Vanishing Girls

I rap once on the trunk before Dad pops it. He doesn’t even bother getting out of the car to give me a hug, not that I want one—just rolls down his window and lifts his arm to wave, like I’m a passenger on a ship about to set sail.

“I love you,” he says. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“Sure. Me too.” I sling my duffel over one shoulder and start traipsing toward the front door. The grass is overgrown and clings wetly to my ankles. The front door needs painting and the whole house looks deflated, like something integral inside has collapsed.

A few years ago my mom became convinced that the kitchen was slanted. She would line up frozen peas and show Dara and me how they rolled from one end of the counter to the other. Dad thought she was crazy. They got in a big fight about it, especially since he kept stepping on peas whenever he went barefoot to the kitchen for water at night.

It turned out Mom was right. Finally she had someone take a look at the foundation. Because of the way the ground had settled, it turned out our house leaned a half inch to the left—not enough to see, but enough to feel.

But today the house looks more lopsided than ever.

Mom hasn’t yet bothered to switch out the storm door for the screen. I have to lean on the handle before it will open. The hallway is dark and smells faintly sour. Several FedEx boxes are stacked underneath the hall table, and there’s a pair of rubber gardening boots I don’t recognize, soles caked with mud, abandoned in the middle of the floor. Perkins, our sixteen-year-old tabby, lets out a plaintive meow and trots down the hall, twining himself around my ankles. At least someone is happy to see me.

“Hello?” I call out, embarrassed that I suddenly feel so awkward and disoriented, as if I’m a stranger.

“In here, Nick!” Mom’s voice sounds faint through the walls, as if it’s trapped there.

I dump my bags in the hall, careful to avoid the mud splatter, and make my way toward the kitchen, the whole time imagining Dara: Dara on the phone, Dara with knees up in the windowsill, Dara with new streaks of color in her hair. Dara’s eyes, clear as pool water, and the small upturned knob of her nose, the kind of nose people pay for. Dara waiting for me, ready to forgive.

But in the kitchen, I find Mom alone. So. Either Dara’s not home, or she has decided not to grace me with her presence.

“Nick.” Mom seems startled when she sees me, though of course she heard me come in and has been expecting me all morning. “You’re too thin,” she says when she hugs me. Then: “I’m very disappointed in you.”

“Yeah.” I take a seat at the table, which is piled high with old newspapers. There are two mugs, both half-filled with coffee now showing a milk-white sheen, and a plate with a piece of half-eaten toast on it. “Dad said.”

“Really, Nick. Skinny-dipping?” She’s trying to pull the disapproving-parent act, but she isn’t as convincing as Dad was, as if she’s an actress and already the lines are boring her. “We’re all dealing with enough as it is. I don’t want to have to worry about you, too.”

There she is, shimmering between us like a mirage: Dara in short-shorts and high heels, lashes thick with mascara, leaving dust on her cheeks; Dara laughing, always laughing, telling us not to worry, she’ll be safe, she never drinks, even as her breath smells like vanilla vodka; Dara the beautiful one, the popular one, the problem child everyone loves—my baby sister.

“So don’t,” I say bluntly.

Mom sighs and takes a seat across from me. She looks like she’s aged a hundred years since the accident. Her skin is chalky and dry, and the bags under her eyes are a bruise-y yellow color. The roots are showing at her scalp. For a second I have the worst, most vicious thought: No wonder Dad left.

But I know that isn’t fair. He left even before things got shitty. I’ve tried to understand it a million times, but still, I can’t. Afterward, sure. When Dara got metal pins in her kneecaps and swore she would never speak to me again, and when Mom went silent for weeks and started taking sleeping pills every night and waking up too groggy to go to work and the hospital bills kept coming, kept coming, like autumn leaves after a storm.

But why weren’t we good enough before?

“Sorry about the mess.” Mom gestures to encompass the table and the window seat, cluttered with mail, and the countertop, also heaped with mail and groceries half unpacked from a bag and then abandoned. “There’s always so much to do. Ever since I started work again . . .”

“That’s okay.” I hate hearing my mom apologize. After the accident, all she did was say I’m sorry. I woke up in the hospital and she was holding me, rocking me like a baby, repeating it over and over. Like she had anything to do with it. Hearing her apologize for something that wasn’t her fault made me feel even worse.

I was the one driving the car.

Mom clears her throat. “Have you thought about what you’ll do this summer, now that you’re home?”

“What do you mean?” I reach over and take a bite of the toast. Stale. I spit it out into a balled-up napkin, and Mom doesn’t even lecture me. “I still have shifts at the Palladium. I’ll just have to borrow Dara’s car and—”

“Absolutely not. No way you’re going back to the Palladium.” Mom turns, suddenly, into her old self: the principal-for-one-of-the-worst-public-high-schools in Shoreline County, the mom who broke up physical fights between the senior boys and made absentee parents get it together, or at least do a better job of pretending. “And you’re not driving, either.”