This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.
In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.
* * *
Not long after the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.
The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.
“There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”
“But what about all this stuff?” I replied.
Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”
He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.
“Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.
“But, Joe . . .” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.
I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Joe said.
Slowly we climbed the creaking steps. I went immediately to my bedroom but paused in the doorway. Unlike the kitchen, this room was fundamentally changed: bed, curtains, stuffed animals, all different, and, strangest of all, in a corner stood a bubbling fish tank that glowed blue. I saw no board games, no tantalizing notebooks. I stepped inside my old room and watched the fish dart in a mindless dance. They were the same size as the minnows from the pond, but these fish were brightly colored with stripes and spots, and they moved faster, with less purpose. There was nothing for these fish to do, nowhere for them to go. They were trapped.
“Fiona!” Joe called from the hall. “Fiona! Come here!”
I found him standing in what had been our parents’ bedroom. This room, too, was unrecognizable, with glossy furniture set in odd places and a large abstract painting on the wall.
“I thought he’d be here,” Joe said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.”
“Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.”
The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.
And so we waited, standing in the middle of a room that no longer belonged to our parents. The air became heavier, the walls moved inward. I could hear Joe’s labored breathing and the faint tick-tick of a clock from another room. The moments lengthened and spun like a carnival ride. I chewed the inside of my cheek and waited for Joe to be finished. Everything about this made me light-headed, vaguely nauseous. Back then I didn’t believe that we would ever see our father again.
Without warning I began to giggle. The silence, the discomfort, the ache in my knees, the outright strangeness of it all. I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
“Joe—ooooh—” I held up my arms and wiggled my fingers. “Look, I’m a ghost Joe! Look!”
I moved toward him with arms outstretched. On my brother’s face, I saw an immediate deflation and a flicker of shame.
“Yeah, a ghost,” Joe said gruffly, and laughed. “Got you, didn’t I?”
The slam of a car door startled us both. There were voices outside in the driveway, then footsteps at the front door. Joe grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs and out the back. We were breathless and scared, both of us laughing as we made it through the side gate and across our old neighbors’ lawns and eventually home to the gray house.
I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his . . . I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his friends, his teachers, the girls. Even us, his sisters.
What did Joe want for himself? I never knew. It was only years later, after the accident, that I realized I had never thought to ask.
* * *
After the episode with Renee, it was ironic that a man in a car at last brought us salvation. The Pause ended because a man in a car slowed and stopped.
It was Renee, of course, who saw to it that Joe attended every baseball practice and every game. This was Joe’s fourth year of Little League. His progress in the sport was a rare orchid that we tended with careful watering, pruning, reverence. “Tell your mother Joe is doing great,” Coach Marty would say to Renee. “Tell her he’s one in a million.”
Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass. Surely we looked curious to passing cars: Renee striding forward with her solid, sure-footed step; Joe pristine in his baseball gear, bat slung over a shoulder; me with curly hair crazy in the wind, skipping beside Joe to keep up; Caroline wearing a long skirt, singing to herself, lagging behind. The trip took over an hour.