She Feared This All Along

It’s a bad day. It’s sunny outside and the faint scent of salt blows inside on the fall breeze, but it’s always fine weather for her parents to fight. She follows her mom into their bedroom, hoping her presence communicates the fact that she cares and doesn’t want to leave her alone. She’s twelve, but nearly as tall as her mom.

“I never should have let him leave the newspaper. At least we had some money back then. And we didn’t have to keep asking my parents,” her mom’s complaints are near a whisper, though he’s stormed off to check the boat and can’t hear. It’s like blasphemies must be spoken softly to ensure your god can’t hear them.

“It was better then, wasn’t it?” she asks gently.

Her mom sits down on the edge of the bed and pulls open the top drawer of her dresser. The wood is swollen with summer heat and the moisture of living near a marsh. Her mom struggles with it so much that the daughter weaves her arms between her mom’s and helps to give the shallow drawer an extra pull.

It finally gives, but emits a horrid squeaking sound of objection. Her mom starts rooting through the drawer, the soft fabric of the short sleeves shifting with each hasty movement. Her mom’s matching shirt and shorts are both black with garishly bright flowers breaking the darkness.

Her mom’s socks and undergarments are similar—neon socks patches of brightness against the dark cherry wood of the hand-me-down furniture. The daughter looks down at the chipped floor tiles when her mom starts extricating old pairs of forbidden-looking… sexy underwear with worn-out elastic.

Cloudy, all wide, inquisitive golden eyes, pokes her little gray head inside the room. She beckons her dear little kitty closer. She scratches behind her ears while her mom digs through the drawer.

“I should just throw these out,” she mumbles.

Her mom plucks out a little blister pack of pills and laughs bitterly. She can’t help but feel worried—pills? In their house? That seemed wrong. Dangerous. Her father is always ranting about “fucked up people on pills” when he boasts about only ever using over-the-counter pain medications. He also says this about going to any doctor, but she’s still just happy she doesn’t have to go to the dentist like children in books do

Deciding she needs to know what these pills are, if she needs to help her mother hide them, she swallows and asks.

“What are those?” she asks hesitantly.

“Birth control pills. Expired,” she adds quickly.

“Oh,” the daughter says. How is she supposed to respond to that? She wants to comfort her mom, but her mom isn’t making it easy.

“I haven’t had sex with your father since I was twenty-nine,” her mom says in that quiet voice that means she’s angry but resigned. “It’s been… nine years? Ten? Not all couples are like this.”

The daughter is at a loss for words. She feels sick. This is forbidden. Arcane. But also—inappropriate! Her father screams at her if she watches something romantic on TV, and “inappropriate for kids” is anything where a man and a woman even make eyes at each other.

Of course, he’d have a heart attack if he saw the pornographic manga she borrowed from the library, but this was a line of content and knowledge that parents and children did not cross. Sex and intimacy were not to be discussed. Ever. It didn’t matter that she’d been bleeding for two years already.

While she’s still doing mental gymnastics of what the hell she should say, her mother plucks a cigarette hidden in the depths of her underwear drawer.

“Ah-ha!” she exclaims dramatically, as if leaning into the cartoonish overreaction. “Found it. Bastard wants me to smoke less than a pack a day and then acts like this.”

Her mom withdraws the cigarette from the old, faded box with all the care of a precious, fragile object.

“I’ll be in the backyard,” her words are only softened by the muttering that happens when she’s clutching a cigarette in her mouth.

Cloudy scurries into the dining room and promptly stares off into a corner of the room. Her mom gives their family cat a wide berth.

