Chapter Text
i.
The front doors open wide, spilling children onto the pavement like so many lost baby teeth. Her father is waiting for her at the pickup corral, which is unusual. It’s been Gabrielle, every day, since the second day of kindergarten, but there’s her father, like someone scribbled him into a drawing at the very last minute. He’s talking to Ellery’s mother, and something she’s saying is making him laugh. He looks out of place and too formal in his work clothes, stiff and shiny where Ellery’s mother is cozy and soft. He waves to Miri, and Miri offers a small, confused wave of her own in return.
“Hi, bunny,” he says. He puts an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close. “How was school?”
“Fine,” she answers into his hip bone. “Good.” She lifts her head up. “I only missed one on my spelling test. Delight.”
“Really? Delight? How strange,” her father says. He shepherds her into a waiting car. “Hey, see you later!” he calls to Ellery’s mother. “Thanks for the recommendation.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is it strange that I missed delight?” Miri asks.
“Ah! Well, I figured you’d spell that word correctly,” he says, buckling Miri in, “given that you are one.”
He thumbs her nose, and Miri giggles. “Why’d you pick me up?” she asks.
His hesitation before he answers is so brief that Miri almost, almost, doesn’t clock it. “I can’t take my favorite daughter--my smartest daughter, my prettiest daughter, my most bestest daughter--out for some Wednesday afternoon ice cream?” Her father places a hand over his heart and pouts. “Miri. Miranda. You’ve wounded me. I’m wounded.”
Miri giggles harder. “I’m your only daughter,” she says, which is always her reply when they play this game. She leans against his arm, which is comfortingly warm and solid.
They go to Sedutto’s. Her father orders her two scoops--one peanut butter crunch, the other pretzel caramel swirl--and himself a scoop of butterscotch praline. They find a table, then trade their bowls for the first bite, as has been their custom for as long as Miri can remember. It’s September and getting cooler every day, but it’s not too cold yet for ice cream. Miri and her father would argue it’s never too cold for ice cream. It’s their favorite food.
“Miri,” her father says.
Miri swallows her bite. “Yeah?”
“I do have something we need to talk about,” he says.
His voice is all deep and worried, like when he and her mother told her that Mondale was very sick and it was time to let him go. The peanut butter crunch sticks in her throat.
“What is it?” Miri asks.
Her father sighs. “Well,” he says, “I actually wanted to talk to you about--about getting a new nanny.”
Miri’s answer is prompt and firm. “No thank you,” she says. She takes another bite of ice cream. “I don’t want one. I want Gabrielle.”
There’s a look in her father’s eyes that makes Miri’s chest hurt. “Honey,” he says, “she--ah. How should I….” He trails off before trying again. “Remember in Mary Poppins, when Mary has to go away at the end because Jane and Michael are happy enough? And other families need her?” he asks. “It’s…sort of like that.”
His smile is wobbly. “Sometimes nannies have to go and…and take care of other little girls.”
Miri shakes her head. Grown ups can be so silly. “No, Daddy,” she says. How is it so obvious to her and not at all to him? “She takes care of me.”
“Miranda,” her father says. He holds her free hand. “Gabrielle isn’t your nanny. Not anymore.”
An ambulance races by and its siren makes Miri and her father both jump. The ice cream in Miri’s mouth goes sour and she spits it out into her napkin. She pushes her chair back from the table. “I don’t believe you,” she says. He’s stupid. They’re all stupid. Gabrielle took her to school this morning. She took Miri to school and she’s waiting at home and no one else in the entire world knows what they’re talking about.
Her father’s brow crumples. “Miri, sweetheart,” he tries, but she talks over him.
“Liar,” Miri says. “You’re a liar, you’re lying, I don’t believe you! I’m not listening!”
She closes her eyes and slams her hands over her ears. “You’re lying, you’re a liar, you’re lying, you’re a liar,” she says, her own voice too loud inside her own head. “Liar, liar, liar, liar!”
Her father tries to take her hands from her ears but she smacks him away. “Don’t you touch me,” she commands. “Get off me. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. I hate you. I hate you. You liar. You’re never allowed to talk to me again, never, never, never.”
She crawls under the table and refuses to come back out. The few other people in Sedutto’s are staring but Miri doesn’t care. Eventually her father picks her up and carries her out to the waiting car. She kicks and howls the entire time. She hopes it hurts him. He deserves it.
ii.
