WHEN YOU’RE LOCKED IN A CLOSET, YOU END UP MAKING ALL KINDS OF EMPTY THREATS

One day when I was nine, my mom pulled out of the driveway to go to the dollar store, so my twin big sisters shoved me in a closet in the hallway and locked the door.

Darkness. All I could hear above their giggles outside the closet door was the sound of my own ragged breath, huffing, panting. I had struggled against them at first, but they were seven years older and that much bigger; I didn't stand a chance.

I yelled at them as my eyes tried to adjust to the dimness:

“It’s dark in here!”

“Let me out!”

“Come on, stop it!”

“This isn’t funny!”

“I’m telling Mom!”

Every outburst was met with more laughter.

Seconds passed and my eyes sharpened slightly. I found the door handle and jiggled it, checking to make sure it really was locked. It was, and the jiggling did little except make them laugh more and yell back at me:

“It's locked, dummy!”

I heard more laughter, then footsteps down the hall. I tried the door again, yelling for them to let me out, but they were gone and I was alone. I slumped to the floor and cried, fat tears rolling down my fat cheeks. If my sisters heard me crying they’d laugh even more, but I didn’t care. I thought back to that morning. They had been reading my journal out loud, their laughter high and piercing as they passed the journal back and forth over my head, skipping between sections and reading snippets.

“ – wish Dad was here, I miss when he would – “

“—three boys I have a crush on the most in class are –“

“—some days I wish we lived in a big mansion and Mom didn’t have to –“

“—one day I’ll wear pretty make-up and new clothes from the mall –“

They were back in our room, and I heard them talking. If they were reading my journal again I swore I would get out and kill them. But it sounded like they were on the phone. I could only hear Lucy’s voice. Tracy was silent. Lucy’s voice sounded different in a way I couldn’t place. It sounded like it used to sound when she talked to Dad: flirty maybe, more high-pitched.

The tears continued, but were no longer tears of sadness and frustration. These were tears of anger, of fortitude. I stood, wiping them away and shifted all of my weight onto my back foot and rammed my shoulder into the door. Nothing. I rammed into it again, harder and louder. Again and again until my shoulder felt it like would pop from its socket, and still I couldn’t break through.

Rubbing my sore shoulder, I put my ear to the door and listened again to my sisters talking excitedly about something I couldn’t quite make out. All I knew was that Tracy kept saying “Oh my God” really fast.

“Are you sure, Luce?”

“Totally,” Lucy said, and they squealed with delight. I could only assume they were devising ever worse ways to torture me.

As I heard them blasting songs they taped off the radio in our room, my mind moved from ways to get out of the closet to ways I would brutally murder my sisters when I did get out. I was imagining lowering them into vats of acid or running them over with a monster truck or training our cat Lucky to poop on their pillows when I heard a car pull into the driveway and almost jumped out of my skin.

Mom’s home!

My sisters shrieked some more, turned off the tape and opened the front door. Instead of Mom, I heard the voices of two boys – loud, deep, almost dark voices.

For reasons I only understood in hindsight, I was maybe angrier at that moment than I ever had been before. I stood up, determined to break down the door and kick those boys out of my house and get revenge on my sisters. I leaned on my back foot and slammed by entire body – not just my shoulder this time – into the closet door as hard as I could. Nothing. I crouched down and started again, this time starting from the back of the closet, hurtling towards the door. I imagined I was the Kool-Aid Man bursting through a brick wall, exclaiming “Oh yeah!” But instead of breaking through, I tripped after a few steps on one of my dad's old shoes, slamming headfirst into the door. Everything went dark.

**

“Lucy?” I yelled. “Tracy?”

No answer.

I sat up and rubbed my head. I noticed for the first time how musty it smelled in the closet. My hand-me-down coats, all our thrift store shirts, the Payless shoes made with stinky rubber that erodes after a month.

My eyes were adjusting more and I could make out shapes. The closet seemed a bit brighter than before and I wanted to explore, see if I could find another way out, but still the place scared me.

Months before, Mom and I went out to the movies together because I got all B’s on my report card. It was raining, so Mom got me dressed right in front of the closet. She gave me the umbrella and I held it until she gave me my galoshes and I tried to put them on, but they were Lucy's too-small hand-me-downs, so I struggled to put them on while still standing up, and I had to lean the umbrella against the door and kept shoving my feet into the galoshes and the umbrella fell down and landed on Lucky, who shrieked, and then my mom yelled at me and my Dad called from the other room to quiet down and Lucy and Tracy passed by me laughing on their way to a slumber party and and really it was all Lucy's fault because the galoshes were hers in the first place.

