The Damned Read Free Page A

We’d only gotten him a few weeks earlier, a yellow Lab stray Dad brought home from Animal Services. Another gesture at normalcy.
    Ash was listening to the Sex Pistols a lot at the time. She named it Sid.
    The day was hot and the flies were already buzzing around Sid’s body as if looking for a way in. It was the blood that had drawn them. Red and glossy, still wet. All coming from its eye socket. The eye itself missing.
    The dog appeared to be smiling. As if it had been trained to Lie Down and Be Dead and was waiting for the command to rise.
    A puddle of pinkened water spread out around its head. I knelt down and touched it.
    Still cold.
    And at this touch, a thought. Spoken not in my voice, but Ash’s.
    This will never stop , it said.
    T HEY TRIED SENDING HER AWAY.
    Not that they sold it to Ash that way. They called it an opportunity.
    We couldn’t really afford the prep school tuition and boarding fees at Cranbrook, but Dad said it was worth it no matter the cost. He told her it was a chance for her to “change course.”
    This was when we were thirteen.
    I remember driving with her and Dad up to Bloomfield Hills to drop her off. Me sitting in the front passenger seat, Ash in the back. She didn’t resist, didn’t argue. There were no tears from her or any one of us. She just looked out the window as our suburb greened into a fancier, more distant suburb, a trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. As if it were all her idea.
    After she was shown her room she closed the door on us both without a word. I could feel Dad fighting the urge to turn his solemn walk into a run to the car.
    Dad took me to his office. A drive down Woodward Avenue and into Detroit all the way to the Ren Center. He said he wanted to get some things from his desk, but it was really an unacknowledged celebration. Just the two of us, trying out jokes on each other, Dad telling stories I’d never heard before about when he was young. The city crumbling and beautiful all around us.
    I’m not sure anyone really thought it would work. But for thethree months Ash was out of the house and up the road in Bloomfield Hills something like peace visited our house. A quiet, anyway. The recuperative stillness of a veterans’ rehab ward, the three of us wounded but on the mend, shuffling around, feeling a little stronger every day. I cut my hair so that anyone could see my eyes. Mom even dialed back on the drinking. Tried out a recipe for Beef Wellington she found in a never-touched Julia Child cookbook. It remains the most delicious meal of my life.
    Sometimes I thought of Ash and was reminded that my sister had never done me any direct harm. Threats, manipulations, frights, yes. But with me, she never carried all the way through in the way she did with others. I was the only one she spared, the one she kept close even if she didn’t know how to love, and in recalling this my happiness was momentarily grounded by shame. Yet soon the horizon of a life without her would come into view again and I wished only to see more of it.
    And then I came home after school to find my father standing in the kitchen, red-faced, silently reading a letter torn from a Cranbrook envelope, and I knew Ash was home, that we would never try to ship her off again, that we would be punished for the attempt we’d made.
    She’d been expelled. That’s all my father would say about it, though the letter contained more information than that. A naming of specific, unspeakable crimes. I could tell by the way his face changed as he read it. His features not just falling but going slack, a deadening.
    When he was finished he folded the letter up into a rectangle the size of a business card. Left the house with it clenched in his fist.
    Ash’s door was open when I went upstairs. A rare invitation to look inside and find her sitting on the edge of her bed, calmly writing in her journal.
    When she sensed me standing there she looked up.