"What the hell are you doing?" Eliza cried the way someone might when spotting a cutter edging a blade into the flesh of their forearm.
Sitting on the floor, feet tucked under her butt with her back straight and ridged, Linda's hands rested on her bare thighs. The only visible movements came from her fingernails, which periodically dug into her legs. Outside of Linda's stillness, nothing about her indicated a girl in peaceful meditation. Instead, her eyes appeared intently focused straight ahead (although her mind barely processed the light she took in), and her pursed lips and furrowed brow produced the look of a girl harnessing every ounce of strength she could muster. Then coming closer, Eliza noticed her baby sister's abdomen flinching under her oversized T-shirt as if electric charges were pulsating through her body.
The sliver of Linda's consciousness still residing in the Stapelton's living room recognized Eliza's presence and pulled her away from the latest horrific episode she'd found in the Sea of Souls. Linda's ability to punish herself had become a compulsion. Day after day, she continued to weave herself into the souls of the tormented, reliving humanity's most bitterly painful chapters. Desperately, she searched out and relived actual suffering. Taking in every moment of the pain she could endure, she forced herself to cling to the soul strands of humanity's most anguished for as long as possible. Today's destination proved particularly effective: The hours and days following the bombing of Hiroshima, as people burned beyond recognition, encountered their loved ones in still worse condition.
"Are you okay," Eliza tried again, kneeling and putting her hand on Linda's back. Drenched in sweat, strands of Linda's wet hair clung to the sides of her face and down the back of her neck. She barely moved at her sister's touch. "What the fuck's wrong with you? You're soaking wet. What are you doing to yourself?" Eliza asked, jostling Linda's shoulder.
Sensing her sister's concern, Linda's eyes rolled upward. As they did, surges of the pain and terror she was forcing herself to bathe in arced like an electrical current into Eliza, pelting her with despair and helplessness like a sandstorm of misery. Once Linda realized what she'd done, she pulled hard on her tether and came snapping back, recoiling into the world like the plug into a vacuum cleaner. She blinked hard and shuddered. "I'm doing my meditation," she said, staring blankly at her sister.
"I thought you said it made you feel good cuz you're sweating and look all freaked out," Eliza said, shaking her head, not knowing what had sent chills racing through her. Then, taking a closer look at her sister's eyes, she asked, "You been smoking grass?"
"No! What do you think; I'm like one of the freaks you hang out with?"
"Oh no, not my baby sister," Eliza laughed. "Why would I think that? Oh, maybe it's cuz you hang out with Titus Dwight, who's like, I don't know, the weirdest man on Earth. Now get your boney little ass upstairs and take a shower. I'll make us some breakfast."
Linda shrugged. Then, in a smooth, controlled motion, she rocked back onto her feet and stood up. Bending at the waist with only the slightest flex in her knees, she easily reached the floor to roll up her mat.
Albeit with a hitch in her step, Linda walked toward the stairs with unmistakable grace. Her mobility had become a point of pride, and Linda felt in her heart that she owed much of it to Titus and more so to Robin for teaching her to practice yoga.
She and Eliza had talked about her relationship with Titus and Robin. Eliza assumed the friendship stemmed from Robin's tutoring and figured people like Robin and Titus were probably the best thing for Linda. She knew someday that her funny little sister would be someone, a scientist studying the ocean or maybe the first woman astronaut – way more than a Metuchin Townie. And she figured people like Titus and Robin came closer to who she'd end up with than anyone else they knew.
Eliza had long believed her sister would be able to escape a life in their little beach town. The only thing that could hold her back was the undertow of their mother's negativity. Once in college, Eliza assumed Linda would free herself of Gloria's festering. Yet, as the weeks after Gloria's accident went by, she saw Linda getting worse, not better. Their mother and Arthur's deaths hung like a stone around Linda's neck, one she didn't have the strength to unyoke herself from.
"They're gone, Linny," Eliza said as Linda, her hair still wet from the shower, walked into the kitchen, "and ain't nothing gonna bring 'em back. And if it makes you feel sad or relieved, or if you think they're in a better place or whatever, there's one thing I know. You gotta get over it."
Linda looked around, acting as if she couldn't imagine why Eliza would say anything of the sort. Then, opening her mouth to protest, her feelings escaped under their own power. "It's just; I don't know, I want to feel something. I want to feel something for them."
"Why?" Eliza asked, handing Linda a plate of slightly burnt eggs and toast. "I mean, you can only feel what you feel, right? And messing up your life cuz you miss Mom and Artie is stupid. Linny, I ain't smart like you, but I think you're trying to feel worse than you do cuz you think you should or something."
