A girl in my sister’s grade got sick. I didn’t know what kind of sick, but I knew it had to be bad because they took her to Strong Memorial, an hour and a half north on the Thruway. Her family had a big house that you saw at the end of First National Bank commercials, the kind of house certain mothers called “stunning.” The three kids had the same pretty eyes, even the older boy. I couldn’t think of anything else I knew about them. The sick girl, Natalie, wasn’t someone Val hung out with, but Val said they were friendly in class. That’s what I remember when Natalie’s being sick first became news—about a week before Val was sobbing in the bathroom.

“Petie’s making me go to Rochester to visit Natalie,” she said in a whimper. “In her hospital room.”

Petie was our father, who didn’t want to be called dad.

“Why?” I asked.

“No kids are visiting her up there. Even the girls she’s close with.”

“Nonny won’t let him take you.”

She nodded in defiance. “She said he could take me out of school.”

Petie’s mom had become ours too when our mother died. I was a baby so I don’t remember; Val was three. Now we all lived together in a weird kind of family. Val and I loved Nonny, but we knew she loved Petie way more than she did us. We knew that the focus of her life was keeping him happy so he’d stay with her.

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“It’s because of Natalie’s father,” she said. “He’s a senior VP.”

Instantly I understood why Petie would want Val to go to Rochester. Our father had done something bad at work and was going to be demoted to another department, and they were deciding which one. There was the department he wanted, and there were a lot of other places he didn’t want to go. The reason he didn’t get fired outright was because of my grandfather, Big Pete, who was a decorated war hero and had every kind of job at Amalgamated—foreman, shop steward, shift supervisor, Local 101 leader—always wearing denim overalls in those old black-and-white photos. He died right before my mother and was a legend for working at the plant since he was fifteen. The VPs loved men like him. You couldn’t find those kinds of men anymore. Their sons had moved south, to Florida or the Carolinas. The ones who stayed were better or worse versions of Petie.

Everyone in town worked at Amalgamated. There were the factory people like Big Pete and then the executives—dozens and dozens of vice presidents. There were so many VPs that the only way you could identify the really important people was with “senior.” The father of my partner in an English class project was a senior VP. And now I learned that Natalie Scovill’s father was the senior VP who’d be deciding on Petie’s lesser job.

Petie wanted Val to tell Natalie that she knew what it’s like to go through something hard because she grew up without a mother. He thought this would impress Natalie’s father.

“That’s dumb,” I said. “You were never sick! And how does he know Natalie will even tell her father that?”

She put her hand on her hip and gave me that cool-girl look. “He wants me to write the same thing in a letter to Mr. Scovill.”

Though I didn’t want Val to have to write a dumb letter, I immediately thought: I can do that for you. It was a reflex from being known to myself as The Writer. If something needed to be said on paper, I could do it. Of all the things in life that were hard, this thing wasn’t. I remembered words from television and adult life and used them according to how they looked on the page. I often didn’t look them up in the dictionary until they got circled in red and “Webster’s” written in the margin. I didn’t mind this system of trial and error. I didn’t even mind the drop from A to B because of all the circles.

I was overjoyed that for English class we were writing novels in pairs. I didn’t like the pairs part, but I lucked out in getting placed with Justine Welliver, who was treated like royalty at Good Shepherd because of her father. I knew I’d get an A on the project regardless. I also knew that Mrs. Clark would make like Justine had done all the work. But I didn’t care since I knew that, with Justine, I could write a ghost story murder mystery. Mrs. Clark would never let a regular kid write about multiple murders, but the daughter of a senior VP could do anything.

Our novel was about a ghost who kills people in the early-morning hours each day the week before Halloween. It was set in Nebraska, when the last days of daylight savings made it dark for people starting their farming. Justine had objected, “Why does this have to be in Nebraska? I don’t know anything about Nebraska. I’ve never been there.” “You know all that prairie stuff,” I argued, knowing her fanaticism about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. “None of the Little House books are in Nebraska,” she shot back. I had the last word with: “Nebraska will make it all seem real.”

Two days after crying in the bathroom, Val came home and said that Natalie Scovill’s story got worse. Her mother, a nurse at St. Joseph’s, had run away with a doctor. The two of them left for Tempe, Arizona, because Mrs. Scovill didn’t want her children anymore. Val told me that Natalie had hurt herself in some way and refused to eat. They took her to a hospital in Rochester not because she was that sick but because they wanted her to be far away from the people at St. Joseph’s who knew Mrs. Scovill and the doctor. Val shook her head. “Now I know why Petie wants me to go up there and talk about losing my mother.”

