Displacement
by Sian M. Jones
My mother didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I think that was part of the problem, why she didn’t know what to do with three children so close together. She’d never been a sibling, so she didn’t know how to handle it. She was always telling me she had cousins the same age, who lived on the same street, and that was almost the same. Her cousins who had more money, better clothes, neat white pinafores that stayed clean over their starched skirts, and whose hair curled like Shirley Temple’s, while she was the tomboy running wild in the undeveloped field across from their houses. But it wasn’t the same, I knew it. The cousins always went home eventually, and her house was always her own, safe.
Still, things were mostly all right until Paul was in sixth grade. When he started school that fall, he was only a little taller than Lana, the both of them able to reach over the bathroom sink and grab their own toothbrushes, while Mom still had to hand me mine. But by the spring, Paul was nearly five and a half feet tall—two inches taller than my father. He grew so fast his legs hurt at night, and at first he’d cry as my mother rubbed witch hazel on his calves, a trick she’d gotten from her mother. But after the first few nights, he stopped admitting the hurt, just laid there in his bed with his arms crossed over his chest, locked tight.
He was probably a skinny kid, but he didn’t seem that way to us, his legs so much bigger, his hands. He was just suddenly the size of an adult.
The little violences we’d traded back and forth, founded in a democracy of similar size, were taken from my sister and me and made wholly his to use against us. The side effects of making him angry changed from quick, stinging red welts to bruises that lasted for days and changed colors like the iridescent fish in the tanks at the garden store. Our fights went from things we could forget to things our bodies had memorized. We were reminded when we changed our clothes or took baths or stood looking in the mirror at our shoulders where he hit us, just above the end of our sleeves so it wouldn’t show.
I won’t lie—I won’t say I got it the worst. He hit Lana more. Back then, I thought he loved her more, because they were only a year apart, and I was two years younger, the baby. I see now that it protected me, that gap. But still, as he held her down and hit her, I won’t say I didn’t feel alone, apart, outside. Didn’t I sometimes say in the chaos of my own mind, Hit me, hit me, hit me, too.
We had always had a certain privacy, three kids sleeping in the same room, so my parents probably didn’t know how far things went. Lana and I were old enough to take baths by ourselves, taking our clothes off in the bathroom, putting on our pajamas, and picking up the wet towels when we were done. So they didn’t see the bruises. And there was a wicked intelligence to Paul’s plans—when the warmer weather was coming, he started hitting us in places that wouldn’t show when we wore tank tops or bathing suits, bruises in the meat of our bums, at the edges of our hips.
But things were different for our parents, too. Paul started fighting with them about everything—going to bed, what to watch on TV, not doing his homework—and when he was really angry, he’d even say to them the sort of things he said to us routinely. That landed him in our room, lying on his bed in that bound position, staring up at the ceiling. When he’d been lying there long enough, he’d start hitting the wall next to his bed with his fist, again and again and again. You could hear it throughout the house—the sound carried through the walls.
“Knock it off,” my mother would say, downstairs with us, trying to watch TV, the sitcom laugh track a background burble. “I mean it.”
There’d be a couple of minutes of silence. Then, defiantly, the even, meditative thunk of his fist against the wall would start again—sometimes the fleshy side landing wetly, sometimes the hard rap of his knuckles.
Mom would go to the bottom of the stairs and yell up. “Stop it. Now. I mean it.”
Dad would come up the stairs from his basement office with a look on his face that showed how he felt put out, irritated at the interruption. “What’s going on?”
“Your son’s trying to destroy the house,” said Mom.
Dad would climb past her to the bedrooms. I’d hear him say Paul’s name, catch the fist in his palm. There’d be talking and quiet and more talking. When Lana and I would go up for bed, Dad would still be there, sitting next to Paul on the edge of the bed.
Then, one night, after talking to Paul for a few minutes, Dad came downstairs.
I looked over the edge of the couch at my parents. Lana kept watching TV.
Leaning against the wall by the stairs, Mom was too tired even to ask a question. She just looked at him.
Dad nodded a moment to himself, then said, “That boy needs his own bedroom.”
Her anger at Paul spat out at Dad instead. “And where are we going to put him?”
I’d never heard them talk about moving, or about the house being too small, but all at once, in my mother’s tone of voice, it was clear that it was, that we didn’t have enough space. Two bedrooms upstairs—that was it. Most of my friends from school or church had their own bedrooms; one of them had a room half filled with a Barbie mansion, even. But I’d always liked sleeping in the same room with my brother and sister, falling asleep to the sounds of their breathing or whispering to each other. Lana sometimes sang herself to sleep, church songs like “I Am a Child of God” or Christmas carols year round. When I woke up crying from a bad dream, Lana or Paul would be sitting beside me, patting my head. I was usually comforted, though sometimes it seemed that they did it to prove that they were older, that I was still the baby.
