One Leaf Gone Strange

There are far worse things in the hills here than whatever it is you think you’re afraid of. We learned a long time ago to keep to ourselves, the way the mountains like for it to be. You stay quiet because there’s more to say than any of us has a mind to, and because there are God-made walls between you and your neighbor, and man-made ones between you and your own kin.

My sisters were born eleven minutes apart on a Tuesday morning when I was in the fourth grade. Our house wasn’t near big enough for the six of us and whoever else stuck around. Papaw died there in his chair in the den with the fake wood paneling a few years back. His dialysis appointments had gotten so frequent that we just moved him in to stay in my room, but mostly he lived on that sofa recliner, a piece of furniture in his own right. I still expect to see the outline of his bowed head when I walk past there in the daytime. At night, the room seems to remember him better than I do.

Whatever’s wrong with this house don’t have anything to do with Papaw, though. Some deaths are the quiet kind, and good men tend to leave the world the same way they move through it, without making much of the whole thing. You don’t exactly expect sinister things to take root in a house with linoleum floors and a satellite dish, but maybe that’s because people like to imagine evil has better taste. Still, we always moved quickly past unlit doorways growing up.

It was when the twins were still new to us and Mama was already disappearing into the work of keeping them alive that we first heard the voice on the baby monitor. I was sleeping on a half-deflated blow-up mattress in Mama and Daddy’s room because of Papaw, the kind that sighed air out around you through the night until you woke up touching the floor.

I woke to a little static breaking through in pulses, two or three of the red LEDs on the VTech speaker flickering with it. Mama lay heavy under the thin sleep between feedings while I watched the lights jump against the dark. For a while there was only the soft electrical breathing, the red bars twitching and settling, twitching and settling, like whatever was on the other end had not yet decided whether to speak.

Then they flared.

“There you are,” came a voice through the speaker.

Delicate. Motherly. Not our mother.

Mama came awake all at once and grabbed hold of Daddy, who had missed the whole thing. She begged him to go across the house and check on the babies. He did, because that is what daddies are supposed to do when there is something frightening enough to require a flashlight but not yet frightening enough to admit is real.

He didn’t see anything when he went up there, but that wasn’t the last we’d hear from it, whatever it was. The first time was easy enough to brush off. Mountains interfering with the signal again. Maybe we’d picked up some trucker on I-40 breaking through our speaker, since the interstate ran just over the hill out back. Or the rain. There was always the damned rain.

A couple weeks later, though, it happened again. This time from the other direction. It was early morning, and Mama was bent over trying to lift Anna from her crib when the voice came through the receiving end of the monitor there in the babies’ room.

“Not that one.”

I watched as Mama froze with the baby halfway to her chest. Anna had one fist tight around the collar of Mama’s nightgown, milk-drunk and warm against her, while Leah slept three feet away with both hands thrown above her head like she’d surrendered to something in a dream.

The monitor crackled once and went quiet. Mama put Anna back down.

She would deny that part later. Not that she heard the voice—she never denied that—but that she had listened to it. Daddy always said she was startled, that Anna was heavy and her arms were tired. Maybe that was true. Memory is charitable when it has something to lose. But I remember Mama standing between those two cribs, looking from one baby to the other as though somebody had asked her a question she had never considered herself capable of answering.

From then on, there was a before and an after to our family. The change was slight at first, the way a season begins in Appalachia: one cold edge beneath an otherwise humid air, one leaf gone strange at the top of a tree. By the time you think to call it autumn, half the hillside has already turned. Families are often too good at making truths out of things they have only suspected, and once a difference has been named, it is terribly hard to look at two children and see them equally again.

I watched from the edge of Mama’s periphery, where I’d tended to exist those days, as she dragged each bassinet into our shared room. Might as well have sold it all for a single-wide at that point, I thought. We were living on top of each other now, paying dearly for a house that we didn’t seem to know how to make use of.  Mama moved silently, reduced by then to a kind of immediacy, as she yanked the monitor from the wall in both rooms, pulled out the backup batteries, and shoved both units into the junk drawer beside the stove.

For a while, we returned to our regular orbits, heedless of what had been shut away in the drawer. Soon enough, the monitors disappeared beneath leftover birthday candles and ink-dry pens kept on the faith that they might someday fix themselves. Anna and Leah took their first bites in hand-me-down highchairs. Life settled enough that, in daylight, we even learned to laugh at the memory of the strange voice.