Linda tried and couldn't answer. Her sister had already reconciled their mother's life and death down to its simplest terms, and she could manage nothing more complex than pushing eggs and ketchup around on her plate.
"Just promise me you'll try to get over it. If I can deal with her dying, you should be able to. She's the only real parent I had." Eliza said it so matter-of-factly that Linda nearly choked on the first bite of eggs she'd managed to take. Eliza looked at her sister's reaction laughing. "Don't tell me you've never figured this one out. It's not like when they met is some big secret. Dad's only told us the story like every day for our entire life."
"Well, I... I guess I just kinda figured it out. I didn't really think about it before," Linda said, shocked they were talking about it. "Have you ever, you know, told dad that you know?"
"Not in so many words; he'd probably flip out. But yeah, he's known that I knew for a long time; since I was like ten, I guess."
Sitting at the kitchen table where their mother played hand after hand of solitaire as her depression ebbed and flowed, they talked about growing up and how it had affected them: As they recounted the good and bad of being the children of Ed and Gloria Stapelton, Linda could see the invisible clouds of denial, guilt, and shame begin to dissipate. The simple act of acknowledging the taboos Gloria used to hold the family hostage placed them in individual boxes. Once safely contained, the forbidden topics lost their power. Eliza allowed Linda to see the Stapelton family demons as nothing more than ideas, showing her that once she looked at them, she could just shut the boxes, and the contents wouldn't pollute the rest of her life.
"Mom was an alcoholic," Linda said, not understanding as she said it, why it spilled out. Minutes before, she would've expected the walls to come down around her for merely mentioning it. Now it amounted to nothing more than the contents of one of the boxes, and she could look into it without fear.
"Yeah...," Eliza said, wondering why her genius sister would state the obvious. The extent to which Linda misunderstood her mother appeared enormous, and Eliza felt compelled to set her sister straight. "Linny, Mom had big problems. She blamed me for a most of 'em. She blamed Dad and her family, and yeah, she blamed you and Artie too. The one person she couldn't blame was herself. Let's face it, Linny, Mom was fucked up. But if you think of it like she was sick or something, it's not as bad."
Linda could still do little more than nod. She knew Eliza made sense. And the idea that her mother suffered from a disease made her feel better. It allowed her to look at the picture Eliza painted, sad as was, without the clouds that had dominated her life rolling back through the house.
Linda and Eliza sat in the kitchen for the rest of the morning. Their talking cleansed Linda. It provided a purification, and the effects were immediate. She started saying and feeling things about her family and herself she had always known but kept secreted behind a Chinese wall.
"So, do you feel better now," Eliza asked when their conversation started getting overly repetitive?
"Yeah, I guess," Linda said. "I mean, I knew most of this stuff, or at least I should've... Somehow, it was all so scary and made me feel bad. Now it doesn't, and I don't know why."
"Who cares why? Just feel better, okay," Eliza said, feeling like the big sister she'd always wanted to be. "Now, there's two things you have to do for me."
"Sure, what?"
"First, you gotta start going back to school. I know I'm no one to talk. It'd take some kinda miracle for me to graduate, but you're different. You're so smart you could probably go to college right now, and they'd pay you just to come."
Linda smiled, basking in the feeling that comes from a big sister's praise. "Well, I haven't been skipping school, not really anyway."
"You've been here nearly every day for six weeks. I'm pretty much an expert on skipping school, and it looks like that's what you're doing to me."
"Yeah, but I've been doing all the work. I'm real far ahead in most of my classes," Linda said.
"Well, since you don't understand how skipping school works, why don't you just start going again? Dad doesn't know how much you've missed and we won't tell him," Eliza said. "It's Friday, so you've already blown this week. Just promise you'll go back on Monday."
"I promise. It's getting kinda boring just sitting around here all day anyway. And what's the other thing?"
Eliza stood up and pushed her plate towards Linda, "Do the dishes. James is gonna be here any minute to pick me up."
_____________________________________________
From the moment Sharon's mother asked her to "stay home with your father," her days had crept at the pace of a martyr's steps. She assumed he'd expect some sort of advancement from where he'd left off in the summer. Still, her mind remained affixed on the notion she'd derived from talking with Titus: that she could absorb Linda's pain and sorrow by causing her own. And at the same time, she believed she'd be resurrecting the family her mother longed for. It would be all right, she persuaded herself, so long as no one found out. As long as she didn't tell a soul, and no one ever spoke about it, she could pretend it never happened.
