Lily was an accident. That’s what Mom and Dad said, when they broke the news to me and the brothers over second-time-around meatloaf and corn on the cob. An accident, as if they were apologizing for puncturing holes in the inflatable pool with the lawnmower.
Six months later they brought her home, small and hollering and getting pissed off every ten minutes at God knew what. As the oldest, at ten, I got to do the honors of changing her diapers every time she filled them up with that mustardy goop babies make. You know the kind. Looks like decayed squash and smells worse.
Me and Lily got along okay, though. Even after that time I burped her for thirty minutes and she didn’t so much as hiccup, until I went nose-to-nose with the squirt to see what the hold-up was, and she threw up right into my mouth.
Right into my mouth.
By the time she was two, I had her on a tricycle. Mom sat fanning herself on the porch, on account the air conditioning was busted that summer, and told me I was ten kinds of crazy thinking I could get a two-year-old to ride a trike. But Mom didn’t know Lil like I did. I got her to ride that trike, all right. Even to make vroom vroom noises that were cute as heck until Mom hollered for her to shut up. But Mrs. Brady across the street would smile and wave at Lil and give her lollipops and things, and sometimes she’d give me one too. “Now you keep an eye on that little dumpling, Ellie,” she would always say. And I’d say right back, “Yes, ma’am,” because Granny had taught me to be polite.
I wanted to teach Lil to throw a baseball, and climb trees. When she was old enough, I was going to sign her up for Girl Scouts and sign me up as den mother. I had a sketchbook filled with ideas for field trips and fundraisers enough to outfit a whole army of Girl Scouts, and none of it was that sissy stuff, either. It was all knots and lures and fire-making and things Mom called me ten kinds of crazy for.
But Lil didn’t seem quite into that stuff, yet, because she would always throw her baseball into the bushes and then command me to go after it. “Command?” I said.
“Yes, Ellie! I command you to find that baseball, because I am a princess. Didn’t you know I’m a princess? I’m the best princess and the beautifulest princess in the whole land!”
And all this from a three-year-old. Now what kind of three-year-old talks like that who isn’t gonna be class president and an ivy leaguer and then eventually somebody famous for being smart? So I crawled into the bushes and slapped the ball into her little royal hand and she laughed and commanded me here and there, little brat that she was.
“Why are you so fixed on this princess thing, anyway?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go camping?”
She just wrinkled the freckles on her nose and said “Princesses don’t camp! They sleep in pink beds in castles and eat candy all day long!” Then she ran off to Mrs. Brady for a lollipop on that trike.
I told her not to ride that thing when I wasn’t home. The boys were always racing wheelies down the hill or throwing rocks in each other’s spokes, and I wouldn’t have her caught up in that stupidity. And Mom didn’t really notice things like cars and stuff, so I just felt better if the trike was chained up when I was gone.
But that one night, I went to bring Lil in for her bedtime story and she wouldn’t come, wanted to sit on her trike and holler about unicorns and nonsense. Well, I’d gotten a D on Mr. Whitlock’s algebra exam that day, and seeing as to how I was already failing middle school in just about everything except gym, I was not in the mood for pet-ulance. So I hauled her princess butt into the house and tossed the trike into the carport, and when she asked “Are you gonna chain my unicorn up so she doesn’t run away?” I said “If it runs away then it’s a stupid unicorn and you don’t want it anyway.”
So I read her a story about some Indians hunting a wild boar, and this one Indian kid was smarter than the rest and killed the boar. Anyway, Lil sat there solemn as Sunday morning and when I asked her what she thought of the story she just said, “One day you’ll see them too, and then you’ll know.”
“See what, kid?”
“The unicorns. The castle. Oh, and my Prince Charming.”
“Right, kid. Whatever. Anyway, go to sleep.” And I turned off the light and tossed the Indian book on the floor and stomped out, because now I had to go and wonder how a five-year-old kid found out about Prince Charming and cared enough to invent one for herself.
That was the last time I talked to Lil, because turns out after I was asleep she snuck out and took the trike, and God I wish I knew what she was thinking. I guess probably she wanted a lollipop or else she got worried her dumb unicorn would run off after all. Anyway, they told me later that it was a guy coming home from the night shift at McDonald’s that hit her, and he wasn’t looking because he was in mid-yawn when it happened. They said it wasn’t his fault, but they took away his license and everything anyhow. I guess that was just because they felt bad, and Mom was screaming and raising Cain like it was her that got hit, and Dad was all ice and ashes and no good for anything.
