The place where my uncle Bobby shot himself was almost always off limits to us kids. Not because my grandma hadn’t cleaned up the walls and carpet so that his room looked almost normal, but because it became a sort of shrine to him. It was a tiny museum, but more religious, where the artifacts of his 15 pre-death years interspersed with the artifacts of Jesus’ centuries of post-death years. The effect was suffocating, like an elevator filled with incense and glass, whose sharp edges were tinged with mold. We were unable to breathe but also unable to move—lined up like toy soldiers in the doorway—afraid to break something, afraid we’d get hurt in there, too, and, like him, never be able to leave.
Nevertheless, every December for his birthday, all his siblings and us cousins were crowded into the little house of my grandma’s, in the little city of Council Bluffs, Iowa to pay homage to his little life by hearing the stories of his childhood and viewing the relics it produced. And because his birthday was the day before Christ’s, we stayed the night to open presents in the morning. Six miniature sleeping bags in a row sandwiched between the sofas on the green living room carpet, like a rainbow of cocooned caterpillars in the grass, that for some reason always smelled like Pine-Sol.
On the Christmas Eve it happened, we were all between five and nine years old. Matty and I were the oldest. Well, Matty and then me, followed by Jessica and Jennifer (the twins), Cody, and then Elliot. The offspring of the surviving four Jennings siblings, or as they were always called where we grew up: the Jennings Girls. I remember them perfectly. Our four moms, all but one divorced, sitting on the plaid sofa under the frost-covered picture window drinking something that smelled like cherries and rubbing alcohol, blonde hair in various contraptions to keep it out of their faces, and us kids crisscross applesauce on the shag carpet, pinching the green fluff between our bare toes and trying to covertly pass it from foot to foot, kid to kid, without the moms noticing, while our grandma recited the Bobby prayers. Prayers for his soul, apologies for his Sin, and the annual promise that none of us would ever ask Him for anything except forgiveness for Uncle Bobby. Ever.
Even then, we knew Jennifer took it all a little too seriously. The fervor in her eyes reflected Grandma’s; it wasn’t contrived like ours. But the trouble started once we tried to subtly point this out to her. When we got to the part where we had to go around and each announce what we’d achieved the previous year as atonement for his Sin, to ease that giant ask of his forgiveness, I lied to God. But before I lied, Jessica stood up and said, “Dear God, this year, I helped my adopted grandpa at the home make a photo album of his whole family and all the dogs he’s had in his lifetime.” Then it was my turn because I was between the twins, like Lisa Simpson bookended by Malibu Stacies. I stood up.
“This—” I started. Grandma, less a collection of physical traits in my memory, than one of principles somehow embodied, shook her head warningly. “Dear God,” I corrected. “This year I read more books than anyone else in my class and got an award and free pizza,” I said, though beforehand we’d determined that it wasn’t really a lie because one of us did win the award, just not me. Next to me, Jennifer was still crisscrossed, no fluff between her pious toes, and by the time I’d gotten to the free pizza part, she’d begun craning her neck behind her at the row of moms, in shock or panic, maybe. Finding nothing there but distracted chatter, Jennifer stood up.
I could feel the shake in her leg where her ankle pressed against my knee from my resumed seat on the floor, and I felt a shame and dread that I have never felt since. “Dear God,” she said slowly, I knew frantically trying to come up with something else she’d done that could possibly make up for the Sin. “I…I mean, this year, I…” she started crying. Grandma’s smile faded, and her face turned hard, like the ice outside, as she considered the child that stood in the way of her only son’s forgiveness. That coldness spread from Grandma to me, and I was frozen, paralyzed in place, watching the thread I’d pulled unravel my cousin.
Mutely, Grandma pointed to Uncle Bobby’s room. The moms avoided Jennifer’s wet eyes as she turned toward the tiny museum. “Don’t forget this,” Grandma said, handing her a pink sleeping bag with white daisies on it. She stooped toward Jennifer. “Spend tonight thinking about the kind of example you should be setting for your cousins and how you let down your Uncle Bobby for the second year in a row.”
I could barely see her face through her tears and snot, but I didn’t need to because all of her was a replica of Jessica. Her blonde hair in identical pig tails with identical Christmas tree hair ties; her identical body in an identical emerald dress; and her face freckled with identical freckles. Jessica, who did not have an achievement to offer God last year, not Jennifer. But my voice and body were useless to me, and I silently watched Jennifer, who’d read the most books in her class, use the sleeping bag to wipe her face, darkening the daisies with mucus and tears. “And don’t touch anything,” Grandma added, shutting her in the museum with a ghost, in a room that had killed before.
The moms argued softly with Grandma in a kind of high-pitched buzz, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I did not sleep, and when all the other caterpillars had stopped squirming, I crept to Uncle Bobby’s door to let Jennifer out. But it was locked. I didn’t even know it could lock. “Jennifer,” I laid on the carpet so that I could whisper under the door to her. “Open up. Come out.”
She didn’t open up. She didn’t come out. But when I woke to sunlight on one cheek and creases from the carpet on the other, a crumpled note waited by my hand: I hate you. It was the precision of it that worried me, I remember. No exclamation point or other theatrics, just a perfect, calm sentence from a seven-year-old. That she never acknowledged. Which is why I was certain the ghost wrote it.
*
Eventually, we no longer fit in our sleeping bags or between the sofas, and then there weren’t any sofas anymore or Grandma or the museum either, and we mostly all flew away. Sometimes we saw each other at family events, and I’d learned that Elliot was in construction, Jessica painted and took care of her kids, Matty and Cody, the only ones to stay in the Midwest with me, started a landscaping business together, and Jennifer worked at a shelter or somewhere for the deserving poor. But she was the only cousin I hadn’t seen for decades when she showed up at our family cemetery for my husband’s funeral. I was sure because I lied about the identical freckles earlier. I could always tell them apart. Jessica’s were the shape of a heart on her right cheek, and Jennifer’s weren’t. Hers were in no shape at all. Even then, somewhat concealed by burgeoning wrinkles and the shadows of sharper bones, the chaos of her freckles struck me. Maybe because I was so used to the order of Jessica’s face by that point.
My husband had been dying slowly for about a year—so that we could celebrate him in each season, I told my girls—of a tumor we were even slower to discover. We’d met when Matty brought him home from college for Christmas one year, a year when our holidays had begun to more closely resemble those of other families we knew. And I remember thinking at his service how good it was that all of us cousins were there together in Council Bluffs where we began and where my husband had insisted we belonged, preferring the winters and agriculture to the gambling and desert he came from. By now, some of our kids were even the same ages we were when we spent Christmas at Grandma’s.
Jennifer—still blonde, but like a shadow of Jessica now, so that when you remembered her, you thought for sure she was a brunette—stood close to us as our pastor read the sermon, no kids of her own beside her. The air smelled like trees and grass and rain and mud, and I was happy my husband would be buried where things grew, next to the roots of the forest and of our family. “Amen,” we all said, as the pastor walked away.
Jennifer leaned down to my girls, and I noticed her ribs through her thin dress. She said, “Learn from this.” They were only familiar with her sister, so Jennifer’s unexpected intensity startled them, I could tell. “She is being punished,” she said at them, I think, but about me. “Your mother is a liar and a sinner and has a devil in her that killed your father.”
And that was how I found out that Jennifer wrote the note I found crumpled by my face thirty years before. But ghost or no ghost, the rest of us agreed that the tiny museum claimed a second life the night she spent there on the mostly clean carpet. Three, if you counted Grandma.