Chapter Thirty-Two

I DREAM OF LIGHTNING SPLITTING THE tree in our front yard wide open, and I wake up to the crack of my door hitting the wall.

Light from the hall spills in, framing the silhouette of a man.

“Get up. Get the fuck up. We have to go through this every fucking time. So I’m going to show you how to do it right.”

Then he’s gone, back into the hall, and I leap out of bed. He’s walking to the girls’ room.

“Leave them alone,” I say. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Well, you all should have thought of that sooner, and done the fucking chores right the first fucking time.”

Another swinging door, spilling light on to wide-eyed faces. The girls are curled up in the same bed, as instantly alert as I was a moment ago.

Mom is standing on the stairs near me, but her eyes find mine. She mouths the words, I’m sorry.

I know. I know. I know. My heart races in time with the words I want to tell her. I know, but it’s so late and we should be asleep.

I know, but in the morning you’ll have forgotten that thing made of fear in your chest. That ache I feel every day and every night.

I move toward the girls.

“Listen, just let the girls go back to sleep. Show me what we did wrong.”

“So you can all fuck it up again next time? No. Everyone up. Downstairs.”

I shove past him and pick up Junie, then let Campbell follow me past him and down to our living room. Every lamp is on, in this room and the next, and in the laundry room, too. Even the porch light is on. My eyes shift along the wall to the clock. 2:37 a.m.

I have an exam in Honors Calculus in less than eight hours.

We plop onto the couch and await orders.

He comes downstairs with all of our carefully folded towels from earlier that night and throws them onto the floor in front of us.

“Show me how to fold a towel,” he says.

I reach for the closest one.

“No,” he says. “Juniper. Let’s see if the youngest of you can grasp what the older two cannot.”

Juniper is ready to cry, and I feel something sharp deep inside of me when she reaches for the towel. She stands up, and the towel is longer than her body, but she still tries, folding it in half so it’s a length she can manage, then in half again.

“No,” he says, tearing the towel out of her hand and passing it to Campbell. “Your turn.”

Campbell folds the towel lengthwise to start, then begins to fold it down.

“No.” He pulls the towel from her hands and holds it out for me.

“If we knew how you wanted it folded, we wouldn’t be awake right now. Why don’t you just show us so we can go back to bed?”

I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it before my mouth opened. But he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t even make me take the towel and fail at folding it correctly. He just looks at me with eyes that are wide and empty and, in that moment, remind me distinctly of a dead fish. His lips twist into a snarl and he still doesn’t yell, he just says it with so much hatred.

“Stupid cunt.”

He reaches for a vase on the coffee table, grabbing it and hurling it across the room. It hits the window, and ceramic and glass shatter together.

“Now everyone has a good reason to be awake. Since the towels weren’t a good enough reason for Leighton.”

Tears of anger fill my eyes, and I will them away with everything I’ve got. He doesn’t get to see it hurt.

He shakes out the towel.

Not a single tear falls down my cheek, but at a cost. My nails are dug into my palms and I’m biting my tongue so hard I taste blood.

“You fold it in thirds lengthwise,” he says, demonstrating with the towel, “and then in quarters. Then the towels will actually fit on the goddamn towel holder in the bathroom and not look like shit.”

He looks at us on the couch. “Do you understand now?”

We nod, silent.

“Good. Girls, go to bed. Leighton, fold the towels. And then clean up that fucking mess.”

“I’ll help her and then come up,” Mom says, moving forward.

“Don’t even think about it. If she folds them all, maybe she won’t forget how to do it in the future.”

They all file upstairs, but it’s not until his door is shut that I let out a long, shuddering breath of air. I refuse to cry. I fold twelve towels, by threes and then fours, double-checking every crease and carefully lining up corners, all the time refusing to cry. I carry them up to the bathroom in three trips, and align them against the edge of the shelves. Straight lines, perfect folds, no mistakes.

It takes much longer to clean up the broken pieces of glass. There’s still a barrier to outside—a storm window—so I don’t have to tape plastic over it tonight. I take my time with a broom and pan, brushing up the small shards. I pick up the larger pieces by hand, and break the jagged edges out of the window frame so that the girls don’t forget and put their hands there and cut themselves.

I walk around the house, turning off every light. On my path upstairs, I hang the pictures on the walls. This house and its slippery nails.

When I go to turn off the bathroom light, I stare in the mirror. The far wall has shelves for the towels, and it is empty. I turn quickly and see all of the towels on the floor in disarray. I don’t know how or why, but tonight I don’t spend time on the strange things this house does. I’m too tired.

I fold the towels again.

By the time I get back to bed, it is almost five. For the next thirty minutes, I lie awake in the dark imagining how badly this night could have gone.

I throw off my blanket and reach for my light. If I’m not going to sleep, I should study for my calc exam. I sink into my desk chair and turn on my calculator. This is what I need to do: focus on school. Get into college. Move far, far away and . . . then what? Leave Campbell and Juniper to fend for themselves? I try to focus on the workbook in front of me.

In the figure below, AB and CD are perpendicular to BC, and the size of angle ACB is 31 degrees. Find the length of segment BD.

My eyes blur, and the problem rewrites itself on the page.

In the figure below, Leighton Barnes is perpendicular to freedom, and the size of angle ACB is irrelevant because she can never, ever leave. Find the greatest distance she can go before feeling she’s abandoned her sisters.

I stare at the clock. Minutes sink into hours. I watch the sky lighten, layers of gray and then yellow. At dawn, I still don’t have a better answer. Time’s almost up.