My Mom said F it, threw the galoshes back in the closet and grabbed my hand. I could tell she was angry because we didn’t even say goodbye to my Dad when we left and our dinner at the Wendy’s salad bar was mostly silent, and I had thirds of chocolate fudge and Mom didn’t even tell me not to or call me fat.

After watching “Three Men and a Baby” at the theatre on the eastside with sticky seats, we got home and it was totally quiet. The TV wasn’t on in the den; Mom checked the back car port and Dad's truck was gone. We checked the closet in their bedroom and a bunch of his pants and shirts were gone too. There was no note.

I went into the kitchen and saw Mom at the sink, staring out the back window, the black umbrella still in her hand. She looked back at me and held the umbrella out.

“Mom, where’s Dad?”

“Put the umbrella in the closet,” she said.

I crept to the closet and looked at the doorknob – it was glowing in the dim overhead light and seemed to have some kind of power. I was suddenly scared of the closet. I stood there for a long time – I don’t know how long – just looking at the door. I quickly opened the door, threw the umbrella in and ran to my bed and buried my face in my pillows.

I sat there thinking, remembering, and the longer I was in the closet the more I could see. I saw that black umbrella askew on the floor, I saw those old too-small galoshes in the corner, I looked up and saw my Dad’s moth-ball smelly motorcycle jacket. And above it, I saw something I never noticed before – I saw a square in the ceiling with a little thin rope attached to a hook hanging off it.

The same thing is in the closet in our room. It’s a door to the attic. It’s a way out.

I heard my sisters and the boys laughing from the kitchen as I grabbed onto the shelf. I pushed down onto the shelf ledge a little bit to test it, and even though we got it at Odd Lots and my Dad called it a cheap piece of shit it seemed sturdy enough to hold me.

My feet were on the bottom rung of shelves, my hands on the third rung, and I stood on my tippy-toes and pushed with my palms and lifted myself up with my arms. Breathing deeply, palms sweaty, I scrambled up another rung of the shelves. Outside my sisters laughed more and I clenched my teeth, pushing again. Now my hands were on the very top of the shelf, so I stood with my feet barely on the lower rung of shelves and panted for a second to catch my breath and look down.

I had never been this high up besides on the rusty jungle gym at school, and I only got up on that because Dusty Johnson dared me at recess even though he knew I was afraid of heights and everybody was watching so I couldn't say no.

One last push and I was just able to slide my butt onto the top of the shelf and my head was almost to the top of the ceiling.

I felt dizzy. I wiped sweat off my forehead and looked around. Right in front of me was the slender cord that pulled down the attic door. It had a little plastic stopper at the end of it, and after I sat there at the top of the shelf to catch my breath, I reached out to see how far away it was.

It was farther than I thought.

So I reached, even though I was so scared I would fall. I put my left hand on the shelf-top to balance and reached with my right. I struggled and strained as my fingertips brushed the stopper. The shelf suddenly felt weird so I shifted my weight back and sat solid and everything seemed right again for a second.

Reaching out again, I felt strain in muscles I didn’t know I had, and right as I grabbed onto that little plastic stopper the shelf felt weird again. The whole thing fell over and I fell with it.

There was a crash, and outside the closet I heard a boy say, “What was that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said. “Let’s go to my room.”

Figures. I could be dead and all they wanted to do was make out with boys.

Shaking with fear and adrenaline, I examined myself. Somehow I was unhurt.

It was still pretty dark but even in the low light I saw that one of the many pieces of clothes on top of me was my Dad’s old leather jacket, one of the few things he left. I slid my hands across the front to feel the smooth black leather. I sniffed it only to smell sweat and dirt – I could almost taste the gasoline fumes coming off it. I could hear a crinkling sound as I checked the pockets and was surprised to find a folded-up piece of paper in one of the inner pockets.

I pulled it out and leaned on my elbows, belly-down, in front of the little sliver of light that came under the door. And as I read my Dad’s bad handwriting I realized it was a note to my Mom explaining why he left.

**

There are things I remember. We would go with him to play football at the local high school. It was one of those big footballs, probably the size of the ones the guys on TV use. I was crouched down playing in the grass when he yelled my name.

“Claire! Catch!”

I stood up just in time to get hit hard in the stomach.

