Mom liked scary shows—The X-Files or Dr. Who—and every Friday night, she’d make a bowl of popcorn for herself and settle in front of the TV while Dad worked on a puzzle in another room. The smell of warm coconut oil filled the old living room and kitchen. Our farmhouse creaked, but at twelve years old, I’d learned all the floorboards. Alex was seven and followed in my footsteps. Pim was right on her heels. We hunkered at the threshold of the living room and took turns peeping around to watch the TV, the carpet scratchy under our knees. When the show got scary, Pim would gasp, and our gig would be up.

“Willem Van Ness,” Mom would say, her words elongated. “You’re too young to see this. I’m drawing the line.”

Behind the couch, Alex and I watched as Pim’s whole face deflated. He covered his eyes with two flat palms, dimpled at every knuckle, as if not seeing the room meant Mom no longer knew he was there.

“Don’t make me come back there,” Mom would say.

“Okay. I gotta go to bed,” Pim would announce to us in the loudest of whispers, his dark eyes huge, his hair like alfalfa.

“You too, girls,” Mom would add. “Take a handful of popcorn to go.” She’d hold the enamel blue bowl high over the back of the sofa and we’d each fill a greasy palm, traipsing out of the living room in a line, back up the stairs, into Pim’s oak-floored bedroom.

“You did it again, Pimlet,” Alex would say, although there was never any scold in her voice. She would tuck Pim in, give him his clothespin, kiss his cheek.

Pim would giggle, and Alex and I would snuggle in on each side of him. Often on those nights, we fell asleep right there, three brown cashew nuts in a row, our joints conjoined. In the morning, Mom’s warm flannel blanket was always over top of us.

I live that memory again and again, and yet the other memories of that miserable September on the farm crowd it out, block the light. Every year that followed in that house was a dirge.

Alex took what happened and turned it into fire, causing trouble every chance she got. My mom and dad spent more time in the principal’s office than they ever had before, but Alex continued to push them. One winter, some kid in her class was throwing snowballs at younger kids in the school. Alex took it upon herself to teach him a lesson. She was vicious. Relentless. She got sent home for pushing him so hard down an embankment that his shoulder dislocated.

“But is it broken?” I asked Alex at the dinner table that night. I was trying to fill the silence, to normalize things.

“Ruth, don’t meddle,” my father said.

“But I was only—”