In the morning, Valerie was gone.
The makeup was missing from her vanity. Half of the hangers in her closet were empty.
“Where’s your sister?” Madge asked at eleven. She had just come in from the garden. Her hands were covered in dirt and she was trying to wipe an itch off her nose with her arm.
“Dunno,” said Collette. She went into the bathroom, and locked the door. She brushed her teeth and then her tongue, gagged. She washed her face with Valerie’s soap, scrubbing the stiff cloth against her cheeks until they burned red. The bathwater was scalding. She soaked all afternoon.
Glow Baby
The lion tucked me in each night. One night I couldn’t look at the lion, so I looked at Mom, who bared her teeth as she spoke in his low growl. I told her I was scared to sleep with him.
“Why are you telling her?” the lion said, taking my earlobe in his mouth. I could feel the warmth of her arm through the fur of his body, and her fingers inside him, gently pinching my ear. “My girl. You’re lucky I love you, or else I’d eat you.”
“I don’t want to play anymore,” I said, and started to cry. The lion fell into her lap. She pulled her hand free and untangled a knot in his mane.
“What do you want me to do, Scoob?” she said. I asked her to hide him, but to tell me where he was hiding. When I closed my eyes her hand tunneled under my mattress. “OK,” she said. “You can open.”
All night I lay awake imagining the lion’s body between the mattress and the box spring, crushed by my weight. I got out of bed and tried to lift the corner of the mattress but it was too heavy and too dark to see him. When I reached in I found crumbs and the outlines of springs, and a small, thin shape that turned out to be a pencil stub. I put the pencil stub under my pillow. The sky turned pink. Mom came running in, naked. She braced herself in the doorway, her eyes barely open.
“What’s happening?” she said, and I said nothing was happening.
“I thought I heard screaming.” I hadn’t been screaming, and was mad at her for running in naked and making a big deal. She sat down beside me on the bed and held my hand. Her blonde braid was matted and her hand shook. I told her if she was cold she could get under my covers, even though dark hair covered her legs. I was afraid of her legs touching mine.
“Did you have a nightmare?” she said.
“All I was doing was being awake.”
I told her I couldn’t find Lion under the bed. He must be hiding from me, she said, in the farthest corner. Because he was more afraid of me than I was of him.
“Please,” I said. “Find him.”
“Only if you really want him.”
I closed my eyes and hugged him. I pretended to myself that I still loved him, because if I didn’t he might get back at me.
“Don’t leave,” I said.
“I’m right here.” But her voice was already across the room.
The diaper was three years old, and it was too small. The plastic stretched to fit my hips. When I worked my finger between the diaper and my thigh there was a red groove already in my skin. I ripped the leg holes wider. I thought I might pee the bed, even though I hadn’t peed the bed in years.
I climbed on the stove for the cookies hidden from me in the upper cabinet and ate one whole sleeve with six cookies, and then I wasn’t hungry but I ate six more and put six in my bathrobe pocket. I turned the heat all the way up and sat by the vent until my fingers tingled. Dad’s banjo was propped against the couch from when he sang to us about catching catfish, and rain. “Hi,” I said, into the banjo’s strings. “Good morning.” When Mom fought with Dad the banjo rang from her shouting, and afterward it became a joke between them. I shouted, “Hi,” but the banjo didn’t make any noise.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Mom stomped down the stairs, trailing a blanket. “We’re roasting. Isn’t it funny, I’m afraid in my own house that your dad is going to come home and catch us with the heat on.” I climbed into her lap. “I’m always feeling like he’s going to catch me,” she said.
* * *
“Can’t you have another baby?”
I held a clump of her hair in my mouth, waiting to braid it. She didn’t say anything.
“I just want a sister,” I said. “I’m lonely.”
“Scoob, cut me a break.”
“I want a family.”
“Be gentle,” she said.
I concentrated on the braid. Her hair was as long as her spine, which I could see through her T-shirt, and the braid would cover it up.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“Your hair smells,” I said.
I wanted to take it back. Her hair was soft and blonde, full of static when I brushed it. Instead I said “Why are you so ugly?”
I drew a picture of her in my notebook with hair down to the ground that curled at the ends and started growing upward. Her bedroom door was locked. I lay down and slid the picture under the door. She didn’t pick the picture up but must have seen it, because I heard her start to cry. I put my fingers under the door and held them there.
She touched my fingers with her toes.
“Come down,” I said, and a sliver of blue bathrobe appeared, and then there was the light of her eye, blinking back at me.
“Can’t you just let me alone for a while?” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t feel good.”
“Do you want ginger ale?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
When I got back I knocked and knocked on her door until finally she opened it.
She wore Dad’s orange hunting hat. “Oh God, don’t look at me,” she said, flopping down on the bed, laughing, wiping at her eyes. She covered her face with her hands. “I’m in trouble now.” I lay alongside her and snatched the hat from her head.
“Please,” she said, smacking my hand but it was too late. Her hair was gone.
Her head looked tiny without it, her ears too big. There were patches on her head where scalp showed through. I buried my face in her neck, hiding from her.
“We’re OK,” she said, rubbing my back. “It’s just hair. I am not my hair.” I was crying. I hated her. I bit her.
“Ow, you little asshole.” She yanked up her sleeve to show me the tooth marks.
I ran away, kicking the ginger ale. I peed into the diaper. I rubbed my bedroom carpet until my palms were black. The carpet hid strands of my loose hair, and Mom’s, and I collected it, hiding with the tuft of hair under my bed. One of Mom’s dangly earrings was stuck between the floorboards, and I tucked it, along with a wooden giraffe, into the center of the hair, as though it was their nest.
* * *
“Scoob?” said Mom. “It’s time to come out.” Her fingertips grazed my sleeve.
“That’s not my name,” I said. “Don’t call me that.”
“What should I call you?”
“Mildred.”
“Milly, trust me,” she said. “That’s an old lady name.”
“Then why’d you name me it?”
“To burden you,” she said. “Come here.”
I scooched closer and touched the thin, scabbed line of blood behind her ear. “Look,” I said.
“But it’s my own head.” She rolled her eyes around and twisted her neck like she was trying to look.
Her hair was curled inside her bathroom sink. I gathered it in my arms. I expected it to be pale yellow, but now it looked duller and darker. It was warm.