What Takes Up Space

sarah hall

My brother got me a turtle for Christmas. I’ve never really cared for turtles, but I suppose it’s been a while since I cared for my brother either, so I shouldn’t have expected much. Over the course of many years, my brother and I had perfected the art of being in the same room and barely speaking. We could win awards for stiff acknowledgements upon first entering a shared space and conveniently seating ourselves on opposite sides of the dinner table. Any conversation between us happened through our mother, who diligently pretended not to notice (an art she had perfected alongside ours). Christmas was no exception to this rule, which was part of the reason why I had been so taken aback by my brother’s gift. 

We had gone around my mother’s living room that morning, me and my brother, Michael, his wife, Becky, and their two little girls, as well as my mother and my step-dad, watching the kids open presents from under the tree and then handing out the gifts we had bought for one another. I had gotten my brother a tie from the men’s section at Walmart, which I handed to him with a grimace and barely-there eye contact. He thanked me too graciously, and that’s when I knew something must be coming.

“And what did you get for Jeanie, Michael?” my mother asked from her place on the sofa.

Michael smiled cunningly and stepped into the kitchen. All eyes in the room fell on me. 

I was curious, but I was mostly nervous. I tried to calm myself down, tried to remind myself that Michael couldn’t do something like pull out a gun from the kitchen cupboard and shoot me. He would never risk breaking the facade he had so carefully crafted for everyone else.

He came back into the room with his hands behind his back and stepped in front of me as his eyes met mine. I couldn’t remember the last time we had held eye contact. His eyes were so sharp I had to focus on not flinching. 

He pulled his hands out from behind his back to reveal a small turtle in a pet carrier. 

My frown deepened momentarily before I remembered my mother was watching. 

“Oh, Michael! Is that a turtle?” my mother asked as if she were the one receiving the gift. 

“Yes,” Michael said. “I thought Jean could use a friend.” I winced. “And pets just really teach people such compassion.” I winced again. 

“Wow,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.” 

“Well, Jean,” my mother interjected. “How about thank you!” 

I looked to her and then back to Michael. There was a challenge in his gaze. I lifted my hands from my lap and took the pet carrier. I looked down at the turtle, and it seemed to stare right back. 

That had only been a few days ago. Christmas fell on a Tuesday this year, which was far enough from the next Sunday that my family proceeded to have Christmas and then turn around and have our bi-weekly Sunday dinner the following weekend. Just before I graduated college, after my dad left my mom, she began to insist that our family have dinner every other Sunday in the name of “togetherness” and “bonding.” By then, my brother and I weren’t speaking and already none of us were speaking to my dad, so I suppose it made sense to at least try. We adored our mother enough to listen regardless of anything else, and in my case, because I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I didn’t have any friends after college and relationships never really seemed to stick, so if I didn’t have my mother, what did I have?

The worst part of receiving a turtle for Christmas was finding a place to put it. It’s not as if my apartment wasn’t big enough for a turtle, but being big enough and having a place for it are two very different things. The only place I could really find was the counter in the sitting room, and I ended up having to uninstall the wine rack that hung above it just to make room for the two-and-a-half gallon tank I had purchased at the Petco. Now, all my merlot and chardonnay and Pinot noir crowded haphazardly next to the stove. 

At first, I had half a mind to simply set the pet carrier on the center coffee table and call it a day, but I’d be damned if my brother came over for our Sunday family dinners and thought I wasn’t taking proper care of the thing. I could see it now: Michael would lean over to his wife, Becky, and whisper something in her ear. She would nod in disdained agreement. My mother would notice, because she always noticed, and so she would ask. Michael would politely decline to respond— “Really, it’s nothing.”— but she would press and push and prod until he had no choice but to say, “I was just noticing the turtle tank, that’s all.” I could see it now: Me, with my stiff smile and stilted laughs, backing into the corner of my own home as my family slowly closed in on every flaw of mine they could find. 

