11.

Audrey grew. By her third birthday in January of 1980, she was an average height of forty inches (without feet, mind you). She was a spunky child, full of vim, with eyes like blueberries and ringlets of shoulder-length blond hair inherited from a recessive gene not seen in a Mapes since Great Uncle Tilbert, who died in 1947 at the ripe old age of one hundred. She mastered all the skills that would earn her applause and adulation. She recognized her ABCs (upper and lower case), could count to forty, and was able to write the first name of each person in her family (except Grandma Pencil). She could spell a handful of words like STOP, NO and OFF. She’d memorized the Pledge of Allegiance, the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the entire Life cereal commercial with Mikey. She could, and often did, eat upwards of a dozen Crayola crayons without getting an upset stomach.

But her Dr Pepper feet were a disaster. Honestly, they’d never worked. Walking in them, she looked like she was constantly traversing a tightrope. Had she been an actual tightrope walker, though, she would have died thousands of times.

“She’s learning!” Murray used to yell, not even glancing up from his Popular Mechanics to see the fallen girl cradled in Grandma Pencil’s arms. “Toddlers tip. You’ll be okay, sweetie.”

“Feel these,” Grandma demanded. She fondled with disgust the set of four straps that connected Audrey’s left “foot” to the plastic band choking her thigh, just above the knee. “She’s standing on a goddamn see-saw.”

Murray ignored all criticism on the subject. For a year he did, anyway. He would kiss Audrey’s boo-boo, hug her to his chest, set her upright again, tighten the straps, and send her on her way.

There was a profound allure to the way the children’s dad so stingily dispensed his scruffy affections. On the rare occasion that he was home from work and not in the basement, Murray’s eyes were pointed at a book, a joist, a schematic, or a can opener that he quietly manipulated to study the movement of its parts. In those even rarer moments when he met one of the children’s gazes, they fell in love. His round-the-clock intensity, which in later years they would understand was only a screen for insecurity and pain, fooled the children into believing he was doing everything humanly possible, at every waking moment, for them and them alone—in the very way, for example, that he faced the bookshelf, scratched the top of his nappy head, yawned, and threw a handful of cashews into his mouth.

When he perched on the toilet for an hour with a notebook in his lap, hollering a string of invented curses at a mathematical equation that hadn’t panned out the way he’d planned (“Knuckles!” “Fist YOU, piehole!” “Pinto beans!” “Oh, rip my stick, buck-wad!”), McKenna and Toby, studying phonics in the dining room, could feel his energy like a pulse in the air. The twins faced each other across the table, and they shared a glance that meant they both understood. They understood that Murray’s fury was inflamed because the equation he’d toiled over had failed and would therefore not better the lives of his wife and children. They understood that this failure drove their father into the kind of rage a gorilla feels when his baby, or his banana, is eaten.

When Murray knelt between their beds to kiss the twins goodnight (every three weeks or so), his body odor, textured like one of Grandma Pencil’s exotic cheeses, clouded the air for hours after his departure. His gamey stench wasn’t an offense. It was a signal—a primal scent encoded by God and designed to narcotize his children, to tether them to him chemically so that they would never, not even far in the future, abandon him when he was sick and feeble and dying. He needed their love like he needed air. He needed their love to make him whole. The children knew these things. Toby and McKenna dreamed of him. They woke in the middle of the night thinking he was still by their bedside. They reached out to touch him, but he wasn’t there.

So this explains why three-year-old Audrey never disliked her shabby aluminum feet. She was only a child. She hadn’t known any other way. She’d worn the cans for a year without complaint. Even McKenna and Toby thought the junky things were miraculous. They bragged to their third-grade classmates at St. Monica’s about the wonders of their dad’s mechanical mind.

Meanwhile, the feet were destroying Audrey’s legs. The bruises above her knees darkened from purple to black. Her stumps swelled as if bitten by a rattlesnake. When McKenna bathed Audrey, now in the regular tub, she dabbed at the stumps with the washcloth, fearful that the skin might simply burst. Rigidly, Audrey sat, clutching a ducky, staring up at McKenna with her sad, round eyes, an invitation to love, or pity, or something else, perhaps, a question or a plea, something that made McKenna confused and afraid.

McKenna never spoke to anyone about Audrey’s legs, just as she’d never spoken to anyone about the way the suds when Audrey was an infant had slid so perfectly into her folds. She’d never spoken of Audrey’s arms, thinner than candy bars. Or the way Audrey giggled when she got splashed. Or the way McKenna let Audrey suckle her finger, and how the insistent, rhythmic pull—almost painful—made McKenna flush with shame.

McKenna never spoke of Audrey’s damaged legs. But neither did Toby, and neither did Misty. It was a fact of life that the Mape-ses bore without worry, without reflection. They believed steadfastly in the father, believed he would never allow them to experience pain. It was merely a matter of time, he said, of adjustments, of settling in.

As everyone knows, Murray finally removed the Dr Pepper feet. What most readers don’t know is that this only happened after Grandma Pencil stopped her scolding and threatened to inform Child Social Services.