Rosalind Penderwick wasn't traumatized. Yes, the death of her mother was a terrible tragedy, but with the support of her family Rosalind was able to pick up the pieces and carry on. Her father and sisters, though, they were traumatized. She's heard her father cry in his study at night, more times than she could count on both hands. He thought none of his daughters knew about it, and Rosalind was determined to keep him under that impression. Skye had grown colder and more distant over the years, especially to Batty, who didn't choose her role in any of this. Rosalind had thought Jane was all right until she read an article about maladaptive daydreaming and realized Jane had been using daydreams to cope for years. Even Batty carried trauma—Rosalind knew her youngest sister best of all them and knew Batty was desperate for stories of a woman she never knew, desperate to feel the same admiration and love the rest of them did.
Rosalind was different. She never had time for emotional distance or daydreams. She had a baby sister who needed her and her mother's recipe book. These were her strength and solace, her source of inspiration. She had always been all right, busying herself with baking a batch of treats or tending to Batty's scraped knee. She'd never had another option.
Things changed after her father remarried, but not that much. Rosalind was no longer the only one who could take care of Batty. Iantha helped keep Batty and Ben in line, and Batty found a new mother figure—a fact that pained Rosalind as much as it made her smile. Things changed, but not too much. Iantha was just as busy as their father, often gone giving lectures or grading papers or attending book talks about things only Skye could even pretend to understand. So Rosalind was still bathing the little ones and running loads of laundry and baking cookies. The smooth steel mixing bowl remained her solace, and Batty and Ben's echoing voices remained her strength.
Things changed again when Lydia was born—another room added to the house, the stroller dragged down from the attic again, tiny clothes strewn everywhere and no one in the house getting any sleep. Yet the laundry was still there, as were the baking pans and the bath toys and the seemingly endless stream of siblings who needed to ask her something. Seriously, though, how did Jane reach her teenage years without knowing how to start the washing machine and how did Skye not know what the speed limit was on Gardam Street?
But things changed drastically in fall, Rosalind's senior year of high school, a change as crisp and sudden as biting into a ripe new apple. It was a Saturday, and most of the family was still asleep. Rosalind went downstairs, wondering if perhaps the family might appreciate homemade pancakes on a day like today, only to pull up short at what she saw in the living room. "Batty?"
Batty looked up, still in pajamas, her hair an unbrushed mess. She was sitting on the carpet next to Lydia, who was lying on the family's much-loved baby quilt. Lydia's favorite rattle was in Batty's hand. "Hi Rosalind. Lydia was up early, so I brought her downstairs so Daddy and Iantha could get some sleep. I want to see if she can crawl yet, so I got out her favorite rattle to see if she'd go toward it."
"Honey, I think she's still a little young to be crawling yet." Rosalind smiled and leaned against the doorway, watching Batty gently coax Lydia forward.
Lydia started crying, evidently having had enough of Batty and the rattle. Batty tossed the rattle aside, scooping Lydia up and patting her on the back.
"Never mind. She's not crawling today." Batty called over Lydia's wails.
"Why don't you put her in her high chair and we can get her some breakfast?" Lydia was just starting solids and loved pureed sweet potato.
Batty carried Lydia across to the kitchen and buckled her into her high chair. "There you are, Lydia. Rosalind, should we do sweet potatoes again? Rosalind?"
"Yes." Rosalind managed to choke the word out. "Batty, I'll be right back." She turned tail and ran up the stairs, making it all the way to her room before the tears started rolling down her face. Something inside her had broken open at the sight of Batty soothing Lydia, like a glass box had smashed and now its ugly contents were leaking out.
She scrambled under her bed for a box of photos, many of them taken before Batty had born. Her first day of kindergarten, Jane's fourth birthday, a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains—there! She pulled out a photo of herself, aged eight, holding Batty in the hospital. She knew the photo well. Her dark curls held back with plastic barrettes, the red sweater she was wearing, Batty's pudgy cheeks and wild hair. Standing up, Rosalind went to the bulletin board above her desk and picked over the photos pinned to it. She was looking for one she'd taken of Batty about six months ago that she'd thought nothing of at the time. It was Batty holding baby Lydia at the hospital.
Hands shaking, Rosalind held the two photos up to the light to compare them. She and Batty both proudly held up a new baby sister to the camera, both had a twinkle in their brown eyes and both wore their curls pulled back from their round, childlike faces. Rosalind, aged eight. Batty, aged eight. Batty who, by some twist of fate, had put on a hand-me-down red sweater that day.
When Rosalind remembered herself at age eight, she remembered a miniature adult who had competently taken on Batty's needs and some household tasks for her father, who had been destroyed with grief. When she saw Batty at age eight, she saw a child who was barely allowed to pour cereal with milk by herself. Rosalind hadn't been a miniature adult at Batty's age! She'd been a child, with chubby cheeks and small hands and innocent sense of wonder.
Rosalind began to sob, muffling the noise with her pillow. She wasn't sure exactly what she was crying for. Her mother, perhaps. But really she was crying for herself, for her past self who was no bigger or older or wiser than little Batty was now. She cried for her lost childhood, her childhood that had never stood in a chance in the ocean of grief that consumed her family. She'd thought she was all right, but seeing Batty with Lydia had brought it all back.
Rosalind dropped the photos she'd been holding. The girls holding their baby sisters, wretched mirrors of each other, fluttered to the floor as Rosalind picked up a different picture that sat in a frame on her desk. Clutching her mother's photo to her chest, Rosalind sank onto her bed and continued weeping. The glass box inside her heart was shattered into thousands of pieces, and every feeling that Rosalind had buried deep down came roaring like floodwaters, spilling from her eyes to cascade down her cheeks in the form of bitter tears.
No one can cry forever. Eventually Rosalind ran out of tears and sat up, head heavy and eyes swollen and nose running freely. She heard Batty and Ben and Iantha's voices downstairs, mixed with the clattering of breakfast dishes. She took a deep breath and stood up to look at her face in the mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks pale, but she was looking past her own face at an ugly truth she'd tried to ignore for so long: that Rosalind Penderwick was indeed traumatized.