After Annie

Bill hadn’t really realized what he was missing until he saw Annie dancing around the living room with Ali, singing, ‘I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.’ She’d looked over, laughing, as tired as she was, wet spots on her T-shirt where her milk had let down, it seemed out of sheer joy sometimes, and she had looped her arm around Bill’s neck and pulled him in. It was amazing, being part of that, but it made him understand that it was something he’d been missing without even knowing it.

Jenny passed her a package of cookies in a plastic wrapper and shook her head, hard. “Don’t tell her anything,” she mouthed.

That was Jenny all over, Ali thought. Ali’s mother had once said someone she knew was a locked door, and Jenny seemed like a series of locked doors.

When Annie told Annemarie that Ali had she had a hard time figuring out what Jenny was thinking a lot of the time, they’d both started laughing. They didn’t have that problem. Ali had realized a long time ago that they didn’t even speak in full sentences. Her mother would say, “Remember that time with the car?” and Annemarie would interrupt and say, “And the bottle broke?” They’d been talking like that one night in the kitchen and Ali had said, “Like you guys talk in some kind of weird code.”

Ali stood still and watched as Jenny’s father, backlit, wearing just boxer shorts, came in and closed the door. She could barely make out his outline, dark in the dark room, and for some reason he seemed enormous, more like a shape or a shadow than a man, and then as he came closer, into a divot of moonlight knifing through the bottom panes of the French doors, she saw only his bare feet, and they seemed monstrous, misshapen. […]

She ran up the driveway wishing she had her inhaler, and retraced her steps, running and thinking to herself, I have nowhere to go, where can I go? and thinking when she pushed through the line of trees to her backyard that she had never longed for her mother more. “What happened, what was it?” her mother would say, holding her close so she could feel her mother’s beating hear through her scrubs, and, “I don’t know,” Ali would say, pleading, “Mommy, tell me, please, I need to know, tell me what it was.”

All the adults acted like if you’d been told about something you understood what it was, what it was like. It was like someone saying if you described what mustard was you’d know how it would taste on your hot dog. See something, say something. Good touch, bad touch. But no one told you what to do if you weren’t sure what you’d seen, whether you’d seen the good touch, the kind that her father did when he was tucking her in at night, or the other kind, the kind that the adults all pretended they were telling you about without really telling you what it consisted of.

It felt final, somehow, Annemarie leaving the room to nurse, Kathy folding the dress carefully as Ali watched. It felt as though Annie, gone, had created a centrifugal force that was sending them all in other directions, to the edges of one another’s lives, away from the center. Or maybe Bill was just sad, leaving this house he’d never liked and always lived in and in which so much had happened, everything.