13

Mom and Calvin are gone for hours. Something is weird when they come back: Gladys is sleeping, and they’re laughing. They disappear into their bedroom, then they reappear, without Gladys. She’s asleep in her crib.

Things are . . . better.

Mom restarts the fire, lays the tablecloth back on the floor, and asks me to set out breakfast even though it’s 4:00 p.m. The doughnuts are tough and cold, and the nine-hour-old waffles are especially gross, but Mom, Calvin, Eloise, and I eat everything anyway.

“I know this would have been more delicious at ten thirty this morning,” Mom says, gnawing on her last bite of waffle. “But it tastes amazing right now.”

I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling. “OK, sure.”

“I’m serious!” Mom says. “This is the first thing I’ve eaten since that egg muffin this morning.”

“Now that was delicious,” Calvin says.

“Thanks,” I say, sheepishly.

“I barely tasted it,” Mom says. Then she quickly adds, “I mean, I’m sure it was wonderful. I was just so worried, but this right here”—she picks up a mostly cooked chocolate-glazed doughnut and pops it in her mouth—“this is the perfect Christmas dinner.”

Mom puts her arm around me, and I sink into her, so glad to have a hug without anything between us. It feels too good to be true, so I don’t ask any questions for the rest of the day. I go to bed still not knowing or really caring what was wrong with Gladys.

The next day, things are even better. Gladys wakes up, of course, but she doesn’t cry. She’s noisy, but it’s gurgling and baby talk into Mom’s collar as Mom cleans the kitchen or snoring on Mom’s shoulder as Mom prepares a lecture at the table. I guess whatever happened at the hospital really did help her stop crying so much. Eloise spends the whole day at our house, except for a few hours at the dog shelter, and she takes me with her for that.

I go back to El Jardín in the afternoon to sing Deck the Halls to the resting roots, but I don’t study there. I study at home. Gladys is so much quieter that I can sit in the living room to study the way I used to. Calvin refills my water bottle before I even ask. Mom sometimes puts a snack next to me. When Gladys fusses, Mom bounces her and hums, and she quiets back down. It’s the way I thought life with a baby sister would be before she was born, normal except for a tiny warm body sometimes wedged between us.

By New Year’s Eve, I’m feeling pretty prepared for all four of my remaining specialties, so, in the evening, I take the Encyclopedia of Plant Life and The History of Natural Disasters and wander into the living room to ask Calvin to quiz me. The light is on under the door to the basement, so he’s probably in his office. I could go down and ask, I know he’d help me, but instead, I look for Mom. Maybe I want her help even if Gladys is in between us.

As soon as I crack the door to her bedroom, Mom comes rushing toward me saying “Shh!”

She tiptoes into the hallway. The good news is she’s not wearing Gladys. The bad news is she’s barely wearing anything. She has on a bra, a tank top, embarrassingly huge underwear, and one leg of a pair of sheer black leggings. Also, makeup. I haven’t seen her in makeup in forever.

“Mom, you’re naked!”

“Oh, I’m not. I just didn’t get a chance to put my dress on yet,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, this is a good thing.”

“Huh?”

She steps into the rest of her see-through pants.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being weird. Mom changes in front of me all the time in her bedroom, but it feels different in the hallway.

“I was getting dressed and Gladys fell asleep on her own. In her crib!”

She says this the way she used to say things like “I’m the lead author on a research paper!” or “I’m being honored for my developments in algebraic K-theory!”

Those times, I said congrats, so I say that now, too, even though I don’t see why a sleeping baby should compare to her greatest accomplishments.

“Why are you . . . ?” I gesture toward her face.

“Calvin and I are going out,” she says, adjusting the straps of her bra and tank. “Gladys fell asleep at this time yesterday, and then she slept through the night. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and it’ll happen again.”

I glance at my phone. It’s 6:37.

“Really?”

Mom laughs. “Well, she slept until four.”

“Four a.m.?” I say. “That’s through the night?”

“It’s the most sleep I’ve gotten in ages,” Mom says, joyfully. “And now she’s asleep again.”

