YELLOW SECRETS
Lindsay Anderson
When I have nightmares I dream about cold, colorless moths and my mouth sewn shut with red thread.
I am fourteen and my aunt calls me Amber. My name is not Amber. She says I have yellow secrets. She also says that paper exists to bring about our destruction. She eats the mail if we don’t get to it in time. Late at night she wanders the house and strokes smooth surfaces with her spider hands. The marble granite next to the sink, the shiny tabletop in the dining room, the baby grand in the corner—she touches them and calms. Never completely, but enough that she can go back to her room and talk to the voices.
But tonight is different from the other nights. Tonight I wake up just when I can hear the moths coming, their wings beating the rhythm of my chest. A brown mantel clock with chubby legs sits on the desk. It’s watching me try to catch my breath. There’s no air in my room. I crawl out of bed and go to the window. I have to put my back into it because the old frame hates to give in. There’s no screen on my window. Last time I took it out I dropped it. It bounced off the roof and landed on the grass in the backyard. It broke so I hid it behind the garage. Mom hasn’t noticed yet. I climb out onto the roof, shutting the window on my finger. There’s no pain, but suddenly I’m dizzy and I feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I drop to my knees and pry my finger out. The roof slopes a little so I crawl a few feet and lay carefully on my back. I can feel tiny grains of the tar shingles in my bare toes and against my back. If I close my eyes and shut out the loud, city traffic from the street, I can breathe again. After awhile the tar underneath me turns into grass, and I’m back home in Minnesota. Away from the streets, away from the traffic, breathing the old air.
The sneaking out started with the talking. By the time I was nine and Maddie was eleven, I’d just really started to talk. Daddy told Mom the problem was Maddie said everything for me. But by the time I was nine there was too much inside me. I had to get it out. Mom would throw open the door of our room late at night and say to us, “Stop talking and go to bed, girls!” So that summer we started sneaking out of the house. We’d lie on our backs in the grass of the backyard on the other side of Mom’s huge garden. In Bloomington, Minnesota you didn’t plant until after Memorial Day. The cold of winter, seven months out of twelve and frost until June, made planting a delicate process. Daddy knew everything about that, since he grew up on a farm nearby. A city girl, Mom relished the success of growing more than eating the results. So many tidy rows of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, peas, and potatoes, all lined up, at attention. Soldiers in Mom’s personal army. We could hear the rabbits gorging on the vegetables. But we ignored them to stare up at the stars. The two-story brick of our house blocked the moon at night, but we sprawled out, feet sticking in opposite directions with our heads together. There was just enough light to point out our favorite stars to each other. Maddie told me the story again. It was her story, the one that Mom and Daddy told people when they wanted to explain Maddie.
“I was four that summer. You were two. Dad wanted to take us to the park by the middle school, and he couldn’t find me. You were in Mom’s room with your green blanket, sleeping on the carpet.”
“Why was I doing that?” I asked, just like I was supposed to.
“Because the carpet used to be soft and fluffy. You woke up when they started yelling for me. You went downstairs and came out here. I remember you had your blanket with you. You found me in the garden. I was sitting in the bottom of the hole. I dug it with the red shovel.”
“What red shovel?” She’d never told me the part about the red shovel before.
“The old plastic beach shovel. The red one. The red of it was all faded. You don’t remember it—Mom threw it out ages ago. Anyways,” she kept on, “Mom finally saw you standing there at the edge of the hole and came back. She was so mad about the mess. Daddy asked me what I was doing. I said that I was trying to get back. He asked, ‘Back where?’ I said, ‘Back into the ground, where I came from.’ That’s when Mom and Dad stopped calling me Potato.”
“Why’d they call you Potato?” I whispered. Mom and Daddy never would tell me when I asked. She dropped a handful of cold grass in my face. I blinked it out of my eyes.
“That’s my secret. I don’t tell my secret to anybody. Not even you.” I sat up, staring down at the dark outline of her body.
“Do I have a secret too?”
She grinned with her voice so I could hear it. “Yep. You just haven’t found it yet.”