So, instead, I thoroughly cleaned out the tank and installed a filter and a light and de-chlorinated the water and placed a large rock in the corner for the turtle to bask on. It was just after getting the tank set up that my phone buzzed with a notification. I fished it out of my pocket and nearly dropped the phone at the recognition of the name across the screen. 

Margery Kindle (margery.kindle21) started following you.

I shoved my phone back into my pocket as if hiding the screen could erase the Instagram notification from my mind. 

Margery Kindle. Why would she possibly want to follow me? She couldn’t have.

 It must have been a mistake, I thought, all the while knowing that mistakenly following someone on Instagram was incredibly unlikely. I hadn’t talked to Margery since everything went so horribly wrong sophomore year of college. I had just assumed she would never want anything to do with me ever again. A fear that felt distinctly like hope pierced my chest painfully, but I couldn’t— I wouldn’t— let it have a voice, so I left my phone in my pocket and focussed on the important things. 

After a quick Google search on how to pick up a turtle— with two hands, apparently, and fingers under its body and thumbs on the shell— I removed the turtle from its pet carrier and placed it inside the tank. The turtle was small, only about two-and-a-half inches long, so it only took my first two fingers to pick it up. It was striped with a sharp green and a dirty green and its shell was outlined in a deep, dark green. 

I replayed in my mind what my brother had said when handing me the turtle. No friends. No compassion. I gritted my teeth. 

The black slits that were its eyes stared into mine as I remained crouched over its tank. A beat or two passed, but it did not look away.

“You honestly don’t seem like you have the capacity to care whether or not I have compassion,” I said, feeling oddly indignant the longer our gazes held. “What do you even do? Eat food and be green?” I pursed my lips. Perhaps that line of thinking was why I was apparently so compassionless. 

I looked away from the turtle, straightening my back as I began to move away from the tank. 

“And what is it that you do?” a pinched voice tittered condescendingly from somewhere below me. 

My head snapped back to the tank so hard I could feel the vertebrae of my neck grind against one another. 

“Because from what I’ve heard your pastimes include drinking too much and working a full-time job in a soulless industry,” the voice sounded again.

I slowly crouched over the tank. 

“Or wait, maybe you think you know so much about me because you’ve had a few pets before, haven’t you? And that went so well?”

I peered through the glass at the turtle. 

She smirked. 

If I passed out, I hoped I didn’t fall into the wine rack I had left on the floor. 

“That’s right, Jean,” she said. “I know all about that betta fish you had in the eighth grade. Zeus, you named him? And what happened? You overfed him and he died. Not to mention you gave him a shit name. Keep your Greek gods phase to yourself. You’re not special for reading Percy Jackson.”

A flush warmed my cheeks. “How could you possibly know that?” I asked, my voice hoarse. 

“Michael told me,” she said, triumph evident all across her tiny, green face. 

“Michael?” I repeated. “My brother?”

The turtle made a noise like a snort. Could turtles snort? I supposed it didn’t matter much if she could already speak. “What other Michael would I be talking about?” she said. “He told me all sorts of things about you. He told me all sorts of things about himself too.”

I took a step back, my eyes darting from side to side as if someone might pop out at any moment to tell me I was crazy, that this was not normal.  

“I can tell you his secrets, you know,” she continued. “But you have to promise you’ll listen to all of them.”

My eyes snapped back to hers. “What are you talking about?” 

“The secrets,” the turtle repeated. “I have secrets about your brother, ones I think you might be interested in. And all you have to do is listen to all of them.”

“That’s your only condition? No first born children?” I laughed stiffly, and the noise sounded jilted as it slipped from my lips. 

She blinked up at me silently. 

I waited for something, anything, to happen that might ground me, but I was nothing but bubbles fleeing from a child’s chubby fist. Then my phone rang. 

“Um, just, give me a second?” I said. I sounded unsure of the words, but I couldn’t be sure there was much to be sure of anymore, so it seemed fitting. 

The turtle nodded at me nonchalantly, and before I had time to register that I had just asked a turtle for permission to answer my phone, I had moved into my room and closed the door behind me.