Bob had played up his silent act all week, neglecting to so much as call home. Tick-tocking along to his own schedule, he filled his days with work and nights carousing in cheap bars and nightclubs around Providence. His malignity set Perrin adrift in an ether of denial. She filled her days by making a show of getting ready for her niece Franny's wedding. The stress clearly weathered her usual facade, and the cracks began to show. Twice Sharon noticed her mother leaving the bathroom, having obviously been crying, and she carelessly grabbed a hot pan one night, burning her hand. To Sharon, her mother appeared distracted, as if she were watching a terrifying movie she alone could see.
Sharon hadn't seen Linda all week. They spoke on the phone every night, and Linda would say she might come to school the next day. Then in the morning, Linda would talk herself into staying home. Finally, when Sharon got home from school on Friday, she told her mother she wanted to spend the night at Linda's. Perrin planned to leave for the wedding early Saturday morning. Applying the last dabs of her magical happy face, Perrin smiled, telling her daughter it would be fine, so long as she made sure to be home when her father arrived.
Letting herself in, Sharon barely recognized Linda's house. Gloria's wallowing kept her far too busy to clean or make much of a home. When all else failed, she often used the state of the house to jumpstart her misery. After her breakfast with Eliza, Linda cleaned the kitchen and kept going. Five hours and several bags of garbage later, a remarkable transition occurred. Linda had put away everything she could to give the house a sense of order. She'd swept and mopped the floors, vacuumed the carpets, chairs, and sofa, and wiped clean every surface within reach. A semblance of tidiness prevailed for the first time since Ed's mother passed. The permanent stains still stood out. A history of carelessness had left its mark on the couch, chairs, and rugs, and the distinctive black lines from cigarette burns scarred tables throughout the house; everything, though, was clean.
"Lin-Lin," Sharon called out over the sound of The Beatles blasting from Eliza's stereo. Poking around downstairs, she assumed Linda must've spent all week cleaning.
"I'm up here, in my dad's room," Linda finally responded as the last chord of Eleanor Rigby abruptly ended.
When Sharon walked in, Linda's condition added a layer of amusement to the shock. With her hair pulled back in a red bandana, Linda looked as if she'd applied the years of dirt and grime to her pants, shirt, and arms. She even had a perfect little smudge across one cheek.
"What are you doing?" Sharon asked between giggles.
"I just couldn't stand it anymore. So I started cleaning the kitchen, and I dunno," Linda said, looking around, feeling a little self-conscious.
"Yeah, and if you keep it up, my Mom'II come over and adopt you."
"I just couldn't... I mean, I just needed...," Linda stumbled. Then, with the fog of Gloria's oppression cleared away, she opened her mouth, and her feelings came out. "I didn't want it to be like when my mom was here. It's time I stopped acting like she's gonna walk back in the door."
Linda was better. The pain she'd been battling had vanished. Looking at her, Sharon believed no matter what the weekend held; it would be worth it. While putting the final touches on Linda's father's room, they joked, danced when a good song came on, and most of all laughed.
After cleaning, the girls headed to the kitchen and looked through the cupboards and fridge for something they could make for dinner. The lack of food in the house and their limited culinary skills left them settling on Spaghetti. They cooked up some hamburger meat and added a jar of Ragu. Then put some frozen vegetables in water on the stove, so when Ed got home, they could heat the veggies, cook the pasta, and serve him dinner.
Ed did a double-take walking into the house of his youth, wondering where or maybe when he just walked into. "Look at what you've done, Linny. I've never seen... well, the house hasn't looked like this since," Ed stuttered and stumbled. Then, finally catching himself, he bent over and kissed his daughter's forehead. "I can't believe you've done all this; it must've taken you all day. And do I smell dinner cooking?"
Linda, who'd cleaned herself up and changed, looked down at her feet, remembering Eliza telling her it would break their father's heart if he found out she'd been skipping school. "Well, I kinda didn't go to school today, but I'll go Monday. And I'm not behind in my classes or anything."
"She could miss the next four years and not be behind in math," Sharon joked.
"Hello, Sharon. Do I have you to thank for this too?"
"No, I just got here," Sharon said, giving Linda's butt a little pinch that made her jump toward her father, "it was all her."
Ed took his daughter by the hand and walked room to room, telling her how wonderful everything looked. As they ate, the girls' laughter brought a joy the house hadn't known in months. Ed enjoyed the meal as much as any he'd ever eaten.