“But you’re awake,” I point out.

“I think I’ll have Eloise wake her up to feed her at eleven. Maybe I’ll get another thirty minutes that way.”

“Thirty minutes?” What good is thirty minutes? Why doesn’t Mom just sleep now? How does she have so much energy after waking up at four? And “Wait . . . Eloise?”

“Yup. Follow me so we don’t have to whisper.”

I’m smiling. I don’t know why. None of the words coming out of her mouth sound like my old mom. But the way she’s saying them, the way she’s smiling, the fact that she’s excited for a date with Calvin: all that is my old mom. And I’ve missed her.

“Don’t worry,” she says, pouring herself a glass of water. “If Gladys is being difficult, we’ll come right back, but I think we’re over the hump. Can you believe we’ve been held hostage by an ear infection?”

“We have?”

Mom freezes and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says. “I keep expecting you to pick things up by osmosis or something. I’m working on it though. When we brought Gladys to the ER on Christmas, we found out she had a double ear infection. She’d likely had it for quite some time. We didn’t notice it for a while because she didn’t have a fever until that day, and she went straight from the fussy five-month stage into an ear infection. But that’s why she always wanted to eat. You know how sucking on something can clear your ears?”

I nod.

“That’s true for babies, too. So, Gladys has been eating and eating to make her ears feel better, and that’s why she’s been spitting up even more. A few days of antibiotics, a few rounds of baby Tylenol, and she’s a whole new kid.”

“Wait . . . really?” This is a New Year’s miracle. “So, she’s going to be quiet all the time now?”

Mom laughs. “Well, maybe not all the time.”

“Right. But are you saying . . . it’s going to get easier?”

Mom tilts her head. “Am I saying what’s going to get easier?”

I bite my lip because I realize this question is coming from the wrong column.

“I mean . . . are you saying living with Gladys won’t always be so . . .”

hard

gross

awful

“Loud?”

Mom puts down her water and throws her arms around me. “Oh, honey. Oh, Piper,” she says. “Jeez, no! I should have been teaching you how this works all along. Babies don’t stay as difficult as Gladys has been forever, thank god.”

“Thank god? You mean . . . you don’t like it, either?”

“Piper. I hate it.”

“You do?” I’m shocked.

“I love Gladys of course, but, honey, I’ve been miserable. I’ve been missing sleep. I’ve been missing Calvin and Eloise. I’ve been missing you. My gosh, Piper, did you think you were alone in it?”

I was alone in it.

I shrug.

“We’re in it together. Or we should be. We have to be. I’ve been failing all my girls, but that ends now.”

“No, you haven’t,” I say. And not just to be nice.

I’m glad when she apologizes for yelling. But how was Mom supposed to notice things like ear infections and notes on the calendar when she hasn’t been sleeping? Why is Mom apologizing for not doing the impossible?

The reason I don’t want to stop the shots is in front of me right now: My mom, thrilled that she might get to sleep past 4:00 a.m. My mom, all made up for a date, and yet unbuttoning her pumping bra and opening her laptop so that her body can make food, while her brain can make money, while her heart talks to me, all on New Year’s Eve.

How can she do all this—do it all in the ugliest underpants of all time—and still not see the Wordless Chain?

I wish I could ask her, but I don’t want to risk a fight when I’m this happy, and so is she.

She’s clearly too busy to quiz me, but I open my books and sit next to her anyway. Even if she looks different and sounds different, she feels like my mom again. And I’ll take it.

About an hour later, Mom and Calvin leave. Eloise, Bobby, and I sit on the couch, Eloise in the middle, and spread blankets over our laps. We pass popcorn back and forth. It’s cozy.

“This was my favorite movie when I was your age, Piper,” Bobby says.

I smile at him, remembering everything he said on the train ride after Ivan’s birthday party. Is he another person in this lonely club? Does he really know about the Wordless Chain? Maybe I’ll get another clue tonight.

“Get ready to laugh your butt off,” he says.

“Bobby!” Eloise says.

“What? She’s a genius.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eloise asks.