Gabrielle is from Lyon. She can teach you the words to “Let It Go” and “The First Time in Forever” in French. She has brown hair that smells like oranges and long nails she likes to paint pink. She’s grown up, but not a mom. She can bake anything in the entire world, but her best is coconut macaroons. She can do all the voices when she reads Charlotte’s Web. She can clean a skinned knee without stinging it too much. Her hugs fix even very, very bad days. She uses heavy cream when she makes hot chocolate because that’s how it tastes yummiest. She can sing along to every song in The Little Mermaid. She knows special magic for making nightmares go away. She makes you lemon tea when you have a cold and presses a damp washcloth to your forehead when you have a fever. She holds back your hair and rubs your back when you throw up. She makes you say please and thank you and excuse me, even when you don’t feel like saying it. Her favorite color is yellow. Her favorite season is spring. Every time you draw her a picture she hangs it on her bedroom wall. She says, “Mon rayon de soleil; mon ciel étoilé. I love you,” every night when she puts you to bed.
iii.
When Miri gets home, Gabrielle is not there. Her bedroom is empty. Her clothes are gone. No note. No explanation. There’s nothing left, not under the bed, not even tucked away in the corners. Miri checks every spot. It’s like she was never there at all. Like she was an imaginary friend Miri made up some long ago, lonely afternoon.
Miri closes herself in her room and doesn’t emerge, no matter how hard her father tries. Her mother is working in Washington D.C. and can’t do anything at all. She does not complete her reading log, does not eat her dinner, does not brush her teeth. She cries until her eyes hurt and her voice is gone and her head is pounding. She cries until the light is purple and soft outside her window. She cries until tears stop coming and all she can do is shudder and gasp.
She must fall asleep because her father comes in to help her get into bed. He takes off her shoes and tugs her pajama shirt over her head. He pulls back the covers and tucks them in tight around her. He kisses her forehead and wipes her eyes.
“I love you,” he says. He rests his hand on her shoulders. “I’m so sorry, bunny.”
Miri rolls onto her side, away from her father. “I don’t want you,” she says.
The words fall between them like a sword. They shift something in the air. Her father pulls his hand away. The mattress moves when he stands back up. He turns on her nightlight when he leaves, but he doesn’t say good night.
iv.
Miri’s new nanny is Annabet. She and Miri’s father pick Miri up from school the next day. She bends her knees so she’s at Miri’s eye level and smiles at her.
“Hi, Miri,” she says. “I’m really happy to meet you.”
“No, you’re not,” Miri says. “I hope you die.”
v.
It hadn’t ever really occurred to Miri that people can just go away. Disappear. She knew, of course, that people leave; her mother, in particular, does that often. Mostly for work, but not always. Leaving, though, implies that there will be a return. Miri leaves school every afternoon, her father leaves for work every morning, Ellery leaves to go home after a playdate ends, but that’s just the natural order of things. Leaving, to Miri, has always been nothing more than the intermission during a ballet. Eventually the lights will flash and the show will resume, exactly where it left off. Like it’s supposed to.
But now that Miri knows that people go away, forever, she can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like when she got that train set for Christmas and the track was a circle. When she and her father finished setting it up all the train did was go around and around and around, to nowhere, until you got bored and turned off the motor. Miri’s brain feels like that train set, only without the switch. She’s in the middle of reading groups and she thinks, what if Mommy never comes back home from Washington? She’s solving an addition problem and she thinks, what if Daddy dies in a car crash on the way to work? She’s climbing the monkey bars during recess and she thinks, what if I wake up tomorrow morning and everyone I’ve ever met is just…gone?
vi.
She decides to take matters into her own hands. She is, she thinks, powerful enough to keep the most important people in her life safe, if she’s very deliberate about it. Her mother and father, certainly. Uncle Roman. Ellery. She’ll have to work her way up to Uncle Kendall, Uncle Connor, Aunt Willa. But she’ll get there. It’ll just take practice.
The stairs in the creative arts wing at school are perfect for it. If she asks to use the bathroom right at 10:40 the halls are mostly empty. She starts at the top step. Jump down to the next one. That’s the easiest to make without falling, so that’s for Ellery, who needs protection the least. Jump over two steps for Uncle Roman. Three steps for her father. Jump four, the hardest and most important, for her mother. If she falls once she has to start over from the beginning. If she falls more than once she has to also pinch her forearm three times, each one hard enough to leave a mark.
Every time she’s gone long enough that her teacher starts taking away recess minutes as a consequence. She takes great pains to hide her perpetually bruised knees.
vii.
The first time Miri forgets how to breathe is on a rainy day during indoor recess. She and Ellery are playing Uno, and Miri tries to inhale and discovers she just…can’t. It’s like whatever trap door that opens to let air in and out has been closed and locked. Prickly heat washes over Miri. Her palms go clammy. She grabs fistfuls of her sweater and twists them.
“Miri?” Ellery says nervously. “What’s wrong?”
