The Eye Unseen (5 page)

“Lucy, I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can. Now tell me which jeans are the most comfortable. Ones you can get long johns under and still fasten.” I held open her pants drawer and yanked out some denims.

She finally came over and helped. We shoved as many clothes as possible into the bag, found a flashlight in my room, and rolled up a blanket that we tied under the pack. While Mom sat in her room casting spells, or whatever her constant muttering produced, I snuck into the kitchen and loaded Brandy up with some food.

“I’m sorry, Luce.” Brandy wrapped her arms around me.

“No, Brandy, don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry you’ll be here alone with her.”

I stared at my sister. I had been in such a race to get her going that I hadn’t even considered this consequence.

“When she came home tonight I really thought that she had changed again. How stupid am I?” Brandy said.

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I reminded her.

“Yeah we have. We were born!”

“What else can we do?” I asked, still looking to Brandy for advice.

“Kill her?” My sister suggested, crying.

Despite the gravity of our situation, Brandy’s idea made me chuckle. Which in turn made me start bawling.

“Or is it too soon for that?” Brandy muttered, glancing at her watch.

I could barely hear her over our sniffling, Brandy’s words so inexplicable I knew I must have misinterpreted them. But Tippy jumped on the bed, joined us in a group hug until Mom yelled for us to come downstairs.

They left the house a bit past ten, Brandy bundled for a Canadian winter, Mom humming a hymn as she opened the back door.

When she spoke to me her black eyes forced me to look away. “You can sit outside with the dog.”

I held my hand out to Brandy, a last wave, a goodbye, a desperate attempt to drag her back inside with me.

“But don’t get used to it,” Mom snapped as she slammed the door.

My insides dropped as I bid my sister farewell.

*  *  *

Mom returned within the hour. I met her at the back door, helped usher in the bags from Menards, and set them on the kitchen table.

We didn’t mention Brandy.

Just like that, my sister was gone. Erased. Eradicated.

Escaped.

Mom lilted about the house, singing to herself, petting Tippy, occasionally letting out a muffled chuckle. Once when she laughed I caught sight of her eyes and instantly felt her claws reaching through my back to rip out my spine.

I wondered if Brandy had actually left the area. What if Mom had hurt her? Could she be in the cornfields somewhere between here and town? Would she run immediately to some authority figure and let them know I was left behind? That France was simply the confines of these walls and Mom’s dwindling grasp on reality?

My heart deflated. Brandy was proud and kept our family secrets to herself. She had too much loyalty to Mom. She would never turn her in.

When Mom ventured back outside I put Tippy in my lap and prayed. For some reason I felt dirty inside, whispering to God. Talking behind Mother’s back, the fear crawling along my skin as though I was covered in thousands of scorpions. But Brandy needed help, and I fretted that she didn’t have the strength to ask for herself, let alone me.

While I loved my sister, she had never understood the gravity of my situation. Because she had survived a few whippings and knew that eventually the bruises healed over, Brandy ignored a lot of the badness in our house. She went to school but never revealed our dirty secrets. Even at church, when she left for Sunday school or youth group, she could have suggested that someone look into my unexpected trip to Dad’s.

My sudden visit with a father who didn’t exist.

Brandy was hot headed. She would be freaked out and fuming, concentrating only on herself and the dilemma her birthday had created for her.

For us.

I listened while Mom installed the locks. Stood ramrod straight, staring out the open kitchen door, Tippy at my feet. My fists flexed open, closed. Mom crouched outside, hanging onto the brass knob, the door a giant eye exposing the moon-drenched yard.

I stretched my fingers. Held my breath as the wind strode in to caress my hair, the fragrance of autumn filling the kitchen. Looked at the cornfield. Dared not look at my mother.

My legs twitched, and I could feel myself making a run for it. Grabbing Tippy by her collar and yanking her into the curve of my arm. Slamming the door with my right hand as I leapt over the threshold, knocking Mom backward and onto the concrete. My head start would be small, but my agility and speed would nurture it. 

Over the sidewalk, into the backyard. Past the shed and old swing set. Into the corn. Into the darkness.

“Done!” She said, curbing my getaway before I ever took a step. Mom checked her handiwork, then walked around me without a word to fix the front door.

I didn’t move. The slight hope that I could always run while she was at work shattered as Mom pounded her way around the downstairs, nailing the windows shut, changing all of the locks. Installing new ones on the outside.

Thwarting any escape.

My stillness became stiffness and even Tippy begged me to move, jumping against my legs before attacking her water dish.

“It was a great party,” Mom said after completing her chores. She gripped the hammer tightly, the look on her face daring me to give her an opportunity to use it.

“Yes, it was lovely. I think we all had a good time.”

*  *  *

I jumped from bed, terror taunting me from sleep. I flipped over and encountered Mother, sitting by the edge of my bed, her eyes red and alive with an energy that made me want to scream.

Her fingers stroked the wooden hammer handle, her knuckles pale as the moonlight that seeped under my curtains. Tippy laid beside her, cuddled against her thigh. Still trusting the woman who had fed her for the past six years.

My eyes moved from dog to woman and I held my mother’s glare.

“God loves you,” she said, standing. “Try not to forget that.”

She left my room but not my head. Her face decorated my dreams. Each time I awoke it was all I could do not to roar and break the windows so I could flee the dreadful house.

God might love me, but someone else loved Mom for sure. Someone whose name was so horrid that I dared not even think it.

