Archive

I found the creature in the middle of my lawn on the day that Ellie came home. I had no idea what type of animal it was, only that it was made of fur and bones and full of dark red blood that stained the pile of leaves it had huddled under to die. A stroke of my rake stretched that blood into seven black lines against my lawn as I gouged into it and pulled out innards and organs, freshly exposed to the slow decay of wintertime.

I crouched beside the thing, compelled and repulsed. Its fur was dark and matted, almost indistinguishable from the red of its insides in the setting sun. It was about the size of a dog with bony, angled haunches and a long tail, but its snout was more pronounced, its lips torn or decayed away to reveal a line of greying teeth. The chill had frozen its expression somewhere between a snarl and a grin, its ears bent back flush against its head. It had died fighting.

I realized in my curiosity I’d moved my face mere inches from the creature, and only then did it occur to me the cold had taken the scent of rot completely from the air.

When animals died on our property growing up, my parents made sure Ellie and I never saw them. They would dispose of the carcasses before they had a chance to form any memory more than a smudge of red or a sour stench in our minds. Grown, I could stare for as long as I wanted. But Ellie would be here any minute, so I straightened and piled a mound of blackening leaves atop the beast. By the time she arrived, it was nowhere in sight.
 
 

Ellie told me it was an accident — in fact, she insisted. I had no reason to doubt my sister; she had never lied to me in the past, and I couldn’t see why she would start now. If she said that it was an accident, that’s exactly what it was.

She arrived in a bright yellow taxi, bundled up in layers from her head to her feet like she was vacationing in the Arctic. It wasn’t until she peeled back layer upon layer that I could see how thin she had gotten since I’d last seen her; I could see the beginnings of her ribcage in lines below her neck when she removed her scarf. Her slightness made her look younger, like the ten years since high school had never happened.

I had been so nervous to see her before she arrived, worried there would be a palpable strain between us. But she didn’t look scary or different or unrecognizable. She just looked tired.

“I like to think I’ve given it a more feminine touch,” I told her as we made her bed together. She had spent less time here than me; she’d long since moved away by the time our father started getting sick, and I thought she wouldn’t realize the bed we were making had once been his. But as we unpacked, I could tell she was seeing it the way he’d had it: masculine and sparse, an empty room with nothing more than a bed stand, a lamp, and a place to sleep. “It looks good,” she said.

My father had rented the home when he and my mother first separated, when they finally realized the way they chafed against each other was leaving marks on us, too. It was clear things were over when he stopped renting the place and bought it outright. Still my parents remained legally married until the day he died. When he passed, I paid back the debts he had against the property from my own savings and put my inheritance towards it; Ellie took hers and moved out to the coast.

For a few days, it was nothing but boxes and dust and realizing how many items we both owned and throwing out the doubles. And then it was adjusting to space, to the constant weight of company. We agreed it would be temporary, but I knew with Ellie that word had no meaning.

At first it was an adjustment. But then, like every life that had preceded it, it was completely normal.
 
 

I don’t think it was Ellie’s presence that disturbed my sleep, but I found myself waking in the middle of the night more and more after she arrived. Sometimes I would read the news on my phone until I dozed off again; other times I would get up and page through a project for work until the sun rose. Once I walked into the den at 3 a.m. only to find Ellie bundled up sleeping soundly on the couch. Maybe the presence of someone new was too much energy for the house, enough to rattle through the floorboards and stir me from my sleep.

On the fourth night in a row that I woke at midnight, I found myself peering out of the window. Insomniac’s boredom piqued my curiosity, I told myself, or maybe I’d been subconsciously wondering about it for days.

Even through the dark, I could see it. It was a dark smudge in the middle of my lawn; a tiny blip that would have gone unnoticed by anyone who wasn’t searching. In a few moments I had bundled up in a robe and a scarf and galoshes, had grabbed my rake, and was standing before it.

I raked until I was pulling dead grass out of my lawn, ignoring the stinging cold to dig up dirt in a tiny circle around it to bury it deeper and deeper under debris. I kept burying it until I could no longer see it through the brush and grass I had covered it with. But I could sense that it was still there, still dark, and now despite the chill in the air I was sure I could smell it.

