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sidewalk.
    The house looked like the stage set for any standard family sitcom. My trusty old piano was a sentinel at the front door, in the tiny alcove off to the side. Daddy was gone, I knew. Mom said he had business in New York. He worked in corporate law, doing something so boring that I didn’t understand it even now, at twenty-nine and counting. His business trips took him to New York all the time, and he’d be home in three days. I’d see him then. 
    “Maggie!” Lena shouted, flinging open the door and rushing down the walkway to give me a huge hug. Younger than me by three years, yet playing the part of the older sister, Lena was as boring as I was colorful, as reserved as I was wild, and was the only person in the world who worried about me more than our mother.
    She smelled like warm cinnamon and butter as she embraced me. Her hair was the color of a freshly-baked cookie. That was my normal color, too. Hadn’t seen that in seven years. We shared dark brown eyes, but that was where the similarities ended. Where she was a round, squat earth mother with a sweet, plump face I was tall, big-assed and filtered the word through color, holes in my skin, and constant surveillance.
    “That’s it? Just the two bags?” she said, grabbing the heaviest.
    “I’m only home for three weeks.”
    “I thought school was over?”
    We’d had this same conversation last year. “It is. Summer session and all the high school camps start soon.”
    “They pay you extra for that, right?” Lena was a labor law lawyer.
    “Of course.” And they did, but not much. I wouldn’t get into that with my bulldog sister, though.
    “Dad’s gone on business and Mom’s having some weekend thing with her book group.”
    “You mean her wine group.” For nearly two decades mom and five friends met once a month to discuss a book. “Book” meant to drink wine and gossip.
    Lena waved her hand and smiled so tightly her dimples had dimples. “Whatever they do is their business. As long as Mom’s having fun.”
    And that was the end of that conversation. We reached the house and a wall of freshly-baked cookie assaulted me. I began to drool. 
    “Some of them have pecans, some have crushed toffee. I’m experimenting,” Lena explained as she shimmied a spatula to unstick a cookie from parchment paper. She nodded her chin toward the cooling rack. “Enjoy.”
    I patted my hip. “I hate you.”
    She smiled, showing teeth, and patted her wider hip. “You’ve got a long way to go to match me.”
    I laughed my way upstairs, mouth full of gooey goodness and mirth. My room was a sanctuary and a tomb. Frozen in time, nothing had changed since I graduated high school twelve years ago. The entire house had been brand new when Mom and Dad moved us in here when I was in fourth grade, and aside from the occasional replaced appliance, everything was the same for twenty years.
    Except me.
    I’d changed.
    Let me backpedal a bit. After the rape, when the television news vans littered our street like piles of dog shit that appear after the winter snow melts, Dad installed motion detector lights and two security cameras. Real ones, he’d assured me, hooked up to monitors that recorded night and day.
    Of all the modern updates they could have done to the house, that was the one I’d needed most back then.
    I tossed my bags in the room and bounded back down stairs, deeply dehydrated and craving more cookies. Lena was rinsing mixing bowls and humming along to some pop radio station. I drank a glass of water and then I went over to the piano and began to play Chopin. 
    “Again? I think that’s burned into my brain,” she complained. “You wore the black off the keys from that one.”
    I changed over to ragtime. She laughed. I played for a couple minutes, just flitting through a few songs, then gently caressed the keys.
    For two years all I’d done was go to therapy and play piano. The instrument was like Lena. A best friend.
    I walked over to my