Farthest House

3

3

When they left, no one imagined six years would pass so quickly. Willow lived in Omaha with hardly any knowledge of family outside of Papa. And me, Amelie-Anais, the ghost of her great aunt. I was the one Papa called imaginary each time she spoke of me, until at last, she quit mentioning me, though she often sensed me standing over her bed at night, soothing away tummy aches and restlessness. She moved me into ever lower regions of consciousness, but I never left her.

On a May morning in 1966, she woke from a night of especially vivid dreams. Her right shoulder blade felt bruised from having spent another night on the hardwood floor, but she lay watching the sunlight stream in through her bedroom windows. Tiny dots of red, blue, green, yellow. Already she had an acute sense of color.

A faint sound grew and overtook her fascination with the bright motes. With a start, she realized the vibrations rivering through the floorboards came from boot heels striking the polished wood in the short hallway. Papa. She scrambled to her feet, and using both arms—even the weaker one she didn’t like—she grabbed up her blanket, pillow, and last of all Doll, shoveling them onto her bed. Falling onto the heap, she shut her eyes as tightly as she could and fought to keep them closed. Papa frowned when he caught her sleeping on the floor, and his frowns went into her mouth and down to her stomach and stayed there a long time.

When the sound said he’d entered the room, she peeked with one eye to be sure he saw her in bed. Now she could be awake, and she yawned and stretched and smiled at him. Her smile faded when he gave her only a distracted glance, only half his attention. He went instead to the wicker basket holding her clothes, moving the easy way she wanted to move, but not coming to her bed to ask her about bed bugs or to lean over and kiss her cheek with his whiskery face, maybe even to swing her into the air. He dropped a knee to the floor before the basket and began picking through her clothing. Watching him, Willow remembered what she’d seen the evening before, and her stomach began feeling saggy and heavy. Was he still so sad? She scooted off the heap of her blanket, kissed Doll, and hurried to stand beside him, aching to have him tell her everything was all right. “The bedbugs didn’t bite me.”

“That’s good.”

He hadn’t turned to her, and her cheeks pinked in determination. She stood still, taking in his every movement. The basket he rummaged through sat beside an empty and never-used clothes dresser with yellow-duckling handles. That piece of furniture, like the white curtains, the yellow rocker, and the wallpaper—hundreds of baby ducks, all with one foot in the air—was the work of Jeannie. A woman she’d never seen. A stranger Papa said was her mother. He didn’t use the dresser, Willow knew, because like the photographs of Jeannie hanging in his room, it made him close his eyes and take deep breaths.

He lifted her favorite pair of pants, the ones the color of a ripe apple. At least they were that red the summer before when they hung over her shoe-tops. They only touched her anklebones now, and matched the red-but-not-red color of her lips.

One of his discarded T-shirts served as her nightgown, and she lifted the cotton over her head and twisted out. Standing beside him in her Friday panties on a Saturday, she ached for him to turn, face her, and smile in a way that told her she was pretty, maybe even as pretty as her best friend in kindergarten, Mary Wolfe.

He looked over the front of one shirt and then another.

Waiting to be noticed was too hard, and Willow grabbed her stomach, pinching her skin to try and make an outside hurt bigger than her inside hurt. The outside hurt she could stop when she wanted.

If I could have pulled Julian aside and scolded him, just as I’d done when he was a boy, I’d have done so. He never let his eyes really see her shoulder when he helped her dress or when she sat naked in the bathtub. Did he suppose she didn’t sense his aversion? She knew he loved her, though. She knew because she’d ridden his shoulders and listened to his thoughts since before she could walk. At first, her arms had been so short she needed to stretch to wrap them around his forehead, his sweat filling her palms on hot days while he held her with one big hand low on her back, and with the other hand he folded laundry, washed dishes, and picked groceries from store shelves. She’d often napped sitting on his shoulders, one cheek and one ear on top of his head, his thoughts mixing with hers. Even awake, watching him walk across the room, or smoke a cigarette, the words in his head mostly said he loved her. Sometimes, they said things like she’ll suffer for her shoulder. Leaving her own thoughts and sliding into his, she first heard directly from him what he never wanted her to hear at all: She needed to be “fixed.”

Standing beside him now, she wouldn’t let herself think about sad things; she’d think about things that matched. Her favorite game was “Memory,” where small playing cards, each with a different, brightly-colored object, were turned over two at a time until matches were found. Those cards she got to keep. Bits of winning and order. Things fitting together and making sense. Even if her mother was dead.

She swayed, leaning her weight onto one foot and then the other. Her and Papa’s bodies matched and didn’t match. They had the same dark brown hair, though he had a few white hairs by his ears, and they had the same green-blue-brown eyes. Mostly though, their bodies didn’t match. She didn’t have the thing she once peeked into the shower and saw hanging off him from out of a mitten-sized patch of fur. (Mary Wolfe was right—boys did have ding-dongs.) But the main reason her body didn’t match his was because his back went straight across. Both his shoulder blades stayed inside him and as flat as the floor she slept on. Her right scapula—a word she knew from her trips to the doctors—pushed out with a knot of bone the size of her fist and not even sleeping on the hard floor made it go away. The bone huddled beneath her clothes and made her right arm slightly shorter than her left. Her right hand was stupid, too, because it was still five when she was six. Girls could have yellow hair and straight backs and be pretty like Mary Wolfe, and girls could have brown hair and crooked backs and stupid hands and be ugly.