With my mother’s tone, the house felt small around me, the ceiling dropped on us like a lid on a shoebox.
Dad thought about her question a moment, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose, flashing a glimpse of the indentations left by the nose pads. “We can put him in my office.”
My parents hadn’t slept in the same bed since before I could really keep track of time. We were used to it. It didn’t seem strange to us. My mother slept upstairs in the low queen-size bed, surrounded by two sets of bureaus, filled with his clothing on one side and hers on the other. Dad slept in the basement, where the furnace heat never seemed to reach in winter and where delicious coolness hid in the summer. A corner of the uncarpeted main room was converted into an office by awkwardly inserted drywall. Inside the little room, Dad’s bed, a twin, was always covered by layers of waffle-weave thermal blankets, soft and worn, and one giant wool blanket the color of apricots. He worked late into the night by the light of a single desk lamp, grading papers or reading, making notes on index cards in illegible but beautiful handwriting, the lines and curves of which swooped like the clefs of music.
“When?” said Mom. “Now?”
Though I hadn’t even felt her move off the couch, Lana was suddenly past my parents and on the stairs, taking them two at a time.
“Wait a minute, young lady,” said Mom. “Your brother’s still being punished.”
“I’m just going to help him pack,” she called.
Dad looked at my mother, his face slightly slack in surprise. “I guess we’re moving him now.”
Mom lifted her hands, tossed them down. “Fine,” she said. “Now.”
Lana bounced up the rest of the stairs. I heard drawers open, things being thrown around, Paul saying, “Hey!” in protest.
“Come on, Ella,” said Dad, holding out his hand to me. “Let’s go help.” I leaped off the couch and put my hand in his.
Mom and Dad cleared the office, dragging the desk and bed into the main room. Then, they wrangled Paul’s bed down two flights of stairs, while Lana and I filled our arms with Paul’s clothes and comic books and toys and carried them into the emptied office. As we moved him, everyone was laughing, even Paul, who never seemed to laugh anymore except when it was at Lana or me. When we were done, Lana and I were hot and sweaty, our bare feet cold against the hard, old linoleum floor of the basement. We were relieved, happy. At the same time, now that it was done, now that we were free of him, we were a little bit jealous that he had a room, his own room, and Lana and I would still be kicking each other’s toys around the same, shared floor.
“Losers,” he said, sitting on his bed. Then he was up, and hitting us, fists random, sweeping us out. “Get out!” he said and slammed the door behind us.
The move changed things, but not for the better.
Paul started prowling at night. I don’t know how many times he’d done it before the night I finally woke up. That night Lana saying “Go away,” half in tears, woke me. Her bed was across the room from mine, against the same wall that Paul used to hit. Paul was crouched over her, sitting on her chest, his hands pinning her hands against her pillow. I heard a slurping noise, the sound of spit in my brother’s mouth, the friction of Lana’s hair against the pillow as she spun her head from side to side, trying to escape.
“No,” she said. “Don’t. Don’t.”
I ran to her bed, saying, “Stop it. Stop it.”
He turned toward me, still holding her down, and spat the loogie he’d been planning for her onto my neck instead.
I screamed. That girl-scream bright like a halogen bulb, a sound almost too high, too clean to be coming out of your own mouth.
The hallway light came on, and Mom rushed into the room. Paul had jumped off Lana and was standing, poised between our two beds.
“What on earth—Paul, what are you doing out of bed?”
I was crying, hard sobs, horrified at what was on my neck and, when I touched it, what was on my hand.
Dad came up behind her, a little breathless from climbing two flights of stairs.
Mom turned toward him, “How did he get past you?”
“I was asleep,” he said, irritably, as if it was obvious. “Paul, come with me.”
Mom took me to the bathroom and used a warm washcloth to wipe the spit away. She held her hands over mine in the sink to wash them gently clean. Then, she sat on the edge of the bathtub, and I sat on her lap, though I was a little too big for it. She rocked me until I stopped hiccupping and just breathed. I fell asleep in her arms.
In the playground, at recess the next day, I came out of the building to find Lana and Paul shoving each other back and forth. Under the huge sycamore tree that hung over the monkey bars, their friends were gathered in two opposing lines. I heard his friends egging him on, but her friends were silent, maybe shy, maybe stunned. He shoved her, loosely, almost condescendingly. She held her ground, though her sneakers slipped against the asphalt. She struck back hard with both hands thrust right into his stomach. I could see it took some of his breath away, which only made him angrier.