Joan

You were supposed to be my miracle baby.

Alex and I had planned to have another child. In fact, we had been trying for months.
Ovulation
became the code word for wanton sex, the lust we had for one another quelled only by our love for Brandy. If she was awake we would entertain her with a video tape and run off to the laundry room for six minutes of intense stain removal or, if we could hold off until nap time, twenty minutes of insanely quiet love making in our own bed.

His parents had passed away when Alex was only eight. He had bounced through the foster system until the state emancipated him at seventeen.

My husband valued family, wanted one of his own to cherish. I simply wanted to be surrounded by Alex. If that meant having more children who looked and laughed and told horrible knock-knock jokes like he did, then I was all for an enormous clan. Four kids with his chocolate curls? Glorious. A dozen, their hazel eyes shifting from brown to green, just like their dad’s? Nothing would have made me happier.

“I drove by the cutest place today. Three blocks from a park, nice sized back yard, two car garage.” Alex told me one afternoon when he returned home from work.

“Yeah? How much?”

“Don’t know. I wanted to make sure you liked it, too. How ‘bout I take you and the kid to dinner and we can check out the neighborhood on our way home?”

He wanted my opinion, but I could tell by the flicker in his eye that his mind was made up. Alex had great instincts and often made life-altering decisions on his gut feeling alone. I could tell that this was one of those occasions.

“Which school district?”

“Hammond. Which, I don’t have to remind you, is the best!” He dipped me so that I was facing Brandy and left me hanging backward while our daughter smeared peanut butter on my mouth with her kiss.

When Alex lifted me back up he licked my lips. “No jelly, Brandy?”

“Dad!” She ran over and clung to his legs.

“Good to see you, too, Pumpkin!” Alex let go of my arms and reached down to pick up his little girl. “I think you got prettier while I was at work today.”

“Of course I did,” Brandy announced, and we all laughed.

My heart melted, watching the two of them together. Brandy resembled her father so much that I often wondered if I had anything to do with her creation at all. Watching my daughter’s eyes, I knew that she idolized this man almost as much as I did.

Almost.

We were a family full of promise back then, our house alive with the anticipation of growth and the strength of togetherness.

At that moment you might have been a shimmer in my eye. Just being in a room with Alex made me all fluttery, my belly doing flops when he held me, my breasts so tender from his touch that I constantly felt pregnant. My husband used to tease me that we should buy stock in EPT, I purchased so many of the pregnancy tests.

I waited for you. When the world crowded around me, when all was black and I could barely rise from bed, I longed to join you in your watery tomb and watch you develop into another little Alex. You could have been my miracle. You could have saved me from the sorrow, as it pressed in.

Instead you were a leech on my life. Cumbersome and relentless. An incessant reminder of all that should have been, but never became. Sucking the life from my every bone as you grew and thrived.

Lucy

Silence startled me, at first. I whistled a lot and talked to Tippy while I worked, but once my mother came home and retreated to her room even the dog refused to make noise. The house was chilling. A tomb. I jumped each time a fly passed.

During dinner Mom often discussed her work at the bank or the issues in town, how the flooding in Iowa would have ripple effects on the local economy.

She spoke as though I were one of her colleagues, issued her daily robotic recitation of polite conversation. 

“So how does that affect the price of gas?” My questions were scholarly, impersonal, a vehicle to carry her conversation forward. Although I didn’t understand her motives, I cherished any time we had together that resembled normalcy.

“It really shouldn’t. But in today’s market….” I listened intently, eager for words to fill the void that surrounded me.

In Brandy’s absence, Mom and I had become civil. We did not joke, hug, or express much concern for one another, but the beatings stopped, and each night we ate at the kitchen table like two strangers paired up in a cafeteria.

My sister became one of the topics we never discussed. One Sunday afternoon Mother slid all of our family photos off the walls, the dust outlines ghosts of the antique frames that once decorated the living room and stairway. The naked markers orphaned me. I sat on the landing, Tippy curled in my lap, my stomach churning as Mom carelessly dropped our pictures into the garbage can.

Brandy and me with the Easter Bunny when I was three. Our hair long and perfectly combed, the dresses Mom made identical except for size. My sister had her arm wrapped around me, protectively. I remembered being terrified of the giant rabbit. In the picture you could tell I was trying hard not to cry, not to disappoint Brandy with my fear.

Mom and Brandy when Brandy was a baby. Mom’s face beamed. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her so ecstatic.

Dad at his high school graduation. I had spent hours studying his shaggy haircut and toothy grin, trying to find myself in him. To see if, just maybe, some bit of Dad swam in my cerulean eyes, or if he was the model for my rather pointed chin.

My sister had the faintest memories of riding Dad’s shoulders at a summer parade, streaking through the yard while he sprayed her with the garden hose, his soothing voice reading to her as she fell asleep. How many times had I imagined myself in her place, feeling the warmth of this man I had never met but through her fragile thoughts?

The three of them. Before Dad died, before I joined the ranks. Everyone smiling, Brandy forever caught with her mouth open during a fit of giggles. Mom pressed under Dad’s chin, her head balanced against his neck, Brandy held tightly on her lap. Although it was a lovely picture, it had always made me feel misplaced. I was forever on the outside, looking in at this happy family. I could put my finger on the dusty glass and touch them. But I could never be them.

Glass crashed as the frames stacked up. Mom didn’t even hesitate as she pulled down the black and white photos of her parents, the grandparents I never knew, her own baby pictures.