I wake up that morning to the sun on my cheeks. I crawl fast. My finger still throbs, so I use one hand to shove open the window. Back in my room, I throw on fresh clothes and head toward the stairs. They creak. I hate the sound. I asked Mom when we first came here four years ago why they do that. She said they were old stairs, with a lot to say. I hate living in a house older than Abe Lincoln. But Mom just says we’re lucky to be able to live with her sister so close to the city. I walk into the kitchen. Mom is already gone; she goes to the gym every morning to punish her body. She’s small and petite, but when she looks into your eyes, you straighten. Kev says she’s formidable. She’s thirty-six, but she looks ten years younger. She has feathery blonde hair and a strong body. It helps when she tends bar on the weekends. She drives a bus in the city during the week. The lawyers said she didn’t have to work a day in her life after they told us about the life insurance policy. She yelled until in that moment there was nothing else in the whole world but her voice. She promised before God and man that she’d never touch the money. But I know the real reason why she can’t touch the money. It’s her secret, and I know.
I eat a piece of white bread, breathing in the smell of burnt crumbs from the toaster. I always sit on the bar when I eat. It’s cold and silky against the back of my knees. Mom hates it—she wants us to sit at the table together, like a real family. Mom still likes to pretend that we’re all one of us together. That Maddie and Daddy are here with us. That we exist in the same space. I hate it. Almost as much as when Mom calls Aunt Emma, Emmaline. I check the time. I have five minutes to get to the bus stop. But it doesn’t matter. I can always run.
She’s staring at me again. The Girl. I forget her name. I sit by the window, toward the middle of the row, and I can feel her eyes digging furrows into the space around me. She’s trying to strip me, see into me. I can’t let her do that. She shouldn’t even be trying. My skin heats—the blood bubbles underneath where I can’t scratch it.
Two hours later I’m between classes, standing next to the bike rack outside the front entrance of school. It’s hard for me to blend in. Kev says I look like a ballerina. He means I look like I could melt away. I’ve always hated my pale skin and hair. That I look as fragile as glass. I don’t want to look like Mom. I want to look dark and strong like Daddy. Like Maddie. I stand there, staring at The Girl’s bike. It’s silver and black. It looks like a boy’s bike. It’s sleek and it has a lot of gears and a water bottle holder on the bar by the pedals. The pocketknife slips out of my jeans and into my hand. It’s red and beat up. I flip open the sharpest blade and slash at the front tire of the bike. It gives a defeated squeal, caught by surprise. I can hear the whirl of voices around me. They’re yelling at me, calling me a freak. They don’t understand. Fifteen minutes later I’m sitting in Principal Hable’s office, staring at the mug on her desk. “Teachers Never Say Quit!” She sits there, staring at an open file. After awhile she brings her eyes up to my face. She looks at me like she’s never seen me before. She hasn’t.
“Miss Sater, this school will not tolerate such violent acts of vandalism against student property.” She goes on, but I crawl inside my mind and sit, pulling out folders of memory with Maddie in them. This is where I feel supernatural, where I know no one else can find me. Kev says it’s my “zone.” He has no idea what he steps into when he tries to get inside our space. But when he comes around the house, he looks at me. He sees me. Sometimes it makes me reappear. I like it, but only when Mom’s not there.
Principal Hable finishes up, saying something about suspension so I stand, picking up my green shoulder bag. She holds out her hand. I dig out the knife and drop it into her chubby palm. She hands me a piece of paper and tells me to have Mom call to set up a time to meet. I stuff the paper in my bag. I’ll have to hide it when I get home.
I’m back at the house. I stare up at the colonial style porch, calculating the distance between myself and disaster. It’s shorter today. I pick at the white gauze wrapped around my pinky. The first aid kit underneath the upstairs bathroom sink is always fully stocked. Mom bought it after the accident. She never looks at it, but I do. Sometimes I wonder if she thinks about what would’ve happened if there’d been one in the car that day. When I walk into the house and drop my bag, I can hear Aunt Emma in the study, talking with the voices. She has to talk to them, or they panic. I walk into the room and check to make sure she’s okay, then head for the stairs.