I remember many nights when my sisters and I would eat our TV dinners in front of the black-and-white TV on trays while Mom was at the diner and Dad was in the garage working on an old car. It was called a Ford Model-something and it was old and smelled like a gas station and it was all grey. He’d heat up all our dinners in the microwave then take his and eat it on the hood of the car.

Tim, the boy next door, would come over and watch and sometimes my Dad would give him a tool and tell him to adjust this or tweak that and sometimes I would be pouring myself some Kool-Aid over the sink and see them together out the window and I would be watching so hard and not paying attention that I would pour so much Kool-Aid that my cup would overflow. Good thing I did it over the sink.

I remember the day he left. I thought about the arguments between him and Mom. Mostly they would get away from each other – Mom would come into the living room when Dad was watching TV, and he would get up from the couch, springs squeaking, and go out back to the garage. Or he’d come to the refrigerator to get a beer, and she’d put down her sponge at the sink and go to their room and close the door.

But I heard one argument coming from their room late one night when I couldn’t sleep. I caught most of it, even though I didn’t understand all of it:

“Stop, hold on a second,” Mom said. “Wait wait wait.”

“Goddamn it, what?” Dad said.

“Listen, I gotta tell you something. I went to the doctors today…”

“OK…”

“And I wasn’t sure before, even though some things were happening, but they told me what I thought, so…”

“Spit it out already.”

“Christ, I got menopause, OK?”

I was on my belly, note clenched in my hand, my face pressed against the crack of light under the door. For a moment, all I could see was Lucky walking by. I heard muffled voices and footsteps coming from the bedroom. It was Lucy with some boy. I’d seen him before a couple of times – he was tall and skinny and had curly black hair just like my Dad’s.

He and Lucy sat down on the couch. I couldn’t see much, but I could tell she was sitting on his lap and I could hear them kissing.

Gross.

“Lucy!” I whispered. In between kissing, I could hear them talking.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “It’s, like, kind of a big deal.”

“Wait – did you hear something?”

“What? No.”

“Really? Sounded like someone saying your name.”

“No. I don’t know. Hold on a second.” Lucy walked over to the closet.

“Look, Luce, I have to show you something –“

Before I could finish, she shoved a few couch cushions against the crack in the door and everything was dark and muffled again.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I stood up and I started pounding on the door.

“What is that?” the boy asked immediately.

“Nothing,” Lucy said. Then footsteps.

“You hear something?” the other boy said, coming into the room.

“I don’t hear anything,” Tracy said. So I pounded as hard as I could to make sure there was no mistaking it.

“Seriously,” the second boy said. “That’s freaking me out. What is it?”

“Lucy, just tell them.”

“No, you tell them.”

So I did it for them. “I’m their sister Claire! Let me out of here!” I yelled.

“Look,” Lucy said, sighing. “It’s our little sister, OK?”

“She was, like, being a brat,” Tracy said. “So we had to, you know…”

“Put her in the closet?” said boy one. “Cool.”

“You gonna let her out?”

“Eventually,” Lucy said.

The boys both laugh, bitterly. Then I saw boy one put his coat on.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asked.

“If you don’t let her out, I’m leaving.”

“Yeah, that’s messed up,” boy two said.

“Listen, I can’t just yet –“

“All right, I’m out of here. You coming?”

“Yeah,” boy two said.

And then I heard lots of footsteps and rustling and my sisters protesting and the door opening.

“No, hold on, wait, I have something to tell you –“ Lucy said.

“I don’t want to hear it.” Boy one said. “I have a little sister myself, you know. You don't treat your sister like that.”

“But I have something to tell you –“

“Then tell me at school tomorrow,” he said, slamming the door.

The couch cushions came up then and the sliver of light seemed brighter than before. I put my face to the door crack and saw a spray can. A cloud came under the door, and immediately I started coughing. I rushed to the rear wall.

“What was that?” I yelled between hacking fits.

“Hairspray!” Lucy yelled back.

“Why?”

“Why? Because you fucked everything up, that's why.”

“F’ed what up?”

“My boyfriend,” she said. “Today was the day I was going to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

Lucy sprayed more.

“Stop it,” Tracy told Lucy.

Then to me she said, “You seriously don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“How I’ve been puking a lot lately?” Lucy said. “How I’ve gained some weight? How I stopped stealing swigs of Mom’s wine coolers?”

“So?” I said.

“I’m pregnant, idiot!” Lucy said.

I felt hot, flushed. I coughed again. “Does Mom know?” I asked.