I slipped my phone out of my back pocket, and my mom’s face lit up on the screen. I pressed the green answer button and held the phone to my ear. 

“Hey, Mom,” I said, trying to sound settled and normal and like I didn’t have a talking turtle in my living room. 

“Jeanie,” my mother cooed, “how are you?”

I closed my eyes and held in a laugh that bubbled in my throat like some sickly, orange acid. In the darkness, I saw that turtle’s smirk. “I’m doing alright. How are you?”

“Oh, wonderful, I was just wondering if you knew what time Michael would be arriving at your apartment this evening? He wouldn’t answer my call,” she said. 

A frown tugged at the corners of my lips. Of course, that was why she was calling. “I’m not sure. I haven’t talked to him since Christmas.” 

She hummed, dissatisfied. “Well you must have at least talked to him after he took time off from the restaurant?” 

I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, feeling that she was about to launch into some grand speech. “No, not really.”

“I’m just so proud of the way he’s taken such initiative for his family,” she began. “Letting Becky go back to work and taking on being a stay at home dad just in time for the girls to go back to preschool...” I could practically see the dreamy look which must have floated across her face as she spoke. “You really should call him and talk about it.”

Michael had worked as a chef at a local, fairly upscale restaurant for about five years until two days ago. Everyone went back to work after the holiday, but he remained at home. My mother had informed me as soon as he had made the decision. 

“Why would I need to call him when I have you to tell me all about it?” I said. I tried not to sound too sarcastic, but I might have failed based on the way she sighed into the phone. “He’s not exactly calling me either, Mom,” I tried to explain. “Besides, he’ll be here tonight. I’ll ask him then.” I hoped I sounded convincing.

“All right then, I’ll let you go. I’ll see you in a few hours. Love you,” she said.

“Bye, Mom. Love you too.”

As I pressed the red, end call button, I thought of my brother. I thought of his slicked back hair and the way he patted me on the head and pretended like there was no reason in the world for me to hate him. I thought of my mother, of the way her eyes sparkled when she spoke his name. 

My eyes focused on the phone screen to find the notification still there. I swiped it to the side and pressed accept before I could stop myself. Pressing follow back came as a bit more of a surprise. I dropped my phone back in my pocket, hoping that feeling of hope, of fear, might still dissipate, and so I ran once again. 

I opened my bedroom door and walked straight into the kitchen, ignoring the turtle in her tank as I passed through the sitting room. I grabbed a wine glass from the cabinet and poured three fingers of Pinot noir. Holding the glass gingerly by the stem, I grabbed a chair from the kitchen and dragged it behind me as I made my way into the living room. I sat down in front of the turtle and downed three-fourths of the glass. 

She was swimming along the bottom of the tank, but when she saw me she stopped and moved toward the rock in the corner. Her head peeked out of the water.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. Tell me what you know.”

She crawled her body onto the rock and stretched out beneath the heating light. For a split-second, it occurred to me that she might not speak. Perhaps I had imagined the way a voice lilted out from her green beak. Perhaps I was sitting across from this two-gallon-tank for no reason at all, and really I just needed to get up and start making the jambalaya before my mom and my step-dad and my brother and his wife and his two daughters all arrived hungry at my doorstep. 

“What, no wine for me as well?” the turtle asked. Perhaps the jambalaya was wishful thinking; I could always make a stir-fry. 

Scanning her as she stretched, I noticed she took up a bit more of the rock than I had remembered. “Did you get bigger?”

“Well, that’s just rude,” she said, before insisting: “Wine?”

I raised my eyebrows. “I sincerely doubt I should give a turtle wine.”

She let out a hard laugh. “Well you already put rocks at the bottom of my tank, and you’re not supposed to do that either.”

I looked to the rocks at the bottom of her tank. I had seen some pictures online with rocks at the bottom, but I supposed I had seen just as many without. “That’s what you do with fish though,” I said, my eyebrows furrowed in thought. If she’d had an eyebrow, I could tell she would have raised it. “And we all know fish and turtles are exactly the same.”