“You big retard,” I heard her say. “You stupid, stupid idiot.”
“Shut up, bitch.” He took a step back and put his full, new weight behind him. She didn’t fall back. Instead, she reached up and grabbed onto his arms, digging her nails in.
Mrs. Salazar’s whistle called through the air, as she came toward us.
Paul dropped his arms first. Without that resistance, Lana’s hold brought her chest to chest with him in something that could have been a hug except for the looks on their faces. In the startled pause, she perched on her tippy toes, most of her weight supported by her arms. Then he gave her one final downward shove. She tried to hang on as she fell, leaving behind four bloody lines on each of his arms. She landed on her back, elbows stuck into a thin skiff of gravel over the asphalt. As Mrs. Salazar bustled between them, I saw Lana sit up fast and raise her arms to look at them. On the undersides, small black stones were embedded in her skin, interrupting the broken white scrapes. Scrapes that filled suddenly with blood.
Mrs. Salazar took them to the principal’s office, and I spent the rest of recess being unable to answer the questions everyone kept asking. I kept having to tell them I didn’t know why they were fighting. Only, I thought over and over, I hope Lana won.
That afternoon, my mother separated the two of them, each to their rooms. She’d heard Mrs. Salazar’s version of the story. I didn’t understand it, but somehow, from across the playground, Mrs. Salazar had decided that Lana was to blame. Lana—who had walked home from school holding her arms stiffly at her sides, her wounds stinging against the contact of the extra-large Band-Aids. Mom looked with concern at Paul’s arms, the long scratches, the deep, half-moon scabs, and she turned on Lana with this kind of bewilderment and anger, looking at her as if someone had replaced her daughter with someone she didn’t know. Lana’s eyes welled up with tears, and she ran past us all and up to our room, slamming the door behind her.
When they’d both gone to their rooms, I went to my mother, who was chopping chicken at the kitchen counter. “It wasn’t her fault,” I whispered.
“What?” said Mom, sliding what she’d chopped into a frying pan.
“She didn’t start it, Mom. He started it.”
She looked down at me. “How do you know, Ella? I thought you weren’t there to see the beginning.”
And she was right, I wasn’t there—that time. But there were all the other times, all the other bruises faint on my body like erased pencil. And I was remembering the look on Lana’s face the night before when my mother had carried me back to bed. Lana had been left alone in the bedroom while Dad took Paul and Mom took me. When Mom brought me back, Lana watched as Mom lowered my head onto the pillow and covered me with sheets. I saw in her face what I was too used to feeling.
She’d been alone in that room with the memory of her own helplessness. We’d left her there. Even my parents, who were supposed to be the rescuers.
But I couldn’t explain that to Mom then. All I could say was, “It’s not her fault.”
Mom just smiled at me, as if I was younger than I was, and maybe I was pretty young. She washed the chicken juice off her hands, dried them on the towel hanging from the cabinet door, then bent down by me, brushing her slightly damp hand over my hair. “I know you love your sister. You love your brother, too. They’re just mad at each other right now. Okay?” She kissed me on the forehead and went back to cooking.
That night, Lana said to me, after we’d been tucked in, “I’m going to stay up all night. I’m not going to fall asleep so he can get me again.”
“Me, too,” I said, my cheek against my pillow. Of course I fell asleep.
When I woke in darkness, Paul was hanging over Lana again, pinning her down to her bed. Only this time, she wasn’t even trying to escape. She was frozen in place. I heard her gasp and whimper as he pressed his palms hard against the big band-aids on her arm, the raw skin underneath.
“Fucking bitch,” the dark shadow of him whispered at her.
“No,” I started to say. “No—”
Before I could even try for louder, he was across the room, on top of me, his hands around my throat, his thumbs rammed against my voice box. It felt like I’d swallowed a rock that wouldn’t go all the way down. My breath, caught in the top of my chest, seemed to lift me, my tiny body twisting up against the immovable weight of him. But he was a wall, he was a slab of concrete holding me down.
“Shut up. You hear me? You’re not gonna make a fucking noise.”
I tried to nod, as much as I could, the slightest flicker of movement.
He released me. I breathed in, the most desperate breath I’d ever taken. I hurt, sharp in my throat and dully everywhere else, especially in that part of my chest where I put my hand during the Pledge of Allegiance. In some new way, I hurt in my heart.
Lana cowered in her bed. I cowered in mine, my hands bringing my blanket up over my chest like it would offer some protection.