She laughed. “You really are stupid, you know that?”

**

“It’s a boy,” Lucy said.

“There’s gonna be a boy in the family!” Tracy gushed.

“Guys,” I said. “You have to read this note.”

“We don’t have to do a damn thing,” Lucy said.

So, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I started reading Dad’s note out loud:

“Dear Sarah,” I yelled, as loud as I could. “I don’t know how to tell you this, and I’m not a good writer anyhow, so I should just come out and say it: I have to leave.”

“The hell is that?” Tracy said.

“I told you: it’s the note from Dad.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In a coat pocket in here.”

“She’s making it up,” Lucy said.

“Am not!”

“Are too!” Lucy said. “You’re just trying to use that to let us let you out.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll slide it under the door and you can see for yourself. It’s Dad’s handwriting and everything.”

“OK,” Tracy said. “Slide it under the door.”

I gave them the note, and put my eye to crack, the line of light growing bright, taking up my whole field of vision.

I saw Tracy sit on the couch and start to read the note.

Lucy walked off back to the bedroom.

There was near silence. The light didn’t sting my eyes anymore. I could only see Tracy’s bottom-half and she had her legs crossed. She was jiggling one leg with a shoe half off her foot. She finished, took a deep breath, set the note next to her on the couch.

“Luce!” she yelled.

“What!” Lucy yelled back.

“Luce,” she said. “Might wanna read this. No, like, you definitely want to read this.”

“Coming,” Lucy said.

She came into the room and Tracy handed her the note. Then, as Lucy sat down to read it, Tracy laid down on her belly in front of my door, her face only inches from mine.

“Did you read the whole note?” she asked.

“Yes, all the way to the end” I said.

“You know it’s bullshit, right?”

“It is?” I asked. And I started crying, because I don’t believe it’s bullshit, I believe what he wrote; I believe it was my fault.

“Don’t you believe it – that’s not why he left.”

“Yeah, no, I know,” I said between sobs, but I didn’t believe her.

“Repeat after me: it’s bullshit.”

“It’s…”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit.”

“Remember that, no matter what, OK?”

“It’s not bullshit,” she said, interrupting.

“Shut the fuck up, Luce.”

“No, I won’t. No, it’s true.”

“Luce –“

“No, we’ve coddled her enough. Time for the truth, OK? The note is right, what Dad wrote is true: he left because of you, OK?”

“Shut the fuck up, Luce!” Tracy yelled.

“He left because he wanted a boy, he didn’t want a girl. I overheard him and Mom yelling about it right after she told him she got menopause and couldn’t have any more kids, she was too old. So I got pregnant, and it’s a boy, and that's going to fix everything. And it’s all your fault, but like everything else, I’m going to fix it.”

“Stop it, Lucy!”

Lucy tore up the note. “I wish you had either been a boy, or hadn’t been born at all and fucked everything up for the rest of us.”

“You’re such a bitch, Luce,” Tracy yelled.

I was fat, they were skinny. I had dark curly hair, theirs was blond. I played boy sports, they were cheerleaders. They had friends and went to slumber parties on the weekends, I stayed at home alone watching TV and eating Twizzlers. I’d always felt different, unwanted, like I didn’t exist. Now it was confirmed. I kept crying, louder. But even over my heavy sobs I could hear a car coming in the driveway.

“Here they are,” Lucy said.

“They?” Tracy said.

Lucy came up to my door, her face right by the crack.

“Listen: we’re gonna let you out now, OK?”

I stopped crying that instant, the weight of sadness in my chest becoming a crackling rage at sight of her face, the sound of her voice.

“But you have to promise you won’t tell, OK?” she continued. “You promise?”

“About what?”

“About everything,” she said. “You promise?”

“Yes,” I said.

We both stood. I heard the car doors slam, footsteps, and then the sound of the closet door unlocking.

Lucy opened the closet door at the moment my Mom walked in the back door and the light from both the doors opening was blinding. In the stinging light, it took several seconds to realize that my Dad stood in the brightness of the doorway, right behind my Mom. It was the first time I’d seen him in almost six months.

Instead of running to him and jumping into his arms like I wanted to, I did what I had planned, but with more ferocity and violence than I imagined possible. I ran directly at Lucy and jumped on her, knocking her down.

It's no surprise that my Dad left again soon after that day, never to return, since the first thing he saw upon returning to our family was the sight of me on top of my big sister Lucy under the bright kitchen lights, pinning her down with my knees and pummeling her stomach.