THE ABANDONED (EXCERPTED FROM WAY HOME, A MEMOIR)
I’d been asleep for hours, curled around my sister’s yellow blanket when a muffled call pushed its way into my brain. “Siobhan? Siobhan?” My father’s words came to me as though I were underwater. “Where’s your sis—” I rolled over.
“Krissy?” My father’s face loomed over me, confused.
“What are you doing in Siobhan’s bed?”
“The dog peed on mine,” I mumbled. Except for a small window in the corner, sunlight did not penetrate this room, but I deduced from my father’s outfit that it was morning. He was wearing a T-shirt, blue Levi’s, and the same brown cowboy boots he always wore. I bolted upright, my mind racing with excuses for my sister who hadn’t come home.
For months, she’d been spending the night at her boyfriend’s, but my father had warned her about this. “Now that you’ve graduated, I won’t tolerate it,” he’d told her. My sister had continued to disobey. My father walked past her room each morning, and he either averted his eyes from her empty bed, or convinced himself that she was there, among the haphazard bundle of blankets, sheets, and pillows. Except on that morning, when he’d walked down the hallway that cut through her room and mine—remnants of a duplex he’d designed as a new architect years earlier—it was my bed he found empty. His fifteen-year-old daughter missing was another matter.
My father stood. “Where is your sister?” Now that he knew Siobhan wasn’t home—and I knew that he knew—he couldn’t pretend anymore. She was violating his rules. He had to act.
I sprang from Siobhan’s bed and followed him as he stomped from the room, his boots clomping on the concrete floor. He went into his side of the house, slammed the door, and returned moments later. “Give me Sheri’s phone number,” he said, his tone eerily calm.
“I don’t know it,” I lied.
“Kristina, I am not messing around.” He went to my sister Jenny’s room and gave three sharp taps on her door. “I need Sheri’s phone number.”
He dialed Sheri from the landline in the kitchen. Siobhan wasn’t there.
“Give me all her friends’ numbers,” he demanded of me and Jenny when he hung up. “Give me Andrew’s number.”
My father called Andrew, my sister’s current boyfriend, a dozen times before someone finally picked up. “Put my daughter on the phone,” he said, still calm. Jenny and I cowered at the kitchen table, waiting. “You thought this would be okay?” His tone was curt, his words clipped.
I waited during the pauses, wondering what my sister was saying, how she would wriggle out of this one.
“Come get your things,” my father said. He was struggling to remain composed, a measure of defeat in his tone. “I want you out of my house by the end of the day.” He hung up the phone with a soft click.
I looked up in time to catch my father’s back as he strode toward Siobhan’s room; his movements were jerky and forceful. “No!” I screamed.
“Dad!” Jenny yelled after him. He returned with his arms full of clothing, metal hangers poking from the jumbled heap.
“Dad, stop!” I pleaded, jumping in front of him in the hallway.
My words did nothing to break his focus. “Get out of the way.” His knuckles were white from his grip, his face composed. “Get out of my way.”
I did. With some trouble, he unlatched and opened the front door. His boots crunched on the gravel for a few steps before he threw my sister’s things out over cacti and desert bushes. He came back again and filled his arms with more of her things. His hair fell from his neat ponytail, obscuring his face. He threw the clothing on the gravel in the front yard and returned again. Jenny and I stood back, gaping. Until then he had been our rock, always composed. While our mother threw tantrums, he held himself together. While we each broke in our myriad ways when our family blew to pieces, he remained hardened. When we fought and screamed and cried, he contained himself. He was even-toned, calm, like the eye of a hurricane, but in that moment, he was the hurricane.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop!”
He brushed his hair aside. He was crying. I froze.
“Please stop,” I begged. “Please.”
Without looking at me, he disappeared to his side of the house and locked his door.
Siobhan’s clothing lay scattered across our front yard, crumbled over rocks and gravel like wilted flower petals. I crept around the yard, picking up shirts and skirts, and began folding them neatly into a stack. My stepmother emerged from her patio door. “Leave it,” she said. “Let Siobhan clean up this mess.”
But we were cleaning up a mess. We all were. When our mother left, she left a mess in her wake. Grief ripped through our lives. Her children wanted her, and when she didn’t want us back, we hated ourselves. Siobhan’s rebellion was no different than my desperately clinging to my stepmother’s approval. We had mother-shaped-holes in our hearts, and Siobhan was filling it the best way she knew.