I smile. “Because I don’t need a butt, as long as I have a brain.”

They both laugh. Real laughs. I don’t think I’ve ever made Eloise laugh like this before. She laughs like I’m her friend. It sticks with me, that laugh. I can see how it’s the next thing. It could be the replacement for sleeping all tangled together: grown-up laughing.

That’s another part of growing up I’d be excited for if it weren’t for puberty and all the strings—or chains—attached.

As soon as Bobby hits play, the baby monitor erupts with wah wah wah. It makes me want to pull my hair out and stuff it in my ears.

“That’s my cue,” Eloise says, as if this is fun instead of the biggest heartbreak in the world. She reaches across Bobby to pause the TV, then walks out the room.

I shouldn’t be upset. Eloise is here to babysit Gladys, not to hang out with me. I’m eleven and I don’t need a babysitter anymore. One minute ago, I was proud of myself for making them grown-up laugh, and now I want to be a baby again. It’s dizzying.

“Oh, Gladys. Gross!” Eloise yells from Mom’s bedroom.

I look at Bobby. “She puked. I’ll bet you anything.”

He smiles. “I never bet against a kid wonder,” he says. He has dimples, too—not as pronounced as Ivan’s, but still nice to look at. His hair is curly, and it flops over his forehead. He put on black-framed glasses to watch the movie. I can see how Eloise must see him. How she must find him cute.

She appears in the doorway of Mom’s bedroom holding a screaming Gladys at arm’s length.

“Told you,” I say.

“I need to give her a bath,” Eloise says. “It’s all in her hair.”

I look up and yes. Gladys barely has any hair, but the little patches of it that she has are caked in crusty green stuff.

“Would you change her sheets, babe?” Eloise asks.

“What?” Bobby says. “That’s women’s work.”

My jaw drops. Women’s work? That’s even worse than calling my mom Mrs. Franklin. How could he say that? It’s like all the lights in the living room dim. I’m so disappointed.

Bobby disappears and Eloise is next to me, puke-covered baby and all. “We’ll start the movie again in a few minutes. We can watch while I feed her. Do you want to help me give her a bath or just watch TV while you wait?”

I shake my head. “I’ll study.”

Eloise laughs. “Of course. Why watch TV when you can read”—she pauses to check out the books I have spread across the coffee table—“Advanced Euclidian Geometry?”

I laugh with her, then she walks toward the bathroom, and I scooch to the floor and open the book. But I can’t concentrate. Women’s work.

My phone vibrates. It’s ringing, which is weird. My friends only talk IRL or over text. I flip it over and my heart starts to vibrate with it. Ivan’s name glows. I turn it on, and his face fills the screen.

“Happy New Year from Kiribati!” he says. There’s a lot of noise and commotion in his background like he’s at a party or something.

“Wait what?” I say. “Kiribati like Christmas Island?”

“Yeah. Dang, you knew that?” Ivan asks.

I shrug. It’s geography. Of course, I knew it.

“What are you doing there?”

Seeing Ivan makes me smile, even though I’m still upset about Bobby.

“We go every year for the holidays,” Ivan says.

“You do?” I ask, shocked. “That’s like a twenty-hour flight.”

“Dang, you knew that, too?” His smile gets even goofier. “Yeah, we go for the holidays. Get it? We go to Christmas Island?”

“Oh,” I say.

“Nah,” Ivan says. “I’m just kidding. That would be wild! But I wanted to call you for New Year’s, and I wasn’t sure if geniuses like you stay up until midnight, so I thought I’d pretend to call from somewhere that it’s midnight right now. When I googled and found Christmas Island, I was like, perfect prank!”

“But . . .” I say, that’s wrong. “Oh. Funny. Happy almost New Year from New Jersey.”

“Wait, but what?” Ivan asks.

“No but,” I say. My voice cracks, giving me away.

“Don’t even lie, bro. Just tell me.”

“OK,” I say shrugging. “It’s just . . . Christmas Island is actually three hours behind eastern standard time.”

“Exactly! That means it’s midnight there,” Ivan says.

