All I have left of you, as of today, is just these pictures (if I stop and think of sending them, it makes me sick)

When a tornado happens at their grandparents’ house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad’s old games from when he was their age

It is hard to imagine their dad being their age because their dad is gigantic, more than six feet tall, and he has a bunch of gray hair, which their grandparents make all kinds of jokes about when their mom’s not there and everyone laughs because they say it must have been because of her his hair went gray. Amy and Zoe are not supposed to tell their mom about these jokes, and they don’t.

When they’re in the closet at their grandparents’, Amy lets them keep the light on even though Zoe is too little for a lot of the games. They play with the dominoes, but Zoe misses the point and knocks them down before it’s time to. They play with the marbles, but there’s not that much you can do with marbles on a small square of scraggly carpet. If you roll them around they’ll just get lost.

Zoe always wants to play Operation, which is where you have to remove the diseases out of Cavity Sam with a pair of tweezers. You have to be really careful because if the tweezers hit the sides of Sam’s cavities where his ailments are, his nose lights up, and he buzzes and you lose the game. But Zoe loves the lit-up nose and laughs and laughs, missing the point, asking Amy for permission to mess up one more time.

Their grandparents call it getting sprung when they’re let back out of the hall closet, and the reward for getting sprung is pop and cookies. Amy and Zoe are not allowed to drink pop at their house so at their grandparents’ they drink all of it they can, and then they jump and jump on the enormous bed upstairs until they’re ready for their grandmother to read to them, and then they collapse into all the great big mismatched pillows and spread out like they’re making snow angels and follow along in their heads because they always choose the same stories, and they know them all by heart but still get scared each time their grandma switches to her witch’s voice, like when Hansel and Gretel get lost. Then the girls straighten up, hands at their hips under the covers, and Zoe scooches over to her sister’s side.

Amy has taken one Polaroid picture of each room at her grandparents’ house, including the garage, the backyard, and the front yard, and two of the staircase, since they don’t have one at home

One is a close-up of the white metal railing that has a big S with a mustache on its waist between every other bar. The bars look like candy canes that have had their stripes sucked off them and their heads chopped off. The other one shows Zoe sitting sulking on the middle step, overshadowed by the big bright light behind her where the bathroom door opens onto a window that lets in the sun.

In the two years since she’s had her camera, Amy’s taken thirty-four more pictures of her sister, seven of which feature the dog Santa gave to Zoe last year. The dog is a scruffy Scottish Terrier with a plastic-looking black nose. Like Zoe, the dog is wild, and Amy suspects it is a bad influence, eating things off the floor it knows it’s not supposed to, like dead bugs and Silly Putty. Amy knows for a fact that Zoe still eats the dog’s treats even though she has told her not to more than a million times. But in her camera Amy discovers a way of civilizing both creatures, of teaching them to sit still. They even learn to play dead. Amy takes her pictures carefully because the film is not cheap, making the dog and her sister pose for ages till she gets it just right.

Afterwards the dog trots off to chase some imaginary thing and the girls wait while the picture slowly comes out. Amy lifts it by the tip of the hard white strip at the bottom and waves it gently in the air as the colors begin to bubble out of the shiny gray. Without realizing it the girls both hold their breath.

Every time Zoe asks if she can have the picture, but Amy never says yes. Sometimes Zoe cries, but Amy is never persuaded by tears, and her confidence in her own judgment regarding what is for her sister’s own good is total. This way they will have the pictures forever. If she gave them to Zoe now, Zoe would inevitably let the dog have them, and then they would get chewed up and destroyed, like when the birds in the forest eat the path that Hansel made for him and Gretel to go home.

So Amy keeps the pictures inside a secret Manila envelope at the bottom of the drawer where she keeps the arrowheads and fossils she collects at camp.

Ordinarily the girls only have secrets that they keep together, from their mother. This is the first secret that exists between them.