This story starts when my parents drop me off at my uncle Jim’s house, on the way to the hospital where my little sister is about to be born. I am six years old.
Uncle Jim is married to a woman named Rhonda, whose hobby is crochet. No, not “hobby,” exactly: her crocheting is a compulsion, perhaps some kind of illness. Rhonda crochets cozies not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier; it makes them look ashamed.
I sit all day on the sofa, the crochet pattern imprinting itself onto my sweaty legs, watching an I Dream of Jeannie marathon and waiting for my parents to show up and take me home. I expect this to happen quickly—within, say, an hour. No one has explained to me how long babies take to come; I have the vague idea that they just spring out, like a Pop-Tart from the toaster. Also no one has explained to me that it’s way too early, that the baby is not supposed to come for two more months.
When my parents have not shown up or called by late afternoon, I begin to suspect that they are not coming back at all. When eight o’clock—my bedtime—arrives, I know with certainty that they have taken the new baby home to replace me and that I will remain with Jim and Rhonda forever. I see myself sitting here on the lumpy loveseat, becoming another permanent fixture of the house. Rhonda will crochet a cozy to encase me from head to toe, so that you can barely make out the lumpy shape of my body; I’ll breathe through a woolly woven web, and will only be able to see the world in pieces, through the constellation of small apertures between the yarn.
That night in the cramped guest bedroom, fearful and unable to sleep, I create the Little Sister. I have invented characters in my mind before, fairies and pirates and things like that. This is different. I do not intend to create anything. I only try to picture the shape of this sister I have desired and already lost, this soft human curve of abandonment, and the pressure of my need turns her real, and suddenly there she is, lying beside me on the crochet-blanket-covered bed, looking up at me with blue eyes and kicking her fat little legs. She looks like a normal baby in every way except the color of her skin—a warm, translucent gold. She smells sweet and powdery. I take her onto my lap and look down at her. She has real softness, real weight. She is a beautiful baby but I know that this is not how babies are supposed to come into the world, and her presence gives me a dark feeling. I carry her over to my My Little Pony backpack and zip her up inside. She just barely fits. Then I return to the bed and instantly fall asleep.
I awake early the next morning, to my father pulling me up off the bed by my armpits. It has been a thin, sour, uncomfortable sleep; I am so dizzy with relief to see him that I throw my arms around his neck and weep. He grunts to me and speaks a few gruff words to Jim and Rhonda. Then he carries me out to the car, throws the backpack in the back seat, and drives me home.
But my mother is not at home, and neither is the baby, because there is no baby. There was a baby, for a minute, but then it just went out. That’s the phrase my father uses: “It just went out.” At first I think he means that the baby got up and walked away. It takes me a minute to realize that he means the baby is dead.
I have not lost my parents, not in the way I thought I would. But I understand that things are different now. When I unzip my backpack in my bedroom that night, the Little Sister is still alive. She blinks up at me like nothing has happened, like we are guilty of nothing. In the middle of the night I sneak out of bed, take my dad’s shovel from the garage, and bury her beneath the oak tree in the backyard. She does not complain or cry, but still I look away from her as I work, not wanting to watch the dirt fall onto her blue wide-open eyes.
Two years later, my parents sit me down and explain that from now on they will be living in different places. This announcement puzzles me because my dad already does not live with us. He has been on a “business trip to Arizona” since my eighth birthday. This is the first time I have seen him since then. Even before he left, I had not exactly thought of him as living with us, because I no longer exactly thought of him as living. He would fall asleep in strange places, like the backyard or the kitchen floor; during his brief moments of wakefulness he would talk too loudly and hug me too hard, like a distant relative, or the Santa Claus at the mall.
“We still love you,” says my mother. “I mean, I still do.”
“Some people,” says my father, “are just not cut out to be fathers. I might have made a good uncle. This has been a whole different ball game.” He leans forward, puts his elbows on his knees. “That is how I want you to think of me,” he says.
“As a ball game?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “As an uncle.”
“I’m getting us a new apartment in town,” says my mother. “It’s next door to the Denny’s. We’ll be closer to school. And Dad will have his own apartment too.”
“Why can’t we stay in this house?” I ask.
“Don’t beat yourself up about this,” says my father. “It’s not your fault.”
It’s an answer, but not to the question I’ve asked.
