Bedtime Rituals

After Oxana Golden pulled the string that turned off the light, the three Orphan sisters lay on their backs and stared up at the dark. As their eyes adjusted, they waved their hands through bits of dust and debris that wafted in shafts of light visible through cracks between the stairs. From her TV watching time on the staircase, Melissa Oliver knew where the widest cracks were—in the seam between the fourth and fifth stairs from the top, and on the sixth stair from the bottom, near the railing where she perched, where it appeared something heavy had once fallen and cracked the wood.

“What did we learn today?” Oxana asked.

Melissa Oliver was the first to speak. “From Lost in Space I learned that it’s the same on planet Priplanus as here. Children are way smarter than adults, and Dr. Smith is the dumbest of all the adults who got themselves lost in space. He says he’s some kind of doctor, the science kind.”

Clara Bean shared that animals aren’t the only ones who bite people. “Sometimes men do it too,” she said. “Sister Waverley has purple man bites on the back of her neck, under her hair. She showed me the scars.” Clara Bean felt beneath her own fluffy reddish hair as she spoke. “But she said I don’t have to worry about Brother W because he’s not really a man, at least not the biting kind.”

The girls were quiet as they pondered this new nugget.

“Well,” Oxana Golden said with a firm harrumph. “According to the encyclopedia, man, is a general term.” She swished her hand in front of her face as if wiping an invisible slate clean of Sister Waverley’s false information. “Which means it includes both sexes, men and women.”

During a prior evening’s sharing session, Oxana Golden had explained what she’d learned about this word “sex.” That chat had gone into overtime and required pulling the string to turn the light back on, in order to review some intriguing illustrations from the encyclopedia.

In the dark, Melissa Oliver frowned.

Clara Bean felt extra fizzy inside. She didn’t want to think about men, or man bites, or this thing called sex. She wondered why Sister Waverley showed her those bite marks at all and even more why Sister W fingered her scars like they were something special. What Clara Bean didn’t tell her sisters was that Sister Waverley had snatched her hand and made her feel the awful purple scar. Remembering the look on Sister Waverley’s face and the lumpy, bumpy caterpillar feel of that awful thing gave Clara Bean an all over shiver up her spine.

“Your turn to send us off sleep now, Clara Bean,” Oxana Golden said.

Clara Bean took a deep, deep breath in and willed those shivery feelings to leave her body through her toes as she exhaled. And even though it was dark and no one could see, she forced her lips to make the curvy shape of a smile.

“Picture a mountain meadow, a bubbling brook and the most perfect rainbow,” Clara Bean whispered, and yes, she did say “bubbling,” rather than “babbling.”

“Typical,” muttered Melissa Oliver, for Clara Bean always chose some pretty setting from nature, which wasn’t at all Melissa’s style, but she complied all the same.

They all did, and the Orphan girls fell asleep in that mountain meadow, side-by-side, holding hands, in their cubby beneath the stairs, with a bubbling brook and a rainbow—which Melissa Oliver pictured as ominous shades of midnight blue and purple, Oxana Golden as rainbows really are, as she herself had seen one arcing across the sky over the Thick and Thin House, and verified within the pages of the encyclopedia, and Clara Bean pictured as sparkly pastels, because at the moment sparkly pastels were her absolute favorite colors, and she squeezed her eyes tight and willed all thoughts of purple man bites and creepy feels to leave her body through the tips of her wriggling fingers and toes.

When Oxana Golden opened her eyes, all was still and dark. Her sisters puttered and breathed softly in their sleep. She shifted her bedroll. A yellow crack of light shone up from the cellar beneath their cubby. She slipped from the covers.

Melissa Oliver watched Oxana Golden disappear into the darkened passageway and close the opening behind her. It wasn’t the first time. Melissa Oliver wondered when, or if, her sister would share what she learned, what she saw, in the cellar at night. She wondered too, if there had always been secrets between them.