Someone played “I Got 5 on It” and they swayed and rolled their hips in a two-step motion, snapping their fingers.
From the corner of her eyes Penelope observed a group by what looked like the initial stages of a fireplace. A short thin girl lit a blunt. Her chest expanded as she inhaled and faint trails of smoke escaped from her nostrils. The kitten Penelope had handed her poked its head out of the pocket of the girl’s jacket. Penelope wished her mother could see how she spooned against her, safe and warm.
A guy, Eric, came on foot. He brought the coke. He poured the powder on the countertop and cut it with a credit card in short stabbing motions, and dragged the plastic over the counter to form lines.
As Penelope bent over, her hair grazed the lines. Eric gathered it in the nape of her neck, his hand hot against her skin. It felt sensual and Penelope used the middle part of an ink pen and snorted the dust, sucking it in so deep she had to take a breath to keep from fainting.
A guy came up to her and asked, “You’re the girl from that private school, right?”
Penelope didn’t answer. She felt her mood drop but honed in on the sense of surety that began to form as the coke kicked in. Soon the most thrilling phase of them all would begin—feeling physically overly competent without the awareness to restrain herself. That was Penelope’s sweet spot. Remaining there had proven difficult. Another line, another rush.
“What about the blood?” the therapist asked and took notes as if he wanted to avoid eye contact.
“What blood?”
Penelope remembered screaming let the games begin. She hurled a brick. There was a crash of glass in the front part of the house. A volley of stones followed, smashing glass, sharp fragments bouncing off the walls. That was the last thing she remembered clearly.
11
EDWARD
Edward often thought the objective of being a father was to keep Penelope from harm, like a little bird fitting into the palm of his hand. He had made it his duty to keep an eye on her, like a fragile creature sitting on a padded cushion, but he hadn’t thought any further than that. He hadn’t been prepared for any setbacks, had not expected bad things to happen to them. That’s what he thought of his family, a good family. Proper—a word Donna used.
There were random memories that stuck out, though he couldn’t remember her first day of school to save his life, but for some reason he remembered Penelope learning to tie her shoes. How persistent she was, folding laces into bunny ears, crossing and looping through and over, pulling a loop to each side. She did it with such determination and wouldn’t quit for anything.
So much about her childhood remained elusive to Edward. He had to admit he had watched from the sidelines. Every morning, he woke at the crack of dawn and glanced into Penny’s room to make sure nothing had caused the fledgling creature distress overnight. Burrowed within duvets and blankets she was invisible but he observed the shelves crammed with dolls touching at the shoulders, propping one another up. After a day working in the OR and catching up on charting, he returned to a home where Donna chattered on and on about parties, vacation homes, schedules for trips, and functions she had committed him to.
If Donna strived for perfection and social obligations, Penelope was determined to endlessly create her own world with the wooden people in her ghastly dollhouses. When they lived in Florida, Donna once had spent money they didn’t have on a wooden playhouse she had built in the backyard. When he saw the monstrosity, he wanted to tell Donna off but the same day Penelope cut her hand on a shard and he was called in to do the sutures. Donna had insisted on it, the nurses had thrown him sideway glances at her sheer panic and her insistence that Edward treat their daughter’s palm. He was taken aback by Penelope’s bravery. There wasn’t a tear when he numbed her hand and closed up the wound.
* * *
• • •
The question of a sibling had come up when Penelope was about three and just about every year thereafter.
“I’m not sure,” Donna said, “Penelope’s a handful. I’m so busy with everything, I don’t know if we should or not.”
Edward didn’t know what being busy meant. He only knew what he had experienced himself: a childhood home full of siblings and chaos, modest but happy Christmas mornings, and yearly trips to state parks.
Over the years, Donna’s running of the household had turned into a well-oiled machine: twice a week help came to pick up the house, and once every quarter the windows were cleaned and women in white uniforms dusted the chandeliers one crystal at a time. Paint was touched up once a year though he’d never seen a smudge on a wall, the exterior stonework got the pressure washer treatment and the chimney sweep was also a yearly thing. Caterers prepared even the simplest meals and his parents had more than once commented—never in front of Donna, though—how formal his life was.
Donna kept her distance from his parents. They never vacationed with them, never spent Christmas together, the most Donna made an allowance for was Easter brunch and an egg hunt for Penelope and her cousins. No one spent the night at Hawthorne Court; Donna always made reservations at hotels.
“They’ll be so much more comfortable in a hotel,” she said. “And Penelope tires easily. Let’s just all put our best foot forward and not step on each other’s toes.”
Once he insisted on a vacation with his parents and his siblings and their children but the planning got out of control and no one could manage to come up with a date that fit in everyone’s schedule and after dozens of emails and phone calls and being unsure about a place that could accommodate such a large group, he gave up. It saddened him, he wanted Penelope to know his family. Time had slipped away from them and they never got around to having another child and the thought of Penelope being all alone one day pained him. Before he knew it, Penelope was a senior in high school and he felt disarmed by the fact that he had missed it all. The challenge was over and there was no more input on his part.
He had never told anyone but he imagined opening his hand and flattening the palm and allowing the fledgling to scuttle off. Penelope had come to embody the image of a bird striking a window and slithering toward the ground. But those were thoughts that over time he learned to repress and from there on out he kept his fingers crossed.
* * *
• • •
There was no warning, no transition, no proclivity to violence. Then the vandalism at the construction site occurred. After Edward smoothed the waters with the builder and wrote a check, he demanded to know Penny’s reasoning but she just raised her shoulders as if his guess was as good as hers.
The next day, an envelope addressed to him arrived in the mail. It said Care of Edward Pryor in a cursive handwriting, jagged letters without any discernible style. He remembered thinking that it was an odd way to address a letter.