The night before we move, I sneak out to the backyard once again. Grass has grown over the Little Sister’s shallow grave, but the spot is still visible. I don’t exactly want to see her again, but the idea of leaving her there beneath the earth fills me with loneliness and panic.
I take the shovel and dig her up. She is still alive, still glowing faintly. She stirs, blinks the dirt off her eyelids, and looks at me. Her eyes glisten wetly, as if she has just been crying or is just about to, but she doesn’t make a sound. I notice that she is bigger now, toddler-sized, with a round belly and plump wrists and a thick head of white-blond hair. Apparently her burial has not stopped her from growing. Apparently she is like a plant: pushed down into the earth, fattened like a root, nourished by darkness.
Our new apartment does not have a yard, so I put the Little Sister under my bed, making a nest for her out of old T-shirts. She grows faster than a normal baby, faster than I do. By the time we have lived in the apartment for three months, she has corn-silk hair down to her shoulders and a mouth full of teeth. In two years she looks like a five-year-old, and in four years—when I turn twelve—she has almost caught up with me: a pretty blond girl with golden translucent skin and long limbs. She has a modest girdle of baby fat still lingering round her middle, but her limbs are lean and taut and sturdy. At night I crawl under the bed with a flashlight and pull up the Little Sister’s dress and compare our two sets of breast-buds, the progress of the sparse, shadowy hair between our legs.
My mother has never discovered the Little Sister, because she never cleans under the bed. She is busy: with her job at the school cafeteria and her boyfriend, Buddy Salvage. Buddy is also known as Mr. Salvage or Coach Salvage, because he is the gym teacher. He is famous at school because he tattooed his ex-wife’s name onto his shoulder and then later burned off TAMMY but not the rest of the tattoo, so that inside a heart it says I LOVE _________ and the blank is just scar tissue. He comes over for dinner three times a week and tells me unfollowable stories about wrestling and plays the “pull my finger” joke, then disappears into the bedroom with my mother for exactly thirty minutes before leaving. At school he pretends not to know me.
At night, after Buddy leaves, my mother sits at the kitchen table and makes life-affirmation collages. She cuts pictures out of magazines and glues them to sheets of construction paper. The pictures are of the mountains and the beach and other places we have never been.
“They say you have to envision the life you want,” she explains.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.
“Oprah.” She takes a drag of her cigarette and replaces it in the ashtray, then cuts out a small picture of ballet slippers and tentatively places it in the center of the empty page. She frowns, then removes it. “My feet are too big anyway,” she says. Then she stands up, gathers the magazines, and stacks them with the recycling by the door. She looks down at the pile, gives it a soft little kick with her foot. “The problem,” she says, “is that I have the wrong kind of magazine.”
When I am fourteen I get a boyfriend, or at least a boy who is sort of a friend and who I regularly allow to touch me. I like the rough texture and woody scent of his hands. I like the way he presses me down beneath him in the back seat of his car, as if it matters that I not float away.
One day, while my mother is at work, I lead the boy into my room. I know what he wants to do; I do not want to do it for the same reasons he does, but I want to take some action to prove I am an adult. While the pain corkscrews up through me I turn my head to the side and imagine the Little Sister lying there beneath the bed silently, and for the first time I hate her.
After the boy leaves I crawl under the bed. The Little Sister looks at me with her knowing blue eyes. I reach out and pinch her tiny tender right breast, as hard as I can. But to my surprise she doesn’t grimace with pain. Instead, for the first time in her life, she smiles.
I get up and go to the bathroom and turn on the shower as hot as it will go. I bend over and let the hot water scour me. Then I get out, towel myself off, and crawl back under the bed with the Little Sister. I do not attempt to hide my wet salty eyes or the way my hands shake. I hold her hands in mine so that all four of our hands shake, together. She stares at me. She smiles.
That night at dinner, my mother and Buddy have one of their fights. The fight is about his tattoo. My mother believes that her own name belongs in blue ink on Buddy’s arm, etched into the scar tissue where his ex-wife’s name had been. She believes that she has earned this privilege by cooking him dinner three times a week for years, despite his failure to propose marriage or cohabitation.