Miri can’t talk. She can’t breathe. She grabs Ellery’s wrist and holds it so tightly that Ellery squirms away in pain. She wheezes, her eyes wide and bulging. Sweat drips down the back of her shirt.
“Ms. Bencik!” Ellery shrieks. “Ms. Bencik, help, please, there’s something wrong with Miri!”
Miri and Ms. Bencik ride to the hospital in an ambulance. Miri, her face hidden behind an oxygen mask, is scared enough that she lets her teacher hold her hand. She closes her eyes and imagines she’s on Stuffed Animal Island, the place Gabrielle used to describe after Miri had a nightmare.
She hears her mother before she sees her. The sharp click-clack of her high heels. Her frightened, angry voice as it bounces down the hospital corridors. She hears her father, too, a few paces behind her mother. He sounds more scared than he is mad, and maybe a little like he’s crying.
Her parents sit on either side of her bed, like the big lion statues at the New York Public Library. Miri’s mother holds her hand and strokes her thumb over Miri’s knuckles. “Has someone been bullying you, Miri?” she asks. “Hurting you?”
“No, Mommy,” Miri says. “I’m okay. Honest.”
“Miranda,” her mother says. “If that were true, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Hey baby,” her father says, reaching for her. “You okay there, my gal?”
“You’re crowding her,” her mother snaps. “Miri, are you sure nobody’s been mean to you? Nobody’s…said anything?”
Someone clears their throat. It’s the doctor, standing in the doorway. Miri wonders how long he’s been there.
“Finally,” her mother says. “I want her taken to Presbyterian,” her mother says. “Now.”
The doctor raises an eyebrow. “Because?”
Her mother rolls her eyes. “Uh, because it’s fucking Presbyterian?” she scoffs. “I mean, please.”
“Siobhan,” her father says.
“Don’t start with me,” her mother hisses.
“Well, she’s actually being released; she’s cleared for discharge,” the doctor says. “It was, as I said, a mild anxiety attack, nothing more.” He clears his throat again. “Counseling is certainly recommended.”
“Uh-huh,” her mother says.
The doctor adjusts his glasses. “Perhaps,” he says, “for the entire family.”
viii.
The doctor who is not a doctor tells Miri to call her Jennifer. Her office is big and bright and full of more toys than Miri has ever seen. Miri sits down on a squashy red couch, Jennifer across from her, and waits.
“Do you like games?” Jennifer asks her.
“I like chess,” Miri says. “I’m learning how to play in school.”
“Would you like to play with me?” Jennifer asks.
Miri thinks for a moment. “Only if you don’t let me win. Sometimes grown-ups do that and it’s boring. I can win on my own.”
“I would never,” Jennifer says.
Jennifer’s chess set isn’t very nice--the field is faded cardboard and the pieces are plastic--but it’ll do. Miri picks white and Jennifer gets black. They get to work setting up their respective sides, neither of them speaking.
Miri moves one of her pawns to e4. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me questions?” she says.
Jennifer moves one of hers to f6. “About what?”
Knight to b3. “About my life and stuff,” Miri answers. “My parents said I’m supposed to talk to you about how I’m feeling.”
Pawn to c6. “You’re not supposed to do anything you don’t want to do,” Jennifer says. “At least not while you're here.”
Miri rolls her eyes and sends her pawn to d4. “I’m always supposed to do things,” she says.
Jennifer takes a moment to consider the board before moving her rook to b6. “You know how in school you have rules?” she says. “About what you’re allowed to say and do, and when you’re allowed to say and do it?”
Bishop to f4. “Yeah,” Miri says. “I guess so.” Admittedly she hasn’t been very good at following those rules lately.
“Well,” Jennifer says. She sends a pawn to a5. “In here, those rules don’t apply. There’s nothing you can say or do that would be wrong. It’s not that sort of place.”
Knight to g3. “You mean I can say anything I want?” Miri asks.
Jennifer moves her rook to b4, and Miri moves her knight to c3 before it can be captured. “You can say anything you want,” Jennifer confirms. Pawn to h6. “So, what do you want to say?”
Pawn to a3. Miri shrugs. “Nothing at all.”
ix.
The stairs stop working. Miri can feel the ritual losing its power. She still does it, she knows she can’t stop, but there has to be more. It was so stupid of her to think that this one thing could be enough to keep people safe and alive. Obviously it could never be enough.
She invents spin-and-clap. She uses chalk to draw an enormous grid on the playground blacktop. Four claps. Two spins, one in either direction. Three claps. Step in different squares; she feels her way into knowing which ones. The pattern varies. Repeat. She has to do it twelve times, and if she makes a mistake she starts over. It takes up all of her recess and requires a lot of concentration. After a few days Ellery stops joining in. After a week Ellery stops trying to get her to play at all.
