The Farmhouse They Left Me At

The first time my mother left me behind for the summer, she handed me a black trash bag with my clothes in it and told me not to cry in the driveway because it would upset my brother. I was ten years old. I have carried that sentence for thirty five years, and I only put it down for good this past spring, in a church basement in front of the whole town, when a fourteen year old girl stood up and said the one true thing that none of the adults in my family had ever had the courage to say out loud.

But I have to start in the driveway. Everything in my life started in that driveway.

We lived in Coldwater, which is a real town in the part of the country people fly over, flat and green and honest, where the tallest thing for miles is the co op grain elevator and everybody’s grandfather is buried within walking distance of everybody else’s. My father, Don, sold farm insurance and thought of himself as a big man because of it. My mother, Patty, wanted the kind of life she saw in magazines and never quite got, and she spent her whole marriage angry at the gap between the two. And my brother, Chase, three years younger than me, was the sun the two of them orbited. From the day he was born, Chase was the one the pictures were for.

I figured that out early, the way kids figure out the weather. There were photographs all over our house, and in almost none of them was I. School portraits of Chase framed in the hallway. Chase on the diving board. Chase at the fair with cotton candy. And me, when I appeared at all, at the edge of the frame, half cut off, looking like something that had wandered in. My mother had a word for how I looked in pictures. She said I looked “sullen.” I did not know what sullen meant when I was eight, but I knew it was the reason I was not in the good pictures, and I knew that Chase, who was cheerful and loud and blond and easy, was.

So the summer I was ten, when my mother handed me the trash bag, part of me already understood. They were going to Florida. There were three matching suitcases in the back of our silver SUV, bright hardshell ones, red and teal and yellow, and a beach tote, and Chase’s boogie board, and Chase himself sitting in the back seat in new sunglasses looking at me through the glass. My suitcase was not in the pile because I was not going. My clothes were in a trash bag because a trash bag was what you used for the child who was staying behind.