“No, I mean, when it’s nine p.m. here, it’s six p.m. there.”

“Wait . . . Oh! Double dang,” Ivan yelps. “I did it backward. And I thought I was being so clever. Bro, it’s hard to have a friend as smart as you, I swear.”

I smile. When he calls me bro, it makes my heart heat up.

“Maybe math should be women’s work,” I mumble.

“What?” Ivan says, suddenly serious. “Why would you say that?”

Oh no. I wasn’t thinking about how different, yet still awful, that phrase would sound to Ivan.

“No, no,” I say quickly. “That wasn’t about you. I was repeating something stupid Eloise’s boyfriend just said. It’s stuck in my brain.”

“He said math was for women?” Ivan asks with his lopsided smile glowing on my screen.

I laugh. “No. He said chores were, I think.”

“What?” Ivan shouts, his smile gone.

“They’re here babysitting for my little sister, and he said he couldn’t change her sheets because it’s women’s work.”

“That’s messed up!” Ivan says.

I’m glad he said the not-nice thing so I can just agree without saying it out loud.

“It is, right?”

There’s rustling behind me as Bobby walks through the room. “Is that the guy?” Ivan asks, too loudly.

“Shh!” I say. “Yes.”

“Hey you! Hey you, sister’s boyfriend!” Ivan screams from the phone.

I’m embarrassed, and I feel bad for saying something not nice about Bobby, and my face is on fire, but for some reason I also can’t stop giggling.

“Shh!” I tell Ivan. I turn around. “Ignore him,” I say to Bobby.

But he’s already right behind me, leaning over the back of the couch to peer at my phone screen.

“Hello,” he says to Ivan. “Who’s this?” he asks me.

Ivan doesn’t give me a chance to answer. “Why are you calling chores women’s work, man?” he shouts.

I want to throw my phone in the fireplace.

“Seriously,” he continues. “You don’t deserve a girl at all, let alone Piper’s sister.”

“Ivan!” I squeal.

“What? That’s messed up, bro,” he says. And I can tell he means it, even though he’s laughing. For some reason, I’m still laughing. And somehow, behind me, even Bobby is laughing.

“All right, I’m out. You go deal with that guy,” Ivan says through a fitful of giggles. “Happy New Year!” And he hangs up.

I turn around. Bobby is standing there with an armload of baby-puke sheets.

“Piper,” he says, still smiling. “It was a joke. I didn’t mean it.” He holds out the sheets as if to prove it.

“Oh,” I say.

But it wasn’t funny.

When he returns from the laundry room in the basement, I follow him into Mom’s room.

I lean against the doorjamb and watch as he pulls the crib mattress up and starts to fit a clean mattress protector around it.

“Can you explain it to me?” I ask his back.

He turns and smiles at me the way I’ve seen Daisy’s big brother smile at her when I’m at her house.

“The kid wonder needs a lesson in changing crib sheets?” he asks.

“No, I mean . . . can you explain why it’s funny? Why was it supposed to be a joke? Women’s work.”

“Oh!” Bobby says. He turns back around so that I’m talking to the back of his head. “Yeah, I get your reaction. I mean, if my dad said that, whew. It’d be infuriating. But Eloise knows I don’t think that way. She knows I actively work against thinking that way.” Bobby lets the mattress thump back into the crib, then picks up the new lilac sheet and shakes it out. “So . . . I guess it was sort of an inside joke? It was only funny because Eloise knew I didn’t mean it.”

“Oh,” I say. “Your dad?”

“He . . . he just . . . did you know I have four younger siblings?”

“You do?”

Bobby laughs. “How do you think I got so skilled with the crib sheets?”

“Right,” I say with a chuckle.

“Yeah. My parents managed to have five kids before splitting up. I don’t know how because they hate each other. And sometimes I hate my dad, too.”

My eyebrows go up. “Really?” I’ve never heard Bobby use left-side words before.

“He’s so disrespectful to my mom, and he doesn’t even see it. And my sisters, too. Every time we have to spend the weekend over there, he expects Beverly to take care of the three youngest ones, even though she’s only fourteen. And he expects me to do what he does: sit on my butt, drink Coke, and watch football. I don’t even like football. Or Coke!”