“Call me if you need anything,” I yell. “Thanks, Amber honey.” Aunt Emma has the most melodic voice in the world, like wind chimes on a hot breezy day. She used to sing before the voices got really bad – the piano was a gift from some music producer in New York. But after Uncle Denny left, all that ended. Now the neighbor kids call her “Emma-Looney.” I want to tell them that she can’t help it. That she’s beautiful. That she sees more than they do. That the time she wandered out of the house without clothes two years ago she was just trying to feel everything at once. But they wouldn’t get it. Not like Kev. Kev was one of the cops that brought her home that night. He’d given her his jacket, and he was so tall it went down to the tops of her thighs. A blanket had covered the rest. I had just turned twelve and still refused to talk to anyone, but when he looked at me from so high up and smiled like he knew all the secrets, he made things around us solid. Mom sees him occasionally, and I watch them sometimes as they try to connect through the thick wall of guilt.
I look around my room and realize I left my bag downstairs. I fly down the steps so fast they don’t even creak, but I’m too late. Aunt Emma is sitting on the floor next to my bag, legs primly crossed to one side. Her jaw is working slowly at the wad of paper in her mouth, and she stops to send me a smile.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m making it safe again.” I throw myself on the couch, and can’t stop the grin. She’s so proud. My twenty-nine-year-old aunt thinks she’s just saved the world. But she did just buy me at least the weekend, so I ask her if she wants something from the kitchen. She says she wants a bowl of ice cream and chocolate syrup. I make it just how she likes it, with two tablespoons of chocolate syrup and two tablespoons of ice cream.
Tonight I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. There are no moths and no red thread as long as I’m awake, so I sit up and grab a black thick-tipped sharpie from my desk. I step inside my walk-in closet and shut the door behind me, pulling the string to the light. There are shelves and boxes and a metal clothes rack on one end, but most of the closet is just bare wall with ugly yellow wallpaper. I take the marker and pop off the cap. The smell burns the inside of my nose. It soothes me, and I start where I left off two nights before on a section of the wall furthest from the door. Mom came into my closet two years ago and realized what I was doing. At first she tried to make me stop, but four days later I overheard her talking on the phone to her therapist about my closet. Something about “grief expression.” She gave me back my markers after that and left me alone. I write words, only words, sometimes only the ones I’m afraid of. But when I reach really far inside and pour that part of me out, sometimes I don’t dream.
I’m in the middle of what Kev calls one of my “ten-dollar words” when I hear the keening. The marker stops and I listen. It doesn’t sound like Aunt Emma. I drop the marker and shove open the door, following the sound to Mom’s room. I almost run straight into Aunt Emma. She’s huddled at the doorway of Mom’s bedroom. I can feel her body shaking, and the whites around her eyes are as eloquent as she gets. I brush past her and walk toward the bed. It takes me only a few seconds to realize Mom’s still asleep. When Maddie was nine she sometimes got night terrors, and I’ve never forgotten the feeling it gave me. The hairs on my arms and legs are moving, and my own blood rushing in my ears sounds like water running inside my head. I sit on the edge of the bed. Her eyes are shut, and her hands are clenched at her sides. The wailing doesn’t stop, doesn’t even begin to waver. I gently rest my hand on her forehead and close my eyes. I know what’s in there. It’s her secret. She’s reliving that day, the day she killed them. She’s smelling the blood, watching as the machines cut through the car, trying to pry it apart. She’s watching the paramedics argue about Maddie’s body, cradled by the windshield of Daddy’s light blue sedan. She’s watching this, smelling this, and she knows how it’s going to end. Daddy and Maddie both dead.
I open my eyes. The wailing has stopped, and her breath is even. I get up and take Aunt Emma’s arm. She’s no longer shaking, but her skin is clammy. I walk her to her room and we lay on her bed. She curls so tightly against me I can’t tell where she ends and I begin. Her voice is frighteningly calm as she whispers against my neck.
“What are you thinking about?” I don’t answer. It’s my secret. The one I can’t tell anyone, not even Maddie. It’s the secret that’s trapped inside, flapping for escape. I’m thinking that no matter how hard I try to make it true, I know it wasn’t Mom that killed them.