Watching Willow, I ached for her. I thought myself ugly throughout my childhood, even believing my scapula, gnarled in the same way, made me deserving of my uncle: The Beast.

Julian continued picking through her things, and because he didn’t say it this time, she did. “I’m growing like a weed.”

“Uh, huh.”

“We can go to a store.” Her left hand pulled the fingers on her right. “You can buy me a dress.”

“You wear a dress to school every day.”

She put both hands on her hips, letting all the ducks on her walls watch. “Papa. My school uniform is not a dress!”

Now he did look at her, an almost smile she didn’t like. She wasn’t making a joke. She wanted a dress. If he bought her one, she’d wear it every day. Mary had a hundred dresses. Willow let her hands drop. Mary had a mother­—that was the reason she had dresses. Jeannie, the mother Willow didn’t have, looked at her new baby and the thing on her new baby’s back, and died.

Five afternoons a week, as one of Willow’s many sitters napped or polished her nails, Willow sat rapt, her attention on a television show, I Dream of Jeannie. Then she practiced crossing her arms over her chest and giving a quick nod. When she got her powers­—she believed absolutely it was a matter of nodding and winking just right­—she’d make two things: first, she’d make herself pretty so Papa didn’t think she needed to be fixed, and then, she’d make a dress. But she wouldn’t make her mother come alive. She didn’t want that Jeannie; that Jeannie had left her.

She moved behind Julian and stretched over his back, wrapping her arms around his neck, as though he’d put a knee to the floor just to give her a piggyback ride. “How come your bones don’t poke?”

He rose slowly, so that she slid off without falling. He handed her the soft pants and shirt he’d chosen. Trailing a thumb down her cheek, he said, “Get yourself dressed now.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and moved to the window where he could stare out and think.

The room faded around Willow as she watched him, found his thoughts, and slipped in behind a curtain of his mind. Damn doctors, his mind said, can’t fix Willow. Couldn’t save Jeannie.

He had never raised his hand or even his voice to Willow, but hearing again how he thought she needed to be fixed made her eyes burn like skinned knees. She sank to the floor to put on her pants. If he only wanted a little girl who could sing and dance, she’d practice until she won a hundred prizes. He wanted her to be a pretty girl though, and she was trying, but no matter how hard she prayed, her fingers going around and around the rosary the kindergarten nun passed out, touching each bead and saying “Hail Mary,” then moving on to the next bead, “Hail Mary,” or how many nights she slept on the hard floor trying to push the bone away, she couldn’t make herself pretty.

Don’t cry, her mind said. Tears blurred her vision, and she stuck both feet into the same pant leg, rolled to her knees, and tried to stand. The tangle pitched her forward, her weaker right arm folding and even the left arm lacking the strength to catch her. Her chin struck the floor. Hot pain rammed up through her jaw, and one cheek scraped over a thorn of the basket’s broken wicker. She grabbed the hurt and felt wetness and warmth. “Papa! Blood!”

Julian wheeled around at the sound of her fall, his hands jerking from his pockets, his eyes anxious as he took quick steps to her. He stopped, his will forcing hesitation into his bones. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re hardly bleeding. Go wash your face.”

She heard what he said, and what he managed not to say: Today is the day. She’s gotta learn I can’t always be there.

She never lost a drop of blood without Papa making a fuss over her, and his rejection now, when bleeding proved she really was hurt, stung worse than her injuries. Running from the room and him, she wailed again, though not even her howling made him follow. In the bathroom, she grabbed the damp towel from the bar on the wall and pushed the cool wad against her chin. Still, Papa didn’t come. He wasn’t acting the way she wanted, and she’d cry until he felt sorry, came and held her. Or turned her upside down, ran her feet across the ceiling, and made her forget what she’d heard his mind say.

She climbed onto the footstool she used to brush her teeth, spied her reflection in the mirror, and sobbed along with it, slow tears running down her cheeks, meeting the smeared blood and turning a watery red. She noticed how her two cuts, her red eyes, and tears changed her face, making it a not-match to her usual face. Every new thing could be a sign telling her that the round bone grabbing ahold of her scapula had gone away.

For extra powers, she dropped the towel, folded her arms over her chest, and gave a quick nod. Satisfied, she let her gaze creep down her reflection, over her chin, her neck, and her chest with its two button-sized and cinnamon-colored circles. Her front looked the same, but she promised herself that her back could still be changed. Turning inch by inch on the stool, afraid of looking too fast, she pivoted to see her shoulder.

Her heart sank. The stupid bone that made her different and Papa sad, still clung to her.