A light bulb goes off in my brain. “So, he says things like that? Like women’s work?”

If Bobby says yes, then all I have to do is introduce my mom to his dad and boom she’ll see the Wordless Chain.

But Bobby says, “No, not out loud. He just acts like he’s doing so much more than he is. Like, my mom had to have this surgery once, right? It was just an outpatient thing, but she couldn’t have all these little kids running around the next day. Beverly and I wanted to stay and help her, so she asked Dad if he would take the little kids for one night. He did, but he acted like this was a huge deal. Like it’s some burden. Like he was doing her a favor by playing with his own kids. Or, like, his girlfriend will cook us a meal, and he spends five minutes doing the dishes afterward and then calls it even. He’s just, like, the opposite of who I want to be. Wait.” Bobby turns back to me now that the sheet is smoothly secured to the mattress. “Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because you see it, too,” I whisper.

He tilts his head. “See what?”

“The Wordless—the things that . . .” I shake my head to clear my thoughts. “I feel like this stuff happens to Mom and Eloise all the time.”

Bobby looks shocked. “With me? Because I’m trying hard not to be like that. I swear. Eloise deserves . . .”

He trails off, dimples flashing, like just the thought of Eloise makes his face light up.

“No, no,” I say. “Not with you, or with Calvin. With . . . with the world. Everywhere we go, people dismiss my mom. When she was pregnant, they’d touch her belly without asking, as if her own stomach didn’t belong to her. And no one calls my mom what she likes to be called. Stuff like that happens to Eloise, too.”

“Oh,” Bobby says. “Yeah, now that you say it, I know what you mean.”

“But . . . it feels like I’m the only one who even notices.”

“Well,” Bobby says, coming close enough to knock a gentle fist into my shoulder. “That’s probably because you’re a genius.”

“No, it’s not.” I’m not ready to go back to joking.

“But this stuff isn’t easy to think about, Piper. I have to work to see it. It’s easier to just not notice it all.”

“It’s impossible to just not notice it all,” I say.

“Again,” Bobby says, gesturing toward me. “Genius.”

“OK, but then, what is it?”

He looks at me like I’m nuts. “Huh?”

“What am I noticing that other people don’t? What’s it called?”

He lowers his eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s called anything. I think it just . . . is.”

I squint at him, certain he knows more than he’s saying, certain he can give me a word or words to make everything I see and feel about growing up totally clear and logical to everyone, especially my mom. But he doesn’t.

“Where are you guys?” Eloise calls from the kitchen.

Bobby smiles. “Let’s go,” he says. “More women’s work awaits.”

This time I laugh.

He leans a little closer and speaks a little lower. “Hey, clear my name with that friend of yours, too, OK? I can tell he’s not a women’s work guy, and if he’s ever here watching a movie with us, I want him to understand that we’re on the same side.”

Then he walks out the room. I stand there frozen as the image washes over me. Eloise, Bobby, Ivan, and me, all watching a movie together. It’s so grown-up, so unreal, so exciting, just the idea, the picture, the fantasy. I can barely stand it.

We find Eloise in the kitchen holding a baby bottle half in and half out of a pot of hot water, Gladys smushed into her shoulder, clean and quiet.

Eloise sets the bottle on the counter. “Little help?” she says. Then she hooks her hands under Gladys’s armpits and straightens her elbows so Gladys is hanging from Eloise’s hands, suspended in the air. I’m expecting Bobby to reach for her, but Eloise is holding her toward me. And Bobby disappears into the bathroom.

I freeze, watching Gladys dangle.

I’ve held her before, of course. A few times when she was freshly born. Back when you had to be sure you were holding her head because her neck couldn’t hold it up yet. I liked her little body, small enough that I could hold her feet in my left hand if her head was in my left elbow. She was always sleeping then, and she smelled like baby powder instead of spit-up, and I think I loved her.

I watch her kick her feet in the air in front of me. I don’t know her anymore.