Lining things up helps too. By size is okay, but color order is best. The plastic rainbow counting bears they sometimes use in math centers are perfect for it, and she gets in trouble with Ms. Bencik for trying to steal the tub to take home. She gets in trouble with her parents the Sunday afternoon they find she’s taken all the books off the shelves in her father’s study to rearrange them the correct way.
Her favorite, though, is writing. If she can get down every word someone says, exactly as they say it, that’s powerful enough to last a whole day at least. It can last up to a week if she doesn’t have to go back and correct mistakes later. She feverishly fills entire pages of her language arts notebook. Please be sure to write your name at the top of your paper. Shut up, Jacob, you’re so annoying. Do you want to come play at my house on Saturday? Remember, the main idea of a story is what the story is…mostly about. Very good. Are you afraid of spiders? We’re having stuffed peppers for lunch. This is boring. She stops turning in her seatwork. She’s too busy copying. It occupies every second of her time. None of the quizzes and tests she gets returned have stickers on them anymore. No more, wow! No more, great work! She doesn’t even miss the scratch ‘n sniff ones. She’s too tired to care.
x.
She stops being able to make it through entire days of school. Her brain is too loud and everything hurts. She’s in the nurse’s office by 11:00 or 11:30 more often than not, complaining of belly aches, sore throats, headaches, neck pain, dizziness. The ear thermometer always reads a perfect 98.6, but Miri sobs and begs until the nurse calls her mother or father, who always without fail demand that she be sent home if she’s not feeling well.
Annabet picks her up. She tucks Miri into bed with a heating pad and tea and leaves the humidifier running, just in case. Miri watches Adventure Time and Gravity Falls on her iPad for hours and hours, until the spaces behind her eyes feel gummy. She stares at the shadows on her ceiling, following them as they elongate and shrink according to the sun’s shifting position in the sky. Her bedroom feels like a cozy vessel slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Protected. Safe. She could stay here, she thinks, for forever.
xi.
It’s a few days from Halloween when Ms. Bencik asks Miri’s parents to come in for a conference. Miri sits on a wooden bench outside the classroom and counts the tiles on the floor. Their conversation is muffled behind the wooden door. She imagines her father sitting in a chair several sizes too small for him and giggles to herself. She wonders what they’re saying about her.
Her mother exits the room first. She grabs Miri by the hand and pulls her up so quickly it almost hurts Miri’s shoulder. They hurry down the hall and back towards the front doors. Her mother’s eyes are dark and flashing, her lips pressed tight together. Her breath is coming in short puffs.
When they get out to the building’s front steps they stop. Miri’s mother sits down on the top one and buries her face in her hands. Miri sits down next to her. “Am I in trouble?” she asks.
“No,” her mother says without lifting her face.
When she does look up she’s crying. “Miranda,” she says, her voice thick. “What are we going to do with you?”
xii.
Things change very quickly. Jennifer goes from being a twice a month presence to a twice weekly one. Ms. Bencik checks Miri’s notebooks during dismissal every day and reports back any copying to Miri’s parents. A paper calendar is taped to the doors of the Sub-Zero. A smiley face means Miri didn’t leave school early. A red x means she did. If she has at least 20 smiley faces by winter break they can take a trip to St. Bart's. If she doesn’t, they can’t. Miri’s mother shows her pictures of where they’ll stay on her iPad. She prints them out so Miri can hang them on her bulletin board. When her mother leaves, Miri promptly rips them up and throws them away. She also begins mentally red x’ing out anything she doesn’t like. The list is substantial. X out school. X out subtraction. X out carrots. X out Jennifer. X out Daddy. X out Ms. Bencik. X out St. Bart's. X out Miri.
They know about the stairs. Everyone does. Miri, humiliatingly, is no longer allowed to go to the bathroom at school unless she’s accompanied by a monitor. For safety reasons. Miri’s parents make her show them her knees, all scraped up and mottled black and blue, and her mother takes a long look at them before leaving the room entirely. Her father hugs her so tightly that it steals her breath. His tears are damp on her neck.
“Miranda,” he says once they’ve pulled apart. His face is so wide open and hurting that Miri feels cracked in half.
He runs a hand through his thinning hair. “I just--I want to understand why,” he says. “Can you tell me why, sweetheart? Or try to? Please?”
There is a giant hand gripping Miri’s throat. The words that come out are a thread, an eyelash, the clipping from a pinky fingernail. “I don’t know why,” she whispers. “I--I can’t help it.”
Her father sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Okay then.”
He pulls her back into his arms, but Miri can tell he doesn’t believe her. Nobody ever does.