I rolled my eyes. “Regardless, rocks and wine are different,” I argued. 

“So are turtles and fish, some might say,” she replied.

“Oh my God, okay,” I sighed, exasperated, as I poured a healthy stream of wine into her tank, then took another long drink for myself. 

“Your brother was fired,” she said suddenly. 

I coughed, choking on the wine. “What?”

“And he and Becky are separating. Sleeping in different beds already and everything.” 

My eyes widened in shock. “Are you serious?”

“Why would I lie?” she responded, closing her eyes and craning her neck back toward the light. 

“Okay, oh my God, hold on.” I stood up and rushed into the kitchen to refill my glass. As the red liquid poured, my mind tumbled over thoughts of Michael. Of course he had been fired and didn’t tell anyone. Of course he covered it up by saying he was staying at home for the girls. Maybe if my mother knew that, he wouldn’t seem quite so selfless. Maybe then she might start to wonder what else he had lied about. Like Becky, apparently. As for the end of his relationship, I wasn’t thrilled for the girls, but… I had always been worried about Becky, about the way Michael treated her. My phone with that same page on instagram still pulled up burned in my pocket at the idea, but I pushed the thought back, a grey cloud dissipating with a quick gust of air as I eagerly returned to my seat across from the turtle.

“Okay, what else?” I asked after tipping the glass to my lips. 

“Eager now, are we?” she said, taking a step to dip the edge of her flipper into the water. She twirled it back and forth in long strokes. “Do you remember college?”

I shifted uneasily in my seat and forced out a laugh. “Of course, it wasn’t that long ago. I’m only twenty-eight.”

“It took me a while to warm Michael up and get him to share a few secrets about college,” the turtle said. “Do you know why that might be?”

“I’m not sure,” I responded tightly. 

“Now, we both know that’s not true. You went to the same college didn’t you? Only two years apart. Michael said you were still friends then,” she said.

Memories from college flickered uneasily in the back of my mind. There were no images, no life flashing before my eyes, but I could feel all of those emotions so clearly. I could feel the hesitancy and the excitement, the promise of a new life like leaning in for that very first kiss. I could feel the comfort of knowing Michael was already on campus, my big brother ready to walk me through it all, someone already waiting in my corner. I could feel the way it all went wrong. I could feel the worry and the guilt. I could feel the way I ran from that life I had created— ran all the way back home, just a few blocks away from my mother, because let’s face it, I had nowhere else to go. 

“I don’t want to know secrets about him then,” I said bluntly. 

She abruptly stopped twirling her flipper and pulled it back up on the rock with her. I noticed then that she took up almost the entire rock. I could have sworn she only took up about a fourth of it when I put her in the tank earlier. 

“You don’t get to choose what secrets I tell you,” she said. 

The look in those tiny, beady eyes of hers made my hair stand on end. I lifted the glass to my lips, leaning back in my seat away from her. “That’s just not the kind of secrets I want to know.”

“Because you already know them?” she inquired.

My phone burned in my pocket once again. Because I lived them, I thought, but I didn’t dare say it out loud. 

“What secrets might you be referring to, Jean?” she pressed further. Her eyes were sharp. Those slits had turned to blades. 

I shook my head, keeping the glass in front of my face as if it could hide me. 

She began to twirl her flipper through the water once again. “He cheated on your best friend. Did you know that?” 

I finished the glass. Standing up, I moved toward the bottle in the kitchen. “That’s really not the kind of secrets I want to know,” I repeated, but the words were weak as I threw them over my shoulder. 

“He cheated on Margery. You two were best friends the moment you got to college. You tried to tell her not to go out with him, but she did it anyway, didn’t she?” she continued. 