I only paused when I heard a rustling behind me and felt a chill of panic bloom in my chest. I turned to see my sister watching me through the window.

She unlatched the window and lifted it quickly, like she had been caught breaking the rules. She continued to stare at me through the open window, her mouth slightly ajar. I must have looked deranged, bundled up in anything but winter clothes, rake in my hand, eyes gleaming under the moonlight.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she finally offered in a half-shout that was swallowed in the air between us.

“Yeah,” I called back, dropping the rake onto the ground. “Neither could I.”
 
 

The truck had only clipped her in the accident, which the nurse at the hospital informed us was nothing short of an “act of God.” Ellie had been somewhere in Arizona, and although she never told us how she had gotten there, my mother and I knew that she must have hitchhiked.

Ellie had been hitchhiking for as long as I can remember. As a child she’d lie to classmates’ parents, informing them that our mother gave her permission to get a ride to their home or to the school. She must have ended half a dozen of my parents’ friendships after they’d called nearly the entire neighborhood, frazzled and accusatory, demanding where their daughter was. By fourteen she had learned how to travel all over the city, getting neighbors or strangers to drive her to the arcade, to bring her to dates, to drop her off at the movies where she would sneak in through the exit and watch five minutes of every film until she got bored and found someone to drive her somewhere else. The thrill of being in someone else’s car or in someone else’s control must have been more important to her than the destination ever was.

The town was small and familiar enough that my parents’ worry never escalated much higher than giving her a stern talking to and taking no action to prevent it from happening again. After one such lecture my father discovered a postcard from a small fishing town nearly 100 miles away that was addressed to him from his daughter, who at the time was curled up with a book on the couch merely a few feet away from him. His face flickered from anger to exhaustion before he finally crumpled the postcard and threw it in the trash.

Older now, I realized why my parents did not do much about Ellie’s travels: For them to have a leg to stand on in an argument, they would have to acknowledge that they were so vacant in their daughter’s life that she could disappear for days at a time without them noticing.
 
 

Mom came to visit Ellie in the hospital for one day. Our mother had long since moved to the capitol, a place where she could finally be lost in the anonymity of a larger population. I offered for her to stay the night, but she insisted against it.

I walked her out to her car when Ellie dozed off. She waited until she was in her car seat, buckled in, engine on, to tell me. “Just so you know,” she said as though it was the most innocuous thing on earth. “They were on the fence about admitting her.” She paused and laboriously took a cigarette from her purse, taking what felt like ages to fumble around for a lighter before continuing. “You know — to a psych ward.”

I knew my mother was waiting for me to ask her to elaborate. I remained silent while she cupped her hand around the cigarette and clicked her dying lighter several times before it caught. “In case she was trying to off herself,” she said. “You know, they brought the truck driver in, too, since he clipped a telephone pole, and he told one of the nurses, he told her he thought he could see Eleanor turn and look right at him and step in front of the truck while he was driving down the highway.”

She blew out a long drag of smoke into air so cold and still I could smell the menthol. She looked tired, ready no doubt to be at home in her bed, and on some level, I felt the same.

“Well, she says it was an accident,” I told her. “So, I’m sure it was an accident.”

“Right,” my mother said. “Okay.”

She looked at me another moment, but I couldn’t figure out what she wanted to hear, so I didn’t say anything. Then she rolled up her car window and pulled away from the curb.
 
 

Between the time that Ellie and I returned to bed and by the morning, the earth had frozen over. Snow mixed with rain mixed with snow again had turned the house and the yard into a glassy mop of white, punctuated with patches of dark, frozen mud. I peered out of my window at the hole beside my rake, but all I could make out was a small dark spot in the middle of the ice.