Fear begins to resemble something finished mostly because ordinary life is so good at growing over it. By then the twins were sitting upright on their own, Papaw’s room had become mine again, and Mama had started wearing mascara some mornings.

I was at the kitchen table doing spelling words while Mama stood at the stove with one hip against the cabinet, stirring something from a bag she’d bought in the freezer aisle. At first the sound was so faint I mistook it for rain against the window. Always the damned rain. Then the static sharpened into that same broken rhythm, and both of us looked toward the drawer at once. Mama stopped stirring. Neither of us moved until a thin red light appeared through the crack where the drawer never quite shut right, followed by another, then another.

Mama pulled it open. The receiver lay facedown beneath a roll of Scotch tape, its battery compartment still empty. The cord was wound around the other unit somewhere underneath it. Still, the red bars climbed and fell as though something on the other end had been waiting for us to see.

The voice was softer this time, nearly lost beneath the static.

“Watch—”

A burst of interference swallowed whatever came next.

“—that one.”

Mama’s eyes went straight to the highchair nearest her, where Anna sat throwing those little rainbow cups that nested inside one another onto the floor, a small pile of them already stolen from Leah’s tray. Anna laughed every time one hit the linoleum.

By the time Daddy got home, Mama had already decided what she’d heard.

Children have a way of leaning into the shape that waits for them, not dissimilar to some sun-starved sapling in a dense wood. Anna and Leah learned to walk beneath the same roof, lost the same baby teeth, came home from the same elementary school with construction-paper turkeys and jackets that had once been mine shoved into their backpacks. The years passed with so little ceremony that no one could say exactly when the difference between them stopped seeming new. By then, it felt older than either girl, as though it had been waiting in the house for them to grow into it.

Leah was easy in the ways families reward without intending to: quick to apologize, content to be told what came next. Anna asked why until the question itself became an offense. She cried hard, loved hard, and remembered every slight long after the rest of us had agreed to forget it. Years later, I would wonder whether she had ever truly grown into herself, or only into the vacancy we’d left for her.

The first time I remember understanding the difference between being difficult and being Anna, the girls were seven. Mama had taken us to the dollar store after church, and Leah slipped a tube of lip balm into her coat pocket without paying for it. When Mama caught her craning her neck in the back seat to admire her pursed lips in the rearview mirror, her anger lasted only a moment before the ridiculousness of it softened her. She and Daddy laughed about it over dinner that night.

“Just don’t do anything like that again,” he said between bites.

A week later, Anna got into a fight with a boy for tearing the wing off a moth she had been trying to move out of the school hallway. She shoved him hard enough to split his lip on the tile.

Daddy sat her at the kitchen table that night and asked why she had done it.

“Because he knew it hurt.”

That was the wrong answer. They sent Anna to her room before her dinner had gone cold.

It’s strange, the way a family can breathe its weather into everything beneath its roof until even a simple act of mercy takes on the color of whatever has gone wrong there. There are houses where vigilance becomes one of the last forms love knows how to take, and after a while no one can tell whether being watched means being cherished or accused.

I thought about the moth often in the years that followed. Anna had been punished for hurting the boy, but I could never stop thinking about what came first—the torn wing, the small body beating uselessly against the floor, her anger arriving before anybody else’s mercy. Mama and Daddy remembered the letter from school. That was easier. It confirmed something in them that had been waiting a long time to be confirmed.

Watch that one.

I was changed by the voice too; condemned perhaps to take the shape of the opposite thing: the one who stayed near, who noticed. Anna had done the same with the moth, believing that loving something fiercely enough might alter what had already been done to it.

Maybe that was the trouble with both of us. We thought the desire to save a thing carried with it the knowledge of how.

By adolescence, Anna had become difficult to account for even among ourselves. She could be painfully tender one minute and mean enough the next to make you doubt the tenderness had ever been there. She moved through rooms with almost no sound, and sometimes you would look up to find her in a doorway with no sense of how long she had been standing there. She knew when people were lying and had the irritating habit of saying so.

Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and found her sitting on the floor of my room, knees drawn to her chest, not crying or asking for anything, simply waiting for me to notice she was there. I never asked why she came. She never offered. By then we had grown into the kind of sisters who understood that explanations could spoil certain things. Still, I wasn’t immune to the thoughts that had worked themselves into the grain of the house. I only tried to remember that, of all the rooms she might have chosen, she had come to mine.

