After the local news, Ronnie rose and turned on the tall lamp in the corner. It was like someone folding shut a large book, the pages closing heavy and certain—and upstairs a door creaked open—because with the lamp on I realized what was bothering me: all the shades were up. The night had fully darkened and the lights were burning in the house so that we could not see the world outside, but it could see us. Ronnie squinted at her reflection in the window. She was tall and slender, already moving past the white-blonde hair Mary and I still wore, the soft flesh of our adolescence. Because of Ronnie’s height and graceful posture, people often thought her older than ten. She occupied that maturity most naturally in our mother’s absence, giving Mary her baths and telling us—as with a guiding hand on the smalls of our backs—when to brush our teeth, when she thought we hadn’t eaten enough. I often felt myself waiting for her to tell me what to do.
Putting a hand on her hip, she looked into the living room, where Dad’s head had fallen back, his eyes closed and feet up. At the table Mary yawned and scratched the side of her neck.
Ronnie said, Come on, Mary. Let’s go to bed. I’ll read you your book.
The two of them trudged slowly upstairs, Ronnie’s hand on her shoulder. I went into the living room, dark save for the light of the television. Dad’s face was small, his cheeks and chin bony, scattered with blond, wiry hair. When I think of him now, I see him as I did that evening, his face still, yet seeming to move away from me, as though at the end of a long hallway.
I put my hands on his arm.
Dad. I pushed gently. Dad, wake up.
He sighed, opened his eyes to dull slits, and said my name: Frannie. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. I climbed over the side and wedged myself between him and the recliner’s arm.
Hey, there, he said, shifting, putting me in an awkward embrace, my arms pinned to my sides, my head hard against his bony shoulder. If he hugged me, it was like this—uncomfortable and stiff—like he didn’t know quite how to do it, as though I were a pillow he held on to for some absentminded comfort. His breathing grew sleep-heavy, his arms loosening, and my body began to slide into a crease in the chair, its fake leather cool and slippery. I felt a sharp fear that I was falling into an irretrievable space, that I would fall and fall and forever be away from Mom and Dad and Ronnie and Mary. I imagined a blackness so complete that it erased even their memory of me. They would not notice my absence, I decided. They would not even look. Then Dad cleared his throat and said, Go to bed, Frannie. He turned away, curling deeper into sleep, and I unwedged myself from the chair and went up to my dark bedroom.
HE LEFT THE FOLLOWING WEEK with little fanfare. I don’t remember boxes being filled or boxes carried from the house or the image of his car loaded with boxes. I remember only weeks later, my mother talking on the phone to some unknown listener, her whisper crisp with intent: He had his problems, she said. It was my choice, but truth be told, he couldn’t wait to leave. He was just itching to get gone. A man unto himself, as they say. It sounded like she’d listened to the country station for too long and had internalized its string of sassy, heartbroken-woman clich és.
She started working Saturdays at the dentist’s office in town. Buying school supplies and new clothes hadn’t been easy before, but now, even with child support, I felt the weight of her steady denials at the grocery store, the pharmacy. No . No , she would say quietly and look away, pushing the cart out ahead of her. Saturday mornings she would drive us out to the edge of our small farming town where my great-grandmother lived in a white clapboard house at the intersection of two gravel roads. One road ran out into corn and dust and hot light, and the other snaked between a shadowy forest and muddy creak, the latter aptly named Widows Road. My great-grandfather died in that house before Ronnie was born, a heart attack felling him as he was returning from work. The steel-gray mailbox at the front of the property bore his name, BULLOCK, the block letters scrawled angry and childlike.
Through the house’s front door were the living room, a dark hallway and pantry, kitchen, and then back door, which opened out onto a treeless swath of sun-bleached grass. We had been told that it was bad luck for the doors of a house to line up in this way, for someone to be able to stand in the threshold of one and see clear through to the other. Something about good spirits too easily entering and then exiting the house. But there was no changing it. Even after a man from down the road snuck in the back one afternoon and went through Grandma’s fridge, she kept both doors open for the breeze.
In the afternoons when she watched her soaps in the living room—the volume turned to its highest setting—my sisters and I would creep up to the second floor, the steep wooden stairs hidden behind a crystal-knobbed door off the kitchen. A closed door at the top of the stairs, and on the other side, a series of rooms, a separate apartment that, by then, Grandma rarely entered. When I think of those rooms, I am alone in them. Just as in dreams, I am the sole protagonist. It is Me and the Rooms. Me and Them. I see the low ceiling and the living room’s long mauve couch without anyone sitting there. But I know I am wrong. I was too scared of the space to have ever ventured up without Mary or Ronnie, the three of us on hands and knees, crawling, searching. Still, in my memory, when I see a dead cockroach behind the flower stand—crisp, flipped onto its back, legs curled—I am the only one who sees it, it is always my small fingers picking it up.
The whole place was furnished—the couch, a Formica table in the kitchen, a small black television on a short stand—but it was otherwise blank. Mom had told us that the space was once rented out to itinerants. Drifters , she said, men looking for work on the surrounding farms or passing from one side of the country to the other. But after my great-grandpa died, Great-Grandma decided she didn’t want people coming and going, and she closed it up.
We would bring our books or poke around to see what we could find: a stack of yellowed Farmer’s Almanacs and LOOK magazines next to the couch, empty mousetraps inside the kitchen cabinets. Other times we’d sit at the kitchen table and play house. Ronnie was the father and I was the mother and Mary was the child. Ronnie would boss me and Mary would pretend to cry or get worked up and cry for real and I would say, Shush shush shush, little child. And Ronnie would say things like, Baby, you’d better hush, or, Wife, it’s time for you to make me supper. Because I’m the man of the house, that’s why, despite never hearing anything like it from our parents’ mouths. Ronnie would pretend to read the paper and I would pretend to wash the dishes and Mary would draw the three of us standing before a blank landscape, a single, uncurving line, and when we heard the theme music change on Grandma’s TV, we would snake back downstairs with our tracing paper and crayons and books, and refill the spaces on the living room floor or couch where our bodies had once been, as though we’d never left.
IT WAS A HOT SATURDAY. Ronnie and me on the living room floor, pushing around a set of cars Great-Grandma had saved from old Cracker Jack boxes. Mary asleep on the couch with her head in Great-Grandma’s lap. She was too old for regular naps, but Grandma still laid her down after lunch and stroked her hair until she fell asleep. Mary’s thumb was in her mouth—a habit no one was trying very hard to break in her—and her white-blonde bangs had fallen over her eyes. I wanted to reach out and smooth the hair away from her face, but before I could, the roaring theme music of Days of Our Lives opened its mouth and swallowed the living room: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives … Mary woke, shifted, and whined. She may have gone back to sleep. She may have joined us on the floor, running parallel lines with our car wheels through the thick green carpeting. She may have followed us when Ronnie and I rolled down the hallway, opened the door to the stairs, and closed it behind us, ascending.