6.

McKenna had to bathe baby Audrey. Three times a week, she hugged shampoo, towel, washcloth, and soap to her chest and walked through the dining room to the kitchen, where she arranged the supplies on the counter. She could hear coos and gurgles resonating through the house from somewhere unknown, most likely Mother’s arms, most likely Mother’s bed upstairs, where Audrey was being rocked, sung to, and loved behind closed doors. McKenna dragged the collapsible stepladder from the space between the refrigerator and wall and spread it open at the foot of the sink. Following her father’s instructions (pinned by magnet to the refrigerator, “just in case” McKenna’s memory faltered [it never did]), McKenna climbed the stepladder. She unfolded the towel across the countertop. She filled the sink with two inches of “tepid” water. She submerged the washcloth, swished it, let it drink.

She pulled open a drawer and withdrew the silver bell, which was smaller than her five-year-old fist. Using three overhead arm motions, as deliberate as a lion tamer cracking a whip, she rang it. The high-pitched sound, her father had said, would ascend stairs, drift around corners, pass through doors and walls. The special curvature, along with the pea-sized, felt-covered clapper, allowed the bell to be audible from one hundred yards away, and most importantly—this was Murray’s big selling point—at a consistent volume. In other words, to a person standing two feet from the bell it would be no louder than it was to a person two hundred feet away. The patent was for The Tap-on-the-Shoulder Handheld Alarmer Bell.

Only one such bell was ever produced, and it remains in Mc-Kenna’s possession, tossed carelessly into the bottom of an un-labeled box in the attic.

Since the birth of her sister, McKenna had noticed that Audrey’s tiniest squeals were audible from almost any location in the house. Not always at the same volume, to be sure, but what did that matter? McKenna rang the bell and wrestled with the notion that her father’s invention—and by extension, her father—was a crock.

Still, the bell did summon her mother every time. So perhaps it worked. Perhaps Murray was as brilliant as he claimed. Mc-Kenna wanted it to be so.

Misty padded barefoot into the kitchen and placed Audrey, stripped to her skivvies, onto the towel. McKenna ascended the stepladder. Her sister was the size of a doll. She unpinned the cloth diaper and began the bath. Misty stood watch the first few times, offering tips for scrubbing the hair and neck. Once satisfied that Audrey was in no danger, she patted McKenna’s head, offered a “Thanks, buckaroo,” and retired to the living room for a nap.

McKenna hated cleaning the monster. Audrey’s bald head made her resemble Grandpa Mapes in his coffin. Red bumps that Mom called “baby acne” speckled Audrey’s forehead. Her unwieldy head lolled as if her neck had no bones. Instead of a thingy, there was a tidy slit between her legs.

McKenna could get past the lack of a thingy. She knew about anatomy. She understood that she herself had no thingy, and Mom had no thingy, and that no matter what Toby said, this didn’t make them any less of a person.

The baby kicked. Her legs resembled broken branches.

But without feet, can they still be called legs? Without ball peen and claw, is it still a hammer? Without tines, is it still a fork? Is a spoon without its bowl still a spoon?

By the end of the first week of washing, the stumps ceased to frighten McKenna. They became sad. They made her feel as if a heavy blanket were smothering her chest, suffocating her. Part of McKenna wanted to protect this crippled, sweet-smelling girl, this big-headed angel with the plump cheeks and curled swath of blond hair and nipples no bigger than periods. At the same time, she wanted to lift her by the throat and stuff her into the garbage disposal.

What made Audrey a monster was her mouth. Always needing to be filled. The mouth opened wide, enormously wide, as she lunged at any object in her path. Her own fingers were a typical target, but when these were restrained, she craned and twisted until her gums hit pay dirt: McKenna’s hands; the washcloth; the rubber duck; the faucet tap. Audrey’s eyes, pulsating like Kmart blue lights, registered no recognizable emotion. She resembled the hatchlings on Wild Kingdom that probed the air blindly with their beaks, ready to swallow what ever dropped into their dark holes.