In the same way Anna had become mine, she had drifted from Leah. Anna frightened her sometimes; I could see that much. There was something unnerving in the way she looked at people, as though attention itself were a form of trespass. Leah learned early that the safest place in the house was wherever Mama and Daddy had decided to stand. Their uneasiness gave her somewhere warm to go, and she settled into it almost without knowing she had moved away from her twin. She hid her diary beneath the mattress. When Anna came into a room angry, Leah watched her hands.

Once, I found Anna standing at the kitchen window sometime after midnight. There was nothing outside but the black slope of the yard and, beyond it, the darker place where the trees began.

“What are you looking at?”

Anna didn’t turn.

“I don’t know yet.”

I told myself she meant she was waiting to see.

The summer the girls turned sixteen, Daddy took the lock off Anna’s bedroom door. She had started keeping to herself more by then, whole afternoons lost behind drawn blinds. Mama had grown tired of finding the door shut.

So one Saturday, while Anna slept, Daddy unscrewed the little brass mechanism from the door. She woke after three and found him finishing up in the hallway.

“What are you doing?”

Daddy looked over his shoulder. “You don’t need a lock.”

Anna stood there barefoot, half present.

“Why?”

“You spend too much time closed up in there.”

She looked at the hollow place in the knob where the lock had been and then at Mama, who had come down the hall to see what all the talking was about.

“I’m sleeping.”

Mama gave a little shrug.

“Then you don’t need it locked.”

After that Anna spent more time on the couch. She came home from school, left her shoes wherever they fell, and folded herself beneath the blanket while the rest of us moved around her. Nobody had to wonder what she was doing behind a closed door anymore. The strangest part was how much easier everyone seemed to breathe with Anna there where they could see her.

Asleep, she required almost nothing of us. She could not appear unbidden, or catch somebody in a lie, or say the one true thing in a room everyone else had agreed not to notice. She was simply our little sister beneath a blanket, dark hair spread over the arm of the couch, breathing evenly while the house went on around her.

Winter came early that year.

The first hard frost killed the last of Mama’s mums before November. Afterward, I kept finding the small arrangements Anna had made with the future; little proofs of a life still expecting to continue: twenty dollars folded into the pocket of a jacket. Half a bottle of shampoo waiting in the shower. A Friday circled on the calendar in her room and left unexplained, as though she had trusted the world to keep turning until she arrived there.

She did not live to see it.

And in that horrible way the world insists upon, dawn still broke. The furnace kicked on. The refrigerator hummed. Morning found the same rooms whether we were ready for it or not.

By the time I went into Anna’s room, Mama had already been through it.

The sheets were in the washing machine. The trash can beside the bed had been emptied. Her nightstand was bare except for the pale square where something had sat long enough to keep the dust away. Mama had opened the blinds and cracked the window despite the cold, and the room smelled like carpet powder and the wet leaves rotting below the sill.

“What did you do?”

Mama was standing at the dresser folding one of Anna’s shirts.

“She doesn’t need all this mess lying around.”

It was an ordinary enough thing for a grieving mother to do. I have reminded myself of that often.

The days afterward filled themselves with casseroles, flowers, and people lowering their voices when they came through the door. Mama endured it all with a composure I could not decide whether to envy or mistrust.

“We were warned,” she said as we got into the car after the funeral.

It was the first time we'd spoken of the voice on the monitor since those strange days.

“But God comes through when you most need Him.”

I hated myself for noticing how something in the house loosened after Anna was gone. Mama moved through the rooms without that old watchfulness in her face. She sang under her breath while washing dishes, and stopped when she saw me looking. Leah stopped hiding her diary. Daddy sat through whole evenings without looking toward the hallway.

I thought again about the moth Anna had tried to save, about its torn wing and the way she had cupped her hands around something already hurt. I thought about every night I had waited up for her, every question I had disguised as conversation, every time she had looked at me as though she could feel my attention resting on her, no different, she’d probably supposed, from the rest of them.

For most of her life, I had believed there was a difference between the way they watched Anna and the way I did. I held to that difference stubbornly, through every age she passed into and every version of her I was permitted to know, as though the heart could keep its own intentions pure simply by naming them so.

Through all of it, there was one thing I never told Mama. Never told Daddy. Never told Leah, and certainly never Anna.

The static had not swallowed the whole word.

I heard it when I was nine.

Watch over that one.