Ellie began to work odd jobs around town, at the library or the supermarket or else shoveling neighbors’ driveways and walking dogs. It felt strange sometimes to come home and find her gone, like coming home only to find that the sofa or the dining room table had disappeared. After a few weeks, we had worked our way into an impeccable routine. I kept the kitchen stocked and the house running and paid for, and she cleaned even things that didn’t need to be cleaned, cooked two meals a day, organized all of the books in my room alphabetically, and all the clothes in our closets by color. Somewhere along the line, I was sleeping through the night again, in sync with, or perhaps in spite of, her presence.

When I was growing up, I must have blamed my father moving into this home for my parents’ split, at least to some degree. I saw his departure as a way of giving up, of checking out. As Ellie and I continued to co-exist quietly, occasionally watching a movie together or going out for dinner but mostly sequestering ourselves to our own sides of the house, I began to understand how living with someone did not necessarily mean having an intimacy with them. My love for Ellie had never faded over the years, but maybe the stagnation wasn’t normal; maybe most people grew in love, whereas Ellie and I, my father and my mother, we just co-existed in it, and maybe that hadn’t been enough for them. But it seemed to be enough for us.
 
 

The temperature continued to drop off, losing a degree or two every day until I could see my breath every time I went outside. Ellie never left unless she was bundled up, a mess of different colors and fabrics as she insulated herself with layers.

“Do you miss it — the heat?” I asked one night as she opened the fridge and pulled out a stew she had made the night before, enough for both of us. Ellie kept working as though she hadn’t heard me, but I knew she had.

“Sometimes,” she said finally. “But sometimes I think it was too nice.”

People always thought that I was much older than Ellie, the way her eyes wandered around and fixated on anything except the present conversation like a child would, like she hadn’t heard. But I knew she was only waiting until she decided exactly what to say.

“You know, you’re in heaven by any standard,” she said. “It’s 70 degrees and breezy every day. And at first, you’re happy, because it’s warm and it’s new and it’s beautiful. But then, you know, life happens and things get hard. And then you start to feel bad again.” She caught my eye for a second and looked away.

“But now you’re feeling bad in heaven, this land of gorgeous people and blue skies and all the weed you could smoke without dying.” She divided the stew into two plates and brought me one. “And you think, ‘If I can’t be happy here, can I be happy anywhere?’”

I blinked at her as she pulled a chair up across from me. “At least here when you’re fighting for it, you can blame the shitty weather,” she explained.

I nodded. “I’d like to see it one day,” I said. “I always thought I would move away from here, I guess. I certainly didn’t see myself moving into Dad’s house.”

“The funny thing is,” she said around a mouthful of food. “He would have loved California. I think if he ever saw it himself, he would have left way earlier.”

I pulled a half-chewed bay leaf from my mouth and pushed it to the side of my plate. “He didn’t leave us,” I said.

Ellie shrugged.

“He was still here,” I said. “He wasn’t far. We still saw him.”

“I mean, for dance recitals and soccer games. And one weekend a month,” Ellie said. “Because he had to.”

“That plus whenever we wanted to see him,” I pointed out.

“Right,” Ellie said. “When we wanted to see him. But he only ever wanted to see us when mom asked him to.”

It was hard for me to consider her living the same circumstances as I did and remembering them so differently, like she’d read a different translation of the same text.

“Trust me,” she said. “If he were really honest about what he wanted, he would have moved somewhere else in a heartbeat. And that would be the end of it.”

“He was happy here. And I’m happy here,” I told her. “If you’re not, you don’t have to be here.”

Ellie blinked, and it wasn’t until the silence hit my ears that I realized how loud I had spoken. Maybe I had even screamed. But I couldn’t hear it anymore, and Ellie stood up from the table. She looked at me almost expressionless for a moment, like I was a painting she was trying to interpret. Then she grabbed just her overcoat from the rack and walked out of the house.

I sat there at the table for as long as I could. Then I stood, cleared our places, and put our dishes in the sink. I grabbed one of Ellie’s coats from the rack and walked outside, shoving my hands in the pockets for warmth. I couldn’t spot her in either direction down the street. She couldn’t have gotten far. If I ran out to the street and looked where the streetlights lit up the walk, I could spot her in a few minutes.

But I didn’t. I grabbed a shovel and walked into the yard and started to dig through the snow where I was sure it would be, slumbering exactly where I’d buried it.
 
