The Wire Hanger

Chapter Four

        The next morning I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, limbs still tangled in my blankets. Usually I kicked them off during the night but this morning they were wrapped around me, like I’d made a nest out of them, like they were tethering me to my mattress. I could hear Esau snoring lightly on the other side of the wall. It was too early for my alarm clock to have gone off but then I thought of the woman, the blood all over the floor, and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep anyway so I got up and padded into the kitchen, avoiding looking at the door that led to the back room, where the woman would still be sleeping.

            My mother was already up, stirring her coffee with a spoon. She looked up at me and sighed when I came in. “I miss real coffee,” she said. “When I was a little girl my father used to let me taste his. Some things, the artificial version just isn’t the same.”

            I hadn’t gone in further than the doorway, staring at her. “Why are you acting like everything’s normal?”

            “Coby,” she said, “keep your voice down.”

            “Is she still here?” I asked, in a furious whisper.

            “No.”

            I paused, nonplussed. “Where’d she go?”

            “I can’t tell you that.”

            “Because you don’t trust me or because you don’t know?”

            “Jacoba.”

            “How did she even get anywhere?”

            “Friends,” said my mother.

            “What do you mean friends,” I asked. My mother didn’t really have friends, not that I knew about. She was on pleasant terms with the various mothers of my childhood friends, she hosted dinner parties for my father’s colleagues and their wives, but she didn’t have any friends all to herself.

            “Coby, this isn’t the time to talk about it,” she said, looking anxious. “Your father and Esau are going to wake up any minute.” As if on cue, I heard Esau’s and my alarm clocks blaring, always tuned to the corporate station, giving us the weather and the news and the daily devotional. He turned his off but mine kept going, a single voice coming out of nowhere.

            I crossed my arms and stared at her. “You got me into this and now you won’t tell me anything?”

            My mother sighed. “You’re right. I know. I wouldn’t have chosen to. But it’s not safe here, okay? Let’s just say she’s gone underground and we’ll leave it at that. And you need to get ready for school.”

            “Coby,” grumbled Esau, coming down the hall, “would you shut that thing off.”

            “Sorry,” I said, and fled back to my room, hitting the button on the top of my clock. I looked into the depths of my closet, where a row of school uniforms hung next to a few weekend dresses. Did my closet have secrets too? I knelt and rooted around at the back, feeling for a loop or a catch or anything that felt at all wrong, but there wasn’t anything. It was just a closet. My mother was the only one, I supposed, who got to have secrets. From her own husband, which I recognized as wrong in a dim sort of way, but from me: and it was from me that I found it hurt the most. She was my mother and she wasn’t supposed to have any other kind of life.

            On the way to school Esau chattered nonstop about his plans for our birthday party. The guest list was our entire class, since there was nobody that Esau didn’t like. I supposed I should be grateful for that; I never found making friends quite so easy, having been able to rely on Esau for my whole life. Mostly I was content to coast along in his wake, adopting his friends as my own, sitting with his group at the lunchroom, and for the most part I was accepted as Esau’s sister. Nobody was used to siblings and they figured that if they wanted him around, I was just the price they had to pay. A social tax. I knew this was the case but I never minded that much; it suited me fine. It was an arrangement that worked for everyone, with minimum fuss.