“I hate it when they stare off into space like that…” her mom says without looking back.

~~~

It’s winter, and there are rarely good days when the heat is tuned to a modest sixty-seven degrees. She sits at the creaky kitchen table, only half trying to absorb the bland information in her history textbook. She knows she needs to pay attention, apply herself. If she scores any less than 92%, the homeschooling academy considers that a failure. And then she has to do the test all over again. But worse, her mom will have to remake the test. And she’ll complain about that extra work.

She taps her pencil’s eraser against the rough wood around the seam of the table. The table came from… her aunt? Her grandmother? It had a life before it found its way into their six-hundred-square-foot house and bore the marks of it. It takes every ounce of her internal resistance not to pick at the narrow chips of wood peeling away from the table’s surface layer.

She halts her tapping and straightens her posture to look more studious. Her father is coming out of the bathroom. She can’t betray how little she cares about the American Revolution.

She flips ahead to the test. She writes her name and her grade down on the blank lines. She wishes they would print her name on these materials. It would make her feel more real.

“We’re almost out of Listerine again,” he says as he steps through the curtain that separates the kitchen from the dining room. “And it’s not on sale at Shop Rite this week.”

“Maybe at Super Fresh?” she asks optimistically.

He scoffs. “Those con artists never run good sales.”

“I’ll look for coupons.”

He nods but gives her a hard look. “Are you sure you’re not wasting it?”

“I’m only using the tiniest sip. Once a day,” she assures with a vehement nod.

“I saw those mouthfuls you used to spit out.”

“I’m being very careful.”

“Then why’s the bottle almost empty?”

“I’ll be more careful,” she says, though it’s impossible to be any more careful than she already is.

He looks dissatisfied and retreats to his bedroom. When the plywood door opens, the stench of weed makes her hold her breath. She picks up her notebook and fans herself with it. It’s not worse than the odor of cigarettes, but she still doesn’t like it.

She sighs internally. She supposes, with a furious resentment at not being believed, that she’ll have to stop using the mouthwash entirely. It’s the only way he’ll ever believe they’re all being responsible about.

~~~

Her father’s at work, and that alone makes this a good day. She luxuriates in staying in bed late, waking up slowly. She rolls over to the pillow beside hers, this one rotated longways while hers is sideways. Cloudy perks up as she scratches behind her kitty’s ears. Cloudy gives half a good morning stretch, just with her arms. Sunlight streams in the blinds; it has all the makings of a good day.

She smiles and lets the moment sink into memory. She doesn’t hear him watching TV. She doesn’t hear him in the kitchen, making messes he’d expect her to clean. Though him getting up and cooking is a sign that he’s in a better mood than when he just lies around all day, his absence gives her permission to truly relax. For a few hours, at least. If only he’d work more often.

She’ll have to prepare a glass of ice water for him as soon as the car pulls in—he’s always quietly angry and says they don’t care about him if he doesn’t have his water the moment he gets home from work. But that’s still hours away. She has peace for now.

After a satisfying snuggle session with little Cloudy, she sits up and stretches, reaching for her toes. The twin bed is pressed up against the wall, and she twists her head to look at the 8.5 by 11 printed “posters” that adorn her wall. Some of them have claw marks since Cloudy loves to scratch at them if she isn’t giving her enough attention.

She kicks aside her old sheets and makes the short walk from her bedroom, over the black and white tiles of the dining room. She rounds the kitchen table and pauses. The milk crate of her homeschool textbooks is missing. There’s just the Rubbermaid container full of junk, with no light blue milk rate of learning atop it.

Had her mom moved them because it’s summer? But where else would she put it? It wasn’t as if they were flush with extra storage space. She presses her lips together as she ducks under the heavy blanket, keeping the window unit air conditioner out of the sauna-like kitchen.

The screen door is revealed through the ajar back door. Her mom must be outside. She walks down the narrow aisle of their rectangular-shaped kitchen to the bathroom. It’s just a blue square at the back of the sea shack they call home. She twists the broken faucet just right to make the water flow and splashes her face.

On her way back out, she pauses by the back door. She peeks through the greasy slats of the blind and spots her mother lounging in the sun, seated on the top of the stairs.

“He nearly had a harry that my black button had elbow-length and not long sleeves,” her mom says, using her favorite colloquialism for heart attack. “Threatened not to pay my hourly! Can you believe that?”

She hears her mom take a sharp inhalation of her cigarette and swears she can hear the distorted buzz of a voice on the other side of the call. Her grandmother—her father’s mother—most likely. Her mom talks to her mother-in-law more than her mother for reasons that don’t quite make sense.

“And he has me on breakfast shifts all next week. I can’t get any decent tips that way,” her mom goes on.

She ducks back into the dining room, avoiding the creaky spots in the floor out of habit. Cloudy perches on the kitchen table, looking at her curiously.

She stops short when she sees that the plywood door to her bedroom is closed. She frowns. She isn’t allowed to leave her door closed. Has Cloudy somehow moved the jar of bottle caps that kept it open?