I kept my focus on the bottle. I remembered the first time I met Margery. We were assigned to the same orientation group. I wrapped by hand around the body of the bottle and tipped its weight until the red liquid seeped over the edge and poured into my glass. The bottle was lighter than I thought it would be, and my unsteady hands wavered, splashing some wine onto the counter. There were ten of us or so that sat out on the grass that morning, all giving our mandatory introductions and drowning in ice-breakers. Just about everyone left the moment they were allowed to, but I loitered on the lawn for a little bit longer, hoping that I might make a friend, or at least meet someone to eat dinner with that night. I saw the moment the wine met the line in the glass where I should stop pouring, and I kept going. Margery had stayed on the lawn too, and a meal later we were nearly inseparable. I picked up the glass and drank half of it. When I turned back around, the room turned a bit with me. 

“Did you already know that, Jean?” the turtle asked.

I squinted at her tank, the words she spoke tumbling around in my mind weightlessly. “Already know what?” I asked.

“Did you already know he cheated on her?” the turtle repeated.

“I…” I started, but before I finished I turned to the stove and grabbed the bottle of wine, taking it to my seat with me. I took a swig, lips around glass, then I cradled the bottle in my lap. “I did, yes. I already knew that.”

“You knew lots of things about their relationship, didn’t you?” the turtle said.

My spine stiffened. I looked at her silently, wondering what she knew. Michael wouldn’t have told her. He couldn’t have. 

She grinned smugly.

“He wouldn’t have told you all of this,” I voiced my thoughts aloud.

If she could have shrugged, she looked like she would have. “You’d be surprised. Sometimes when you get someone to talk, they don’t stop. Perhaps he needed the outlet.”

I rolled my eyes angrily before I could stop myself. 

“Why the face, Jean?” the turtle asked. 

I tried to measure my words carefully, but the wine had warmed me up enough that I forgot to try the second my mouth opened. “He doesn’t need an outlet. Doesn’t even deserve one.” I took another drink or two. “Are you alone?” I asked suddenly. Hearing the words in my head, I winced. “Like have you ever had a sibling?” Maybe she just didn’t know what it was like, didn’t understand how complicated it could be.

“What a ridiculous question,” the turtle said, brushing my words aside with a flip of the fin. “I’m born in hundreds. I have more siblings than you could dream of. Are you alone? That seems to be a much more pertinent question.” 

My back straightened. “I could smash you to pieces in seconds,” I said, but I felt a little bad afterward. After all, she was not wrong to ask. Here I sat, 5:30 in the afternoon in a chair in my living room interrogating a turtle as if it were the only thing I could think to do on a Sunday. Aside from starting the stir-fry, of course. 

Back in college, I had things to do. I remembered sitting sprawled out in the common room of my dorm with Margery. We would do homework for hours, which mostly meant talking until it was too late into the night to really do any work at all. 

The turtle pulled her flipper back onto the rock and tucked her head halfway into her shell. She didn’t seem afraid, but rather she seemed to mock me with the way she mimicked fear. “I would rather you didn’t,” she said, gloriously unbothered.  “But if you must, I would much prefer a direct squish. It’s faster that way.” 

My stomach turned. “I won’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry I said that.”

She came out of her shell. The knowing look on her face made me wish I hadn’t apologized so quickly. 

“He hurt her, you know,” she said, the weight of her words dropping onto the floor with a loud, echoing sound. My gaze drifted to where they laid. They took up so much space. Looking back to her tank, I noticed she also took up so much space. She practically filled the tank now, her shell brushing up against the glass of the two-gallon-tank.

“Your best friend, Margery,” the turtle continued. “Michael said that you knew, and from the look on your face I can tell that he was right. You let that poor girl get hurt, didn’t you? You were home for the holidays, and Margery was visiting. You let him force her up against that bedroom wall when yours was just on the other side. You could hear her asking him to stop. She laughed a little at first, nervously, trying to control her panic, but she wasn’t laughing for long. You could hear it, couldn’t you? You knew your brother was a monster long before that though, didn’t you?”