I was in fifth grade and my sister in seventh, but I considered myself just as mature. When I heard this stuff about Mrs. Scovill, though, I had to go behind the garage and cry. I had held it in when Val asked, “How could she leave her own kids? How? Everything for some doctor? It’s like something on The Young and the Restless.” Behind the garage, I remembered Mrs. Scovill’s smiling face in the school lobby when she was Good Shepherd Parent of the Month. It was a hospital photo, and there was stethoscope around her neck. I wondered if she thought that giving her kids pretty eyes was all she owed them. Was that all it meant to be someone’s mother?

That night, Petie told Val they had to go the next morning because Natalie might get released and they wouldn’t be able to “show how much we care.” More angry than upset, Val went through the few things she knew about Natalie Scovill: that she wanted to be a football cheerleader in high school—and probably would get picked because of who her father was; that her brother was in the fraternity with the navy and gold varsity jackets—Kappa Something Something. Val didn’t want to see Natalie Scovill with a feeding tube. What was she going to say about losing her mother at three years old when Natalie was twelve?

It was my idea how Val could get out of this: volunteer to escort a senior to seven o’clock Mass. It wasn’t too late to ride her bike over to the rectory and buzz to get a name and address from the list. No one wanted to do things like this except extreme Catholics like my cousins in Utica. Val was sold: my idea became a plan. Sometimes it scared me how easy it was to get people to do what I suggested. I got Justine to go along with my storylines by flattering her into thinking the ideas were hers. She had wanted to call our novel The One-Way Door to Insanity. I said we shouldn’t be that “ordinary.” What I meant was “obvious,” but that wasn’t a word I knew how to use. I wanted The Week of Dark Mornings because I could imagine seeing those words on the cover of a library book and having a lot of questions that could only be answered by checking it out and reading it.

Listening to Val quietly get ready the next morning made me heartsick. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and even with daylight savings ended, it was still dark before seven. As I lie motionless in the dark, I thought of an old Beatles song on one of Petie’s albums, “She’s Leaving Home,” and it seemed like Val was my own little girl all grown up. As I heard the click on the screen door out front, I could not imagine what life would be like if Val never came back. How could I live if someone kidnapped her on the walk to the old lady’s? How could I live if someone murdered her? I already felt bad that I had no memories of my mother, who was born in Omaha with a heart condition and raised in foster homes because her unmarried mother couldn’t handle the hospital trips. This condition caused my mother to eventually die of a blood clot, after she grew up and moved to New York and met Petie and got pregnant with Val and had to get married and then had another kid that she was holding in her arms when her time came.

By the time I was brushing my teeth, Petie was having a fit over Val’s disappearance. I heard him swear and throw things downstairs in Nonny’s kitchen. As I tried to slink out the front, he pulled a strap on my knapsack just when the bus was coming into view. “OK, then you’re going.”

“I don’t even know her!” I cried.

It was no use. He grabbed my hand. “Come on.”

Nonny did the same thing she always did while failing to protect us—act like she was the one in mortal danger. “My blood pressure!”

When we started the drive, Petie said he’d take me to that hamburger place by the lake where all the college kids go, but I doubted he’d make good on his promise. He didn’t even care if Val and I buckled our seat belts. Nonny said the reason he forgot things was that he was the youngest. There was Uncle Lawrence who lived alone in Dayton, Ohio, and who everyone thought was strange. Val and I met him only once, for ten minutes. And then Aunt Margaret, who married a strict Catholic name Kenneth and lived in Utica with their weird kids who sang in folk Masses. Val thought that the reason Petie forgot things was that he had a bunch of girlfriends in different cities and maybe even other kids.

He looked down at me next to him. “You girls are so damned lucky to go around in ignorance-is-bliss.” He had to look back and forth at the road and me to let me know he was glaring. “I get the world thrown at me at work. They treat you like you’re stupid, just another seal flapping its fins for fish. They treat you like dirt.”

My head was stuck on the image of Petie as a seal. I thought of him more as a raccoon with crafty little claw-paws, flinging the lids from trash cans.

“Now I’ve got to please this goddamned Politburo!” he shouted. “Too effing busy for the three of them to meet until after the holiday, so they leave me hanging out to rot. This effing Politburo, this troika.”

I knew it couldn’t be me he was talking to.

“Did you hear what I just said?” he yelled even louder. “Troika! Troika!”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, looking out the window.

“Scovill, Bartholomew, and Welliver!”

I realized that one of them was Justine’s father.

He laughed at the highway ahead of him. “Scovill’s wife working as a nurse—that’s sure as hell a serious slap in the face.”

I didn’t know why this was a slap in the face. Everyone loved nurses.

“And her in there with the big-shot surgeons, handing them the scalpels all hot and bothered. Stupid-ass Scovill at the country club rubbing shoulders with the orthopedic dick who takes off with his wife.”