She pushes the door open, and it’s like all the air has evaporated from inside the house. She can hardly breathe.

This isn’t her room. Her bed (a hand-me-down from the woman who owns the marina where her father keeps his boat) and her desk (from a kind neighbor who got the wrong desk from Staples and gave her the extra) are gone. Instead, there’s a dresser—still hers, from one of her father’s customers—pressed up against the window. But her desk is gone, and there’s a large bed with a dark blue bedspread that makes the room as dark as bad mud.

There’s something so wrong about this, seeing this room she’s spent all of her thirteen years in, suddenly not hers. It’s so wrong that she’s more distracted by how much she hates this perversion of her space than the impossibility of the sudden transformation.

She backs out of the room. Cloudy brushes against her leg. She bends down to give her a quick pet with a shaking hand and hurries into the living room. She considers it separate from the dining room, though it’s really just one large room.

She weaves around the clutter of too much hand-me-down furniture and climbs onto a recliner from her fraternal grandmother to look at the photos on the wall. Her parents at their wedding, her father looking tense and unhappy, her mother smiling with vacant eyes in a short white dress. That was the same. A photo of their first cat, darling Daltrey, sprawling in the sunshine. She’d passed away five years ago.

But right beside that one—there should’ve been her in a pink tight gown as a child, laying on the floor beside Dalt. Instead, there was a photo of Dalt gazing out the window, her lean, gray body tensed as if she were about to pounce.

She slides down from the chair and feels the blood moving in her veins. Her heart was beating so fast. She was panicking as badly as she did when her father caught her in a lie.

It doesn’t make sense. Has her mother changed the photos overnight? But how could her room change so fast?

Cloudy comes up to her and sniffs.

“You still see me, right?” she asks shakily.

Cloudy leans into her hand, and she pets her, greedy for the contact. Her fur feels so soft.

She needs to figure out what the hell is going on.

She dashes back to the kitchen and the back door. She pulls the main door open, then slips out the screen door.

“What the hell?” her mom startles.

She pauses. Her mom is looking at her, but not.

“Mom?”

Her mom’s expression doesn’t change as she scuttles up to her feet.

“Eunie, you won’t believe this,” her mom says into the phone. “The screen door’s handle must be busted now…”

“Mom, what are you talking about?” she asks, struggling to keep her voice calm.

Her mom walks right through her. She freezes in place. She’s never felt so close to her mom before, but this is… impossible.

Her mom jiggles the door handle. She moves out of the way.

“Mom? Mom, can’t you hear me?”

“He’s going to be so pissed,” her mom said tiredly. “Maybe you could ask him to fix it? He’ll listen to you.”

Her grandmother says something on the other end, and her mom laughs.

“Mom!” she raises her voice.

Her mom doesn’t respond. She tries screaming. Her mom is unfazed, strolling a few more steps down, and sits leaning against the weathered wooden railing.

“Mom, this isn’t funny,” she says, running down the stairs after her.

She reaches the concrete base at the bottom of the stairs. She drops to her knees before her mom, not caring about the dirt getting on her bare feet. Her mom reaches into her pocket for her package of cigarettes. She takes one out and places it between her lips. She keeps the cordless phone balanced on her shoulder and produces a lighter.

She stares at her mom. “Can’t you see me?”

Her mom laughs again. “I still can’t believe he did that. But wait, I didn’t tell you about the charter call I got earlier. I swear these people were drunk at 10 in the morning.”

She falls back and sits on the ground. Was she dead? Did she die like the brother she was never meant to have, who’s nearly taken her mom down in an ectopic pregnancy? Cloudy could still see her, but she’s always been told that cats could see ghosts. She’s watched, countless times, both Cloudy and Dalt watch with intensity something that wasn’t there.

Had she ever been born at all, or was she a grand delusion?

She hears the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees in the cramped backyard. She stares up at the branches cutting through the sky with their dark limbs.

But of course. Of course, she isn’t real. It makes so much sense, this cold logic, that she feels so sick with the horror of the realization. She doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t have any friends, beyond little Cloudy. Her name isn’t printed on anything. Why in the world would she be real?

She’s never helped her parents. She’s never done anything to deserve being real anyway.