change into their pajamas. She said they could stay up as late as they wanted, but as soon as their parents came home they had to run to their room and pretend to be sleeping. This was one of the many reasons that Georgia was perfect.
In the bedroom they shared, Liz and Susan took off their shirts. Liz saw Susan’s stomach. It was a sunset, dappled red and orange and black and blue. Liz had seen this before, for months she’d seen bruises like this before, but tonight, Georgia was babysitting. Tonight, she remembered the animal sounds her father had made. Can grown-ups do anything they want? They turn on you at any time even if they pretend to love you? She saw the sunset and she screamed.
She screamed loud and long, until the floors grumbled, and the house raged, and Georgia stood in the doorway. “Look,” Liz said, “look what he did to her!”
Susan cowered in a corner. Georgia pulled her arms away from her stomach and looked at the sunset. “Help us,” Liz told her. “You help us.”
Liz thought Georgia would wave a magic wand and make the sunset go away. She thought Georgia would shout so loud the walls would crumble. Georgia was big, after all, so big she could blow the house down with just one breath. “Oh, shit,” Georgia said.
“I fell,” Susan said.
Georgia took them both into the bathroom and wiped down Susan’s stomach with a towel. Bits of dried blood got wetted, and smeared, and then disappeared. Liz hoped maybe it would all go away.
“A boy in school,” Susan said. “He doesn’t like me. He hits me at recess.”
Georgia sat down on the toilet seat and started to cry. Just a kid, Liz thought, a little kid. They were all little kids. Georgia took them both on her lap and held them.
T
he next day Officer Willow came to the door with a man in a wrinkled brown suit and he smelled like coffee. The man asked questions. He talked to them all together, and then alone. No, they all said. No. No. No.
He poked Susan’s stomach, searching for broken ribs, but there weren’t any. He didn’t like the look in her eye, so he didn’t talk to her for long. “I fell,” she said. “I was playing on the front stoop and I fell.”
When the man and Mr. Willow left, Mary called Georgia O’Brian to yell at her, but instead Rose O’Brian answered the phone. “I don’t want Georgia babysitting for you anymore. I don’t like your kind,” Rose said, and her voice carried over the phone so that Liz and Susan could hear it ten feet away.
After that day Mary switched her schedule so that she didn’t work nights or weekends. Susan moved down to the basement because she said she didn’t want to share a room with a nosy little kid. The house continued to creak, only its groans were more insistent. At night Ted Marley stayed late at the bar or worked on his garden, and only after the girls were fast asleep did he come home.
S
usan spent the next six years in the basement, amid the kicking boiler that sounded like the beat of a heart, and the wet rain that leaked through the gutter windows. When she thought she was alone she moved her lips, as if having conversations with people not there (“Creative! Special! Imaginative!” Mary told anyone who asked). Her voice deepened into a throaty alto, but she did not grow any taller than five feet. From a distance she looked like a child, and up close like something bound too tightly to grow.
Mary stayed up late at night during those six years. She sat in the kitchen with her ears pricked while her husband slept soundly, convinced that if she was not vigilant, an intruder would break into one of the rooms where her children slept. For this reason she locked all the doors and windows. For this reason she installed a deadbolt on the basement door, so that Susan could lock it from the inside. For this reason she had nightmares of men with strange faces peering into her daughters’ bedrooms while she sat tied to a chair, her mouth full of sand.
She wasn’t sure what had happened to her Little Miss Muffett. She’d always been different. Something to do with the girl’s eyes that saw too much, and her skin that was too thin, and this town that was so dark. By the time she was ten, if Mary hugged Susan, she scowled. If she left her alone, Susan’s eyes accused her of neglect. Other times Mary would sneak up on her daughter in a quiet moment, and for a short instant see another girl. A smiling girl. A beautiful girl. Most importantly, a kind girl.
Toward the end of Susan’s stay at the Marley house, Mary began to have nightmares about terrible things. Monsters in closets, pricked fingers that never stopped bleeding, daughters sitting alone in small white rooms, their lips too red. From the way Ted tossed in his sleep, she knew he had them, too. He got thinner and thinner, and slept less and less. His diet became coffee and beer, and high blood pressure had made his artery walls paper thin. But even with sleeping pills, he didn’t get any better. When Mary looked into Susan’s eyes, she thought she saw the family nightmares hiding there. Living there.
For all these reasons, it was not easy to look at the girl. And so, after a while, she stopped looking. None of them looked, except for Liz, late at night, whom she could hear knocking on her sister’s locked door.
A little before her eighteenth birthday, Susan left. She did not finish school. She did not pack a single bag. She did not leave a note. She did not say good-bye. She simply left. Her teacher found her a place to live as well as a job at the local pharmacy. Mary found this out, not from a phone call or a friend in town (she didn’t have any) but from a knock on the door one March evening.
When Paul Martin entered her house he did not take off his hat or shake her hand. “I’m her teacher,” he said, as if this explained everything. His coat, a fancy tweed number with a green cashmere scarf, had made her self-conscious.
She knew he was waiting for some explanation. As Mary looked at this handsome, well-dressed man so different from her own silent, angry husband (Why had she married him? Had she hated her own father so much?), she was tempted to tell him. Tempted to explain the parts that could be explained. But the moment passed. “She needs some things,” he said.
Mary pointed at the basement stairs. “Her room’s down there.”
He came back with a bag full of clothes. He left, and she did not show him the door.
When Ted came home, she announced that Susan had left, but that she planned on retrieving her that very night. She would bring the girl home. She would sit her down. She would ask her what was wrong. She would ask her what could be done. “No,” Ted had said.
“She’s our daughter.”
“I know that. I know she’s our daughter. But there’s a sickness inside her.” He had looked very sad then, lost. Such a strange man. Silent, withdrawn. A solid man in so many ways. She’d never feared he would stay out all night carousing. In his own way (painting the house, gardening, sanding the floors), he adored her. In retrospect she would wonder if she had waited for Ted to come home because she’d wanted him to stop her.
She did not retrieve Susan. She did not call or visit her, though every week she intended to. She did not bring her the chocolate cakes she baked (every year announcing her birthday: Eighteen! Nineteen! Twenty! Twenty-one! Twenty-two! Twenty-three!). Even after Ted died, she did not deliver the groceries, or wool sweaters and pretty barrettes she bought. (These later went to Liz. Every time she saw her younger daughter wearing them she would think of the other daughter she had betrayed.) As time wore on, if she saw Susan in town, she crossed the street or ducked inside a store so that she would not have to see her face, and the accusation she was sure that it bore.