 

When Ellie didn’t return by the end of the night, I knew it could be days before I saw her again. While I waited, I worked against the cold. I shoveled our walkway, salted anywhere we might step, and made sure that I had reburied the creature well enough that no one but me would spot it.

By the time a week had passed, I had made up my mind that she wasn’t returning. I kept all of her things, washed and dried her sheets, put all of her clothes away, just in case. I nearly considered calling my mother to see if she had heard from her, but I knew she’d be the last person Ellie would go to.

Sleep became elusive once again. Maybe my rhythm had gotten so used to twoness that it could no longer know oneness. I found myself pacing around my kitchen most mornings by the time the sun rose.
 
 

She had been gone two weeks before I let myself call her. It went to voicemail and a tinny, younger version of Ellie told me, “You can leave a message, but just text me.”

There was something about hearing her voice, young, far away, and captured in a forever recording that made me think of a truck, a massive 18-wheeler hurtling toward me at a million miles an hour down a highway and how exactly I could muster the strength of nerves and tendons and muscles to take a step out in front of it.

And there was something in her voice that made me need to find the creature. No matter how much snow I covered it with, I knew where it was. It was lurking there on my property, clumps of flesh turning green as they clung to browning bones, a meal that no animal wanted badly enough to forage under a mass of snow for. I yearned for summer, wishing for quickly devouring hawks and vultures and ants and maggots. But decay was out of season, so the creature remained.

It cracked as it met with my shovel, point first like a blade. I severed its head first. And then I turned the shovel sideways, raised it above my head, and came down hard enough to crush its skull into a thousand pieces. Now shattered, I crouched beside it and began to work.
 
 

A month after Ellie left, I got a phone call from a complete stranger.

“Your sister said I could reach you here,” a young woman told me. It was four in the evening, but the sun was nearly gone. The woman sounded calm, almost amused. “We’re on the way to the hospital. You should meet us there.”

This time it didn’t involve a truck or any roads at all. They had spotted her at the lake. They had spotted her on the lake. The woman and her husband were out looking for their lost dog, the only people willing to be out in the exceptional cold. Except for Ellie.

“I thought it was weird that she was standing there,” the woman said. “But you know. We get weirdos around here.”

Weirdos, I thought. They had waved to Ellie and kept walking. They didn’t have time to wonder what she was doing. It was so cold and the dog was so lost and they just kept going. Then the husband realized she wasn’t standing on the bank but on the frozen surface of the water.

“I thought maybe she was a ghost,” the woman said as I buckled myself into my car and put it in gear. “But my husband had to look back and see. And then it cracked right in front of us, and she fell into the water.”

As I listened to her, it occurred to me that here I was, driving with one hand holding the phone to my ear, nerves unwired, black ice everywhere, and if anyone was going to die today it may just be me. After all, Ellie didn’t seem to have much luck in that arena.

I tucked my phone into the crook of my neck as this woman, this stranger, described how she saved my sister’s life. Or how her husband did. He reached into the steps of the lake and nearly fell in himself. I pictured the wife with her arms around his waist, stabilizing the husband and my sister as he pulled. Ellie’s frozen skin must have been so cold it hurt him just to touch it, although his hands were probably aching and numb from the frigid water anyway.

“I can’t imagine falling in like that,” the woman told me, her voice registering somewhere in the back of my head. “She must have been so frightened.”

“She shouldn’t have been standing on the ice,” I said, my first entrance into the conversation in minutes. “She grew up here. She knows it doesn’t get thick enough to walk on.”

“It was a mistake,” this stranger told me of my sister whom I had known my entire life and she had met for the first time today. “It was an accident.”

I met them at the hospital. They stabilized her temperature, re-pinked her blueing lips, and administered fluids. By the time I had arrived, she was curled up in the hospital bed with an IV plugged into her arm, flicking through channels on the TV and looking completely at home. I watched her through her window, unable to go in. The couple never found the dog.
 
 

I left the hospital before Ellie was discharged. I didn’t want her to feel that she had to come back. But she did.