Paul stood there between our beds, breathing hard like it had been a struggle for him, too. It was too dark to see the look on his face, but how he held his body spoke clearly enough, hunched with so much rage. Then, all at once, he straightened up. “Good,” he said and left the room.
I guess it had been satisfying enough for him, that sudden exercise of power.
It took a long time for me and Lana to go back to sleep. I heard the quiet hiccups of Lana’s crying for a long time.
In the morning, Lana and I got up and went downstairs without really looking at each other.
Mom was in the kitchen, pouring our cereal into bowls.
“Can we watch TV?” Lana asked. A normal question.
“Yes, but no lollygagging,” Mom said cheerfully.
Lana nodded and started carrying her bowl into the living room. I picked up my bowl to follow her but stopped when Mom called, “Paul!” at the top of the stairs.
I stood there.
“Ella?” she said. “What do you need?”
I wanted to say, He hates us. He hates us. He tried to kill us. He’s going to try and kill us again.
But all I could think was how she hadn’t believed Lana the day before. How on earth was she going to believe me, so much younger?
So, instead, I shook my head and carried my bowl carefully to join Lana in the living room. We dug our spoons into the cereal and watched morning cartoons with unfocused eyes.
The moment we heard Paul reach the top of the stairs, the stones started falling.
There was a heavy clop against the kitchen linoleum, and Mom saying, “What the —” Then a clop, another clop. Then the sound of the kitchen chairs squealing with sudden movement as Mom dodged around.
Mom backed into the kitchen doorway as if what was happening was an earthquake. She looked at us over her shoulder, saw we were safe—I’ll give her credit for that—then looked back into the kitchen, her mouth open in shock.
Lana and I stood up to move behind her, and we watched through the frame of that white doorway. Round, gray stones, the size of eggs though flatter, were falling out of the air just below the ceiling, one after the other, like a shower of rain.
Mom bent down to pick up a stone at her feet. As she did, another stone dropped out of the air above her and rushed past her ear, almost brushing the clean angle of her jaw. She jerked backwards in reflex but stayed on her feet. She examined the stone in her hand, and I could see it was carved with a neat capital letter. An S I think, that first one.
I guess Paul had jumped back down the basement stairs when it started, or we’d have heard him yelping. We couldn’t see, but we heard Dad join him there at the top of the stairs, commenting uselessly as the stones fell and fell.
“What on earth?” Dad said. “What on earth?”
Standing beside Lana, I saw that her hand was shaking, so I put my hand in hers—to make her feel better, to make myself feel better.
Her hand trembled the same way our neighbor's blind newborn kittens had when they first lifted their heads. She shook like something new in her was waking up.
When I was older, I remembered that moment. Recognized it when I read histories of poltergeists, other times when rocks fell out of nowhere in some ordinary household. We didn’t have rapping on the walls, or appliances that turned themselves on and off, or books and dishes flying through the air. No voices in the night, no family members falling sick one after another, tongues swollen in their heads. No Bell Witch for us.
But we did have Lana, an eleven-year-old girl, which the histories say is really all that’s needed. An eleven-year-old girl who’s been disturbed.
That morning, the rocks stopped after a few minutes. But through the years, they’d fall again and again, bursts of storm, inexplicable—through all the years we lived as family, until we kids were old enough to get away from each other, to move out and away. The rocks would fall in every room in the house, materializing out of the air and plunging down with speed. They’d break things. They’d bruise us. They’d pile up until we threw them out into the backyard, where Mom would bury them in her garden.
I’m telling you the connection is clear to me now, but it wasn’t then. It was just one more thing I couldn’t understand. Like Paul’s violence, the rocks never got worse, but never got less. I wish I could tell you the stones pelted Paul the most, but Lana had anger enough, it seemed, for all of us.
There was no way my parents could talk to anyone about what was going on without seeming crazy. Respectable middle-class families don’t call psychics or exorcists or even shrinks. And they had so much practice at pretending things were normal, I guess. Like everything else that happened in our house, no matter how many rocks fell, they accommodated it somehow.
Their nonchalance wasn’t perfect, though. I came across Mom once, furious, trying to put the rocks into sensible order, moving them back and forth on the kitchen table like Scrabble tiles. But they never made any sense, any order, any words.
They were so tantalizingly close to communication, but all they ever did was accumulate.
Sian M. Jones received an MFA in fiction from Mills College. Her work has appeared in MoonPark Review and Coffin Bell, among other publications. In her day job, she writes as clearly as she can about complex code. She occasionally updates jonessian.com.
Photo by Oliver Paaske on Unsplash