I stared out the window and thought how, with our novel, I didn’t have to try to think like a bad person because the killer was a ghost. All I had to understand was revenge. But with Mrs. Scovill, I didn’t know. She was a nurse who took care of sick people. But now her own daughter was a sick person. Was she bad for being in Arizona with a new life?

I tried to think of something good, something happy. And of course I thought of Mrs. Qualiano’s IBM Selectric. After we had written out our novels in longhand and there were no more changes, we could sign up to use the secretaries’ typewriters for two hours after school. Nonny had a sticky old manual typewriter, but it was nothing compared to Mrs. Qualiano’s big blue machine outside the principal’s office. I was allowed to try it out once for ten minutes, and the feeling stuck on my fingertips for days. And Justine being Justine, she in fact expected me to do all the after-school typing because of her daily classes at Madame Helena’s, the dance studio for rich kids.

Petie did a lot of herky-jerky driving and braking in Rochester before we got to Strong Memorial, which was huge and official and scary. I was afraid of seeing people crying and dead people on stretchers. I looked at the groups of workers holding paper cups and wondered how they could do this every day, face down some people crying and other ones already dead on stretchers.

“You’re not on the list,” said a woman at the reception desk when we got out of the elevator.

Petie pulled me in front of him as if I were something for show-and-tell. I knew I looked afraid and upset. “She came all the way up here. Please don’t break her heart.”

When it was agreed I could go in for ten minutes, Petie leaned down to whisper in his gravelly voice: “You know what to say.” I was so glad he didn’t go in with me. Part of his act was pretending I was the headstrong child driving this entire plan. It was funny that in pretending this wasn’t his idea, he was pretending he was a different kind of father, one who cared about kids, who waited for kids, who was nice to nurses.

Natalie had a room to herself with the door closed. The nurse who brought me in announced “a visitor from the Good Shepherd” and quickly went back out and shut the door. It was dark in there with the blinds down and shut. Natalie was the strangest stranger, so thin and pale. I knew older girls from how they hiked up the skirts of their uniforms, from the lip gloss they slid around their faces on the walk home. I felt like a trespasser seeing all of her personal things around her, the stuff people brought from her bedroom. I felt I had invaded her dignity. And if she was going to die in that room, I had done worse. I was so afraid of death that I imagined it had a smell exactly like here.

“I’m Val Putney’s sister,” I managed to say.

She stared vacantly, this blade of grass on a bed. She seemed sick and weak and had orange stains down the front of her. There were tubes. I was disoriented trying to tell where each of them led. “Val wanted to visit you today,” I continued, staring at the tubes, “but she got the flu last night. She asked me to come and say that everyone misses you and hopes you get better soon. They are thinking of you a lot. The whole school is thinking of you a lot, fifth grade too.”

“You’re the little Putney,” she said. Her voice was like a breath with no tune.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just the two of us, me and Val.”

Standing in that dark room, I wondered what kind of person could ever bring up the subject of Natalie’s mother. I was hoping she’d ask me to leave.

“Your mother died,” she said.

I nodded because she was looking directly at my face. I wondered how much of me she could make out. I could see nothing of the crystal blue that made the Scovill eyes so special.

“Did you cry?” she asked.

My mother had gone to sleep with me in her arms. That was the story. I woke up crying and my mother never woke up.

“I was a baby,” I told her. “I was always crying.”

“Did you want a new mother?”

I laughed for some reason. “We have our grandmother, Nonny.” The minute I said that I realized it wasn’t an answer. Nonny often said that you’re never supposed to sleep with a baby in your arms, as if my mother somehow caused the blood clot. We knew Nonny didn’t like our mother. Our mother was pretty, and Petie used to be handsome, but Val and I were average-looking like Nonny.

“But . . . ”—something made me keep talking—“me and Val always hated not knowing a single person in our mom’s family. Our mom’s mother gave her away to foster families. Our mom never even knew her father. She came from farmers in Nebraska. Val and me, we’re always halfway in the dark.”

She looked away from me, toward the wall—past the rows of little gift-shop animals with ear tags.

Just the day before, Justine and I had been arguing about the ending to our ghost story murder mystery. She had just got the original cast album of Annie and wanted to use some words from “Tomorrow,” after all the neighbors have been killed and the ghost decides to spare a girl on a bike from a similar grisly death. Justine wanted to write that the sun would come out over the Nebraska fields tomorrow. I had snapped, “This isn’t a musical!”

Now, however, I felt I needed some of those annoying words. “The sun keeps coming up no matter what,” I said, looking at the blinds. “It stays dark only if you make it that way.”