“Piper?” Eloise says.

I’m not sure what else to do, so I lift my arms. Eloise settles Gladys on my shoulder. She’s like a sack of halfway baked potatoes. Heavy. Mushy. Solid. Warm and sweet smelling.

“How old is she now?” I ask.

Eloise laughs. “Seven months. I’m surprised you didn’t know that, Ma’am Piper Franklin.”

I guess I don’t bother doing the math when it comes to my baby sister. I take a step back as Eloise pulls the hot pot off the stove.

Gladys puts her face in my neck and slobbers into my collar. It’s gross. But for some reason, I hold her tighter. Then she grabs a chunk of my hair and shoves against my shoulders, arching her back so she can look at me.

“Her eyes are green now!”

The last time I saw them, they were blue.

Eloise stops halfway to the sink, still holding the pot. “You didn’t know that?”

“No,” I say, staring at them. I can see my own green eyes reflecting back. When was the last time I saw her eyes? I think and think, but I can’t remember.

“They’ve been green for, like, months. What have you been looking at when you hold her?”

“I haven’t held her,” I say.

“What?” Eloise sounds shocked in a way that makes me feel like a bad sister again.

“It’s not my fault. She’s always on Mom. I only ever see this bald head.”

Eloise stares, dumbfounded. “You’re going to feed her.”

I wait for no way to appear in my Can’t Say That column, but it doesn’t. I want to feed her.

Eloise sets me up the way I’ve seen Calvin set my mom up to nurse. She arranges pillows behind my back and helps me rest Gladys on my lap so that she’s half sitting up. She shows me how to tilt the bottle so no air gets into her mouth. Bobby and Eloise settle into each other on the couch. He puts the movie back on.

It’s funny, the movie, I think. But I’m too focused on the weight in my arms to pay attention. Her green eyes flutter: open and closed, open and closed. A soft sigh comes from her mouth when I pull the bottle away to burp her. Her cheek leans against my jaw when I pat her back. And when she burps, it feels like winning a round of the decathlon.

Maybe I don’t hate Gladys.

After her bottle, I help Eloise cover her soft skin with rose-scented lotion, change her diaper, and wiggle her body into footie pajamas. She cries when she’s cold, but it doesn’t make me want to rip my hair out because I understand why she’s crying, and how to fix it. When we put her to bed, I sing her Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Twice.

At midnight, Mom and Calvin come home and we all watch the ball drop together. We give each other hugs and then Calvin says he’ll drive Bobby home. But Eloise doesn’t go with them. Instead, she follows me down the hall to our room.

“You’re staying here tonight?” I ask, shocked.

“Of course, Iper. It’s after midnight.”

There’s a part of every day that’s after midnight, and yet there are many, many after midnights that Eloise is not in our room.

She glances at my corkboard.

“You threw some out,” she says.

I take pajamas out of my dresser.

“Yeah. You were right. I’m not jealous of Ivan.”

“Good,” she says.

“Except, well, I am jealous that he gets to live in New York City,” I say.

And, just like I wanted, it makes her laugh the grown-up laugh again. “That one’s OK. I am, too.”

“I had to throw out the yellow one, too. Daisy got her period.”

“So, you won’t be first!” Eloise says.

“I still need the shots,” I say.

“I know, Ipey. I’m on your side. Remember?”

“Thanks.” I don’t tell her about the thoughts that suddenly creep up when I say that. The way it feels to imagine Ivan here watching a movie with us. The way it felt to make Eloise and Bobby laugh like grown-ups. The way growing up is starting to look . . . exciting.

I take all those thoughts and shove them into a little box and throw it away. I can’t be excited to grow up. That’s like being excited for puberty. That’s like wanting to be subjected to the Wordless Chain. I can never want that.

I lay down with a huge smile on my face and listen for Eloise’s breathing to even out. Then I climb out of bed and throw out the green card. The Gladys card. I don’t know if I’d ever want to have a baby, so it’s not like this affects my feelings about puberty, but still the green card is wrong now. I don’t hate babies anymore.

Only two colors left. But that doesn’t change anything.