That’s what they told me happened. But I knew they were wrong.
Because later on that week Lil came and woke me up in the middle of the night, told me it was time for the Sunrise Ceremony. I asked her what the heck she was thinking, taking the trike out at midnight, and she just put her little finger to her lips and shushed me. I followed her outside and sat in the wet dew grass while she sang and twirled and lifted the sun right up into the sky. And then what do you know but that dumb trike was a unicorn after all, and it came skipping out to have tea with us. By then the folks were waking up and I heard the usual hollering and weeping from Mom in the kitchen and not a peep from Dad, then the boys like a pack of hyenas hustling to the school bus.
I figured since I was failing and anyway, didn’t school teach you unicorns weren’t real? Why would I waste my time learning lies like that? So I sat with Lil and fed that unicorn the magic apples Lil gave me, and then she showed me her castle behind the tool shed. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how it had been there all that time and no one ever knew, but then I remembered.
“I used to live here,” I told Lil. “When I was littler than you.” And it was true, because I suddenly remembered I used to be a princess too, and this was my castle tucked in between the azaleas.
“Did you have a unicorn?” Lil asked, and I said no, that I had had a dragon, and she wrinkled her freckles and said how like me that was.
It was a couple of hours before they came and told me to come inside, why the hell wasn’t I at school? I told them to shove off, couldn’t they see I was busy with Lil, and Mom started crying everywhere and Dad sort of went twitchy.
They sent out some folks in important clothes, with ties and little pencil skirts, and they talked to me and I showed them the castle and the moat me and Lil were working on. “I wonder if you could find us a hose long enough so we can fill it up once we’re done?”
They said “Sure, honey, but don’t you know Lily isn’t there? She’s –“
And that’s when I started cussing my teeth blue and Mom turned red and insisted she didn’t know where I learned those words, and truth, I didn’t really know myself. But those folks in their expensive clothes left and me and Lil were let alone, at last, for a little while.
Lil showed me how to make a crown out of azaleas and we made necklaces too, and she said, “See, now you’re a princess again.”
I hugged her and told her I’d always been a princess, but I’d just forgot for a while. Eventually Lil said she was tired and she was going to sleep in the castle, but I was welcome to come and finish the moat tomorrow. So I went inside and ate some mac and cheese, remembering to put Lil’s in a container in the fridge, since it was her favorite thing for breakfast, always with ketchup on top. The boys got home and whooped and monkeyed around until Mom sent them all to their rooms, and she and Dad just stared at me while I watched TV for a while.
Next day the kid from McDonald’s came by and found me and Lil in the backyard. Mom and Dad had decided to let me stay home, and the folks they called up on the telephone agreed. I didn’t care. I had important work to do. Ankle-deep in a dry moat and sweating, that’s how the McDonald’s kid found me. When he came I realized I knew him, not by name or anything, but I recognized his face – all shrunk and sucked-in looking – from when we went through the drive-through. He usually worked lunch and I wondered why he had been working dinner that night. Maybe he had switched shifts so he could go to a football game or a date or something.
Anyway, he just kind of sat there for a while before offering to help dig, and I said sure. We dug for a while, until the moat was finished all the way around the castle. I was glad because the kid said he could see the castle plain as day, though I was little skeptical when he said how nice the drawbridge was, when I saw plain as bread there wasn’t one.
When we were done he dragged a hose from his house down the road, and I realized I’d seen him walking past our house sometimes, because after all we were neighbors. He hooked up the hose and we filled the moat, but it just drained out quicker than we could fill it. I said to heck with it, why do we need a moat anyway? A ditch will do just fine. So we sat in the grass and Lil romped around the ditch, making unicorn noises and chattering about the next project which was to be a garden.
The McDonalds guy finally asked me if it was alright he left, and I said okay. He kind of looked around, as if looking for Lil, and I told him she was right there sitting by me. He kind of nodded and said bye to her too, then he started off for the road. He stopped only once and said to me. “About Lily… it was an accident. I swear. An accident.”
Like he’d run his lawnmower over our inflatable pool or something.
END