Four Years Ago
I NEVER FELT LIKE THE ANNOYING LITTLE SISTER that you didn’t want around until you started seeing Elton. He changed everything. He changed you. And since we have always been connected, he changed me too.
Changed for the worse. I want to be clear about that, although I don’t know how there could be any doubt. He ruined us. He ruined everything.
Elton had arrived earlier that year, right around the time when Daddy was first beginning to show his age. It wasn’t a dramatic change—no graying hair or stomach paunch. There wasn’t one specific thing that you could point to, but rather several small cumulative shifts that made him seem older. Daddy no longer looked fresh and young and just barely twenty as he had for at least two decades. Now he looked, not middle-aged exactly, but on the brink of it.
He combated the change by doubling down. More women who weren’t Mom. More languid strolls down Main Street, where people had no choice but to love him. More town meetings where Daddy sat at the front of the room like a king holding court, allowing the peasants a chance to kiss his ring.
In response Piper and I started spending less and less time at home. When Daddy was away, it was terrible to listen to Mom wail and moan, sick with missing him. Even worse, though, was when he wouldn’t come home for several days. She would go quiet, her cheeks would burn bright pink, and her whole body would radiate heat. You could see the fever on the brink of breaking, but Daddy—using some sort of sixth sense—would return and she would succumb to the love sickness once more.
In warm weather, you and I roamed from one end of town to the other, measuring it with our bare feet. During the sharp winter days, we curled together under a pile of blankets in the shed out back. It also helped when Chance would curl up between us, and his furry body lent us a bit of extra heat. An extension cord gave us a single line of power that we used for a hotplate. We kept warm by filling our stomachs with cans of soup and hot cocoa. Sometimes you’d bring different books from the school library and read them aloud. You loved poetry then and would recite the same ones over and over until we’d both committed them to memory. Your favorite was “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath. Do you remember it, Piper? I can’t recall much of anything anymore, but that one line that repeated over and over throughout the poem sticks with me: “I think I made you up inside my head.”
The way you said it—sometimes spitting the words out like they were burning your tongue and at other times exhaling them as if you were forming smoke rings that only you could see—still haunts me.
Perhaps it haunted Elton too. You recited that poem for him. You brought him into our little shed, saying there was room for one more, and when it turned out that it was in fact a little too crowded, I was the one who was told to go. It was only pride that kept me from sitting outside the door like Chance did, whining until I was let back in.
You had a crush on Elton before I even knew he existed. Later I learned he was a teacher at the high school and the number-one crush of every girl there. It was hard to believe you were just like the rest of the girls. Although, in the end you weren’t. They wanted him, but you actually took him.
Later you told me that on his first day, he had asked you for directions when you were sitting on the front steps reading a book. “Follow me,” you’d said, and he had, chatting with you all the while. He asked what you were reading and you both discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson. “She was so alone and sheltered, you’d think she wouldn’t have much to say, but the exact opposite was true,” Elton said, and in that exact instant—between one footstep and the next—you fell in love with him.
I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem like such a clever thing to say. I would’ve asked you, but I couldn’t because you never told me this story. I took it. Please forgive me, Piper, but I couldn’t accept being locked out from so much of your time with Elton. I needed a part of it, even if it wasn’t mine to take.
“There it is,” you’d said, pointing to the classroom that would be Elton’s.
He didn’t move toward it; instead he just smiled at you. “What’s your name?”
“Piper.”
“That’s perfect. Like the Pied Piper. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that I’d happily follow you anywhere.”
You laughed and then, because you are fearless, you leaned forward and pressed your lips against his.
He stepped away quickly. “Piper, I’m a teacher.”
“I know.” You shrugged. “But who really cares about that?”
As it turned out, nobody did. They said it was only a five-year difference and what was that anyway? The thinking on the subject was so uniform it was almost like someone had gone around putting that exact thought into every single person’s head.
And Elton eventually came around too.
Later, Piper, not so very long after, although so much had changed that it felt like forever, you and I had that big fight.
By then I was so full of jealousy. I had stolen so many secrets of your time with Elton that I had half fallen in love with him too.
An explosion was inevitable.
It came the day you returned home with grass in your hair. I didn’t need that to know what you’d done. Before you even entered the house, I was reaching out and reading your secrets as easily as other little sisters crack the cheap locks on a sibling’s diary. You could see on my face that I knew how you’d lain naked in the grass with Elton. How when it was over you held hands and stared up into the endlessly blue sky. How he had been gentle and—
You slapped me, knocking every secret out of my head for an instant.
“That’s mine,” you hissed, angrier than I’d ever seen you before. “I need something that’s just mine and not ours to share.”
I would rather you’d just slapped me again. Or punched me.
“He doesn’t love you,” I said. “He says he does, but he doesn’t. I know.”
You turned white at that last bit. You believed me.
It was a lie, Piper. I admitted it later, but after that you were never quite sure, and then when he got Angie pregnant it seemed to confirm the lie. He had never loved you.
But Piper, Elton did love you and he still does. The thing is, he was afraid of you too. That was where the uncertainty came from—not a lack of love, just an inability to fully understand who he loved and why.
And despite being able to shake every last secret from Elton’s brain, I can’t say I’ve ever understood anything about what truly makes him tick—except that.