I put my keys down then. I put them on the dining room table, very carefully, beside the salt shaker, and I stepped into the puddle in my sneakers and knelt down beside the panel and turned it over.
It's strange what you notice. The first thing I noticed was that it wasn't all gone. I'd been sure, from the doorway, that it was all gone. It wasn't. The bottom half was mostly there. The snow was wet and wrinkled, the coffee filters bubbling up off the board where the water had gotten under them, but it was there. The porch was there. The front room window was there, with my father's empty recliner in it. My mother's window, the kitchen, with her feet in the dishpan and the pencil-shaving pencil behind her ear, was completely untouched. Not a drop on it. The little stairwell window with me on the landing was fine too, a little scuffed at one corner.
The roof was gone. She had scraped the whole thing down to the bare white gesso with my putty knife, every shingle, all the way across, so that the top of the house was just a raw white triangle with gouges in it. And Krista's window, the upstairs right, with her at her desk with her hair falling over her chem book, was gone. Not torn. Dug out. She had dug it out with the corner of the knife, so deep that the plywood showed through in a ragged rectangle, like somebody had pried a tooth.
I didn't think about what that meant. I want you to understand that, too. I knelt in the gray water and looked at the hole where my sister used to be and all I thought was: she took herself out of it. She doesn't even want to be in my picture. That's how much she hates it. That's how much she hates me.
"Why," I said. I was still looking at the board. "Why would you do this."
"I told you why."
"Because people talked about it? That's it? Because Mom showed a newspaper article to Toomey?"
"Because everybody in this house acts like it's the Sistine Chapel," Krista said. "It's paper. It's garbage. You made it out of garbage. You literally went through the trash. And now everybody acts like you cured cancer, and I'm sorry, I was sick of it. I was sick of looking at it every time I came downstairs."
"So you go to your room."