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By Root 861 0

father would die. After he became sick, she went to church with Faith every day, lounging beside her sister on the pew, content to swing her feet and gaze at the dangling Savior and pretty candles while Faith took care of the praying. Phoebe hardly bothered to pray, and when she did, it was often for some greedy purpose; much on her mind were those Kiddles that came inside plastic perfume bottles, each with its own scent. She had Lilac and Lavender, but was desperate for Rose. She didn’t worry much about their father. She was powerless to help him and therefore not responsible; Faith was acting for both of them. Phoebe left the church feeling cleansed by her sister’s feverish prayers, satisfied, as Faith seemed to be, that whatever cure she was working could only result in their father’s recovery.

After he died, Faith stopped brushing her hair and a giant rat’s nest formed in back. She didn’t care. Loose, soundless tears slipped from her eyes when their mother tried to comb it. She was racked by stomach pains, prompting Dr. Andrews to limit her diet to boiled rice and saltine crackers. Weight fell from her like layers of clothing. She disappeared. And only then did Phoebe realize what a brilliant, magical world the old Faith had granted access to. Neighborhood games had formed around her spontaneously—statuemaker, spud, capture the flag—lasting over days in the rapturous hours between school and dinnertime. Their house had been a labyrinth of secret passageways Faith never tired of searching for, tapping floorboards, prying at moldings in the zealous belief that any moment a wall would slide away to reveal underground cities, treasure chests gorged with pearls and silver. Barry tried to fill the gap of their sister’s absence, tried rallying the neighborhood for a treasure hunt one Saturday, but the effort fell flat. He wasn’t enough. Gradually the neighborhood gang began to disperse, and Barry retreated to his room, stung by his failure.

A deadening sameness bore down on them. The floorboards and walls of their house no longer trembled with hidden passages—it was just a house. Their street was a street, Phoebe’s room a room, not a honeycomb of hiding places. Their mother was constantly hugging them, smoothing their hair, but she moved like someone underwater, so pale that Phoebe saw blue veins on her temples. In losing their father they had somehow lost one another—Barry’s door always shut, Faith drooped alone before the TV set. Try as they might to be cheerful at dinner, eventually the silence always won, snuffing out conversation like the fog that overwhelmed their house each night, obscuring every other house from view. Phoebe wanted to scream, kill that silence for good, but she felt buried under the ordinariness of everything in her life—a carton of milk, a stick of butter—they were bricks being laid on top of her one by one. She began closing the door to her own room, losing herself among The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, magic worlds that seemed to Phoebe far less magical than Faith’s had been until their father died.

Retracing the steps of their father’s life was one of the few activities Faith still found worthwhile. Phoebe liked going with her to prowl his North Beach bachelor haunts. “Dad sat on this same bench,” Faith said in Washington Square, across from the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, whose white façade he’d loved to paint. “He lay on this grass.” And Phoebe shared her sister’s awe at touching the very things their father had touched. He was gone forever, but he was everywhere. It felt miraculous.

Nowadays young people lounged in Washington Square wearing colorful outfits, smoking, playing guitars. Faith was too shy to approach them, but they fascinated her. She speculated that they must be painters, or the Beat poets their father had so admired. She used Phoebe as a prop, piggybacking her around Washington Square for a better look at its bohemian occupants. After their father died, these were Phoebe’s happiest times.

The following March, 1967, their mother went on her first