I could see him now, Michael when he was young. He had always been a liar, but when we were young it was more fun. Lies were secrets, and secrets were something to hold onto, to hold you and someone else close together. He would lie about the smallest things, whether he did the dishes or not, how many pieces of candy he took from the bowls left on porches on Halloween, but then he would lie about bigger things. Like the time he kicked our cat, Rosie, so hard she tumbled down the stairs. He’d told me he had no choice; she had swatted at him, wanted to hurt him. I had never known Rosie to hurt anyone. It took me a while to forgive him, but soon it became a secret of ours like any other. 

When Michael started dating Margery, I was wary. I did tell her not to go out with him, but I could have sworn it was just because I didn’t want my worlds colliding. My best friend and my brother? No one wanted that. I told myself there was no other reason, but I knew there was no running from what would happen. He might as well have kicked her down the stairs just like he had done poor Rosie with the way he spoke to her. I pretended not to hear it— he said he was joking, laughed like he was joking. And when those words turned into worse, into the purple pattern of fingers on wrists and whispers of “please stop” from across bedroom walls, I pretended not to see that too. And when it was all over, when Margery dropped out of college and went home— because where else was she supposed to go?— I worked up the nerve to ask him what he had done and why, and Michael smiled like slick oil spreading. Then he gave me that same, dreaded response; he told me he had no choice. It was her fault, just like Rosie, and before I knew it, that became a secret of ours like any other. 

The turtle continued. “You knew your brother was a monster, and you let him hurt her. But doesn’t that also make you a little bit of a monster too?”

“Stop it, please,” I whispered. 

“Why do you think he gave you a turtle in the first place?” she asked.

“Really, please,” I said, a little louder this time. 

“It’s what you thought all along. He knows you’re compassionless. Just look at what you did to Margery. You didn’t even set up my tank properly,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear anything else. Please.”

“You didn’t even check if I was male or female,” she said.

“Why does that matter?” My throat protested at the force of my words. “Why does any of this matter?”

“What were you going to do if I needed to lay my eggs? Make me lay them in the water? What if I didn’t want to do that, and they got all stopped up in me, and I died? What would you have done then, Jean? What would a monster have done?”

“Jesus, I don’t know, okay?” I said, running my loose hand through my hair as I gripped the bottle of wine tighter in my other. “I didn’t even want a turtle. It’s not my fault you’re here with me.” 

“But you do now, Jean. You do have me. What are you going to do now that you have me? What are you going to do now that you know? Go ahead and do what you’ve always done? Ignore it all? Go ahead, Jean, live up to the lie. Live up to that compassionless person you know you are,” she persisted. 

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I screamed, and before I knew it I had taken the neck of the wine bottle into both of my hands and swung it at the tank. As the bottle came down, for a split second I could see the turtle on the rock staring up at me with those slits for eyes, and I regretted it all. I hated proving him right, living up to the person he said I was, but the bottle was so heavy—or was it my head that was heavy? my eyes?—and I had already begun to swing and there was no stopping it, and then I hit the tank with so much force it shattered. It all shattered. 

After the glass broke, the world seemed a little quieter. The neck of the bottle hung heavily in my hand, its bottom in pieces along with the rest of the tank. The rocks and the water and the shattered remnants of the enclosure laid just as heavily on the ground. I dropped the neck of the bottle and took a step closer, peering down into the pieces. The turtle sat in the center of the mess, unharmed and no longer the size of the tank, but instead so small, only mere inches all the way around. 

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket. 

Margery Kindle (margery.kindle21) accepted your follow request. 

I slid the notification to the right and was met with a picture of Margery. She was older now and smiling with her arms wrapped around a man who was also smiling. He had kind eyes. 

I slipped my phone back into my pocket and leaned forward, scooping the turtle up off of the ground. Her eyes met mine, but she did not speak. I walked over to the kitchen table where the pet carrier sat and placed her inside, then I grabbed a blanket from the couch and threw it over the glass and the rocks and the water. I needed to start my stir-fry. My family would see the mess when they came. My brother would see the turtle still in the pet carrier. But as I felt my phone sit lighter in my pocket and saw Margery’s smile every time I blinked, I couldn’t find it in myself to care so much.