SIX
She woke up at least five times during the night—she counted, the way other people count sheep. She’d been dreaming about Jenny—the six-year-old Jenny, who used to haunt her dreams on a regular basis, forever screaming for help that never came.
Laurie had been given industrial-strength sleeping pills back then, courtesy of her psychiatrist, Dr. Leslie, but she’d never taken them, even though she’d sometimes pretend to in order to stop Jake from hounding her about it. She understood—it was him being jolted awake by his dissembling wife’s sobbing on a near nightly basis.
Can you describe your emotional state? Dr. Leslie had asked her.
No, can you?
The thing is, she hadn’t wanted to stop seeing Jenny. She couldn’t see her daughter wide-awake, so seeing her in nightmares had to do. Being terrified awake or sleeping—was there really a difference?
She was deep into her short-lived God phase by then—having run back to the church the way you run back to your mother’s arms when you’re desperate for the comfort of home. If psychiatry couldn’t save her, maybe the church could—where you were allowed to call dream figures souls, and your emotionally wrenching nightmares visions.
Over the years, the frequency of those visions began to lessen, and Jenny became an unreliable guest. Laurie would go months without seeing her, years even, only to have her unexpectedly pop in like that family member who’d long ago moved away but couldn’t pass through without saying hi.
Tonight was different. As if someone had blown the dust off that family album and made it magically spring to life. Jenny wasn’t screaming anymore. She was shrieking with six-year-old glee as she galloped through the house on her favorite Palomino—life-size and snorting plumes of hot vapor—then suddenly performing pirouettes across the basement floor in Laurie’s cavernous high heels. They may have been the best dreams Laurie ever had.
After she woke up for the fifth time, she slipped out of bed. She had to see if an actual eighteen-year-old was sleeping down the hall.
Was that actually possible?
When she got to the door, she hesitated for a moment, wondering if all she’d see was a closed fold-out couch, unused Xbox, and dusty diorama—a daughter’s bedroom remodeled into virtual unrecognizability in an effort to obliterate memory. They’d been like Stalinists, Jake and her, airbrushing a once-important personage out of the picture as if she’d never existed.
The most excruciating part had been removing Jenny’s things, because they were the closest things to Jenny. Each toy or doll or dress they threw into the cavernous packing box felt like throwing clumps of dirt onto her coffin—her final burial. Laurie had to take a break in the middle of it just in order to breathe. And there was all that unexpected stuff they stumbled across—a birthday card Jenny had drawn for her brother—Hapy birhdy Bne—three silver dollars and an Indian-head nickel she’d been given by her grandfather, a stable she’d constructed from Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue. Each item cracking open another door into memories they were dutifully trying to suppress, and each door opening inward, pressing painfully into what was left of her heart.
Once the room was empty, it was easier. Then they could pretend it was just a room: four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. They bought the desk where Ben would do his homework and Laurie would pay her bills, they mounted that big flat-screen TV to the wall and hooked it up to Ben’s Xbox. A home office, a game room—call it whatever you wanted, as long as you didn’t call it Jenny’s bedroom.
Of course, Laurie kept one toy from banishment to Goodwill, a golden horse belonging to a golden child, stashing it under a precarious tower of shoeboxes in her clothing closet—the one Jake never ventured into without a search warrant.
She’d pretty much forgotten about that toy—until she’d seen it today in one of the photos in the album. Four-year-old Jenny dancing Goldy across the floor of her bedroom, oblivious to the camera being held by a mother equally oblivious of what was to come. That unimaginable moment, when life would be separated into before and after.
Laurie pushed the door open.
For a moment, blackness. She had to wait a few seconds for her eyes to acclimate to the dark before she could see that the fold-out couch was actually folded out, and, yes, there was a person lying on top of it.
Laurie could hear her breathing, ragged and restless like a broken-down air conditioner. She wondered what she was dreaming about. Something horrible, probably, remembering what the female detective had told them.
Why did she wait so long to run away? Laurie had asked her.
They were her parents since she was six years old. They were monsters, sure—but they were her monsters.
And Laurie had thought there was something awful about relegating monster to a relative term. Even if it was true. There were all sorts of monsters let loose in this world, the detective was saying, and some of them belonged to you.
This is Jenny, she told herself.
Their friends the Shapiros had adopted twin daughters from Colombia, and as they were walking into the room where two complete strangers were going to be ushered into their arms, Amy Shapiro had whispered a kind of mantra to herself: These are my daughters, she’d told herself, Meghan and Molly Shapiro, these are my daughters.
That’s what Laurie was doing now.
This is my daughter, Jenny.
She didn’t look like Jenny—Jenny was six years old with dimpled knees. She didn’t act like Jenny—Jenny liked to gallivant around the house singing songs from Mulan. She didn’t talk like Jenny either, whose missing front tooth made her t’s whistle.
It didn’t matter.
This is my daughter, Jenny.
Who suddenly shifted and moaned, throwing an arm up as if to ward off a bad dream, her hand clenched into a tight fist. Her hair was a tangled mess and so was the blanket, as if she’d been wrestling with it before finally pinning it into a kind of submission.
Laurie let herself sink into the lumpy mattress the way you slowly lower yourself into a hot bath, then tentatively brushed away several strands of gold that were stuck to Jenny’s forehead. She stroked her hair and whispered, “Shhhhh.”
“Shhhhhh . . .”
Jenny’s eyes blinked open.
Jake had once set a trap for a possum that’d been mauling their backyard gardenias, but it’d been Laurie who’d first discovered it hissing and writhing in its makeshift prison. It was the possum’s eyes that still haunted her—twin beacons of panic.
That’s what Jenny’s eyes looked like now.
“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away,” Laurie whispered, continuing to stroke her hair.
“So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away . . .’”
Jenny blinked.
“‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you . . .’”
She blinked again, and Laurie could see a single tear slowly rolling down her cheek. The panic was leaving her, going back to that subterranean place where it caused sleeping hands to ball into angry fists.
“‘For you,’ said his mother, . . .”
Jenny curled herself into Laurie’s lap and shut her eyes.
“‘. . . are my little bunny . . .’”