Invisible

I
HAD BEEN TRAPPED IN THIS MISERABLY HOT SPACE
for nine weeks, six days, and fourteen hours, with all the windows and doors locked and the shades drawn. Everyone I knew was out swimming or boating or just having fun, but not me. I was pacing from one room to the other, picking up magazines and tossing them down, turning on the television only to switch it off again. It had seemed like such a good idea back in March: sell the house and move to where we knew no one and no one knew us. But now I realized I’d only traded in one prison for another.

When the key finally rasped in the lock, I was kneeling by the narrow window, my face lifted to capture any stray breeze that decided to drift across the sill. I pushed myself up as the door swung open, and there was my sister.

“Finally,” I said.

“Hey, you.” Julie locked the door behind her. “So, what have you been up to all day?” Her eyes were clear, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t still been crying. Julie was a master at protecting me.

“Your dryer was making weird noises, so I unplugged it. And your mailman has the hairiest legs I’ve ever seen.”

Your
. Not
our
. The accusation lingered in the air. So many balls I’d tossed her way. Which one would she bounce back? But she surprised me. “I got you something.” Reaching into her backpack, she handed me a book.

A thin, spiral-bound book with a flexible cover. I glanced at the title.
Knitting for Beginners
. “Give me a break.”

“Dana, we talked about this.”

“No,
you
talked about this.”

She sighed, dropped her backpack on the floor. “I just hate that you’re just sitting here, watching TV all day.”

“I don’t watch TV all day. Sometimes, I stare at the ceiling.”
And count the hours until this will all be over
.

“My point exactly.” She dangled a plastic bag by one finger. “I got you some yarn, too.”

“Just … stop. I don’t want to learn to knit. It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”

She put her arm around my shoulders and gave a gentle squeeze. “Okay,” she said, after a moment. “You hungry?”

Why did I feel a prick of loss when she turned away to make supper?

The plastic bag sat untouched beside the book all night and into the next day. I fashioned a clothesline by tying string from doorknob to doorknob, which worked fine until I tried to hang up a pair of jeans. The closet door flew open; the brass knob smacked the wall and clattered to the floor. One more thing for Frank to deal with when he got back from Afghanistan. He’d be thrilled.

Mid-afternoon, the next-door neighbor came home, her pickup rattling up the driveway. The truck door slammed, then all was quiet. She’d gone inside her house. In a few minutes, she’d reappear to stretch out on a bright orange towel in her backyard to sun her legs, a beer bottle balanced on the grass beside her. Her phone would ring and her giggling would skip across the yard.
Later, her boyfriend would visit and the two of them would go somewhere in the pickup, maybe one of the few local bars, maybe the lake. Or maybe they’d fire up her small Weber and the spicy aroma of roasting bratwursts would seep into Julie’s small, steamy kitchen and make my mouth water.

What was our old next-door neighbor doing now? Not yet five o’clock, so Martin would still be at work. But his arrival home would be noisy and full of purpose. The slam of the car door, followed by the rumble of the garage door along its tracks. The growl of the lawnmower as he fired it up to cut first his grass, then ours, topped off by the chatter of the trashcans as he dragged them from the curb back into place behind our houses. He’d be humming as he wound up the garden hose, then stop and smile when I appeared with lemonade. The tang of cut grass would rise around us and the mosquitoes would swarm. He’d swipe his face with a handkerchief and take the glass, ask if I was doing my homework, or whether I was planning to tackle the weeds any time soon.

I’d left without even telling him goodbye.

I’d told Mrs. Gerkey goodbye, though. She’d blinked in surprise, clutching my last paycheck as though by not handing it over she’d keep me tethered there. I’d shrugged away the questions in her pale blue eyes. It wasn’t as though I’d ever promised her anything, not in so many words.

Julie had picked out sunshine yellow yarn, a big fluffy cloud of it, impossibly soft. The book had drawings, each step diagrammed and numbered. How hard could it be?

By the time the key scraped the lock, my palms were sweaty and I’d gnawed my lower lip raw. As Julie stepped into the front hall, I hurled the knotted mess aside, the needles clattering to the floor, humiliated that she’d caught me trying—and failing miserably—at something so absurdly simple. Or maybe something else was weighing on me. “Why don’t you get me a book on how to fix dryers?” I snapped at her. “You know. Something
easy
?”

After retrieving the needles as they rolled across the floor, Julie sank beside me on the lumpy couch. Her eyes looked tired but she patted my knee and smiled. Then she took up the jumbled mass of yarn. “You know, Mom always wanted to teach you to knit.”

At the mention of our mother, something shifted inside me. I’d been thinking about her a lot lately. “I didn’t know she could knit.”

Julie nodded. She began pulling apart the tangles, winding the bright yarn around her finger. “And crochet. She made those potholders, you know.”

Right. The white ones with red flowers, made of string, deceptively delicate. You could pick up a flaming skillet with one, which I had done once while burning French toast, and not even feel the heat.

Julie had wound the yarn into a ball and now held the knitting needles loosely in one hand. “Okay,” she said, her gaze meeting mine steadily. “What does the first page say?”

Grudgingly, I opened the book. “You’re supposed to cast on. Like fishing, but not.” Fishing would have been a lot easier. Drop the line into the water and just wait. Fishing made me think of Joe, but I shook that memory away and focused on what Julie was doing. Her fingers were slim and long, capable of almost anything. She’d gotten our mom’s hands, whereas I must’ve inherited our father’s, stubby and square. I hated to think of anything else I might have gotten from him.