Chapter Twenty-Five

THIS HOUSE IS UNBROKEN THE WAY a healed bone is.

Something was bent at an unnatural angle, pushed too far, until it snapped, or shattered. But then it got better again.

When I was eight, we had a snow day. Mom was waitressing by then, and the diner didn’t close, so she went in, hugely pregnant with Juniper. Dad slept in, his body tired from long hours all weekend spent trying to get a roof job done before the snow arrived. I made breakfast for Campbell and myself, and we were watching cartoons when he finally came downstairs. The trash was overflowing in the kitchen. We didn’t take it out—I don’t know that I even could have lifted it—but when he saw it, he got so angry, and he threw it across the floor, spilling it everywhere. Then he grabbed a cabinet door we’d left open, slamming it back the wrong way so that it tore off the hinges, the crack so loud it felt like it broke inside of me. I grabbed Cammy and we ran to my room, hiding in the closet.

Mom found us there in the late afternoon.

When we came downstairs, the trash was still everywhere, and he was asleep on the couch. But the cabinet door wasn’t broken. I tried to explain to Mom, in confused, urgent whispers, that the wood had cracked right at the hinges. But it was intact, like it had never broken. I decided I must have seen it wrong. That it had just been the noise of the cabinet hitting the wall. But I know Campbell saw it, too, because when Mom went to change her clothes, Cammy leaned in close and whispered, “It was magic.”

It was two years before the next explosion like that. There used to be so much time in between them. He’s always sorry. He says it won’t happen again.

I know now that the last is never true. It will happen again. And he probably does love us, but it’s never been enough to make him stop. Instead, it makes it worse—his love for us. And ours for him. It makes it impossible to leave.

It took me a while to remember the cabinet door, and the way doubt had erased what I saw. I forgot until it started happening again, and more frequently. The house always repairing the things he breaks.

The house doesn’t make sense, but neither does the way he splinters into something unrecognizable when he’s mad. It’s incredible what you learn to accept when so few things make sense, and Campbell and I learned to observe it in silence. To note the patched walls and fixed frames, and then fold that strangeness into a soft corner of our minds, where it could be ignored.