“So lower your voice and she won’t find me here,” I said. “And come out. My neck’s starting to hurt from looking up at you.”
The house was one level, but Matt’s window was still six feet off the ground.
“If she finds out, I’ll get in trouble too,” he said.
I wished we were like any other siblings, wished I could tease him for being scared of our mom, but that wouldn’t be fair. If he got caught sneaking out of the house — especially to talk to me — he’d be put in the closet.
(Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions…)
“We can be quieter if you come out,” I said.
He sighed and opened the window wider, then lifted one long leg through the opening, followed by the other.
He dropped to the ground on bare feet. “You better not get me in trouble.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Dishes.”
“Then we have a few minutes.” I looked up at him and felt my heart squeeze in my chest. I stepped forward to hug him. “I’ve missed you so much!”
He put his arms around my shoulders in a half-hearted squeeze. “Seriously, Lilah, what are you doing here?”
I pulled away and frowned up at him. Boys could be so dumb.
“Gee, thanks for the warm welcome.”
He looked nervously at the window and sighed. “I’m happy to see you, okay? I just don’t want to get in trouble.”
Annoyance prickled my skin. I took a breath and forced myself to remember what it was like to live with my mom: the constant paranoia, the fear that I might have done something wrong, that even if I hadn’t, my mom would think I had.
The closet.
I dropped my eyes to Matt’s knees, visible under the basketball shorts he wore around the house in any weather.
I reached for his arm. “Oh, Matt…”
I couldn’t help the sadness that filled my voice. His knees were red and raw from kneeling in the closet. I felt the ache in my own knees, a kind of fucked-up muscle memory, even though it had been ages since my mom had been able to put me in the closet.
He jerked away from me. “I deserved it.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “You never do, and neither did I.”
“You didn’t want to be good,” he said. “That’s why you hated it here.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“Mom’s just trying to teach us to be good, to love God so we get in to heaven. How are you going to get into heaven if you can’t follow his rules?”
He said it patiently, with maximum patronization, like I was a little kid at Sunday school.
Even worse, he sounded like he believed it.
“I don’t believe God has those rules,” I said. “You know that. If there is a god, he loves us, just as we are.”
“If thereisa god?” He ran a hand through his floppy light brown hair. “What are you saying, Lilah? You don’t even believe in God anymore?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” I said. “I’m trying to figure that out, without Mom telling me what I have to believe. Is that so wrong?”