She must have come in the middle of the night because one morning I got out of bed and found her eating cereal at the counter. She looked up at me and smiled like it was just a pleasant happenstance we were both here, her cheeks cheerful and chipmunked full of a bright pink children’s cereal.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked her.

She nodded and chowed down another spoonful. “Hypothermia made me hate the cold a little less.” Then she winked at me, a gesture so out of place that for a moment I thought I was dreaming. “Hey, I want to show you something.”

I followed her out to the back yard, both of us in our night clothes. There was any number of things she could have been showing me, but I knew precisely what it was going to be. I didn’t know how she had found the creature under all of the snow where I was letting it rest. Maybe she had seen me out there one night, or maybe it was inevitable from the beginning that she’d find it, just like I had.

But she walked right past where I knew that it was.

“Check it out,” she said, standing beneath one of the trees that lined the yard. “It’s like they didn’t get the memo that it’s still winter.”

I heard them before I saw them. A family of tiny cheeping newborn birds, tiny balls of reddish-brown fluff, celebrating a spring that had yet to come. “They have no clue they’re going to freeze to death,” she said, dark laughter coloring her tone. She turned to me with a confused expression, wondering why I wasn’t as entertained by the most inconsequential nest of birds I had ever known.

“You can’t stay if you’re going to keep doing it,” I told her. Her head jerked back to me in a pivot so sharp it must have hurt.

“Keep doing what?”

Anger burned in my belly. “You know what,” I said. “I can’t stop you from doing it. Or trying to do it. But you can’t stay here if you’re going to.”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” she said.

Silence hung between us, heavier than the clotted snow we stood on.

“Do you want to go?” I asked her. I didn’t want her to go, nor did I want her to stay. I just couldn’t stand not knowing.

“I don’t think so,” Ellie said, taking a few steps toward me and planting her feet right atop where I had buried the creature. Beneath her, flesh and blood and then rot and bugs and then nothing but bone. Bone that I had broken apart with my shovel and then hunched over, lining out row by row, skull, vertebrate, limbs. Bones I had labored over for what felt like hours until the creature was no more a creature but simply a series of white chalky lines that radiated like an echo within the undercurrent of the earth. Bones that I had rewritten and rescripted and then reburied with dirt and snow and sweat.

She turned away to look at the home we shared, the one I — and my father — had built. Then I could see her as an eight-year-old, long brown hair curling at the nape of her neck just like it did today.

I could see an image of her at eight-years old that I’ve kept and seen every year since. Ellie rounding her way into my father’s room when we were children, before he left, and our mother was away. She wanted him to read to us, or take us to the park. I couldn’t remember the day. I could just remember Ellie’s face when she stepped into the room.

I still don’t know what kept me from walking in behind her. All I could see then and all I could see now was Ellie’s face drop from a smile into confusion and then pain. Fear twisted across her features like a sickness, something that has been there ever since just below the surface. I couldn’t know what it was then, but it was enough to keep me from following into the room. It was enough to keep me from seeing what she saw.

“I don’t think so,” Ellie said again.

The paramedics came and drove our father to the hospital. Our mother told us that he was sick and that he needed to go away for a few weeks to get better. When he came home he wore bandages on his wrists and then long sleeves for the rest of his life. It wasn’t for years that I understood it, but Ellie understood it immediately because she’d seen it. It wasn’t me who found him there, lying half dead on reddening bedsheets. It was her.

“But sometimes, I feel like I need to.”

She took my hand and squeezed it, her fingers hard and freezing. Then she turned and walked back into the house. I knew she would be leaving soon. She’d be back to hitchhiking, to jumping from city to city, to falling in and out of contact. And I knew I would hear from her in a year or I wouldn’t, or she’d reach out from a hospital bed or from the bottom of a river or she wouldn’t.

The air was still as she walked away from me, quiet enough that I could hear her feet crunch the snow as she left a pattern of footprints behind her. As I watched her disappear into my home, I realized the thing was still there, quiet, secret, undiscovered. She had never seen it, and I guess that made it mine.