Buddy claims that the tattoo remains an accurate depiction of his heart. He is still scarred and no amount of Hamburger Helper casseroles will change that. My mother argues that she never uses Hamburger Helper and Buddy accuses her of changing the subject. He announces that he is an honest man and that this is his best quality. He states that our mother knows this about him and has chosen him despite or perhaps because of this quality. He points out that most people, especially women, do not like to hear the truth, and he refuses to apologize for telling it. Then he gets up and leaves.
My mother walks out after him and does not come back for four days. When she returns, she is married to Buddy Salvage. His arm still reads I LOVE _________ but he has agreed to rent our mother an ornately beaded wedding dress and have their photo taken at the Glamour Shots place in the mall. The dress is large, even larger than Buddy Salvage, so large it almost swallows my mother. It looks less like a garment than a vessel. It has a skirt full and wide enough to hold several stowaways, a bodice that squeezes my mother’s bosom up and out like the prow of a ship, and a veil that billows out like a ship’s sail, ready to catch the wind or whatever else comes along.
My boyfriend tells me that he has seen Buddy Salvage’s wiener in the locker room and that it is extremely wide, like a Coke can. This knowledge is hard to suppress when I hear Buddy and my mother having sex in the bedroom next door.
At these times I crawl under the bed and torture the Little Sister. I pinch the soft skin of her inner arms and twist her breasts. I like to watch her close her eyes, silently enduring the pain, and then open them again and smile at me, like nothing has happened. Or possibly like everything has happened, like I have already done everything I have ever imagined or not imagined, so many times that none of it could possibly matter. Sometimes when I pinch her I whisper, “I’m going to kill you someday,” and when I say this, she smiles biggest of all. “I’m going to drop you in the dump,” I whisper, “and run off by myself. I won’t tell anyone where I’m going.” She smiles, as if daring me to do what I threaten, as if suggesting that this is what she has wanted all along.
But the more I threaten to kill her, the more I need her; the more I torture her, the closer we are bound together. At the end of the night I always cry and apologize; I stroke her hair and tell her I love her. She smiles again—but differently now, more gently.
One day, while we are having sex beneath the football bleachers, my boyfriend asks me to marry him. “I want to knock you up,” he says, “and I want to do it properly.”
I say yes, but then when I get home I am greeted by the blown-up picture of my mother and Buddy Salvage at the Glamour Shots place, framed and hanging above the mantel. I stand in the middle of the room and stare at it for several minutes. Then, without exactly deciding to, I drag the Little Sister out from under the bed, belt her into my car, and start driving.
I drive and drive, the Little Sister in the passenger seat. She has continued to grow, and now she appears close to my age; it is hard to tell, because the world has not marked her one bit. She has long blond hair and translucent gold skin and full buoyant breasts and a tiny curved waist. She looks like me, except better: how I might have looked if I’d never encountered cigarettes, or Tostitos, or birth control, or insomnia. I realize that I have chosen her: over everyone else, perhaps even over myself. I will never be able to bring myself to harm her again.
I drive and drive all night and when I run out of gas somewhere in Kansas I stop. I live in a motel until I run out of money and then I get a small apartment above a Laundromat and a job at Target.
I make the Little Sister a bed in my closet and then, when I move in with the floor manager who becomes my boyfriend and later my husband, beneath a false floorboard. The rest of my life will happen—my twins will pound across the floors with their fat sticky feet, and my husband will leave and come back and leave and come back again, and Buddy Salvage will call one day to tell me my mother has died of a heart attack, and I will drive home drunk from my mother’s funeral, swerving in and out of cars on the black highway, my strange survival gone unnoticed—and no one will ever find her. She will remain my own forever. My only sister, my first and last child, my sweet secret under the floor. She will become the most stunningly beautiful old woman. She will have long snow-white hair and skin that reminds you of a Japanese lantern: lightly crinkled rice paper, lit from inside by a soft golden glow. Every day I will brush her hair, tend to her fingernails and clothes, rub rosewater into her skin.
Before I die I will do something—write a note, leave the floorboard slightly ajar—and my children will find her, delicate in death as a white moth on the windowsill, perfectly groomed and pristine. They will stroke her long soft hair and hold her cool clean hands with their warm ones and say, This was our mother’s secret: how beautiful, how strange. They’ll lift her from the floorboards and cradle her white head in their laps and say, Look at what she protected. Look at what she lost.