I waited for my stepmother and father to leave for work. Returning to the front yard, I piled shirts neatly atop one another, tucking the sleeves and creasing them down the middle. I folded her shorts and pants into another pile. I returned the flimsy metal and plastic hangers to my sister’s closet, and I placed her clothes in three neat stacks on her bed, sitting beside them for an hour until she finally came home.
“How long have they been gone?” she asked when she entered the room. She was dragging a tattered blue suitcase and had flat boxes tucked beneath her arm.
“About an hour.”
She lifted the suitcase to her bed beside me and unzipped it. There were three smaller bags inside. She tossed them out and started picking through her clothing, throwing some pieces into the suitcase and others at me. “You can have that,” she said, “and that.” Her blond hair was in a messy topknot and she was wearing day old black eye liner, smudged from crying. She went to the wide maple dresser and rummaged through her make-up and hairpins in the top drawer but then gave up and started dumping them in with the clothes by the handful. As she stormed from one side of the room to the other, she talked, but with an air that told me she did not expect a response. “This will probably be your room now. I’m sick of this place anyway.” On her windowsill, she kept a collection of glass frog figurines each smaller than a credit card, and she started tucking them into the pockets of the suitcase two-by-two.
My eyes followed her every movement. “Where will you go?”
My sister looked at me for the first time since she’d entered the room. “I’m going to Mom’s.”
Our mother lived on the other side of Phoenix with a man I’d never met, her third, possibly fourth husband. We were never sure of what happened with the last, but she’d left in a hurry, leaving most of her things behind. While Siobhan and I loaded her things into her hatchback, she answered the question that had been floating around my head. She and our mother had started seeing each other again a few weeks earlier. It did not surprise me. When our mother resurfaced, she always called Siobhan first. Even in her most uncommunicative periods, if any of us knew anything about our mother’s hidden life, it was Siobhan.
“Andrew and I come here sometimes,” she said as we pulled up to the house half an hour later.
It was a cookie cutter house in a new housing development on the west side of Phoenix. It looked exactly like the kind of house I had always imagined living in—normal. It was two stories, brown and beige. Everything from the stucco on the outside walls, to the cactus plants in the front yard was brand new. Instead of weird decorative walls and glass doors that you could see through, my mother’s house had a real door. Siobhan pulled a key from beneath a potted plant and she pushed the door open. It smelled like new paint. The shag white carpets were new too. “Take off your shoes,” Siobhan said, kicking hers off beside a shoe rack. The front door opened into a living room with vaulted ceilings and two giant ceiling fans that were spinning at a slow rhythmic purr, and then an open kitchen with a wide marble island and glass patio doors. In the back yard, the blue swimming pool sent shadows sparkling in a kaleidoscope against the black metal fence.
“How many bedrooms is this?” I asked as I followed Siobhan into the kitchen. Our mother wasn’t home. She was at work, but I didn’t know where. I knew only that she did medical filing, and now I also knew that she kept a hidden key beneath a potted plant to a large empty house.
“Five.” Siobhan strode around the corner and down the darkened hallway as though it were the most comfortable thing in the world. I peered around for a light switch, flipping one and then another before the hallway lit up.
At the end of the hall, my sister dropped her bags on a bed. I started to make my way to her, but halfway there, I noticed the pictures on the wall. Rows of two and three frames, lined up neatly. Family portraits, children’s photographs, school photos of three boys I had never seen. “Who are these kids?” I asked.
“Mom’s husband’s.” She didn’t use his name. We never used the names of the men in our mother’s life. They were gone too quickly to ever learn them. She waved her arm at the frames and walked past me headed back to the car. “Help me with the rest of this shit. I have to get you home before dinner.” My stepmother was planning to take me out for my birthday, and I wasn’t supposed to be here, on the other side of the city, in my mother’s house, where there were images of somebody else’s children hanging on the walls.
I went home and that night, just as Siobhan suggested, I moved into her bedroom. I took over her bed, her dresser, and the windowsill that she had once decorated with her frog figurines. I tried to forget the children on my mother’s wall, the boys who got to see my mother every day while I didn’t. The boys who got to hear my mother’s voice, eat her cooking, and maybe even get back tickles from her. I did my best to banish it from my mind. And I tried to forget my mother altogether.
