paused when she heard Father and Mother arguing in there, in tones that sounded as much fearful as angry.
Certainly no one heard her, and she stood alone in the darkened hall as the noise got worse and things crashed and there were awful, burning smells, then the impossible sound of a roaring wind, as loud as an express train. The whole house shook with it and something thumped hard, once, twice, three times against the door until it seemed about to burst off its hinges.
Then there was silence, and blood flowed like a wave under the door, eclipsing the light from within, splashing over Caroline’s slippers until her feet were soaked and the cuffs of her pajamas were glued to her ankles.
That was when Caroline started screaming. She ran out into the chilly November night, screaming, until windows came up and people shouted, “Shut up you crazy brat!”
She was still screaming when the police found her, hours later, minus her slippers and covered with mud, huddled among some trees in the park, almost hoarse now, so that the noise she made was more of a wheezing moan than a scream, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
After that she was wrapped up in warm blankets and treated kindly by lots of people who made stupid noises at her and talked in near baby-talk in a pathetic attempt to “get down to her level,” as someone (even Caroline, years later) might have put it. She was made to tell her story again and again, but still she screamed a lot, and therapists, in a hospital, gave her drugs to make her sleep, and told her when she woke up that everything had been a bad dream.
But no one believed her story. Her father was gone, yes, but there was no trace of blood, and nothing was broken in the house, and her mother, on visits, refused to explain further. She overheard the doctors and her mom and someone who might have been a lawyer talking about “desertion” once, but when everybody realized Caroline was listening, they shut the door to her room and went down the hall to the lounge.
What really must have been a dream, Caroline concluded, was the time her mother slipped into her room after visiting hours and sat down beside her bed in the dark. Mother was crying, which was amazing, and she whispered, “Honey, I want you to know that whatever happens, I still love you.”
Then Caroline turned and buried her face in her pillow and screamed as hard as she could, but no one heard her, and Mother was gone.
That was the greatest discovery in her life so far, that if she screamed into her pillow and no one heard her, she could pretend she was getting better and would be allowed to go home, and she could keep her secret from her mother, from the therapists, from everyone.
Her secret, which indeed she had kept, even through the relentless interrogations, was the real reason she made so much noise in the first place, why she screamed—into her pillow now, unheard by everyone else, which was actually much better.
It was because if she screamed loudly enough, it was like punching through a barrier into another world, and sounds came back to her, not echoes, but answers. She was conversing with something or someone very far away, and she had to shout to make herself heard. Many nights she would scream into her pillow for a while, then lie awake for hours, listening to the darkness make its reply, comforting her and soothing her, telling strange stories and promising the answers to things she didn’t understand.
If no one else listened to her, if no one else believed her, there was always this other, this answerer, who did.
Once she even asked the darkness, “What am I going to be when I grow up?” and a voice like a winter wind rattling dead leaves replied, “Anything you want. Anything at all.”
II
That must have been a dream about her mother saying she loved her, because when Caroline came back home, Mom had a new boyfriend, whose name was Jack. He pretended to be her uncle, but wasn’t. He didn’t like Caroline at all. Mom would not let “Uncle” Jack hurt her, and once she even grabbed his wrist when he raised a coke bottle to smack her, but otherwise Mom did everything Jack told her to do, as if she were his slave. The two of them were away a lot, or when they were home they were locked in the basement (which had been converted into a laboratory of some sort; Caroline was never allowed down there), and sometimes there were the awful smells and noises.
In summer, Caroline took to sleeping on the porch, or in the hammock in the back yard. This was encouraged. She wasn’t wanted in the house.
She always brought a pillow to scream into.
She pretty much raised herself. When she was twelve, she decided she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, and in the times when Mom and Jack were somewhere else, she would spend long hours curled up in front of the TV watching videotapes of Fred Astaire and Ginjer Rogers movies, sometimes with the sound off, just watching the two graceful black and white figures whirling across the screen, while the darkness whispered to her in the voice she had known all her life.
Meanwhile, Jack started to bring strangers into the house, a lot of them, late at night. Sometimes they didn’t seem to arrive. They were merely there. They spoke with foreign accents or even in foreign languages, or chanted, or sang behind closed doors, and the smells were worse then. Caroline could tell that her mother didn’t like this. Mom looked hollow-eyed and even afraid, exhausted all the time, but she still wouldn’t say anything to Caroline, who knew that when this sort of stuff was happening, it was time to make herself scarce.
She spent hours in the local library, doing her homework, reading books about far places, or drawing leaping, flying, costumed figures in her notebooks. She had given up on the idea of being a dancer by the time she was thirteen, because she knew she’d never get lessons and it was probably already too late to begin anyway. She’d fallen in love with comic books and sometimes pretended she was a superhero with a secret identity. Not heroine. It never occurred to her that comic-book characters really had gender, or anything under those tights.
More seriously, she thought she’d like to draw X-Men when she grew up, even if, right now, her figures tended to be lumpy and misshapen. She knew she’d have to study hard.
But it was hard enough just to get by in school. She was out of the house so much that it was a struggle to keep up appearances. Not that she cared much about appearances the way the popular girls did, not that she bothered with makeup or painting her nails, but she did like to be clean like anybody else, and have fresh underwear. Yet if she spent all night at the library, or at the train station reading under the lights while pretending to be waiting for a late train, and then came home to find the house full of strange people and noises and odd flickering lights and had to sleep out in the yard, it showed. She hated going to school with the knees of her pants dirty or leaf bits in her hair. By the time she was in junior high, she figured out how to slip into the girl’s locker room at six o’clock in the morning and use the shower—until she got caught at it one day.
“My mom hasn’t been paying the water bills,” she said, but she didn’t think she was believed.
“Caroline,” the school counselor said, in a voice so drippingly sympathetic that it was all Caroline could do to not laugh in her face, “is everything all right at home?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
That was the funny part, as she laughed and cried and screamed into her pillow—or sometimes, when she was alone in the park, into the sky and she didn’t give a damn who heard her—because things were not fine.
It was, again, almost November. She was sleeping out in the yard more often than not because she was afraid to go into the house, and she was likely to get frostbite in that damn hammock, even if she did wear a heavy coat and sleep under the same old, muddy blanket as always.
She lay there in the dark. Her face was cold. Her teeth chattered. She was angry. By now she was fourteen and had torn up her notebooks in a fit of rage, and wasn’t going to be an artist anymore when she grew up. No, she was going to become a scientist and learn a way to blow up the world and do it. No one cared about her. No one believed anything she said, and so, she decided, it didn’t matter what she said—because she was always a mess, because she was crazy and everyone knew it and she lived in