Suddenly, a nurse came in and pulled me from the room. Out in the hall, a man in a suit I assumed was Mr. Scovill was yelling. “Who the hell are you people?” I could tell Petie was considering telling some kind of lie, but he thought better of it and said nothing.

Why did my father think this was a good idea? Why did he think Mr. Scovill wouldn’t be at the hospital? Why did he think Mr. Scovill would want to be reminded that everyone knew his wife ran away with a doctor? The look on the senior VP’s face was pure disgust. At first I thought that Petie was lucky that Mr. Scovill didn’t know him by sight. But then I thought that maybe he did recognize Petie but was trying to keep that distance because of the disgust. I could tell so much from that look. It said that Petie and I, we were a defective family. He was repulsed by the idea of defective families. But then wasn’t Mrs. Scovill not wanting to be a mother just like Petie not wanting to be a father? This was a strange thing to consider—that the circles of our two very different families now had a prominent subset.

Petie grabbed my hand and stormed off toward the elevators. Then down in the lobby he let go without a word. I felt his hand leaving mine as if it took more time than it did. I saw his back go through the big revolving door. I went out there too, thinking he might swing by with the car, but he didn’t because that’s what Petie did—left you places as some kind of punishment.

I went back inside and waited in the main lobby, spitting mad at myself for leaving my knapsack with the sandwich back home on the floor. After a couple of hours, some hospital people came up to me and there were men called “Security” hovering around. I told them that my father usually did this when he got mad—went away to do things and then came back late. As I was talking to the adults, Mr. Scovill came up to us.

“What happened to your father?” he yelled.

I was terrified of him. “I don’t know.”

“How are you getting home?”

“I’m going to wait till he comes.”

“No, you’re not, young lady. You’re going home and you’re getting your homework assignments from your teachers and you’re doing your homework this very evening instead of gallivanting around the state!”

He acted as if I had wanted all of this to happen, like I was playing hooky from school, like I enjoyed sitting alone for hours in a big-city hospital with no food and no money. He acted like I was part of all the problems in life—like I was everyone’s problem.

He arranged for the people around us to call a taxi and asked them to Xerox the driver’s license before I got in the cab. I was so confused and upset. “But I don’t have any money,” I told him.

“Oh, that father of yours will pay for this!” he yelled.

In the backseat of the strange man’s yellow cab, I thought how this feeling of being all alone brought to mind two extremes—being taken to jail by the cops and being driven by a chauffeur. At first I was upset enough to feel nauseous. Did Mr. Scovill mean that the very expensive cab fare would come out of Petie’s paycheck, or that Petie would pay by losing his job? What if Petie never came back? What if he went off with one of his girlfriends?

But then later I felt this strange relief . . . this enormous gratitude that Mr. Scovill was not my father. He seemed such a mean person—like he was missing some basic part of his soul. He was the opposite of Petie because he took care of his family and did things right. But if you had money and that kind of life, why shouldn’t you take care of your family and do things right? I felt bad for Natalie and the Scovill kids with their pretty eyes. Why would you want the house you lived in always showing up in bank commercials?

The dark silhouettes outside the windows seemed like vacant storage for throwaway thoughts. One of mine was that my previous thoughts might have been all wrong. I thought that a novel had to feel like real life, but what happened when real life stopped feeling as real as a novel? The Week of Dark Mornings was about a farmer whose new wife dies of a blood clot. He can’t get over losing her, and none of the farmers or their wives on the surrounding farms have any sympathy. The farmer goes insane and throws himself into some big machinery I still needed to ask a farmer about. He returns as a ghost to kill each of these farmers as they begin their workday in the dark. Maybe, it now occurred to me, Mrs. Scovill was like the ghost farmer; maybe she left because she wanted revenge more than she wanted her kids—revenge against her husband the senior VP.

I knew that bad endings happened because people did dumb things when they should have done nothing. If Petie hadn’t brought me to see Natalie, and if I’d known that Justine’s father was on the troika, I might have asked Justine to say something to Mr. Welliver to help Petie get the job demotion he wanted. Now that bridge was washed away.

So much was wrong and I was so hungry that I needed to think again about Mrs. Qualiano’s IBM Selectric. You turned it on and it wanted to go, like a bridled horse aching to run, pulling you into the future. Your handwritten words looked so clean and confident transferred onto the white paper the cylinder held tight. There was nothing like seeing “Anna Putney 5A” in the upper left corner of a clean white page. And if you made a mistake, you just pushed the correction key that made the typing ball go backwards and white out the wrong letters. Mrs. Qualiano’s blue Selectric offered instant reassurance—something I hadn’t considered but drew in almost instinctively through my skin. Her machine told me that nothing was permanent, like the black stains of sin weren’t permanent on a soul. There were ways to go back and white them out if you had something better and truer to say, something realer than real. §