"Hadley. Why."
"Because you made her cry," Hadley said.
She said it to the glove, and then she looked up and said it again to me, louder.
"Because you made her cry and you didn't even notice. You didn't even notice, Marlo. She sat in her closet with that dress, that old dress, after you said that stuff about it, she sat in there on the floor with the door shut, and I heard her through the wall. She didn't know I could hear. She did it more than once. She did it the night you brought yours home. And you were in your room trying yours on and looking at yourself in the mirror like a — like a princess, like you were already gone, and you never even —" She stopped and wiped her face with the back of the glove, which smeared it. "You said you weren't her. Like it's a disease. Like being her is the worst thing anybody could be. She's our mom. You said it right to her face."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything in me to say it with. I looked at my mother. My mother was looking at the floor.
"That's not all," I said. My voice sounded strange to me, very calm, as if it belonged to somebody older. "That's why you're mad at me. That's not why you'd do it. You've been mad at me before. You've never done anything like this. Why did you do it, Hadley?"
And Hadley turned in her chair and looked at our mother.
"She said it," Hadley said. "She said she could take scissors to it."
The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator and the little tick of the clock on the stove and a mockingbird outside the window going through its whole list.
"She did," Hadley said. "The day you brought it home. You went upstairs with it and she was standing right there at the counter, and she said, 'I could take a pair of scissors to that thing.' She said it. Dad was there. Ask him. And then last night I heard her in the closet again, and I thought, fine. I thought, somebody should do something. I thought if it was gone you'd have to wear hers and she'd stop crying. I thought —" She took a breath that shook all the way down. "I thought she'd be glad."
"Tricia," Marcus said.