Focusing on what Sharon had marveled at, he saw his daughter's spirit had returned. Linda's brown eyes shone as brightly as they had on her first day in the ocean. Ed didn't know how it happened or who to thank; he simply felt relieved.
Sitting on her bed that night, exhaustion grabbed ahold of Linda. Sharon sitting behind her, brushing her hair, goosed her when sleep began to win and her head tipped. The brush running through her hair, and Sharon's rubbing her back, relaxed Linda to the point where she stood no chance. Finally, she gave in and cuddled down. Sharon helped her out of her clothes, got undressed herself, and crawled into bed.
Through the dark hours of the night, Sharon spooned Linda as she slept, weighing it all out in her mind. On the one hand, Linda had undergone a near-magical resurrection; on the other side, she believed the piper still required his payment. So far, she'd merely accepted being placed in pain's path, the suffering restricted to anticipation and nothing more. She convinced herself, though, that withholding holding her side of the bargain risked casting Linda back into the morass. Just as her algebra homework so often did, the equation overwhelmed Sharon. But even at the end of her days, she would contently sit in the field of her grave, positively believing that her actions had absorbed Linda's pain. It was an exchange she never questioned the fairness of.
Getting up quietly the next morning, Sharon left Linda asleep in bed. Then, after writing a note and giving Linda a gentle kiss, she rode her bike home. Perrin had already left for the wedding, so Sharon knew she'd be home alone for the afternoon. She pattered around nervously, watched TV, and took a long bath. Finally, just after she'd settled enough to enjoy having the house to herself, her father arrived.
"Daddy!" Sharon screamed, running towards the door and jumping into his arms. "I'm so glad you're home; I missed you."
Even plagued by speculating what her father's arrival would mean, Sharon still missed him terribly. His disaffection only strengthened her visceral draw. For eight months, he'd shown virtually nothing resembling love or affection. Now, starved of his attention, she blindly accepted anything he offered.
"Now that's the kind of girl a man likes to see when he comes home," Bob said, holding his daughter at arm's length, admiring her. "Since your mother isn't here, I thought we'd go out. We can go to the Middleton Inn. We went there once before, remember."
Sharon remembered. She believed herself ready and ran upstairs to get dressed. Putting on something she thought looked grown-up, she pulled her hair back in a fancy barrette and applied a little mascara and blue eye shadow that she'd swiped off Eliza's dresser the night before. After one final check in the mirror, she took a deep breath and walked out. Coming down the stairs, though, all her primping proved inconsequential. Bob noticed her miniskirt, tight sweater, and nothing more. Life at home might be turning around, he thought, and all his sacrifices would be worth it.
Driving to dinner, Sharon sat in the middle of the front seat of her father's new Cadillac. Resting his hand on his daughter's knee and periodically running it up her thigh, Bob told her she could put whatever she wanted on the radio, something he usually never allowed. And to Sharon's surprise, he even knew the songs her favorite station played. Telling her, "I know lots of young people; I'm not quite the old man you think I am."
Just as he did the last time they were at the Middleton Inn, Bob encouraged his daughter to take sips of his scotch and ordered her a glass of wine, which she drank straightaway, then asked for another. "You're not such a cheap date after all," Bob said. "I hope you're worth it."
Sharon didn't understand his comment. It made her feel dirty all the same, and she gave a coy shrug.
"Well, just don't tell your mother," Bob said. "The last thing I need is her yapping at me about giving you a little glass of wine."
"Oh Daddy, don't be so mean," Sharon said, stepping to her mother's defense. "Mommy's not like that."
Bob continued making nasty comments about Perrin throughout the evening, harping about his wife getting too old for him. Wondering aloud when he saw a woman in a short skirt, why his wife didn't dress like that; answering for himself that the public shouldn't be subjected to her varicose veins (a condition so minor on Perrin that a person would be arrested searching for it). Sharon tried defending her mother, stopping after realizing that, like with any bully, her protests made matters worse.
By the time they got home, the effects of the wine and the sips of her father's drink had put Sharon well past tipsy. The dread she'd carried for the past few days had changed, morphing into a detachment she wore like a cloak. She no longer cared what her father did. His abuse had built to inevitability in her mind, and she couldn't imagine the act itself any worse than the anticipation.
Sharon went upstairs, and even though February's cold hung in the air, she came back down wearing a thin summer nightgown – a confused little lamb, self-readied for the slaughter. Walking into the living room, she found her father pouring himself another drink. "Do you want to come upstairs and tuck me in," she asked a little above a whisper, watching as he slammed back three fingers of scotch and snubbed out his cigarette.