All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

“Well, we can put it in here, to keep it safe,” I said.

Mom returned with a towel, which she tried to put over Wavy’s dripping hair. Before Mom could touch her, Wavy snatched the towel away and dried her own hair.

After a moment of stunned silence, Mom said, “Let’s find something for you to wear.”

She laid out panties and an undershirt on the bed. Without any embarrassment, Wavy peeled off the sundress and dropped it on the floor, before stepping out of her tennis shoes. She was almost as bony as the kids in the UNICEF ads, her ribs sticking out through the dry cotton undershirt she put on.

I offered her my favorite corduroy pants and plaid shirt, but she shook her head. With her thumb and first finger she plucked at an invisible skirt. Mom looked helpless.

“She wants her dress,” I said.

“She needs something warmer.”

So I went into my closet and found a Christmas party dress I hated the one time I wore it. Navy velvet with a lace collar, it was too big for Wavy, but it suited her. With her hair already drying to blond wisps, she looked like she had stepped out of an old photograph.

At lunch, Wavy sat at the table, but didn’t eat anything. Same thing at dinner and breakfast the next morning.

“Please, sweetie, just try a bite.” Mom looked exhausted and she’d only been a stay-at-home aunt one day.

I love my mother. She was a good mother. She did arts and crafts projects with us, baked with us, and took us to the park. Until we were practically teenagers, Mom tucked us into bed every night. Whatever Wavy needed, it wasn’t that.

The first night, Mom tucked Wavy and me into bed, me with my Winnie the Pooh, and Wavy with the baby doll she said wasn’t hers. As soon as Mom left the room, Wavy threw off her covers and I heard the thud of the doll hitting the floor. If something else had happened to make the room go dark—if Leslie had played a prank or the bulb had burned out—I would have screamed for Mom, but when Wavy turned off my nightlight, I shivered under my covers, afraid but excited. After she lay down again, she spoke. Her voice was small and quiet, just what you would expect from a tiny, blond elf-child.

“Cassiopeia. Cepheus. Ursa Minor. Cygnus. Perseus. Orion.”

Since she had finally spoken, I grew brave enough to ask, “What does it mean?”

“Names of stars.”

Until then I hadn’t known the stars had names. Arm extended, finger pointing, Wavy traced out shapes above her head, as though she were guiding the movements of the stars. A conductor directing a symphony.

The next night, Wavy smiled at me as Mom crawled around looking for the unwanted doll. A minute after we were tucked in, the baby was again among the dust bunnies under the bed. Eventually that became the doll’s name: Dust Bunny. If Mom failed to look for the doll at bedtime, I said, “Oh, no. I think Dust Bunny is missing again,” to make Wavy smile.

While I had a growing friendship with Wavy, my mother had only anxiety.

In the first month, Mom took Wavy to the doctor three times, because she wasn’t eating. The first time, a nurse tried to put a thermometer in Wavy’s mouth. It didn’t end well. The other two times, Wavy mounted the scale and the doctor pronounced, “She’s underweight, but not dangerously so. She must be eating something.”

Dad said the same thing and he had evidence to back it up. One night, he came home from work after we were all in bed, and woke us up shouting, “Oh, goddamnit! What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Wavy wasn’t in her bed, so I ran downstairs alone. I found Dad in the kitchen with the trash can lid in one hand and his briefcase in the other. I’d never been in the kitchen that late. In the day it was a warm, sunny place, but behind Dad, the basement door stood open and dark, like the mouth of a monster.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?”

“It’s nothing. Go back to bed.” He put the lid on the trash and laid his briefcase on the table.

“What’s going on, Bill?” Mom came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“She was eating out of the trash.”

“What? Amy, what are you—”

“Not Amy. Your niece.”

Mom didn’t take Wavy to the doctor again to complain about her not eating.

After failing to solve that crisis, Mom became obsessed with sewing for Wavy. The dresses you could buy hung on her like sacks and were too frilly, which Wavy hated. The first day she wore my Christmas party dress, she tore the lace collar off.

So Mom sewed dozens of dresses that Wavy unraveled, plucking at the seams until a thread came loose. From there she could unravel a dress in less than a week. Mom rehemmed her dresses each time they came through the wash. It slowed the unraveling down, which was a practical solution, but Mom didn’t want a solution, she wanted a reason.

One of the book club ladies said, “Does she have toileting problems?”

Mom frowned, shook her head. “No, there’s no trouble like that. She’ll be six in July.”

Wavy and I eavesdropped from the other side of the kitchen door. Her games all involved sneaking around and finding people’s secrets, like the cigarettes my father hid in a coffee can in the garage.

“I wonder if she’s acting out over some inappropriate contact,” the book club lady said.

“You think she might have been molested?” another lady said, sounding shocked but excited.

That conversation led to Wavy’s first visit to a therapist. She stopped unraveling her dresses and Mom went around looking triumphant. To Dad, she said: “I think we’ve had a breakthrough.”