I spot both Mom and Dad hanging out on the new deck. Even with the sliding door shut, I know they’re fighting. I can tell because Mom keeps her face blank, neither accepting or denying anything Dad says. He’s told her before—one time when they forgot to shut the door—that it makes him fucking insane. I’m not supposed to know he says that word, or that the word even exists. I know a lot of things I’m not supposed to, mostly because Mom and Dad get angry with each other, and when they’re angry they’re loud, too.
But Mom keeps making the face Dad hates. She’s good at it. I’ve started practicing it in the mirror. Apparently making boys fucking insane is something that works; Mom always gets what she wants.
If I can catch them at a bad moment my own news might slip past, as they both try really, really hard to act like everything is okay. That’s something that we’re all good at. I flip back the lock and am about to jerk open the door, when I stop in my tracks, catching the last few words out of Dad’s mouth.
“—goddamn birthday party! There’s no reason why they can’t spend the night!”
“Really? Really?” Mom asks, dragging out the second one, like maybe Dad made a mistake by saying what he did. By the look on his face, he might be thinking the same thing. “Because we all know what happened last time our daughter had a sleepover.”
Yeah, we do. Us and the whole town. In my hand, my phone buzzes again. My fingers are sweaty, smearing the name on the screen: Tress Montor.
The last time our daughter had a sleepover. I touch my fingers to the side of my lip, where the scar still lingers, even though Mom has told me twice there’s a doctor who can make it like it never happened.
I already feel like a lot of things never happened, like the big chunk of time I can’t remember from that night at Tress’s. But I remember what came before, super well. Mom and Dad had been fighting out on the back deck, just like this. Outside, where they thought I couldn’t hear. But I am small and quiet, and I’d sat halfway up the steps, listening.
“If she wants to go to the Montors’ there’s no reason why not,” Dad said.
“No reason?” Mom shot back, her voice angrier than his, and louder. “It only has to happen once, Brandon, just once. One seizure and everybody knows that the Turnados have something in their blood, and who will marry her then?”
I squirmed on the stairs then, thinking about the fact that my dad had a real name, more than the idea of getting married.
“Married?” Dad’s voice rose to match Mom’s then, cracking. “Jesus Christ, she’s in sixth grade, April! And this isn’t the seventeenth century.”
“No,” Mom said. “But it’s Amontillado. You didn’t grow up here. You don’t know. People still talk about the Evans boy marrying that Troyer girl out of the kindness of his heart, knowing full well insanity runs in their family.”
“You sure it’s not the only one?” Dad bellowed, and then there was a smacking sound that made me jump, the hem of my nightgown fluttering with the movement. Mom had come around the corner, shaking her hand, freezing when she spotted me on the steps.
“What did you hear?” she asked, but all I could do was shake my head.
Like I did when I came home from school to find her on the floor, a froth around her lips. Like I did when I caught her taking my seizure medication, her mouth a tight line around the pill. Like I did when she told me, for the thousandth time, “Never let anyone know there is something wrong with you.”
I have become very good at pretending there is nothing wrong. So good that now, as I slide open the screen door, I put on the face I’ve been practicing. Mom’s face. Blankness, waiting for the other person’s reaction.
“Tress RSVP’d,” I say. “She’ll be here tomorrow for the party.”
“Okay,” Mom says in her fake, cheery voice, the one she practices as much I do the face. The door is almost latched again when Mom stops it with her foot. “Wait. Who?”
“Tress,” I say, keeping my voice light and airy, like hers. You can get away with a lot if you keep a polite tone. I’ve learned that from watching Mom. She bartered down the salesman at the car lot last week to a price that had actually made Dad hug her. We drove off the lot together, Mom looking in the rearview mirror at the salesman with a smile.
“He has no idea what hit him,” she said, then told me to set the air however I wanted it because we had dual climate control now. And heated seats. The clothes I was wearing still smell like a new car, leather and plastic and steel, shiny and bright. Clean. New. A lot of my stuff is new these days.
“Tress,” I repeat. “Remember her?”
Mom’s blank face folds a bit, into a scowl, and I know I messed up. I messed up because I sounded like Dad. And—like Mom said that night before I ran to Tress’s house—nobody likes a smart-ass.
But I hear Jackson Troyer really likes yours.
That’s what Dad had said, right before there was another sound that wasn’t a slap but something harder, something I didn’t want to know more about, so I ran. Went down the road and across the bridge and out into the night, like Tress and I used to sing—
Over the river and through the woods to my best friend’s house I go . . .
“Yes,” Mom says calmly now, eyeing me. “Of course I remember Tress. I didn’t realize that you’d invited her. I’m just wondering if it’s a good idea for you to see her. Won’t that be . . .”
“Difficult?” I fill in for her, using the word my therapist applies to just about everything.
Is it difficult for you to move past that night?
Do you have difficulties remembering because of the trauma?
How difficult is it to manage your panic attacks recently?
Would you say that your relationship with Tress is difficult now?
No. I’d say it’s gone, over, done with. And that’s not okay with me. I don’t know what happened to the Montors that night, but I know that my mom wants to pretend that it was nothing. That nothing happened and Tress never existed. But she did, and she still does, and she’s my friend, and I want her at my birthday party. Even if my mom doesn’t.
I stick my chin out. That’s Dad’s move and I know Mom doesn’t like it, but we’re past the part where we pretend to be polite.
“Yes, difficult is a good word,” Mom says, reaching to take my hand. I let her have it, but I don’t squeeze back. I just let my hand lie in hers, because difficult is not a good word.
“It won’t be,” I say. “Tress is my friend. Why shouldn’t she be at my party?”
It’s a dumb question. I know why. Because I was with her parents in their car the night they disappeared, and I haven’t hung out with Tress since then, even though it’s been months. Mom and Dad said we couldn’t really talk to each other because there was an open investigation, and we were both witnesses. Everybody wanted to make sure our stories were kept straight, that we didn’t end up “muddying the waters” by conferring with each other.
But, like the investigator who talked to Mom explained, I’m a witness, but only kind of. Technically I was there when something happened to the Montors, but whatever it was, I seized right before it happened. I was there . . . but not there. I was in the car, and then I was on the bank by the river, my nightgown covered in mud and pee, crying because someone carried me there but then they left. I was alone, and I was cold, and I was scared.